ACRL, IPEDS, and National Surveys

New and Improved! This guide has undergone a complete redesign and revision for the 2025-2026 reporting cycle (data year 2024-2025).

Last update: October 29, 2025

This LibGuide provides invormation and tutorials to support PALNI libraries that are reporting for the annual ACRL, ATS/ATLA and other national statistics surveys. This guide only includes those measures on the surveys which can be fulfilled by WMS Reports and tools for expenditures, collections, and circulation.

All PALNI libraries run OCLC WMS with Report Designer, allowing for creation and use of custom reports developed for this guide.

We request that all PALNI libraries participate in the ACRL survey. Libraries need not submit a complete survey, but may respond with a partial survey for the former required IPEDS data points. Including this data in the ACRL survey allows the PALNI staff to do internal analysis and benchmarking to support PALNI data-driven decision-making and assist member libraries with comparison analysis. 

Important Notes

• Use the LibGuides tabs for report instructions
• Most reports and templates will require customizations to account for local library practices
• Not every data point can be answered with WMS reports and some reports will only provide a portion of the data needed
• Additional work in Excel/spreadsheet software may be needed for calculations and analysis
• Refer to OCLC documentation for detailed information on how to use and generate reports. Instructions and screenshots are for guidance only.
• We strongly recommend completing ACRL first and then using that data to complete IPEDS

Roles & Permissions

Staff users creating and scheduling reports should have either the Analytics Report Author or Analytics Report Author Admin role.

Need More Assistance?

We are happy to work with PALNI library directors and staff via individualized consultations to help with gathering data, reporting data, retrospectively providing past data or corrections, and using survey data for analysis and benchmarking.

The IPEDS Academic Libraries component has been discontinued. The last reporting period was 2024-2025, representing data from 2023-2024.

Beginning in 2023, the ATS survey has been redesigned to align with IPEDS data points. Use ACRL guidelines for the appropriate data points.

Beginning with the 2024 reporting cycle, PDF/print guides are discontinued, and the recommendations and instructions are fully hosted on this LibGuide. The 2023 document is retained here for user reference, if desired.