Strategic Initiatives
Based on our mission, vision, and values, these are the Libraries' major goals, strategies, and initiatives.
Goal Areas
User-centered Excellence and Innovation
Enable and catalyze our University community’s success by applying innovative, user-centered approaches in our programs, services, and spaces.
Social Justice
Deepen the impact of our values-based work in the Libraries, partnering with others to promote democracy, social justice, and equitable participation in our society.
Partnerships
Strengthen the Libraries’ positive influence, reach, and reputation through new and existing strategic partnerships.
Organizational Capacity
Ensure the Libraries’ continued organizational capacity, resources and sustainability so that strategic goals can be reached.
Strategies and Initiatives
User-Centered Excellence and Innovation
- Identify, collect, and integrate performance data to inform decisions and align the Libraries with the university’s performance indicators.
- Redefine our collections with data and models to better inform collections funding and bring our practices in line with UMD’s academic curriculum and priorities.
- Charge a new, interdisciplinary group, working title: Scholars Brain Trust, to explore and create structures to address Big Challenges such as scholarly communications, anti-racism work, and digital scholarship trends.
- Contribute to the university’s pandemic-related crisis and recovery efforts to ensure short- and long-term success of UMD.
- Co-lead a collaborative Open Educational Resources and Affordability Initiative to address college affordability and access to knowledge as an ethical issue.
- Enhance and redesign Libraries’ user-centered public website and interfaces.
- Carry out first phase of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Libraries’ Discovery to Delivery initiatives.
Social Justice
- Make our collections, data, and exhibits more open and accessible through digitization and other tools.
- Document and preserve the student experience, including student life, social justice activism, and stories of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Partner with ARHU’s Center for Literary and Comparative Students to deliver Anti-Racism series of events and actions.
- Carry out COVID-19-related community engagement projects that will mitigate disproportionate negative impact of the crisis on some students, faculty, and members of the surrounding community.
- Follow through on commitment to anti-racism and social justice work, ensuring we are considering BIPOC constituents in all that we do using anti-racism and inclusive research and applied solutions in our work and operations.
- Explore options and implement changes to integrate library teaching and outreach into the campus’s implementation of the university-wide Diversity Education Task Force (DETF) recommendations and into the IDEA elements of Terrapin Strong improvements related to orientation.
- Reclaim our purpose and values as sources of knowledge, service, and hope through promotion of values-based work to the community.
- Support and broaden the work of the Libraries’ Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Committee.
Partnerships
- Participate fully in the Big Ten Academic Alliance BIG Collection Initiative related to consortial licensing and large-scale acquisitions.
- Lead Project 1856, the university’s participation in Universities Studying Slavery -- and an international consortium of over 60 universities sharing best practices in addressing their institution’s past.
- Expand use of the Center for Research Libraries collections for research and learning.
- Collaborate with the iSchool’s Trace Research and Development Center to pilot test use of tools to improve technological accessibility.
- Provide leadership in USMAI as the consortium plans and implements a systems migration to a Next-Generation Discovery Platform, Integrated Libraries Systems (ILS), and Resource Sharing System.
- Join the Google Books library project to expand searchable, full-text content.
- Contribute content to the HathiTrust Research Center.
- Strengthen collections-based relationship with AFL-CIO, LABF, NPR, and international partners.
- Partner with the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA), Merrill College of Journalism, iSchool to launch the WHCA Pool Reports Archive.
- Create a new Digital Collections Collaboratory Program with the iSchool and and the Digital Curation Innovation Center.
Organizational Capacity
- During COVID-19 hiring freeze and beyond, focus on improving professional development and retention strategies to fill gaps in staffing and experience levels.
- Run a library-wide planned abandonment exercise to decommission programs and services that are no longer as relevant for users to increase capacity for new initiatives across the Libraries.
- Investigate automation and semi-automation tools to more effectively run operations and allocate staff time.
- Improve organizational policies and processes to incorporate anti-racist and inclusive principles into our practice of librarianship and library operations.
- Modernize and scale up to cloud-based infrastructure for digital collections.
- Develop and implement Avalon, an open-source streaming media system.
- Streamline Libraries faculty processes as much as possible.
- Develop and operationalize a new comprehensive communications plan.
- Strengthen development and fundraising efforts, emphasizing building of endowments and fostering donor relations.