Strategic Initiatives

Strategic Framework

This living document charts our direction and builds on our strengths as a hub of scholarship, research, and learning for UConn students, faculty, and staff. We connect our community to information resources; to the spaces needed for thinking, studying, learning, and collaborating; and to the essential expertise of Library staff.

Cultural Behaviors

“Culture is the commonly-held set of values and principles that shows up in the everyday behavior of the people.” David J. Friedman, Fundamentally Different. Our culture is directly linked to our vision of being the right Library for UConn so in 2023 we embarked on a journey to put our culture into action. By engaging weekly in 28 behaviors that represent our shared assumptions and norms, we are building a culture that will enable us to thrive and grow. For more information, contact Dean Langley

Collections at UConn Library: Responsive. Relevant. Sustainable.

The UConn Library is committed to supporting the academic and scholarly success of our community. As stewards of the world of information, our goal is to strike a balance between providing relevant resources to meet the increasingly diverse research and teaching needs at UConn while staying within our budget.

The ability of the UConn Library to meet our community’s rapidly evolving information needs is challenged when we must pay for expensive “Big Deal” journal subscription bundles with annually flat or reduced library budgets. This combination of mounting costs and shrinking budgets has led many research libraries to shift from traditional collection development practices to a more sustainable approach for providing access to scholarly information. As a national leader among public research universities, we join other academic libraries in rethinking how we manage the challenges of the for profit journal publishing system in order to make scholarship more open, affordable, transparent, and sustainable.

We are committed to supporting sustainable scholarship through what we are calling the Future of Journals, by implementing alternative means of accessing scholarly information that provides access at the point of need instead of just in case. The Future of Journals enables us to manage our budget so that we build collections that reflect the needs of our faculty and students.