Proposal for a Strategic Plan (Spring 2003)
Purpose: The strategic plan will help set the course for the Library for the next five years. The plan will be designed to reflect the overall curricular, intellectual, and cultural goals of the Saint Xavier University strategic plan.
Definition: The strategic plan is a tool that will enable the Library to focus its efforts on accomplishing a set of mission-critical goals over a five-year period.
Goals of the Strategic Plan: In this initial stage, the plan has four overall goals
- To help the Library develop information resources by finding ways to maintain, enlarge and make accessible its informational and research resources in all appropriate formats.
- To help the Library find better ways to support the teaching, research and service mission of the University.
- To help the Library develop the technical facilities and physical environment that promotes the best use of information resources, research tools, and other services.
- To help the Library establish a continual planning process.
Governance: The official name of the committee is the Library Strategic Plan Committee (LSPC). The Director of the Library, serving as chair, will select eight individuals for the LSPC, depending upon the approval of the Provost and the individuals. The members proposed for selection are:
- Mark Vargas, Chair (Library Director)
- Judy Christie (Circulation Desk Coordinator)
- John Eber (Dean of the Graham School of Management)
- Nelson Hathcock (Chair, Department of English and Foreign Languages)
- Bob Hansen (Director of Orland Park campus)
- Bea Julian (tenure-track librarian; since replaced by John Anagnostopoulos)
- Dave Kohut (tenured librarian)
- Anita Morgan (technical services librarian)
- Graham Peck (faculty member, Department of History)
- Pat Philbin (library periodicals technician)
Timeline: The Committee would begin meeting in January 2003, with an estimated completion date of May 2004.
General Methodology
Step 1: Establish a planning structure and initiate the process
- Engage Library staff on initial concept (completed)
- Obtain approval from the Provost to conduct planning process (in process)
- Establish the planning scope, timetable, and budget
- Establish a Library Strategic Planning Committee
- Select a planning consultant if needed
Step 2: Identify critical issues and identify key institutional objectives
- Identify the key institutional objectives relating to Library resources and services
- Identify the special needs and priorities of all constituent groups
Step 3: Identify models of excellence
- Investigate other academic libraries with published strategic plans and analyze and evaluate transferability to SXU (in process)
Step 4: Asset analysis
- Analyze assumptions, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (ASWOT)
- Identify and prioritize issues
Step 5: Establish a shared vision for the Library
- Forge a philosophy and vision of Library resources and services, establishing a clear relationship between its goals and the broader university mission.
Step 6: Strategic Plan
- Propose strategic goals
- Review and validate goals
- Establish priorities, timetables and budgets
- Establish an annual planning process
Identification of Assumptions, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (ASWOT)
A basic principle of the Library’s strategic plan will be to support the four basic goals by the enumeration of pertinent assumptions, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The Library Strategic Plan in the Context of a Changing Environment
The information marketplace is increasingly complex, presenting significant opportunities for improvements in research and teaching but requiring difficult and careful choices.
The primary mission of the Library is to support the University's teaching, research, and outreach programs through acquiring, preserving, and ensuring access for its users to knowledge and information. Many forces are forcing the Library to establish an effective and sustainable relationship between the ownership of collections and other forms of information access, including lease of electronically networked information, document delivery/interlibrary lending, and direct links to resources freely available through the Internet.
Changes in the needs and expectations of library users call for new criteria for successful library services. The growing importance of lifelong learning and a more mobile and demographically more diverse university community place a higher premium on readily available networked electronic services. In addition, many students and faculty require information in formats that are dynamically updated, that can be manipulated electronically, or that integrate sound and moving pictures. These new services and formats place additional pressure on the information budget of the Library.
Traditional patterns of collection-building can no longer be sustained because of the spiraling per-unit costs of scholarly information, a continuing increase in the amount of information being published, duplication of content in print and digital formats, and the growing dominance of for-profit corporations in the information marketplace.
Rapid growth in the information marketplace has created alternative models for library services. A wider range of information, including e-mail archives, numeric data streams, free websites, and multimedia files, is available to researchers. Moreover, similar or identical information content can be acquired under different economic models, including lease arrangements, purchase by subscription, and purchase on demand. Advances in communications technology and the rapid growth of the commercial information marketplace now enable information to be delivered directly to scholars. Globally networked library catalogs and subject indexes, responsive and rapid document delivery options, automated current awareness tools, and licensed access to electronic text offer alternatives to on-site ownership for some academic and scholarly purposes.