Vision & Strategic Focus

VISION

GWLA strives to be an innovative, flexible, and risk-taking consortium. We advance student learning and success, transform the research and scholarly communications ecosystem through advocacy, collaboration, and making bold decisions together.

Areas of Strategic Focus & Cross-Cutting Themes

Areas of Strategic Focus

Student Success

Collections

Scholarly Communications

Cross-Cutting Themes

Advocacy

Assessment

Workforce and Professional Development

Innovation and Experimentation

Framing and Infrastructure

Student Success

Develop and provide programs, services, spaces, and resources that promote student success.

Objectives:

Identify institutional needs, bottlenecks, and common challenges;
Develop programs and responses to address identified needs and challenges;
Support OER activities and textbook affordability programs on our campuses;
Develop assessment metrics to demonstrate impact.

Sample Activities

Provide resources to serve emerging student populations
Develop mentored student employment program
Survey students informally about what the library is/should be doing to help them be successful
Create/share best practices

Collections

Using our collective expertise, GWLA will develop scalable, strategic, and sustainable models of collection development, preservation, stewardship, and access to information.

Objectives:

Determine the distinctive collection strengths of GWLA member libraries to enable potential collaborations and programs;
Explore shared print possibilities to ensure print formats are available for lending;
Develop alternative models for content access;
Establish a rigorous data analytics service;
Develop and share journal negotiation principles and data analysis;
Ensure GWLA’s vendors meet accessibility standards.

Sample Activities

Establish data analytics resources and expertise
Investigate RA21 impact
Collaborative collection development
Digital preservation

Scholarly Communications

We will invest in shared infrastructure and expertise to move the Scholarly Communications environment toward open.

Objectives:

Pool resources to support shared infrastructure and expertise;
Benchmark our efforts that support “moving the needle towards open” -- open access, open data, open scholarship, open educational resources;
Enhance and encourage library and non-profit publishing initiatives;
Establish a data analytics program to help campuses understand publication patterns at their own institutions;
Share resources to enable libraries to lead campus discussions about scholarly publishing, open access, collection models, and navigate difficult campus conversations.

Sample Activities

Expand toolkit idea to include costs of collections, research data, and researcher visibility
Fund shared Data Analyst position
Expand shared infrastructure to include library publishing and research data
Create toolkit/talking points about library spending

[Adopted by the GWLA Membership, Fall 2019]

Page updated

Report abuse