University LibraryStrategic Framework 2025

AspirationThe University Library is an intellectual hub where people, information, and ideas connect to create and share

knowledge to ensure a sustainable future. 

Core PurposeWe advance learning, research, and collaborations across our diverse community through the unique combination of

academic support services, inclusive spaces, and relevant and distinctive collections.

Principles and ValuesWe commit to the University of Saskatchewan values adopted by the University Senate, University Council, and the

Board of Governors in October 2016.

A belief in principles vital to our institution and a commitment to key values—ways of conducting ourselves—constitute the raison d’être of our mission and vision.

Strategic Commitments

Strategic Framework

Build Research Infrastructure

• Develop information infrastructure

• Illustrate research lifecycle• Intensify preservation

Enhance Student Learning

• Enrich academic skills• Strengthen the academic

experience

Foster Academic Community

• Transform libraries• Delight users

• Champion open scholarship

Decolonize the Library

• Academic freedom• Collaboration• Commitment to community• Di� erent ways of knowing,

learning, and being• Diversity, equality, and

human dignity• Excellence

• A healthy work and learning environment

• Innovation, curiosity, and creativity

• Openness, transparency, and accountability

• Reconciliation• Sustainability

• Collegiality• Fairness and equitable

treatment• Inclusiveness

• Integrity, honesty, and ethical behaviour

• Respect

The University of Saskatchewan community believes in the following principles:

The University of Saskatchewan community is committed to acting in accordance with the following values:

Additionally, the University Library is committed to acting in accordance with the following professional principles:

• Service• Access

• Privacy and con� dentiality• Intellectual freedom

Introduction

The University Library is a key contributor to the University of Saskatchewan’s mission, providing services, spaces and collections that support student learning and advance discovery. Through upholding the commitments in this framework, the University Library will ful� ll our important obligation to facilitate learning outside the classroom and support inquiry and knowledge creation outside the lab. Providing services and resources that expand learning and understanding is vital to our operation.

Building on the University Plan 2025, the University Library developed our strategic framework to identify key commitments and objectives that will de� ne our work and inform our priorities through 2025. The process of developing the strategic framework began in October 2017 and included multiple rounds of brainstorming, feedback and re� nement through engagement with library employees and stakeholders. With enthusiastic and forward-thinking participation, we aimed to make the strategic framework ambitious yet attainable. The University Library’s strategic framework is constructed to evolve over the next several years to allow us to ful� ll our core purpose and aspiration. It will serve as the playbook for what the University Library aims to achieve in the coming years.

You will notice that collaboration with our campus partners is an integral part of our framework. The University Library prides itself on being at the heart of the campus community, and for providing essential services and resources for students and faculty.

Our strategic commitments to build research infrastructure, enhance student learning, foster academic community and decolonize the library are the nucleus of this plan; these are important factors that we will keep top-of-mind throughout our decision-making, operations and planning.

You are invited to review the plan and familiarize yourself with our aspiration, core purpose, principles and values, strategic commitments, goals and objectives.

We are eager to realize these endeavours with your continued support and interest.

Commitment #1:

Decolonize the LibraryPartner with Indigenous campus and community stakeholders to understand and dismantle the colonial perspective that underpins the library system to make everything we do welcoming, responsive, and accessible to all.

Description: The library strives to be an open and inclusive environment that respects and uplifts Indigenous voices and perspectives. However, modern library practices arose out of and re� ect colonial worldviews. We must actively broaden our approaches to collection development, description, and ownership; service design and delivery; and space design and allocation to reduce barriers of access and use. This foundational goal will inform the activities and outcomes of all of the goals in the library’s strategic framework.

Objectives:• Bring together activities, programs, services, and expertise currently scattered throughout the library to create a

cohesive and strategic approach to decolonization.

• Develop and implement an action plan that addresses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, responds to the Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ Truth and Reconciliation Report, and advances the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and USask Partnership Agreement.

• Identify actions we must undertake to ensure our services, spaces, and collections are welcoming, responsive, and accessible, in partnership with campus and community stakeholders.

• Support education and personal development of employees related to the colonial perspective, including unlearning what we were taught about the history of Canada and discussing the e� ects of residential schools and intergenerational trauma.

• Implement a strategy that builds and supports a diverse and inclusive workforce, including increasing Indigenous representation.

• Enhance collections, including re-energizing the iPortal and decolonizing description (e.g., subject headings).

2.1 Develop Information Infrastructure: Develop robust information infrastructure, services, and expertise to collect, make accessible, and promote the university’s digital research, scholarly, and artistic outputs.

Description: Libraries are well positioned to work with researchers and campus administration to provide infrastructure, services, and expertise to support digital scholarship at all stages. Currently our initiatives in this area are ad hoc and project based. Creating an ongoing suite of services in the library will allow researchers to collaborate, create, and curate using infrastructure, spaces, services, and expertise and allow us to collect, make accessible, preserve, and promote the university’s research, scholarly, and artistic outputs to the international scholarly community.

Objectives:• Support and promote creativity and interdisciplinary digital scholarship by providing services that enable researchers to

collect, create, curate, and interact with diverse forms of knowledge.

• Collaborate with researchers to plan and realize digital projects throughout the entire research lifecycle.

• Promote appropriate metadata use and preservation standards and practices to help researchers with their digital projects.

• Lead digital scholarship training and outreach in collaboration with research partners on and o� campus.

2.2 Illustrate Research Lifecycle: Lead the collaborative development of an institution-wide framework that illustrates all services, systems, and supports across the full research lifecycle as a practical tool for researchers.

Description: Academic libraries support the many steps along the research lifecycle: idea generation, grant writing, the research itself, dissemination, and preservation. However, the research lifecycle needs to involve many other campus units and this distributed research support model can be confusing and challenging to navigate. Creating an illustrative framework that incorporates all campus-wide research services, systems, and supports will help USask researchers e� ciently use all components to successfully progress their research.

Objectives:• Connect with the O� ce of the Vice President Research (OVPR) and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to

determine how to achieve the goal of illustrating the research lifecycle in a collaborative and positive way.

• In partnership with the OVPR, ICT, and other campus stakeholders, develop a cohesive framework and shared understanding of campus research supports and determine ways to make the framework accessible and useful to researchers, including information gathered in the following ways:

- Review research lifecycles created by other universities in order to learn from the experiences and expertise of others.

- Create an inventory of all existing supports for research across the university.

- Identify tools and resources researchers are using to meet their research needs, both those provided by the university and those provided by others. Identify researchers’ unmet needs through a needs analysis.

Commitment #2:

Build Research Infrastructure

2.3 Intensify Preservation: Enhance our preservation program and services to ensure long-term access to our print and digital collections.

Description:Preservation is fundamental to the mission of the University Library, ensuring the ongoing and long-term ability of researchers to access a rich variety of collections. Both digital and physical preservation require a programmatic and global approach. While we have longer experience with physical preservation, we are now able to address some important limitations of the facilities housing rare and archival materials. Digital preservation goes beyond technological solutions, also requiring a robust policy framework and sustained human and � nancial resources.

Objectives:• Incorporate preservation thinking across the whole continuum of collections activities at the University Library.

• Ensure the long-term accessibility of our rare and archival physical collections through a systematically developed preservation management program, including state of the art environmental controls, security measures, and policies and procedures for sta� and patrons.

• Undertake large scale digitization to ensure the long-term accessibility of at-risk media formats (� lm, video, audio, etc.)

• Establish a robust digital preservation program in the library, including technology, processes/policies, and sustainable � nancial and human resources.

• Ensure the long-term accessibility of born-digital collections through migration, emulation, and other proven methods.

Commitment #3:

Enhance Student Learning3.1 Enrich Academic Skills: Design, coordinate, and deliver academic skills programming integrated at the college/school level to develop engaged, self-reliant, and life-long learners.

Description: Some universities o� er opportunities for students to participate in academic skills courses that introduce them to a set of core academic skills necessary for university learning (i.e. reading, writing and research, learning and study strategies). At USask there are pockets of this type of programming in di� erent colleges but it is not consistent. The library will address this gap by implementing an integrated, developmental, and cross-disciplinary program that aligns closely with the goals and initiatives of selected colleges/schools.

Objectives:• Articulate and promote, within the library and across campus, the library’s role in developing student academic literacy.

• Partner with an interested college to develop and pilot a library service model that provides integrated academic support and learning opportunities for its students across departments.

• Work with the partner college to:

o identify those academic skills, within the library’s mandate, that will help their students meet the learning pursuits outlined in the University of Saskatchewan Learning Charter.

o develop and implement a customized academic skills program taking into account mode of delivery, scalability, resourcing, assessment, and academic incentives.

• Develop a strategy for implementing the piloted academic skills program in colleges/schools across campus.

3.2 Strengthen The Academic Experience: Align our student learning programming with other campus units to enhance academic experience and success.

Description:There are a number of units working alongside the colleges/schools that are concerned with student success. These units reside in di� erent university portfolios and areas, which leads to challenges for coordination and collaboration of programming and services for students. There is a tendency to rely on referrals to connect students to the services they need. However, as students move from one unit to another there is a greater chance of them missing key services. Additionally, in some cases units are duplicating e� ort and resources to provide the same or similar services. In order to e� ectively address the needs of students and enhance their academic experience we need to align our programming with those other units we know overlap and intersect with library services. These include the student experience units within the Teaching, Learning, and Student Experience (TLSE) portfolio; the Undergraduate Research Initiative in the O� ce of the Vice President Research (OVPR); Information and Communications Technology (ICT); and the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (CGPS).

Objectives:• Work at the TLSE portfolio level to develop and put in place a structure (or series of structures) that integrates the library’s academic skills programming and learning supports with the student experience programming/units within the TLSE.

• Work with ICT to develop and deliver technology skills programming for students, recognizing that these skills are critical for students’ academic success.

• Work with the OVPR to improve the collaboration and coordination between the Undergraduate Research Initiative and the library to ensure the best possible support for undergraduate research.

• Work with the CGPS to integrate library academic supports into the overall graduate student program, with a particular focus on the needs of international graduate students.

4.1 Transform Libraries: Transform library spaces to enrich learning, discovery, creation, and inspiration.

Description:The University Library Master Plan provides the framework for the continued evolution of the University Library over a ten year period. Transforming library spaces will be done within the context of the master plan while recognizing the need to continually review the plan’s design decisions to ensure that the new spaces re� ect the ever-changing teaching, learning, and research environment.

Objectives:• Relocate University Archives and Special Collections to renovated space on Murray Library 5th � oor, complete with the

environmental controls necessary to meet the speci� c needs of our unique and archival collections.

• Renovate and expand the Ground Floor Commons, including additional access to the � rst � oor.

• Steward the physical collection to re� ect campus research and learning needs as we transform the library’s public spaces.

• Partner with Colleges of Law, Education, and Engineering to realize the vision outlined in the master plan for the libraries located in their buildings.

• Identify opportunities to progress components of the master plan through internal resource reallocation, donor support, and partnership with other campus units.

4.2 Delight Users: Ensure our services and spaces are user-focused, accessible, and inclusive to create a positive and enriching user experience.

Description:The Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University identi� es seven principles for organizations to consider:

• The design is equitable in use to people with diverse abilities.

• The design is � exible enough to allow a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.

• The use of the design is simple and intuitive, easy to understand regardless of previous experience or skill.

• The design is perceptible, such that it communicates information e� ectively to the user.

• The design is tolerant of error, such that it minimizes adverse consequences if used incorrectly.

• The design requires low physical e� ort, allowing use with minimal e� ort.

• The design accommodates the size, space, and approach necessary for use.

• To meet the University Library’s core purpose, aspiration, and goals the library must ensure that its services and spaces re� ect these principles of universal design.

Objectives:• Develop and implement ways to both hear from library users and to actively inquire about existing, changing, and new

library programs, services, and spaces.

• As the transformation of library spaces proceeds, establish regular and targeted consultation with library users to ensure that transformed spaces are user-focused, accessible, and inclusive.

• Review borrower and reference services procedures and physical and online service points to assess accessibility and to ensure that they are user-focused and inclusive.

• Develop and implement services to increase accessibility to our print collections in an increasingly distributed environment.

Commitment #4:

Foster Academic Community

4.3 Champion Open Scholarship: Champion open and transparent scholarship to promote equitable and sustainable access to information, facilitate discovery, and amplify impact.

Description:To be the university the world needs, USask must reach all those who could potentially build upon, bene� t from, and/or apply its research and scholarship. When the results of research are locked behind expensive publisher paywalls, these maximal bene� ts are not realized. We must ensure that USask research and scholarship is openly available to increase its discoverability, access, and impact.

We acknowledge that there may be sensitive situations and cultural contexts in which making research products open is not appropriate.

Objectives:• Educate researchers and scholars about the bene� ts of open scholarship, such as improved reach and impact,

and how it counters issues such as information privilege and corporatization of scholarship.

• Help researchers disseminate their scholarly outputs and research data in open venues, such as HARVEST, subject repositories, OA journals, FRDR, and Dataverse North.

• Collaborate with campus stakeholders to determine ways to appropriately recognize and reward open scholarship.

• Participate in the global conversation about open scholarship models, platforms, and infrastructure to facilitate transition to a more equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing system.

UNIVERSITY PLAN 2025

INTENT OF THE UNIVERSITY PLAN: Through this plan, the University of Saskatchewan will be the university the world needs.

COURAGEOUSCURIOSITYEmpower a daring culture of innovation with the courage to confront humanity’s greatest challenges and opportunities.

• Unleash Discovery• Uplift Indigenization• Embrace Interdisciplinarity• Seek Solutions

BOUNDLESSCOLLABORATIONInvigorate the impact of collaboration and partnership in everything we do.

• Enrich Disciplines• Align Structures• Embolden Partnerships• Experience Reconciliation

INSPIREDCOMMUNITIESInspire the world by achieving meaningful change with and for our communities.

• Embrace Manacihitowin (respect one another)

• Amplify Value• Celebrate Stories• Energize Champions

D I S C O V E R Y

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I N T E R N A T I O N A LN A T I O N A L

Transformative Decolonization Leading to Reconciliation. Indigenous students, faculty, sta� , and communities are holistically strengthening the spirit and methodologies we inhabit.Productive Collaboration. Community, private-sector, and international partnerships animate every facet of our research enterprise.Meaningful Impact. Our knowledge, discoveries, and innovations are helping communities achieve their social, cultural, and economic goals.Distinguished Learners. Our graduates are among the most inventive, collaborative, and sought-after in Canada and around the world.Global Recognition. Our research, graduates, academic programming, and reputation are recognized as world-class.

2025 ASPIRATIONS

The University The World Needs nīkānītān manācihitowinihkni manachīhitoonaanOur plan weaves together our commitments, goals, principles, regions of impact, and mission, vision and values. In the summer of 2018, the Indigenous community gifted a name to the plan; nīkānītān manācihitowinihk in Cree and ni manachīhitoonaan in Michif which translates as “Let us lead with respect.”