Mission & Strategic Plan
Our Mission
The Caltech Library partners with faculty, students, and staff across the Institute in the creation, dissemination, and discovery of knowledge. To advance the Institute’s mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education, the Library catalyzes information discovery and sharing while functioning as a center for scholarship and innovation. The Caltech Library provides students, faculty, and staff with access to collections and repositories, research and instruction support, publication services, and preservation of data and archival materials.
Strategic Plan
The Caltech Library has devised its Strategic Plan for Annual Years 2021 through 2023 around the key theme of partnership. Download the Strategic Plan as a PDF (209 KB).
This plan serves as the foundation for progress at the Caltech Library and establishes future directions to ensure its growth as a premier research library befitting the world-class research institution it serves. Each strategic priority has one or two central goals. Each goal has a set of outcomes that, if realized, would indicate that goal has been achieved.
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
- Goal 1: Promote equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging for all members of the Caltech community in all of our collections and services.
- Outcome: In harmony with Caltech’s core values, we actively and consistently work toward equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging.
- Outcome: Our services and resources satisfy the accessibility needs of the Caltech community.
- Goal 2: Provide our staff with opportunities for professional development, growth, inclusion, and belonging.
- Outcome: The Caltech Library is an inclusive environment that promotes belonging among staff.
- Outcome: Library staff are recognized for their contributions to the Library and the Caltech community.
- Outcome: We have identified potential pathways for growth for all staff positions.
- Outcome: Staff are encouraged to continue to grow professionally. They regularly take advantage of training and development opportunities.
Collaboration & Partnerships
- Goal 1: Partner with departments and researchers across Caltech in pursuit of common aims.
- Outcome: In recognition that we are stronger when we work together, the Caltech Library collaborates with people and groups throughout the Institute.
- Outcome: The Library is recognized as the campus partner for access to and preservation of Caltech-authored publications, records, software and data.
- Outcome: The Library enriches education across Caltech by providing embedded and hosted instruction.
- Outcome: In partnership with campus constituencies, the Library makes technology, both hardware and software, available to members of the Caltech community and provides support and instruction on use.
- Goal 2: Develop relationships with organizations external to Caltech in strategic support of our users.
- Outcome: The Caltech Library has strategic partnerships with publishers, vendors, and other libraries to promote access to research materials for our users.
- Outcome: The Library maintains memberships in organizations that support our work within the Library and the research and teaching of the Institute.
Publishing & Dissemination
- Goal 1: Develop new platforms of scholarly communication and publishing to meet the needs of modern researchers.
- Outcome: In collaboration with Caltech researchers, the Library pioneers innovative modes of scholarly communication that best meet the needs of modern researchers. These modes are not based solely on long-established means of communicating scholarly research but rather are inspired by current and future communication methodologies.
- Outcome: Caltech Library collaboratively develops an institutional repository environment that is integrated with the international scholarly communication infrastructure, enabling efficient distribution of Caltech research outputs.
- Goal 2: Enrich current modes of scholarly communication and publishing to enhance discoverability, access, and reuse of Caltech research and archival collections around the globe.
- Outcome: The Caltech Library publishes researcher-led, open access journals, books, conference proceedings, and technical reports that serve the academic community.
- Outcome: Caltech Library has robust library systems that are user-centered and provide seamless access to all Library materials, including those materials produced locally and those materials acquired and shared.
- Outcome: Caltech’s institutional repositories hold the complete history of Caltech publications.
- Outcome: The most frequently accessed materials in the Caltech Archives are publicly available on the web.
Access & Preservation
- Goal 1: Engage the Caltech community and beyond with services and resources that support research, instruction, and institutional needs.
- Outcome: The Library builds robust research, teaching, and archival collections to support current and future needs of the Institute and to preserve and share Caltech’s history and research outputs.
- Outcome: Caltech community members are aware of the Library’s resources and services, using them to address fundamental scientific questions and pressing societal challenges.
- Outcome: Constituencies beyond Caltech are engaged with Caltech research and our unique archival collections.
- Outcome: The Library makes resources, such as textbooks and technology, available to members of the Caltech community who would not otherwise have access.
- Goal 2: Preserve library collections, particularly those in Archives and Special Collections.
- Outcome: The Library migrates vulnerable and deteriorating media for preservation of their content.
- Outcome: The Library stores tangible special collections materials in environmentally stable environments.
- Strategic Plan (PDF, 209 KB)Covering the Annual Years 2021 through 2023.
EDBI Value Statement
We recognize that equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging are core to the mission of the Caltech Library. Equity goes beyond equality and means fair and impartial access to our collections and services for the entire Caltech community. Diversity means all of the various ways the members of our community are unique; it includes but is not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, and national origin. Inclusion means embracing all members of our community as part of a greater whole. Belonging means full acceptance of the members of our community and celebrating them for the richness their experiences bring to our collective work. These values are the primary guiding principle in our work, and they are both individual responsibilities and institutional imperatives.