This is My Place: The Academic Library as a Retention Resource

This dissertation project addressed the gulf between the persistence rates of students in underrepresented minority (URM) and non-URM communities. To this end, a multisite exploratory qualitative case study focused on the experiences of students in academic libraries was conducted. The project applied a sense of belonging as an interpretive framework based on prior research which relates belonging to improved academic success outcomes among URM students. Previously, libraries’ capacity to support URM students’ sense of belonging had not been systematically analyzed. The three articles that constitute this dissertation, a literature review and one article on each of the two sites, a university pseudonymously referred to as Southwestern University (SWU) and a community college referred to as Southwestern Community College (SWCC), described the interplay of institutional context and student characteristics in the dynamics of URM students’ belonging. They each support the overarching finding that academic libraries are a retention resource by fostering URM students’ sense of belonging.