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For the AU Libraries to be successful, we MUST be especially good at the following 2-3 things:
Customer Service
Excellent service through personalized attention
Accommodating user needs
Quality service in support of our community (students, faculty, staff and outside users) and our educational mission
Positive experiences with patrons
Perceive the needs of campus community and propose to meet them
Listening to Patrons, student employees, faculty and staff.
Being present to meet needs.
Customer Service – it’s important the customer has a good experience in our libraries
Letting the customer know of our services to obtain materials that we don’t own.
Engaging students and providing support that’s relevant to their life at AU
Customer Service
Responsiveness to our patrons’ needs (including one another).
Having an understanding of our patrons needs/wants
Developing student-centered approaches to librarianship.
Instruction – Showing the customer how to navigate our webpages. Showing the customer the layout of our buildings. Showing them how to use equipment in our buildings.
Understanding the needs of our students (and faculty)
Listening to our students, and the worlds we prepare them for.
Helpful and connected people
Vision/Planning
Looking forward and making proactive decisions on how to best use our limited resources.
Looking backward to see what worked and determining what did not work so well.
Take advantage of pivots we have made this last year by strengthening the ones that work well for our staff and patrons.
Being adaptive to changes/updates
Staying in touch with the constantly changing environment: shifting needs of a changing student body, changing technology and changing social/societal landscape
Advocating for resources and making hard decisions about priorities in a climate of scarce resources
Project management
Keeping up with change
Asking ourselves hard questions
Inclusivity/Welcoming
Providing welcoming and inclusive resources, spaces, and services
Promoting inclusivity (through our collections, events, employment opportunities, general culture)
Embrace and promote our students’ cultural diversity and educational interests.
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Building anti-oppressive and anti-racist practices, environments, and collections.
Welcoming environment for study and research.
Welcoming and helpful people
Work together to provide a safe environment for student, staff, faculty, and the Alfred community.
Create welcoming, inclusive, productive and safe environments for our students to feel comfortable in.
Collaboration
Including/working with faculty
Collaborating with the entire university to promote critical thinking and conscientious use of information.
Proactively engage with faculty, pushing our instructional and resource support for their classes
Collaboration with faculty to identify educational resources to enhance our students’ instruction.
Collaboration with administration and faculty to identify financial resources to provide instructional resources.
Working together
Merging library systems is good, losing library individuality is not so good.
Employee Morale
Taking care of our people
Maintaining staff morale (taking care of our people)
Employee satisfaction and overall morale
Work/life balance
Ensuring/maintaining the well-being of our library personnel
Resources
Resources – what’s available in our print collection and what’s available in our online databases.
Accuracy of our holdings in the catalog.
Findable and useful information
Provide resources and materials to support the University programs that are easy to find and acquire for our faculty and students.
Technology
Using technology effectively at all levels of the organization
Support learning and teaching in the digital space
Transforming Student Lives
Making students ask themselves necessary (and frequently unnecessary questions) about themselves and giving them knowledge and paths to many answers
Empowering Transformative Meaning-Making
