Dean’s Note: Welcome Back!
Welcome, Bearcats, to UC! I hope you had a rewarding summer and are excited to begin the new academic year. This new academic year, the university welcomes over 54,000 students! That equates to 43,500 undergrads, 11,000 graduate students and 9,600 online students. Whether you’re a freshman, a returning student, or a faculty, research or staff member, the University of Cincinnati Libraries faculty and staff are here to work with you as you achieve your academic goals.
This volume of Source is a Welcome Back issue, highlighting our work this summer preparing for the academic year, as well as announcing new collections, events and services designed to connect students, researchers and faculty with library services, collections and expertise.
This June marked the completion of the first year of our Strategic Plan. This past academic year saw significant progress towards completing our goals. Some of the work completed includes:
- Established a digital initiatives team to increase capacity and support for digital projects. Read about one of the collections this team recently made available online with the Daniel S. Young Civil War Illustrations Archive;
- Migrated to a new, comprehensive library services platform (LSP), which supports everything from acquisition to discovery (try out the discovery interface on our homepage!);
- Evaluated our multiple digital repositories and made decisions on what to sustain and how, leading to a decision to migrate to Preservica, a digital preservation software;
- Investigated participation in the university’s micro-credentialing initiative; and
- Delivered training, technical support and incentives to support our faculty and staff in obtaining external funding opportunities to fund library initiatives.
Much of our progress was in recruiting and hiring the expertise required to achieve our goals. Those new hires included:
- Two associate deans: collections and operations & user services;
- Expanded our communications team;
- Hired an assessment and evaluation specialist to better understand the impact of our services and the needs of our users;
- Hired a website & user experience specialist to enhance the libraries digital spaces; and
- Hired a collections strategist to execute on a plan to assess our physical holdings.
We are well positioned with newly hired expertise to make continued progress towards our goals on the horizon for 2025-2026. In particular, our team is about to embark on a comprehensive physical holdings assessment to make decisions about the long-term storage location for our materials. In tandem with this project, we are undertaking a space needs assessment to develop a vision for our library spaces on campus. I look forward to sharing updates on these projects with you all in the spring!
With the launch of the University of Cincinnati Libraries Strategic Plan, 2024-2027, we are increasing our impact by focusing on four Strategic Directions: Enrich Our Collections, Expand Our Impact, Strengthen Our Organization and Support Our Students. Progress on achieving our goals is documented on the Strategic Plan website.
Thank you for remaining a part of our UC Libraries community. On behalf of my colleagues in UC Libraries, we look forward to working with you to achieve our vision to be the intellectual center of campus life, a partner within the expanding research and innovation agendas and a catalyst for engaging the greater community. Go, Bearcats!