Staff are the Library’s greatest source of strength. Library staff are also distinguished by their spirit of workplace community and high degree of commitment to the Library’s mission within the University. Driven by the University’s priorities, the evolving role of research libraries, and the number of long-serving staff approaching retirement, the Library is in a period of both organizational change and staff renewal This impending loss of deep institutional knowledge in particular underscores the Library’s need to position itself as a learning organization — one that continuously gathers and assesses data, adapts, and improves. We need to ensure that our staff not only have the knowledge, skills, and structures that are needed to achieve our strategic objectives, but also benefit from an organizational culture that continues to build staff capabilities for operational excellence.
The Library will embrace a culture of continuous learning for building capacity and creating new approaches to meet the changing needs of the scholarly environment and attaining our strategic objectives. Central themes for building our learning organization include:
Expertise as Leadership: Library staff’s specialized skills and training are essential for guiding students in their educational pursuits and enabling faculty to realize their scholarship. As Brown seeks to recruit the most promising students and outstanding faculty, it is critical for the Library to invest in staff capabilities in order to reach our objectives and fulfil our mission at the highest possible level. Our goals for Academic Integration, Knowledge Generation, and Innovative Practice will shape the evolution of Library departments and individual staff roles. Similarly, these objectives will drive the creation of cross-departmental teams that bring together multiple areas of knowledge and practice around institutional priorities. For all these reasons, it is especially important to ensure that we prioritize the knowledge, skills, and practices necessary for highly effective collaboration.
Organizational Development: To support this effort, organizational development has been made a central function of the Library’s human resources office, and important groundwork has been laid for strengthening our partnership with University Human Resources, including the Center for Learning and Professional Development.
Communication: Strong communication is essential for being an effective organization of any kind, but especially so for a learning organization.
- Within the Library, improved communications are needed to create greater organizational cohesion and accountability through fostering shared awareness across all departments, improved collaboration across the Library, and greater transparency around key decisions and initiatives.
- Improved communication with stakeholders on campus and beyond is also a critical set of investments to raise the visibility of the Library’s expertise, resources, and programs. In particular, the Library website as point of entry and essential information tool must be upgraded to improve user navigability, provide better support for staff’s work, and give a better representation of the Library’s scholarly resources. The Library also requires stronger vision and organization around social media as an essential tool in reaching students, promoting scholarly activities and programs, and engaging a wide range of external audiences (including alumni and scholars elsewhere) in our work.
Diversity and Community: The Library will become a more diverse and inclusive learning organization through actively recruiting, developing, retaining, and supporting staff with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that enrich our collective capability to serve the campus as conductors, creators, and caretakers of knowledge. Staff should be more broadly representative of diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences. The Library needs to build more diverse employment pipelines and professional pathways. This includes developing stronger community-facing practices in Providence and the region.