The United States is facing a crisis in higher education, particularly amongst liberal arts colleges. High tuition prices coupled with extreme amounts of student debt and a decline in the traditional college-age population has resulted in less students enrolling in higher education institutions each year. This, in turn, has led to the closure of a number of small, often liberal arts focused, colleges. The reasons for the closures can vary, from sharply declining enrollment numbers, to unsustainable endowment draw-downs, to accreditation issues, as can the amount of notice before the closure and the fate of the campus, but the end result is the same.

This is not the book we dreamed of writing and it is hard to welcome you to participate in a project about how to close a small college library. But here we are. Even though closing a library was not something any of us wanted to do, we still wanted to do it well. We are here to take our collective misfortune and turn it into something useful, something that will hopefully help librarians do the best they can with the most unenviable task of closing a college library.

Each library and college community is unique; this book aims to cover some of our similarities as well as highlight the many variables that can impact the work of shuttering a college library.