Our Strategic Plan

Earlier in the spring I told you that the library had written its mission statement. At a series of meetings in the Spring semester we developed a series of "Strategic Directions." The Library Advisory Council and the Provost had an opportunity to comment. Here they are:

1. In partnership with the faculty and through the curriculum, educate all Rollins students – in groups and individually -- in the skills of critical thinking, research, and evaluation of information.
2. Improve our users’ experience of the library; with exceptionally good, consistent, friendly, and professionally competent customer service to users, both online and in person.
3. Develop, organize, and provide easy access to the best possible information resources in the most appropriate formats for the Rollins community.
4. Find new and more effective ways to provide services and information resources beyond the library building so that the user need not come to the library, but the library services and resources are where the user needs us to be.
5. Develop the Olin Library as a welcoming and well organized space, in the building and online, that fosters the love of learning through services, programming, and exhibits.
6. Effectively communicate with and learn from the Rollins community and consistently use quantitative and qualitative evidence in decision making and development.
7. Support professional development and engagement aimed at continually improving all library personnel ability to implement this plan and improve library operations.

These are all priorities for us, but they are also in priority order. Maybe in years past collections(3) would have been number one, but that now comes below our educational (1) and user (2) services. The others, particularly six and seven are aimed at helping us achieve those top priorities.

All of these are situation and time specific. We decided on these for the Olin Library, at Rollins College, in 2007 (and hopefully for a few years hence.) We fully expect to have review them and change them as conditions change.

We are now actively engaged in the next level down of our strategic plan: determining the projects, action plans, and responsibilities that actually take us over the next year (or two) in the direction we think we need to go. After that we will incorporate those items into individual people's annual goals and begin measuring progress.

In the meantime, I would love to hear your comments on these strategic directions. Are we on the right track? Wat have we missed? What is not clear?