Strategic Directions and Objectives

Strategic directions

Over the next five to seven years, in consultation with our communities, we will:

• Practice coordinated and intentional strategic planning, including establishing sustainable systems to document and communicate our norms, processes, practices, roles, and responsibilities.
• Clarify our understanding of both our commitments and resource capacity, and actively work to align the two.
• Continuously strengthen and evolve our user-centered services, spaces, and collections (physical and digital).
• Cultivate a welcoming, compassionate, and inclusive workplace climate.
• Acknowledge, confront, and interrupt the structural and institutional racism that shapes our interactions with colleagues, patrons, and the larger community.
• Cultivate and encourage a learning and growth mindset that will move our organization toward values-informed change, including by holding space for and following up with difficult conversations and facing challenging realities.

Strategic objectives

In support of our strategic directions, over the next few years we will: 

• Develop and implement a shared library service philosophy and strategies that center user needs, acknowledge interconnectedness and multimodality, and ensure an inclusive and welcoming scholarly environment, regardless of the point of entry.
• Advance our digital scholarship service through strategic cross-divisional collaboration to develop infrastructure, policies, and best practices that work towards just, equitable, and inclusive outcomes.
• Evolve and adapt our instruction programs, resources, infrastructure, teams, and modes in response to campus directions, and engage in ongoing assessment with attention to diverse pedagogical needs and equitable learning opportunities. 
• Collaboratively develop a well-documented collection services strategy.
• Prepare to build a preservation-grade physical materials repository.
• Implement and adopt recently developed digital preservation and access principles to strengthen our services, technologies, policies, and commitments to long term preservation of the scholarly and cultural record.
• Develop, cultivate, and support new publishing models that maximize access to high-quality scholarship, with a focus on sustainable monograph and journal publishing, reusable research data, and interoperable open infrastructure.
• Develop, fund, and implement a space and facilities strategy. This strategy will take a holistic approach (including library-managed, provost-managed, and academic unit-managed spaces and buildings) to ensuring our people-centered spaces (open public, browsable collections, programmed, and employee workspace) are more flexible, functional, welcoming, accessible, and equitably allocated and managed.
• Support our commitment to accessibility by aligning library practices with U-M official digital accessibility policy, adapting or developing processes and policies where they are lacking.
• Continuously improve workplace culture and organizational climate, in closer alignment with our library values. 
• Coordinate cross-library data gathering and analysis to support high-quality services provision and a positive workplace climate.

 

Last updated: October 2022