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Mission + Future Vision

January 2024

Mission

Cultivating scholarship and intellectual curiosity in our community through access to collections, expertise, and spaces.

Future Vision

Collections

  • Provide easy, reliable, and secure access to scholarly primary and secondary resources that reflect diverse perspectives and are accessed and used actively by students and faculty across disciplines.
  • Develop the public profile of our unique special collections, ensuring that our collections are widely utilized at Swarthmore and around the world.
  • Ensure the preservation of our collections by creating secure and sustainable storage that is built to withstand an unpredictable climate.
  • Increase global access to Swarthmore's scholarship through digitization, digital publishing, and digital preservation.

Expertise

  • Actively shape the curriculum, in collaboration with faculty, through opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and research offered by library resources.
  • Ensure that all students graduate with a strong knowledge of the research process and are literate in the use of information, digital technologies, and primary sources.
  • Enable the use of primary and secondary sources in digital scholarship to enhance teaching, learning, and research.
  • Build capacity for responsible use of emerging technologies across campus by offering access to technologies and a highly informed understanding of their use.
  • Create a more equitable information landscape and ensure that the campus community is informed about security and privacy issues in the scholarly information ecosystem.
  • Engage in campus conversations around diversity, equity, accessibility, and social justice.
  • Mentor students who want to pursue careers in cultural heritage and digital scholarship by providing a range of for-credit and extracurricular opportunities for experiential learning, including paid fellowships and internships.

Spaces

  • Through an inclusive, rigorous, and evidence-based process, develop and build accessible library environments that offer a range of work spaces, access to expertise, a sense of intellectual community, and a safe place for curiosity across disciplines.
  • Program well-attended exhibits and events around themes of relevance to the curriculum and interest to the surrounding community.
  • Support our strategic initiatives, including the library building program, through successful fundraising from alumni, donors, and grants.