The McMaster University Library has just launched a process to review our vision, mission and strategic directions. As a first step we held an open forum for all staff and asked them to read the David Lewis paper, A Model for Academic Libraries 2005 to 2025. The staff were assigned to work in small groups where we asked them to (quickly) brainstorm trends and implications and then develop a vision and mission statement. Then, we asked them to think about the initiatives we should be involved in. Their remarks are attached to this as word documents.
As a next step the leadership team will meet with a consultant to synthesize the results and come up with a draft vision, mission and strategic directions draft document and more meetings will be held with staff until we’ve developed our final strategic plan. More to come!
July 20, 2007 at 11:54 am |
Thanks for posting the notes, Jeff.
The biggest argument my group had with the Lewis article was the very first bullet point: the un-nuanced view that all print is dead. We agreed that trend existed in certain categories of materials (journals are pretty much there, and reference books are moving rapidly that direction), but globally we’re also publishing more print books than at any point in our history. We were concerned that he seemed to overlook that. As things move forward, I’m really interested to hear from our own users what THEY want (besides a coffee shop…) in the library’s collection and how we can best supply it.