Purpose & Goals

Strategic planning in academic libraries exists in tension between the strategic vision and plans of the university as a whole, and the long-term goals of library administrators, faculty, and staff. The library needs to support the vision of the university, while the university vision may not fully encompass library-specific concerns of collection development, access, and preservation. Successful strategic planning also requires input and support from personnel across the library. This paper considers how the strategic planning process can be designed in a way that produces a plan or vision that aligns with the priorities of diverse stakeholders and is adaptable to a rapidly changing future.

Design & Methodology

As a case study of the recent strategic planning process at the libraries of a state flagship research university, this paper explores how the university libraries built a new strategic vision aligned with university priorities, accounted for input and feedback from libraries personnel and university administration, and remained adaptable to future changes. References will be made to current literature on planning in academic libraries. Our planning process at first attempted to move directly to project proposals in each of the university’s vision areas. A review of the resulting proposals by administrators, together with feedback from across the libraries, made it apparent that aspects of many projects were already in process, while others would require substantial preparation and reorganization. Instead of becoming a strategic plan, these documents, together with input from university administrators, became source material for a second round of strategic visioning with a large group of stakeholders, resulting in the final strategic vision.

Conclusions

The standard visioning process begins broadly and proceeds to highly specific goals and timeframes. In our library, the previous strategic plan process had ended with an extensive list of action items. While attempts were made to track and celebrate these individual goals, many were superseded or rearranged by changes in the university context or institutional priorities. As we embarked on our next strategic visioning process, we used a variety of techniques to make our university’s recent strategic vision our own. Our process borrowed from agile methodology to form iterative phases that informed one another and the final vision. Ultimately, we produced a vision for 2023-2030 that has brought our work into alignment with university priorities through broad priority statements stretching across multiple teams and departments. These statements attempt to meet stakeholders’ needs for storytelling frameworks. Individual ‘strategic goals’ will be shorter-term departmental and individual goals justified through ties to the vision statement. We thus aim to be more adaptable to changes in the university and the broader environment. Now that we have completed our visioning process, we are presented with another question: how do we track progress towards our vision in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders? Assessment was a consideration in our process, but demonstrating progress in meaningful ways requires more creativity than a simple checkbox or single statistic can provide. Our broad vision is attractive to stakeholders’ desire for powerful storytelling but will need an assessment plan that is just as impactful.

Implications & Value

Strategic planning is an unavoidable part of life in an academic library, and assessment librarians will be called upon to contribute to planning with data and trend analysis. Our case study will provide some pointers and some cautionary tales to help those planning their own strategic visioning process. Assessing a strategic plan sometimes means assessing the planning process as well as progress toward goals. We will consider how the strategic planning processes should remain flexible to guide an organization through transformative changes in technology, the student population, and university business decisions.