email : Webview : Celebrating a year of Catalyst

Dear colleagues,

I wanted to take a moment to reflect with all of you on the significance of our accomplishments this year with Catalyst, our strategic plan. Especially when we consider the difficulties we faced — and will continue to face — with the coronavirus pandemic, the fact that we were able to develop and implement a fully-realized strategic plan on top of all our other endeavors is a remarkable achievement.

Roughly half of you contributed directly to an initiative as part of a working group or as a sponsor or facilitator. Still many more of you responded to surveys, collaborated with and assisted working groups, participated in planning exercises, provided feedback and asked important questions, and attended information sessions. These combined efforts have driven our organization forward in significant ways. They have also laid an important foundation on which we can build, whether by incorporating and continuing them in our daily efforts or further developing them in our academic year 21-22 plan.

Develop talent, resources, and experiences to facilitate an inclusive community.

Professional Development

The Professional Development (PD) working group received feedback on the LibGuide and is working on incorporating it to make sure it is useful to everyone in the Libraries. We have also been examining ways to sustainably maintain the LibGuide to keep it up to date.

We also reviewed the results from the PD survey sent out at the beginning of 2021, and made note of work that needs to be done moving forward. We noted a gap in information about unclassified, non-librarian staff's PD opportunities and hope to develop ways to fill this gap in the future.

Adaptability

The Adaptability working group fulfilled the first part of its charge: to investigate the Miami University Library community’s experience with flex work, ideas about what future flex work could look like, and the challenges and opportunities with flex work during COVID. While it may have been difficult to separate out the impact of COVID from that of altered work arrangements, our goal was to look beyond the pandemic to understand the impact of flexwork itself.

See our survey result in the infographic below.

Transform the Libraries’ environment and user-centered experience to anticipate evolving modes of learning and the actual resource needs of our community.

Virtual spaces & services

The Virtual Spaces & Services working group is excited to celebrate the completion of the #GoDigital marketing campaign, which was designed to raise awareness of four critical library digital services: Digital Collections, Software Checkout, Research Guides, and Library Chat. Created by students for students, the campaign is a culmination of a year-long collaboration with the Department of Media, Journalism & Film. Elite students from a Strategic Communications senior capstone class conducted original marketing research for the campaign using surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews in fall 2020.

Anna Gyde, a graduating senior and honors student in Strategic Communication, designed and implemented the #GoDigital campaign in spring 2021. The VSS working group will also continue working on an algorithmic audit of the libraries’ discovery system over the summer. Thank you to everyone for your support and contributions!

Click on the images below to be redirected to the videos

Communicating services

The working group was tasked with creating infrastructure in order to communicate our values and cultivate community by (1) assessing and analyzing user needs, (2) solidifying a brand for the libraries, and (3) creating a brand ambassador program.

We have had great progress with our Strategic Communication Resources Drive: 35 members as of June 17, 2021 — all who have needed and been able to access photos, video, and other communication resources. The tagged photography repository is 60% complete, and below are screenshots from the Style Guide LibGuide that is in progress.

We shared our survey with 2,000 Miami University undergraduate students. The "Communicating Services Strategic Planning Survey 2021" has been live since April, and we continue to gather and analyze the responses. We will follow up our survey with focus group interviews in the fall of 2021.

Forge meaningful partnerships that foster affordability, ensure relevancy, and cultivate life-long connections.

Meaningful Partnerships

The Meaningful Partnerships team found in our survey and focus groups with library staff that, while staff for the most part feel empowered to form partnerships at different levels, they would like a structure for doing so.

Our team is creating a toolkit to provide resources including:

a list of current partnerships
an environmental scan listing potential partnerships
rubrics for evaluating current partnerships.

We will be sharing these resources and a report of our focus group and survey findings in the Fall 2021 semester.

We should all take pride in successfully launching and stewarding this strategic plan for our organization, and for having done so during an unprecedented challenge.

I look forward to sharing more in the coming months about the next iteration of our strategic plan. Until then, however, I’m delighted to celebrate our successes together.

Thank you again — for your hard work, and for your dedication to our Libraries, our community, and our university.

Jerome

Download our values sheet

Download a summary of our strategic plan

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