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not particularly concerned about the expense of maintaining libraries. Funding libraries was perceived as the cost of being part of higher education. CAOs were more interested in outcomes—how much were the libraries being used? How central were they to the mission of the institution? In what ways did they enhance the reputation of the college or university?

Instead, she worked with her leadership team to create a two-part document: the first section outlined the library’s significant achievements over the past year, and the second explained what we want to do in the coming year.

the message our vice president received was not “Here are all the reasons why you ought to give the library more money.” Instead, it was “Here are some of the most important ways in which the library is moving the university towards its goals, and here are ways in which we could do that even better if we had more resources to work with.”

Thus, the message our vice president received was not “Here are all the reasons why you ought to give the library more money.” Instead, it was “Here are some of the most important ways in which the library is moving the university towards its goals, and here are ways in which we could do that even better if we had more resources to work with.”

Map your library’s programs and services to the mission of the university and you will be seen as an essential strategic partner, not just another piece of costly infrastructure.

Takeaway lesson: Map your library’s programs and services to the mission of the university and you will be seen as an essential strategic partner, not just another piece of costly infrastructure.

Solving a problem that already exists for your faculty (such as compliance with a mandate) is more likely to generate support for the library than trying to convince the faculty that they have a problem.

offering dedicated collaboration space for use by faculty working in those clusters, reaching out to the clusters with targeted information about existing technology offerings in the libraries, and “providing dedicated subject specialists for each faculty cluster to work across the life-cycle of their research to offer guidance and connections to services

Sometimes aligning your library with institutional goals and programs means creating new services, and sometimes it means adapting old ones. Since our host institutions are always changing, it always means responding quickly and nimbly to new programs and priority shifts.

Listen also for areas of emphasis that you might not think of as relevant to the library.

ask yourself what the library might do differently (or what it might already be doing) that could have an impact on that goal, even if the goal doesn’t seem to be connected directly to library services.

ask yourself what the library might do differently (or what it might already be doing) that could have an impact on that goal

, even if the goal doesn’t seem to be connected directly to library services.

not just what your campus leaders and spokespersons say, but how often and in how many contexts they say it that will tip you off to a particularly important or emerging area of institutional focus

It’s not just what your campus leaders and spokespersons say, but how often and in how many contexts they say it that will tip you off to a particularly important or emerging area of institutional focus

If the library is doing things that don’t help further the goals and strategies laid out in them, ask yourself why—and unless the answers you come up with are unusually compelling and can be defended (with a straight face) in conversation with your provost or vice president, seriously consider discontinuing them. If your library is doing things that actively undermine those goals and strategies, stop doing those things immediately. As you consider establishing new programs or practices in your library, ask yourself from the very beginning how those new programs or practices will help further the strategic mission of your institution.

If the library is doing things that don’t help further the goals and strategies laid out in them, ask yourself why—and unless the answers you come up with are unusually compelling and can be defended (with a straight face) in conversation with your provost or vice president, seriously consider discontinuing them.

your library is doing things that actively undermine those goals and strategies, stop doing those things immediately. As you consider establishing new programs or practices in your library, ask yourself from the very beginning how those new programs or practices will help further the strategic mission of your institution.

no library that aligns itself to institutional priorities will end up serving all programs and all academic disciplines equally

our budgets and programmatic support should not be distributed equally across disciplines, but should reflect the curricular and strategic emphases of our host institutions.

means your monitoring of institutional communications for strategic hints will have to be sensitive to nuance