Collections Strategic Planning
(Revised) January 31, 2005

The collection development mission is:
Shape collections to meet the emerging and ongoing needs of the university through acquiring, accessing, and creating resources in a rapidly changing information, educational, and research environment.

Introduction: As Rutgers strives for greatness, the library must also be nurtured and encouraged to grow in excellence, strengthening a partnership that will be richly rewarding for our academic community and the people of New Jersey. "Growth," as applied to library collections, covers both the acquisition of traditional print products (books and journals) as well as electronic access to online scholarly publications. The growth process in print and electronic collections can be sustained only with adequate funding. The inadequacy of the collections budget in the past decade has resulted in Rutgers being unable to keep up with new scholarly development in monograph and journal publications (both print and online). For the next several years the vast majority of new library resources will be purchased; yet there is also a growing and significant body of scholarly resources freely available via the internet. The Libraries will continue and expand its efforts to harvest, organize, and contribute to this body of knowledge.

Seek new sources of funding for collections:

• Pursue increased fund raising from private donors
• Campaign to implement revenue contributions for the libraries from departmental grants
• Promote contribution of University funds for the library in support of new academic programs
• Seek University contributions in support of the special informational needs of newly created endowed chairs
• Expand participation in state-wide or regional consortial endeavors that enhance our purchasing power
• Review budgeting and allocation process to insure alignment with the changing scholarly information publishing environment

Increase effectiveness of the print, digital and manuscript collections in the hybrid information environment

• Enhance support for existing programs via:
  • Identify the most critical gaps in our print monograph and media collections and the cost of filling them, and obtaining funding to fill them
  • Expand access to online resources required to support University academic programs, including both e-journals, and e-books
• Design and create appropriate space for housing of print, media and manuscript collection
  • Design, raising money for, and construct a remote storage facility for analog material and mass digital storage equipment
  • Enhance appearance of public stack areas
  • Increase involvement with state, regional, and national projects for retaining copies of older print material in joint facilities

Develop collection resources to support university designated high priority programs

Integrate scholarly communications, including the intellectual creations of the university community, more fully into the research and learning process.

• Practice and advocate Open Access
• Practice and advocate principles of copyright, fair use, confidentiality, user privacy, information security
• Develop the institutional repository
• Increase involvement of library liaisons in course development with teaching faculty

Promote diversity in collections and collections development librarians

• Hire librarians from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds and with foreign language skills to match the university's emphases in ethnic and global studies
• Develop collections reflecting the university's emphases in ethic and global studies

Increase understanding and awareness of current and emerging trends and products in digital information services and determine what roles the Libraries should play on behalf of the university

Develop new organizational structure for collection development:

• Create structure to deal more effectively with the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the academic community (e.g., interdisciplinary selector teams involving multi-campus collaboration)
• Facilitate closer integration of collection development and technical services on a system wide basis

Insuring continuous and long-term access to critical information resources by implementing the Libraries' preservation plan

• Hire appropriate preservation staffing including a system-wide preservation administrator
• Design and construct of a Preservation Center for housing of infrequently used, but important scholarly resources, including large manuscript collections and multi-media collections; mass digital storage equipment; a preservation laboratory Continue and expand development of digital preservation standards and procedures

Integrate assessment into every strategic goal and annual objects