Vision Statement and Strategic Goals
Draft, July 22, 2005

Vision

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
          -- Dr. Linus Pauling

Over the next five years, the Rutgers University Libraries will develop collections and services that are focused on undergraduate students and researchers and that are integrated into the instructional and research programs of the university. The combined themes of focus and integration will guide decision-making, task selection, and priority setting for collections, services, technology, buildings, and human and financial resources.

Environment

The 21st century will be a time of great change for research libraries. During the coming decades, the Rutgers University Libraries and its peers will be challenged to find their way in a world where information is abundantly available, where expectations come from many contexts, where new infrastructures must be built, where there is an imperative to provide easy access to scholarly resources, and where there is opportunity and obligation to provide leadership on campus in matters that contribute to the public good. At the same time, there will be competition for the financial and human resources required for meeting these challenges. With a rich, complex environment typical of a large public research university and ambitions of becoming a first rank institution, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey needs libraries that are recognized as excellent that are responsive to institutional change and priorities, and that provide university leadership in areas of their expertise, such as copyright, intellectual freedom, and access to government information.

President Richard L. McCormick has introduced a number of important initiatives, and each of these affects the Libraries.

• Many recently designated new strategic research areas are multidisciplinary and do not fit neatly into how the Libraries currently assign subject responsibilities, develop services, or apportion the collections budget.

• Rutgers faculty are expected to break new ground in their research, and the university is seeking grant funds to support innovation.

• A review of undergraduate education is in progress on each campus. The recently issued report from the New Brunswick/Piscataway Task Force on Undergraduate Education describes for the first time a course in critical thinking that incorporates information competence and reasoning as a requirement during the first two years.

• There is increased commitment to instructional services for undergraduate education. One example is the high-level Office of Instructional and Research Technology established by Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Philip Furmanski with which the Libraries are a partner.

• Administrative changes in budgeting, policy implementation, and planning are moving many processes from the central university administration to campus provosts, deans, and directors, including the university librarian. Since the Libraries are a university-wide unit, the implications of these changes are likely to require increased networking and collaboration.

• The findings of the recently completed Rutgers Constituency Research Project Consultant's Final Report will set an agenda for how the university presents itself and provides outreach to and communicates with the State.

• There is an increased emphasis on facilities and environment on all campuses, especially on classroom space, to help create a sense of community and re-engage faculty into campus life.

• One capital campaign has just been completed, another is planned, and a new foundation president has been named.

Rutgers students and faculty are diverse racially and ethnically and have high expectations for library resources and services

• Faculty have come from many places in the world and engage in a number of international activities and programs, a broad range of disciplines, and collaborate extensively across disciplines. They use a variety of courseware packages and expect the Libraries to provide collections, services, expertise, speed, convenience, and reliability 24 / 7. They assume that the high cost of doing all of that will be supported as a part of normal university operations.

• The student body is also internationally diverse and includes many transfer students from community colleges across the state and returning adult learners. Students are media savvy, including being avid users of instant messaging and mobile devices, and heavy users of Google. Students expect good resources, help, study and social spaces, speed, convenience, and reliability 24 / 7, at no additional cost to them.

Rutgers faces the same challenges as other research universities in acquiring adequate financial resources. The Rutgers University Libraries compete with other units of the university for their share of the institution's resources, which generally means a piece of a smaller state allocation. They also compete for attention and support from the university and the foundation, which is required to raise external funds from government programs, foundations, and individual donors. At the same time, the costs of acquiring scholarly resources continue to rise dramatically.

To fund areas of excellence and priority, Rutgers has created a number of internal grant programs and a presidential excellence fund. The State of New Jersey has provided bond programs for higher education that have made funds available for buildings and computing equipment. The Libraries have benefited with funding from these programs, but these special funds do not assure continuing investment in the Libraries' infrastructure, collections, and human resources.

Focus

In response to this environment, the Libraries will focus on the undergraduate and the researcher. Undergraduates are the university's largest population, and a focus on them will serve as a gateway to the Libraries for the entire university community. The focus on the researcher will concentrate on the university's core academic disciplines, especially those of national and international excellence, and the university's strategic research areas. Graduate students will benefit both from satisfying the informational needs of the undergraduates and those of the professional researchers.

Some general principles for achieving this focus are:

• Collections: Focused development of the Libraries' collections will necessarily require an increase in collaborative partnerships with teaching faculty, instructional support offices, and research faculty in strategic research areas, many of which are interdisciplinary. The Libraries will concentrate on developing nationally and regionally recognized collection depth in strategic research areas and in areas of current strength, such as the Institute of Jazz Studies.

• Technology: The Libraries will work within the framework of open access to focus their technology on developing resources and services that support undergraduate life and learning, especially information literacy, and strategic research areas. The Rutgers digital repository will focus on providing digital access to the Libraries' collections and university scholarship.

Integration

Building upon the technological achievements of A Bridge to the Future: The Rutgers Digital Library Initiative, the Libraries will deepen the value and impact of their resources and services by making them easy to access, customize, and integrate into the university's instructional and research programs. There are now available so many scholarly resources, in every format and language possible, that students and researchers recognize that order and assistance are necessary. The Libraries will provide that organization and assistance in the various styles that students and faculty need and in the places, both physical and virtual, where they learn and create knowledge.

Some general principles for achieving this integration are:

• Collections and Services: Integrated development of library collections and services will require improved communication with students, faculty, and relevant administrative units, such as instructional support offices. The Libraries will develop cross resource searching mechanisms, including seamless access to external collection resources, and instructional and service programs and documentation that clearly guide library users to find, identify, select, and obtain digital and analog scholarly resources. The Libraries will continue to provide university and national leadership in such areas of public policy as privacy, intellectual property, intellectual freedom, and access to government information.

• Technology: The Libraries will use technologies developed for the Rutgers digital repository to integrate access to all formats of scholarly resources, whether analog or digital; text or media; owned, licensed, or borrowed. The Libraries will support scholarly digital resources developed at Rutgers by providing streamlined, integrated, and permanent access to these resources. The Libraries will also unify its electronic services by consolidating the number of places users need to consult to place requests and check their status and to communicate with the library. The process of integration should be invisible to the user, yet transparent in that users will clearly know where they are in the process of finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining the resources they need.

Focus and Integration

Some general principles for achieving both focus and integration are:

• Buildings: The Libraries will expand the annex on the New Brunswick/Piscataway campus, which will have a systemwide preservation and storage focus, while supporting efficient delivery services and reciprocal borrowing opportunities on all three campuses and beyond. This will recoup library space for new uses that address the ways that students learn, work, and socialize in the digital environment.

• Human Resources: The Libraries will redeploy the existing library workforce and recruit personnel to support new areas of emphasis and excellence and technological development, and create broad awareness of its resources, services, and support. They will increase the diversity of the Libraries' workforce and continue to develop a climate that cultivates and values diversity. Liaison relationships with schools, colleges, and academic departments; administrative units; and centers, bureaus, and institutes will be an area of emphasis and development.

• Financial Resources: The Libraries will secure increased resources through a variety of means to bring the Libraries' resources to the level of peer institutions, including active participation in the university's next capital campaign.

Strategic Goals

The Rutgers University Libraries will build its work on the following interpretation of university goals. Over the past year and a half, the Libraries have consulted broadly with the university community and identified numerous activities where students, faculty, and administrators believe the Libraries can positively impact their work. In addition, the university librarian's cabinet invited statements from librarians and library staff on topics of particular concern and interest. User and library recommendations are incorporated into this goals statement:

Academic Excellence

Strategic Goal: Improve the quality of scholarly resources and information services that support the advancement of academic excellence at Rutgers

• Acquire more full text online resources

• Build up the collections with an emphasis on the book collection

• Build a preservation program for the collections

• Allocate the collections budget strategically to ensure that areas of academic and research excellence are supported

• Improve collaboration with UMDNJ and NJIT

• Develop the reciprocal partnerships that provide Rutgers faculty and students access to collections outside the university

• Address information competency standards for students through information literacy materials, services, and programs in partnership with the teaching faculty

• Create services that connect librarians and students using new and emerging modes of communication and teaching, i.e., text messaging, student portals, learning management systems

• Adopt or develop tools that provide easy, seamless, reliable, and convenient access to both online and traditional scholarly resources, wherever they are located

• Increase the diversity of the Libraries' workforce

• Focus the development of digital resources on the Libraries' collections and on the output of Rutgers University, with an emphasis on support for the faculty research process

• Advocate for university and faculty participation in the open access movement and its impact on access to information

• Enhance the roles of library liaisons

Students and Campuses

Strategic Goal: Enhance the effectiveness of library services for students and the development of library facilities as learning spaces

• Enhance the physical library environment so that all libraries are welcoming, comfortable, and easy to navigate

• Provide appropriate current technology and equipment to facilitate access to information

• Organize library collections to respond better to our constituencies, to support efficient delivery services and reciprocal borrowing opportunities, and to recoup space for new uses and new collections

• Improve library safety and security

Service and Constituency Relations

Strategic Goal: Improve awareness of the resources, services, and support available to all of the Libraries' constituencies

• Develop and implement a marketing and communications plan for university and statewide constituencies

• Develop collaborative relationships with new university programs and offices

• Participate and take a leadership role in collaborative statewide and regional initiatives and further develop tools to share resources

• Improve services by utilizing assessment and accountability indicators that measure needs and impact

Resources for Rutgers

Strategic Goal: Increase the Libraries' resources to the levels of peer AAU public universities and manage those resources more strategically and efficiently

• Secure resources to bring the Libraries to the level of peer institutions and to support new areas of academic and research excellence

• Increase support for multilingual information that meets the curricular and research needs of the university and the rich diversity of the State of New Jersey

• Participate in all aspects of the next capital campaign

• Partner with university and campus offices such as the Office for Information Technology and the Center for Advancement of Teaching in ways that leverage the expertise of each organization to support teaching and learning

• Continue the integrated allocation of resources to support the Libraries' strategic plan

• Develop an integrated fundraising plan that takes advantage of an external relations focus to capitalize on opportunities to leverage public as well as private fundraising projects to increase overall support

Leadership and Administration

Strategic Goal: Continue to develop an organization and the human resources to achieve the Libraries' strategic goals

• Invest in staff development and recognition, and support organizational development, including the areas of managing people and resources

• Recruit and re-deploy personnel to support the Libraries' strategic plan

• Investigate alternate career tracks and new opportunities for advancement for library personnel