Mimi Calter is Deputy University Librarian at Stanford Libraries, where she directs strategic planning, manages capital and departmental projects, advocates for library programs both locally and globally, coordinates outreach to faculty and advisory groups, and keeps policies compliant with current copyright and patron privacy laws. In this interview, Mimi discusses a strategic approach to these issues and how her career at Stanford has presented opportunities to grow and to learn.
How do you approach and implement strategic planning?
Stanford Libraries, like Stanford itself, is very entrepreneurial, and we sometimes struggle to focus on single specific goals. I wanted to start at the top by ensuring that the Stanford Libraries senior staff have a shared vision of the library’s purpose and are agreed on our high-level programmatic goals. I coordinated a series of meetings over the last year, in which the Directors have developed three programmatic goals:
Access: Accelerate knowledge dissemination by making curated collections, people, and space accessible and discoverable
Community: Build connections and foster a supportive, stimulating, and inclusive environment within the Libraries and with our research and teaching communities
Stewardship: Preserve and steward cultural and scholarly heritage in a digital age in support of research, teaching, learning, and cultural enrichment
These three goals provide a framework that we can all use in assessing any of the myriad projects that might fall in any one of those areas. We can then make appropriate decisions about where and how to allocate resources.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
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