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Library Mission & Goals

Mission   The Dartmouth College Library fosters intellectual growth and advances the mission of Dartmouth College and affiliated communities by supporting excellence and innovation in education and research, managing and delivering information, and partnering to develop and disseminate new scholarship.

Vision   Inspiring ideas for personal transformation and global impact.

Values   In our daily work, we adhere to the principles of fairness and equality, and we believe that each user of the Library is unique and important. We aspire to provide the best possible patron experience while maintaining a comfortable, welcoming and secure place for study, research, work, reflection and interaction. We anticipate and contribute to scholarly inquiry and embrace our role as collectors and custodians of the intellectual record.  - Dartmouth College Library Values, April 2011 (PDF)

Goals

Assessment: Continue to strengthen the culture of continuous improvement through ongoing assessment of Library activities and programs.

Infrastructure: Provide physical and digital infrastructures that advance research and education.

Staff: Recruit, develop and retain exceptional staff committed to our service culture and philosophy.

Information: Develop information resources and services that support research, education, and healthcare at Dartmouth

Publishing: Build collaborations to support faculty, graduate, and undergraduate student scholarly publishing.

Learning: Teach members of the Dartmouth community to be effective users and producers of information to meet their current academic needs and prepare them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership.

Institutional collaboration: Provide leadership and support for College initiatives and priorities.

Marketing: Market the Library’s information resources and services to all the Library’s communities.

 

Dartmouth College Library: Strategic Thinking 2015-2020 (2015)

 

Dartmouth College Library FY16 Initiatives

16.1 Digital Scholarship Program
Sponsor:  Jennifer Taxman
Leads:  Ridie Ghezzi, Carole Meyers

Develop a two-phase approach for a Digital Scholarship Program and Center for the entire campus, both virtually and in physical space, including scope, resources, intended audiences, and collaborators. Propose a suite of services and tools across disciplines to provide consultation, teaching, and project workspaces and to encourage cross discipline collaborations. Develop a plan to communicate the importance of institution wide advancement of digital scholarship across the disciplines.


16.2 Dartmouth Library Depository Phase 3
Sponsor:  Jennifer Taxman
Lead:  David Sturges

Plan for phase three of the Dartmouth Library Depository.  Provide supporting documentation and rationale for the third phase.  Following approval, begin detailed planning for the renovation and for occupying and staffing the space.


16.3 Discoverability
Sponsor:  Eliz Kirk
Leads:  David Sturges, Cecilia Tittemore

This exploratory initiative addresses a perceived lack of awareness of library resources and services and will investigate how to enhance patron discovery of the resources using wayfinding tools while in the physical library spaces. Additionally, recently implemented wayfinding tools, such as StackMap, will be evaluated.


16.4 Experiential Learning
Sponsor:  Jennifer Taxman
Lead:  Laura Barrett

As part of this exploratory initiative, and by partnering with DCAL's new Experiential Learning Initiative Director, the Library will strengthen its ties to the campus-wide experiential learning initiative, brand existing programs, and develop new ones further increasing awareness on campus of the Library's important role in teaching and learning.


16.5 Drupal Implementation
Sponsor:  Jennifer Taxman
Leads:  Anthony Helm, Jane Quigley

Migrate the Library website to Drupal, the new CMS offered by ITS, which affords multiple benefits to library patrons and staff. Through implementing web best practices and strategies that support the Library's missions and goals, the Library will be able to develop and maintain the website as an effective library service and information delivery platform.


16.6 Collection Management
Sponsor:  Eliz Kirk
Leads:  James Fein, Cecilia Tittemore

In preparation for an impending Ivy Plus Libraries' project to share responsibilities for the retention of older, rarely used collections, the Library will complete any outstanding administrative work on the Dartmouth-Brown print archiving memorandum of understanding and will ensure that our bibliographic file fully describes the materials we are retaining under that agreement. An action plan will be developed that will enable us to meet any Ivy Plus requirements once that project begins.


16.7 SharePoint and File Plan
Sponsor:  Lora Coble
Leads:  James Fein, Wess Jolley, Lora Coble

A SharePoint site will be created for the Library in order to collaborate, organize, store, and document its work. The SP site will allow Library staff to setup and manage projects as well as communicate meeting agendas, minutes, and other relevant operating information. The scope of this project is limited to a specific set of functionality upon which additional capabilities (including specific work processes) can later be built.


16.8 Open Access Policy Implementation
Sponsor:  Eliz Kirk
Lead: Barbara DeFelice

Collaborate with campus partners to implement the Dartmouth Faculty Open Access Policy in a manner consistent with the intentions of the policy.  The goals of the implementation are therefore to increase the reach and impact of scholarly articles, and enable long-term preservation of this part of the scholarly record, while being as convenient for the faculty as possible.  Partners include the Council on the Libraries Faculty Advisory Subcommittee on the Faculty Open Access Policy and Repository, ITS, and experts in the software products and services being used in this implementation.