Mission + Future Vision

January 2024

Mission

Cultivating scholarship and intellectual curiosity in our community through access to collections, expertise, and spaces.

Provide easy, reliable, and secure access to scholarly primary and secondary resources that reflect diverse perspectives and are accessed and used actively by students and faculty across disciplines.
Develop the public profile of our unique special collections, ensuring that our collections are widely utilized at Swarthmore and around the world.
Ensure the preservation of our collections by creating secure and sustainable storage that is built to withstand an unpredictable climate.
Increase global access to Swarthmore's scholarship through digitization, digital publishing, and digital preservation.

Actively shape the curriculum, in collaboration with faculty, through opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and research offered by library resources.
Ensure that all students graduate with a strong knowledge of the research process and are literate in the use of information, digital technologies, and primary sources.
Enable the use of primary and secondary sources in digital scholarship to enhance teaching, learning, and research.
Build capacity for responsible use of emerging technologies across campus by offering access to technologies and a highly informed understanding of their use.
Create a more equitable information landscape and ensure that the campus community is informed about security and privacy issues in the scholarly information ecosystem.
Engage in campus conversations around diversity, equity, accessibility, and social justice.
Mentor students who want to pursue careers in cultural heritage and digital scholarship by providing a range of for-credit and extracurricular opportunities for experiential learning, including paid fellowships and internships.

Through an inclusive, rigorous, and evidence-based process, develop and build accessible library environments that offer a range of work spaces, access to expertise, a sense of intellectual community, and a safe place for curiosity across disciplines.
Program well-attended exhibits and events around themes of relevance to the curriculum and interest to the surrounding community.
Support our strategic initiatives, including the library building program, through successful fundraising from alumni, donors, and grants.