Aligning Priorities
The current economic downturn underscores the impact of donations and encourages aggressive new thinking about how to achieve long-term goals.
Facing rapidly changing expectations of students and faculty, libraries nationwide are changing the way they have traditionally done business. At IU, economic realities are accelerating how quickly that change will come: belt-tightening brings priorities into clear focus.
Librarians in Bloomington believe now is the time both to look forward and let go. “We are not only trying to see far into the future,” says Pat Steele, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries, “we are positioning ourselves strategically to anticipate the needs of our users. Sometimes that means moving in new directions altogether.”
For example, libraries now play a pivotal role in creating ways to disseminate the university’s scholarly research. “For decades libraries have purchased scholarship published in journals, put it on the shelves, and made it available to the academic community,” Steele says. “Increasingly we are partners in publishing. We're helping faculty find better ways to accomplish their goals in the digital world.”
Librarians are also working with Google to digitize volumes, and working with other libraries (those from the Big Ten, the University of California, and the University of Virginia) to make these digitized resources more useful to researchers via an online repository called the HathiTrust.
Donors should be reassured because “we get it,” says Steele. “We understand the new environment and what it will take to succeed. But we will be successful only if we maximize our resources by working with partners who share our goals. As we discovered long ago, together we do more.”
Copyright © 2009 The Trustees of Indiana University