Strategic Planning for Academic Libraries

No doubt about it: strategic planning is a serious commitment. But when carried out skillfully, thoughtfully, and with sensitivity to the impacts on all those involved, it's an undertaking that can pay large dividends for the library and its users. A strong strategic plan gives shape and clarity to the library’s intentions and, when carefully written, can make a powerful case for the library’s indispensability to its sponsoring institution. Providing library deans, directors, and university librarians with up-to-date guidance, this book

• outlines a step-by-step method that helps readers prepare for a successful strategic planning process, create and implement a strategic plan, and assess the effectiveness of both the process and the resulting plan;
• discusses the differences between scenario planning and strategic planning, with pointers on determining which would be best in a given organization;
• offers expert advice for communicating a strategic plan clearly and compellingly to the library’s many stakeholders at every stage of the process;
• shares ways to bring library staff as well as users into the planning process;
• teaches how to use surveys and focus groups to inform strategic planning, complete with sample survey questions and a consent cover letter;
• addresses whether and how to hire consultants;
• concludes with a summary of the essential elements of a successful planning process, ideal for quick reference; and
• includes an appendix with numerous useful templates, from an Executive Council Strategic Planning Retreat Agenda to a Final Report.

Written by a team of authors with decades of library administration experience between them, this powerful resource enables academic libraries to produce plans that will offer directional guidance to employees while also demonstrating the library’s power to meet institutional goals.

Rick Anderson is associate dean for collections and scholarly communication in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. He has worked previously as a bibliographer for YBP, Inc.; as head acquisitions librarian for the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; and as director of resource acquisition at the University of Nevada, Reno. He serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards, is a regular contributor to The Scholarly Kitchen, and has been a regular contributor to Library Journal's Academic Newswire. His book Buying and Contracting for Resources and Services: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians was published in 2004 by Neal-Schuman. In 2005, he was identified by Library Journal as a "Mover &Shaker" one of the 50 people shaping the future of libraries. In 2008, he was elected president of the North American Serials Interest Group, and he was named an ARL Research Library Leadership Fellow for 2009 2010. In 2013, he was the recipient of the HARRASSOWITZ Leadership in Library Acquisitions Award and was invited to give the Gould Distinguished Lecture on Technology and the Quality of Life at the University of Utah. In 2015, he was elected president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. He is a popular speaker on subjects related to the future of scholarly communication and research libraries.