Rankings are playing an increasingly important role in the competition between universities. They are having an ever-increasing influence on the choice of university for first-year students and those changing their place of study.

With this in mind, Paderborn University Library (UB) actively and gladly voluntarily compares the performance of academic libraries in order to better assess its own strengths and weaknesses on the basis of key figures and comparative results and to receive suggestions for its future work.

Ranking results from library and university comparisons are a tool for the university library to determine whether and to what extent it is fulfilling its task of consistently orienting its services towards the needs of its users and the strategic goals of the university and actively promoting its services to its users.

• Library Index for Academic Libraries (BIX-WB)

Various university rankings also analyse the supply of literature from the perspective of students and teachers. Here, university libraries are often only mentioned in passing, for example under the term "library", e.g. for the respective subject areas under the heading: "Student judgements on the library". When comparing the ranking results of different universities, it should be noted that in Paderborn University it is always the single and central library that is assessed, while at other universities it is sometimes the faculty or seminar library, sometimes the central university library, without this always being explicitly stated.

• University ranking of the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE)