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ZSR strategic plan 2019-2021

Administrative bloat and the accompanying decision-making is an albatros around the neck of the university.
 
Libraries in general are trying to make themselves relevant this far into the 21st Century, so there's some fluff here, but also this reads like any strategic plan you tend to see.
 
seems like ZSR knows what they're doing if they won some fancy library award fairly recently
 
I have some thoughts about libraries in general that might get too ranty, so I'm going to refrain, but broadly I think that libraries should be judged by different measures than a lot of other units on campuses/in society, but someone has convinced someone else that it's about something that can be tallied to make people feel more important, and we all get caught in this loop of justification/relevance. That probably makes no sense except in my head. Anyway.

The library I work in is probably getting rid of most of its books though. Fuck this place.
 
El Chupacabra said:
I have some thoughts about libraries in general that might get too ranty, so I'm going to refrain, but broadly I think that libraries should be judged by different measures than a lot of other units on campuses/in society, but someone has convinced someone else that it's about something that can be tallied to make people feel more important, and we all get caught in this loop of justification/relevance. That probably makes no sense except in my head. Anyway.

The library I work in is probably getting rid of most of its books though. Fuck this place.
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I can get behind this idea. ROI calculations are a challenge for libraries, for example. They don't make money, they spend money. And a lot of the money they spend is on subscriptions and acquisitions, maybe 40% of library budgets? But then that expenditure is something like less than .5% as a line item on a university budget. To me the (or at least a) standard libraries should be judged on is their ability to translate those acquisitions and their existing collection into research and knowledge. That doesn't have to be within the physical space of a library either--it can be off campus as people who've used a VPN to access a database the library sets up or administers. It could be the research output of the faculty.

Curious to hear your thoughts apart from the above--I'm biased working on the publishing side.
 
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