Vision & Strategic Focus

VISION

GWLA strives to be an innovative, flexible, and risk-taking consortium. We champion diversity, equity, and inclusion in all activities; 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

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Collections

Scholarly Communications

Cross-Cutting Themes

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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 diverse & 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

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Develop and provide programs that support DEI advancement for our member institutions.

Objectives:

  • Support, promote and develop DEI awareness and activities in our libraries and on our campuses;

  • Encourage exchanges of DEI ideas, resources;

  • Support the IDEAL conference by becoming a sponsor and advocate for attendance by deans and associate deans;

  • Create DEI benchmarks and an annual assessment tool to measure progress;

  • Provide at least one DEI program per year for library deans and associate deans.

  • Develop greater DEI awareness and actionable outcomes by providing education, support, and resources.

Sample Activities

  • Develop fellows/residency to support DEI librarians

  • Benchmark measurable DEI outcomes

  • Share DEI success stories with GWLA members

  • Develop/offer search bias training

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]