St. Mary’s County Library Strategic Plan, 2016-2020
Guiding Statements
Our Vision for St. Mary’s: A literate and diverse community that values opportunity and education for all.
Our Mission: We share resources and information to promote reading, inspire learning, and connect our community.
Our Core Values and Guiding Principles
- Education
- Build collections that inform and entertain, support the building of skills and life-long learning, and spark creativity
- Ensure our collections are freely open to all
- Inspire a love of reading and learning through resources and programming, promoting health in mind and body, and fostering wisdom
- Service
- Develop friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive staff to provide excellent service to all
- Embrace change and constantly innovate, reimagining our service to meet changing needs and expectations
- Expect outstanding results for our customers and from each other
- Relationships
- Respect people in all their diversity and welcome everyone in our community
- Provide training and opportunities for continued growth
- Responsive to our Trustees, Friends of the Library, and volunteers, seeking creative community partnerships, and engaging in joint efforts with regional and state library partners to achieve our mission
- Integrity
- Be good stewards of funds and resources, fair, and ethical in all our dealings with customers and staff
- Be honest with ourselves and others, always accountable, and always true to our word
- Protect our customers’ privacy and preserve intellectual freedom, including the right to read and access information
Our Goals and Strategies
- Goal 1: Inspire Learning: our customers will discover the joy of learning and pleasure of reading at every stage of life, experiencing personal growth
- Strengthen our effectiveness for the youth of St Mary’s County
- Foster literacy and learning from early childhood on
- Support teens’ college and job preparation and creativity
- Increase opportunities for young minds to get and maintain library cards
- Lifelong Learning: high-quality resources help our users grow at every stage of life
- Job skills and workforce development
- Digital literacy
- All areas of learning
- Reconsider and expand services for all adults, especially our growing population of those 50 and older
- The Joy of Reading: foster a love of reading for pleasure
- Readers Advisory: Connecting people to books
- Programming, resources, and media expand knowledge of and access to reading enjoyment
- Strengthen our effectiveness for the youth of St Mary’s County
- Goal 2: Increase Access: our community will have greater access to information, ideas and narratives, well-designed and maintained physical spaces, and easy to use digital collections.
- Create a Comfortable Space for Learning
- Our facilities will keep pace with the growing demands of an expanding community
- Library physical spaces will be inviting community hubs
- Our communications will be well-designed and accessible and branded with graphics to convey our mission successfully
- Our collection will relevant, popular, and responsive to demand
- Library technology and bandwidth will keep pace with user demand
- Drive new models for access: promote digital content growth and advocate for beneficial business models and formats
- Create a Comfortable Space for Learning
- Goal 3: Build Community: enhance the library’s effectiveness through partnerships to leverage resources
- Strengthen partnerships with library supporters
- Friends of the Library and a possible foundation
- Foster and maintain community partnerships
- Schools and institutions of higher education
- Early Childhood organizations
- Workforce development agencies
- Community development agencies
- Veterans’ organizations
- Strengthen partnerships with library supporters
- Goal 4: Build a Culture of Innovation: develop employees who improve their skills, innovate, and thrive in a time of change
- Ensure training and support that keeps staff both current and future-focused
- Foster and reward staff’s creativity and calculated risk-taking
- Manage creatively and flexibly to build a staff that embraces change
- Goal 5: Foster Sustainability
- Ensure the library’s fiscal viability through effective advocacy and constantly improving policies and practices
- Respect St Mary’s County’s natural environment and realize efficiencies gained through sustainability principles
For further details please contact the Director, Michael Blackwell at 301-475-2846 x1013 or mblackwell@stmalib.org