Strategic Planning 2004/2005 Strategic Planning Steering Committee

 

Jean and Alexander Heard Library

Strategic Plan

2005

Introduction

The Heard Library's environment is one of constant and dramatic change. To achieve maximum effectiveness, we must transform ourselves into an organization that preserves the best of our traditions while discovering new ways of assisting our users. The Internet and digital media have dramatically altered the nature of library collections and services. While we continue to provide assistance at service desks, we also provide a host of virtual services and intellectual resources for faculty, students and staff that are accessible anywhere at any time.
The University recently created a Strategic Academic Plan that refocuses its direction and priorities For example, University changes include the establishment of new trans-institutional centers, residential colleges, and the movement away from the ETOB budget model, which underlies the organization of the Heard Library system. The Heard Library Strategic Plan articulates how the Library will support the University's new vision.

Issues of Greatest Concern

The Library is a trans-institutional organization. Yet, because of its distributed physical infrastructure and budget structure, it is also a microcosm of the University's propensity to replicate services and decentralize decision-making. Each divisional library offers a high level of customized services for its primary user group. However, patrons cross boundaries to use the services of libraries other than those of their schools. The customization that serves them well in their "home" library can lead to confusing inconsistencies in other libraries. Moreover, while many of our new digital assets and services are trans-institutional, most of our staff work independently in divisional libraries. Finally, the shifting to the Internet of the locus of both collections and services makes our divisional alignment a much less meaningful organizing principle. Thus, while continuing to support the needs of each school, we must develop less fragmented and more consistent trans-institutional library services. Our vision is one of transcending the traditional library function in order to create a Center for Academic Life that serves the entire University.

The New Environment

Technology has changed the mission and role of libraries in very dramatic ways. No longer stored primarily on paper, information is transportable, easily replicable, and unrestrained by geography or time. Academic research libraries have responded with creativity and reinvention.
Technology affects how information is received, evaluated and processed, but it also influences our users' behaviors and attitudes toward the Library. Each year's entering class arrives with a more sophisticated understanding of technology. According to Barbara Oblinger, Vice President of Educause, the "NetGen" students are digitally literate, mobile, always on, and experimental. Their focus is on community and groups, not technology; they expect pervasive technology, live in multipurpose habitats, learn through simulation, prefer images and icons over text, and are focused on the course, not the discipline.

Just a few years ago, no one had heard of blogs, wikis, swarms, nor used games as part of the educational process. Highly personalized interfaces are now commonplace at Amazon and other Websites; Google appears to be the doorway to all knowledge, and blogs offer information in an informal network that challenges conventional "authoritative" sources. The Library continues to have an important role in teaching students to make judgments about the quality of the information they find.

Advances in technology increasingly tie disparate digital resources together in a seamless web that draws students and scholars into a deeper understanding of their discipline. We are at the beginning of a revolution in publishing where universities may regain some control of scholarly publishing and where Google intends to digitize millions of books.

Institutional repositories, open access publishing, and digital libraries will transform scholarship. ETANA.org, a project hosted at Vanderbilt, holds the promise of offering almost immediate access to Near Eastern archaeological excavation reports. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive continues to capture, index and offer scholars a unique source of national news. Publishing electronic journals edited by Vanderbilt faculty, a new service we recently began offering, expands the Library's from acquiring content produced elsewhere to facilitating the creation of content locally; We are the host to new media in scholarly communication.

Planning Process

The strategic planning process began early in 2004 with the establishment of task forces that focused on user groups, digital libraries, metadata, and organizational structure. Each task force conducted an environmental scan, gathered data, and compiled recommendations for change. A steering committee oversaw the process, evaluated the recommendations, and created the strategic plan.

The 46 members of the six task forces interviewed 78 faculty members and contacted over 70 others; they interviewed 21 graduate and undergraduate students in focus groups, and met with 55 library staff members. Twenty-three University administrators were interviewed, as well as seven alumni and six members of the museum community. Surveys were sent to 294 alumni, both recent and long-term graduates, and 46 percent of those solicited (136) responded. Task force members also reviewed almost 200 Web sites of ARL libraries and other institutions of higher learning to gather information for their environmental scans.

Library staff responded to the task force reports at three "town meetings." Seventy-six staff members attended the sessions, where they voted for the best recommendations. Staff members were also encouraged to submit recommendations that were not included in the task force reports and they brainstormed about their vision of the "ideal library."

Where We Stand

The Library's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats include:

Strengths:
· Specifically tailored collections and services keyed to each school
· An extensive array of digital databases, journals, and books
· A well-trained, knowledgeable and responsive staff
· An increased emphasis on quality of service

Weaknesses:
· Disparate policies, services, and programs due to the independence of the divisional libraries
· Lack of clear connection to the University direction or strategic plan
· Poor communication of our services and resources to users
· No clearly articulated digital library program
· No organized grant-seeking capability

Opportunities:
· To develop a deeper working relationship with other campus unitsthat support the academic enterprise
· To improve the alignment of our activities with key University initiatives and goals
· To leverage best practices of individual divisional libraries to all libraries
· To become an important element of the Residential College Program
· To emphasize our trans-institutional nature in support of University initiatives
· To provide information (knowledge) preservation, organization, and description services to faculty and administrators
· To participate in the national and international restructuring of scholarly communication
· To create new tools for scholarly communication
· To provide a desirable physical environment for scholarly activities

Threats:
· Google will become the de facto access point to information for students and faculty
· The Library will continue to be seen as a collection of books rather than the provider of services vital to the pursuit of research, teaching, and learning
· The cost of scholarly information will continue to increase faster than University budget increases, thus limiting learning, scholarship and research

Goals

To strengthen our position as a strategic asset to the University, the Library has established the following strategic goals for the next five years
Goal 1. The Center for Academic Life

The Library will become a "Center for Academic Life." The Library is well respected on campus, but it is widely perceived as only a repository for books and journals. To become a center of academic life we must offer a broader array of services to assist faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in all facets of the academic enterprise. We are positioned to offer many types of assistance that complement our traditional services, such as research and writing support, image databases for teaching, an institutional repository, e-journal publishing, e-portfolios, geographical information systems, dataset management, instruction in course-related technologies, and discipline- or group-based portals.

We can leverage our ability to provide some of these services by partnering with University units outside the Library. We have already begun conversations with the Center for Teaching and the Office of Innovation through Technology to co-manage a digital media unit and an "information commons" that would provide specialized software and hardware along with expert help to both faculty and students.

Goal 2. The Digital Library

The Library will build a seamless and powerful infrastructure for access to digital assets in support of the academic mission of the University. The Library will continue its acquisition of scholarly digital information. We will expand on this service to create, preserve, and make accessible the digital intellectual property of Vanderbilt faculty and students.

Like other contemporary research libraries, we will provide a host of new digital services that support local research and scholarship. These services include:
· Providing software, infrastructure, and services to support electronic journals and e-portfolios
· Creating image databases
· Hosting research datasets
· Supplying metadata so that scholars everywhere can find locally created content

The Library will partner with faculty by providing a rich digital environment for them to present and interpret their discoveries. Librarians and faculty, in turn, can work together to equip students to succeed in the digital environment.

Goal 3. The Library as Place

The Library will develop a comprehensive plan for space utilization and collection management in an environment of limited capital expansion. Although there is little possibility of increased library space within the next decade, our physical collection must continue to grow. We add 50,000 volumes or more annually. Every building in the Heard Library system has reached its capacity to house and preserve print materials; consequently, an increasing proportion of our collection will be located off-site. To assure rapid access to needed materials, we must employ means such as faculty book delivery, scanning, and faxing. Even so, the storage annex will be full within five to eight years.

Students and faculty expect to find a variety of research and study spaces in contemporary libraries. They expect group study areas, individual carrels for intensive research, technology-enabled spaces, lounges that offer an "Internet café" experience, and quiet reading rooms. The Library needs to create a "Third Place" where, after the residence and the classroom, patrons find inspiration, contemplation, scholarship, and learning.

Goal 4. Access

The Library will provide seamless access to scholarly information in all formats. Information lives in many places: books, journals, Websites, archives, image databases, data sets, audio and videotapes, and institutional repositories. We will find and develop tools that can simultaneously search all of these places and present reliable academic results in an intelligible manner. These tools will replicate Google's simplicity and ease of use, but not be subject to the profit-driven motivations of corporate information producers. Patrons will continue to find print materials in our collection, but they will also discover digital materials we acquire, create, or host.

Goal 5. Instruction

The Library will develop, in consultation with faculty, a cross-college information competencies instruction program to educate undergraduates in the use, evaluation, and management of information resources. Our findings show that students need to learn to evaluate and make informed decisions about the quality of information. They also need to develop searching skills to find relevant data in both digital and print media. Google cannot answer every question completely, and un-refereed forms of communication such as blogs are highly questionable. The four divisional libraries serving undergraduates can benefit from a multi-college instructional program that utilizes and builds on their best practices. Working with faculty, the Library will design a comprehensive program of information competencies that can be utilized throughout the University but customized to specialized needs. The new Residential College system and the new Freshmen Commons may be perfect venues for exposing undergraduates to information analysis and retrieval skills.

Goal 6. Communication

The Library will better communicate with our patrons. We found in our faculty and student interviews and focus groups that many patrons are unaware of the Library's new services and information products. We also discovered that we are not always cognizant of our patrons' information needs and perception of the Library. There is a clear need for greater dialog between library staff and our patrons. We will create venues and forums that facilitate communication and establish an assessment program that enables us to measure the Library's effectiveness.

Alignment of Goals

One of the major reasons for conducting this strategic plan is to bring the Library's collections and services into better alignment with the University's goals. No major research university can reach the goals that Vanderbilt has set for itself without a robust and vital library. The Faculty Senate has noted that graduate students in all disciplines make heavy demands on library resources. Those in the humanities, especially, expect physical facilities that support intensive library study and research. Faculty and graduate students in the sciences view immediate access to electronic databases and scientific literature as a basic need. Strong collections attract accomplished faculty who rely on libraries for their research and teaching. Undergraduates want attractive physical and social environments in the library as well as easy access to electronic resources seamlessly connected to their courses.

Our Library already provides many of the necessary resources and has the talented staff to offer the highest-level services to faculty and students. However, the above-stated goals will help us to focus our resources in support of graduate education, faculty recruitment and retention, trans-institutional research, and residential life. To accomplish these goals, we must find creative ways of redeploying staff, especially as our digital collections continue to grow. We must not let our ETOB budget structure bind us to a silo mentality, and we must reach out to other academic units on campus to leverage our talent and resources and provide easy access to all of our services. Over the past decade, we have developed many important cooperative agreements with other libraries to augment materials available to our community. Now is the time to focus our attention internally on campus and across schools to make certain that our resources are used to their fullest, and that our community is aware of our potential to partner with them in their endeavors.

Implementation Plan

The Library will develop a detailed implementation plan to accomplish the six goals stated above. We will devise "trans-library" budgetary, personnel deployment, policy, and organizational tactics. Most important, we will embrace values and cultivate a library organization and climate that will help us attain our goals:

· We will strengthen our user-centered orientation and constantly work toward understanding and meeting the needs of the Vanderbilt academic community.

· We will cultivate a climate of assessment that incorporates metrics that measure our success, adjusting our course in light of what we learn.

· We will strengthen our commitment to service quality.

· We will be a learning organization in which staff acquire new skills at an increased pace to keep current with technological change.

· We will foster a strong collective identity that encourages a spirit of cooperation and collaboration with common understanding, beliefs, and behaviors throughout the library system, and that encourages the staff to work together to provide effective and efficient services.