BiblioFile

The Library holds a key place in the President's Plan for Academic Enrichment (endorsed by the Brown University Corporation in February 2002). Already, the Library has benefited from the purchase of a new Annex to house collections, as well as from additional funds for targeted acquisitions and building improvements in the Library's public spaces.
A vital part of the President's vision is an ongoing plan-ning process that sets goals and priorities and actively measures the University's progress in reaching them. As the Library works to implement the current and future elements of the President's plan, we will need to demonstrate ­ in concrete and measurable ways ­ our success in meeting the plan's outcomes to improve the quality of education and research at Brown. Over the next several months, the Library will implement an internal plan to reallocate and reorient staff and other resources to better support the changes in teaching, learning, and research at Brown. These steps are based on the Library's strategic plan, Collecting and Connecting for the Extended Classroom, issued in May 1999, and are a direct response to the needs expressed by students, faculty, and scholars in the Brown community.	Academic Enrichment "In the end, the question is: What experience are students having here? If you're attracting the best minds, are you also putting them in the circumstances that will allow them to flourish? Or are we squandering the talent that they bring to us? That, fundamentally, is the question we have to worry about night and day. Our vision is that Brown as an academic institution cares about the quality of the education we offer our students. We want to improve on that quality of education and be competitive at the highest level. Period." BROWN UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT RUTH J. SIMMONS
The plan will place people where they are most needed, moving some staff away from the "behind the scenes" processing activities, so that more staff will be available to work directly with faculty, students, and scholars during hours that are more convenient to them. Moreover, it will enable librarians to be more proactive: to meet and work with faculty, students, and classes outside the libraries (e.g., in an office, in a classroom, in a department's student lounge) rather than sitting at library service desks waiting for someone to approach them for help. It will also increase the number of librarians who serve as "bibliographers," specialists who have an in-depth knowledge of the literature and col-lections in a specific discipline and who work with faculty and scholars to develop the Library's collections in all appropriate formats.
The plan will devote more resources to enhancing the accessibility of digital and multimedia information resources for our researchers and scholars worldwide. Brown has many unique collections and cultural resources. Reallocating staff will enable us to create a digital library of these materials that can be accessed anytime, anywhere.
The Library's plan will lay the groundwork for improvements in the convenience, speed, simplicity, ease-of-use, and around-the-clock availability of Library services. Staff will be devoted to continuously improving the Library's website and making Josiah and other finding tools easier to use. Library visitors will be greeted at a service desk that will be capable of meeting the full range of user needs, rather than referring users from one desk or build-ing to another. The plan also will provide our branch li-braries with more staff who are trained and prepared to backup the day-to-day needs that currently are covered by only a small group of individuals.
To measure our success and ensure that our ongoing efforts are aligned with the needs and interests of the Brown community, the Library will continue to utilize tools such as the LibQUAL+ � survey, focus groups, and other formal and informal means to elicit feedback from faculty and students. We aspire to provide the highest quality Library service, period. Therefore, we must have in place the means to gauge systematically the success of our performance, and must work constantly to improve Library services. The mission of the Brown University Library is centered around meeting the information needs of the Brown community ­ we need to hear from you, and we're listening!

Let us know how we're doing in meeting your library and information needs! Email Library User Needs Team (LUNT) at LUNT@brown.edu, drop a note in a Suggestion Box, talk with a Library subject specialist in your field or participate in one of the Library's regular surveys of faculty and students.