March 31, 2015 Meeting of Strategic Planning Steering Team

Agenda not yet available.

Peg Burnette, Jim Dohle, Lisa Hinchliffe, Lisa Renee Kemplin, Bill Mischo, David Ward, Lynn Wiley

Also Attending: Sarah Crissinger (Information Literacy GA)

Members Absent: Lisa Romero

1. Re-Cap from Presentation at All-Library Meeting

Lisa thanked Bill and Valerie for volunteering to present at the All-Library meeting on March 19 on behalf of the Strategic Planning Steering Team (SPST). Lisa edited the blog post to make it more clear that there will be an event based on ClimateQUAL feedback and staff morale. ARL is analyzing the data now but we should get more information back by mid-April.

2. Report on Open Discussions of Campus Strategic Plan and Office Hours

There has been low attendance for both campus strategic planning informational sessions and open office hours. Lisa will send a reminder about the last two campus strategic plan sessions to LibNews. Staff might still appreciate the opportunity and it could be sparking smaller conversations and people reading the campus strategic plan on their own.

An additional option is to implement open houses over the summer. Two or three members could be at each open house and there could be refreshments. This would allow for more discussion. The goal is to pair these with the deep dive events so that people can use them as an opportunity to ask questions or reflect. The SPST will also continue to encourage people to talk to any member of the team about concerns.

The STSP also believes that these open sessions will be attended more once the committee produces a draft document. They might also be attended because of budget changes, which the team discussed. At the same time, the goal of the open sessions is to be proactive (and not reactive) about strategic planning while in the information-gathering process. The team also decided that, while the SPST is not responsible for budget decisions, the new strategic plan will be a guide for administrators and faculty as they make decisions and advocate for the library.

3. Lisa report on Planning Discussions with AULs

Lisa has talked to all of the AULs about the deep dive events the group discussed previously. She reported that she has talked most extensively with Sue Searing about the transformational learning event. It will be three-hour event broken into a few pieces: 1) someone from provost’s office talking about the campus vision of transforming education and campus conversations already happening, 2) a panel of seniors and juniors talking about what was transformative about their college education at Illinois, and 3) a panel/interview session about library activities related to transforming education, which could include the Grainger Design Lab Project, the Undergraduate Library instruction program, and the Ethnography of the University Initiative. These are broad initiatives that have changed the Illinois curriculum.

Lisa has also been talking to Beth Namachchivaya about doing a research deep dive. She is hoping that the event will combine the ARL 2030 document with a local SWOT analysis done at UIUC to make a more meaningful hybrid document for this event. Lisa is meeting with her again next week to draft a plan.

Finally, Lisa has been talking with Tom about a research ecosystem deep dive. This event will focus more heavily on bringing external speakers to UIUC. He mentioned considering someone from CIC. OCLC is also studying research library transformation so inviting a researcher from that team is also an option. This event will probably be after ALA Annual.

4. Bill Report on Executive Committee Discussion of Strategic Planning

Bill is unsure about the Executive Committee’s (EC) ’s stance on all faculty voting to approve a SP document or whether the goal is extensive opportunity for all library faculty and staff to contribute to the the document with the document actually being approved by EC and Dean Wilkin. Bill will work more closely with EC to clarify this and Lisa will schedule another time to meet with EC. Lisa will also be visiting Admninistrative Council and the Library Staff Steering Committee in the coming weeks.

5. Informal Discussions with Campus Departments, Units, etc.

Valarie spoke with a number of campus departments about what questions the library should be asking faculty. They helped her draft a few sample questions.

David suggested that the campus strategic goals use specific language about scholarship and learning that might be more useful for framing our conversation with faculty. These might also help the team get more broad, over-arching answers instead of specific buying requests. David will work on these with Valerie and submit draft questions to SPST by the end of the week.

Once the questions are drafted, Lisa will send them to LibNews and encourage any liaison (including first year liaisons in the Undergraduate Library, liaisons in Scholarly Commons, etc. as well as subject department liaisons) to talk about them with their faculty either formally or informally. She will collect feedback through Web Tools.

The team can also use some of the Ithaka faculty survey data to see what faculty think of the library. This might be something to think about as the team asks for feedback and help from the Library Assessment Committee.

6. Senate Committee on Library  Discussion on Strategic Planning

Lisa will be talking with the Senate Committee on the Library this Thursday. SPST affirmed that it would be useful to provide the Senate Committee with a general overview and solicit their input throughout the process.

7. SPST Discussion and Decision: Should the Library adopt that campus strategic plan four goals as the large framing for the SP and use that to present ideas/initiatives?

The STSP decided that  the Library strategic plan should be structured based on the campus strategic plan. There are multiple reasons for this. It would set the library up to easily receive more financial and administrative support, as the budget proposal has to be mapped to the campus strategic plan, and also facilitate communication by presenting library impact and initiatives in a framework familiar to those outside of the Library.

Jim explained that the campus IT plan is currently attempting to transition to the campus strategic plan as its structure. He will share documents in the G Drive about this process, as it might be helpful for the team to conceptualize what this looks like.

The final campus strategic plan area, sustainability, does not obviously connect to the library’s goals; however, SPST suggested that sustainability be considered more broadly. It could include the research library ecosystem and working with others, including ARL, HathiTrust, CARLI, and the shared print repository.

Overall, creating the SP document in this way will allow the library to explicitly illustrate the difference that it makes. If the four goals of the campus plan do not fit perfectly, the STSP can always add additional goals or delete sections.

8. Next Steps

Lisa will write a blog post discussing the decision to base the library strategic plan on the existing campus plan.

Lisa asked everyone on SPST to look at all four goals in the campus plan and pay particular attention to the sentences describing each goal. The team will have to think critically about how to adapt those.

Lisa will also put on a future agenda for SPST to look at how the seven initiatives from the last library strategic plan map to the current campus plan.

 

Respectfully submitted,

Sarah Crissinger