Mission statements in academic libraries: a discourse analysis

The purpose of this paper is to determine how academic library mission statements are related to their parent institution mission statements.

Using a random sample of the US colleges and universities, library and their respective college or university mission statements were compared using discourse analysis.

This study shows a very weak link between college or university mission statements and library mission statements in the majority of cases.

This paper opens a discussion of the value and purpose of library mission statements with the context of parent institution mission statements.