To fulfill its mission of providing exceptional service and collections to all users, the University Library has developed the following strategic plan for FY2000-2003. The plan contains six goals to enhance the level of Library services. The first goal challenges the Library to further develop direct information delivery to users; goal two addresses our desire to expand and preserve our preeminent collections; goal three calls upon the Library to teach students to be life-long learners; the fourth goal states our aspiration to recruit and retain the best service-oriented faculty and staff possible; goal five speaks to the importance of improved library facilities in the delivery of services; and the sixth goal envisions the ways in which the Library can serve the campus by increasing its own and the University’s reputation.

The plan, while ambitious, demonstrates the Library’s renewed commitment to excellence.

The University Library exists to serve the curricular and research needs of the students and faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by making available published materials, unpublished documents, and electronic resources that together comprise a current and retrospective record of human knowledge. As an integral part of the worldwide scientific and scholarly community, the Library engages in alliances with other institutions nationally and internationally to further the development of its collections and the provision of information resources. As a major component of the statewide library and information services network, the Library provides service to users across the State of Illinois. Building upon a rich heritage, the Library seeks to maintain a strategic position as an institution of worldwide renown that offers unparalleled opportunities for intellectual exploration.

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Goals and Objectives for FY2001-2003

Service to users is at the core of all our efforts. To provide service effectively and efficiently the Library will take great care in deploying our internal resources to meet users’ needs. The Library will also form partnerships with other units on campus and with other institutions to obtain service advantages that we might not be able to provide alone.

• Develop a campus-wide user outreach and education program.

A campus-wide user outreach and education program is a central component of delivering services to users. If our users do not clearly know what services are available from the library and how to obtain those services, then all our efforts are wasted. We must know what our users’ needs are; we must communicate with them on a regular basis; we must apprise them of what services are available. Beyond improving two-way communication, we must offer our users a range of opportunities to learn about library services and to enhance their information-seeking skills. Specialized outreach and user education services will not be provided when they subtract from the provision of basic user and collection services.

• Develop up-to-date and meaningful tools for monitoring and analyzing the Library’s activities so that Library resources for services can be allocated strategically and tactically.

Over the past decade academic and research libraries have become more complex. This complexity also reflects a potential richness of services available to users. However, we do not have a reliable, accurate system for monitoring the library’s activities in the delivery of services. As a result we are handicapped in making intelligent decisions for the delivery of services. We intend to develop and implement a set of tools that will enable us to allocate resources where they are needed.

• Provide bibliographic access to the collection on a timely basis.

The Library acquires approximately 100,000 items annually. We intend to have all materials possessed by the Library accessible through our online catalog. This will help our users in identifying whether we have an item and will help us in preventing duplicate acquisitions.

• Foster cooperative arrangements with both intramural and extramural units in order to accelerate and expand service provision.

We recognize that acceleration and expansion of the provision of services cannot be done in isolation. Units, whose goals are similar to ours, can be partners in providing service to our users. We will endeavor to identify and expand these cooperative arrangements for our own and others benefit.

• Increase the donor base for services support.

State funds alone will not adequately provide enough support for our operations. Therefore our Development Office will continue to increase the donor base for service provision, in addition to that for collection support.

• Aggressively identify and develop new services to meet our users’ evolving needs.

One major advantage of our 42 unit library system is that we are close enough to many of our users to be able to know their needs. But because many users avail themselves of more than one departmental library, we are determined to define a core level of services across campus. This core level will be continually reviewed in each of our libraries. By the same token, each of our libraries will also continue to deliver the specialized services in which they excel.

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In concert with campus teaching and research priorities the Library will ensure that our users have access to needed information resources. These resources not only include traditional print materials and special collections located on campus and off (via interlibrary loan and document delivery), but electronic and other mediated resources available to us through licensing, consortial, and other arrangements. The Library will also engage external donors and other entities in fulfilling this goal.

• Develop a materials allocation plan that equitably distributes funds for collections based on campus priorities, users’ needs, and its potential impact for the university.

This objective is central to the equitable distribution of collection resources on campus. The Senate Committee on the Library and the Campus Library Policy Committee are working with the Library to develop this plan.

• Clearly define and communicate to campus the extent of resources needed to maintain our preeminent collections.

Part of our responsibility to the faculty and students we serve is to articulate their collection needs to campus and to point out our ability to meet these needs in comparison with peer institutions. In collaboration with campus administrators we can ensure that our users will have access to the types of information they require.

• Implement a comprehensive preservation and conservation program for all library materials in all formats.

We have a commitment from the Mellon Foundation for preservation planning. This, coupled with the hiring of a preservation librarian, will enable the library to protect the enormous investment already made in collections by the University and the State of Illinois. The aim is to preserve information for current and future scholars.

• Build the donor base for collection support.

The resources needed to build, maintain, and preserve a collection such as ours cannot come from the State of Illinois alone. We will continue to seek endowment funds, and other gifts targeted for collection support. In addition, we will work collaboratively with teaching departments to increase support for departmental libraries.

• Actively pursue cooperative collection development activities with other institutions.

Over the past decade academic and research libraries have realized that no one library can collect all the materials needed by its users. Collection development has to evolve into cooperative collection development. In meeting this objective we will identify common collection interests among our peers and develop cooperative programs. We will strengthen and expand the cooperative borrowing and document delivery services.

• Develop guides that direct users to those parts of the collection that meet their needs.

Many users have told us that the collection is so large and complex that they cannot find the items they need, nor do they know of our special collections. To meet this need we intend to develop better methods to publicize the collections and to help our users be more self-sufficient . This will enable them to better exploit the unique resources we possess.

• Establish more accurate and comprehensive ways of determining what our users need and better ways to obtain materials for them.

We will work on a variety of fronts to determine what the needs and expectations of our users are. This will entail communicating with departments and departmental library committees, conducting surveys of faculty on teaching and research needs, and other activities. The newly established University Librarian’s Student Advisory Committee will also provide an avenue for this type of information.

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The library has a teaching mission to educate citizens to be productive members of society. By cooperating with teaching departments the Library will contribute to students’ education by equipping them with the skills to obtain further knowledge in all fields of endeavor.

• Develop quality information literacy programs.

Undergraduate students in particular arrive at the university with little knowledge of how to use published and unpublished information sources effectively. Many of them cannot interpret bibliographic citations, do not know how to find articles and books on a specific topic, or how to evaluate the sources of information they do find. We recognize that students learn about these things in different ways and at different times. By increasing effective library instruction to undergraduates and graduate students, we will enable them to become self-sufficient and critical thinkers. These programs will use varied methods for different levels of users, be based on the measurement of baseline competencies and desired learning outcomes, and continually be evaluated and refined to reflect changes in the local and global information environments.

• Work collaboratively with teaching faculty and information technology staff on instructional projects and programs .

Only by having library instruction and information literacy programs as part of the entire teaching mission of the university will the goal be met of equipping University of Illinois graduates to be life-long learners. To do this we must collaborate with teaching faculty, not only to produce students competent in a discipline, but competent in accessing, filtering, evaluating, interpreting, and applying information. The joint collaboration of the Library, the teaching faculty and the information technology staff on campus, will give graduates the tools they need for the next century.

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Exceptional people provide exceptional service. It is the Library’s responsibility to recruit those people to be members of our faculty and staff and to ensure that they have the motivation and skills to meet our goals.

• Increase the attention and care devoted to the process we currently employ in recruiting the best candidates for positions in our library.

To recruit and retain the best faculty and staff we will ensure that salary, benefits, and job requirements are appropriate and reflect the wider labor market that governs our profession. Furthermore, we must promote diversity in all aspects of recruiting.

• Create a system of faculty and staff performance evaluation that directs personal and unit efforts towards the goals articulated by the Library.

In order to achieve the Library’s goals we must improve our current faculty and staff performance evaluation system. This will not happen overnight but will evolve into a system that is a best fit for our circumstances.

• Create an ongoing internal training and development program for all Library faculty and staff to ensure a basic knowledge of library operations, to impart needed skills, and to develop each individual’s skills, gifts, and knowledge.

A well-trained workforce is the primary ingredient necessary to obtain the materials for teaching and research and to provide the services needed by our users. When our staff are well trained, they become more than functionaries in the labor-intensive work of the Library. They know how to apply technology to improve and streamline services. They are aware of the surrounding environment of scholarly publishing. They synthesize and generalize from the particulars of their jobs to newly emerging demands. They adapt to change.

• Ensure that faculty and staff are deployed strategically to meet the Library’s goals.

To provide services of high quality, the Library must be able to collect and analyze a great deal of information about our current expenditure of efforts and the benefits derived. With that information we would be in a position to deploy our staff both tactically and strategically.

• Provide meaningful and substantive mentoring programs for all newly hired employees.

Mentoring of faculty and staff begins in the home division and unit. Valued employees must be encouraged and supported to be successful.

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• Expand specific external partnerships to help us achieve our strategic goals.

Like cooperative collection development, other areas of academic library activities are ripe for partnerships to achieve goals individual libraries could not do alone. This type of activity will not only focus on the State of Illinois, but also nationally and internationally.

• Establish our presence as an intelligent mediator between developers of new technologies and their application to teaching and research.

The interrelationship among developers of technology, users of technology, and the application of technology to teaching, research, and information-seeking is becoming increasingly complex. We can position ourselves in this process by bringing our professional knowledge and expertise to bear on the design and development of new online resources for teaching and research.

• Solidify our impact and leadership in professional associations, corsortia, and in the literature of our field.

Individual Library faculty and staff have always been active in professional associations, have written in professional journals, and spoken publicly in a variety of forums. Through this kind of activity we derive the benefit of improving our knowledge about issues in our field and also convey to our colleagues around the country the strengths of our own faculty. This often leads to inter-institutional collaboration and other positive benefits for the Library as a whole.