The Gould Library Mission

The Laurence McKinley Gould Library serves Carleton by collecting, preserving, and building connections to the record of human knowledge. By creating a setting conducive to learning, discovery, and cultural excitement, we help faculty, students and staff meet academic and personal goals that extend knowledge and promote achievement in the individual and in the community. (Adopted 2001)

The Gould Library Vision

Over the next 10 years, the library will:

• Collaborate with other campus academic service units to coordinate our collective support of learning, teaching and research at Carleton.
  
• Develop relationships with other departments, libraries and cultural institutions that aid us in providing cost-effective access to a broader range of information resources and developing innovative services.
  
• Partner with faculty to integrate information literacy and research skills more fully in the curriculum and support student and faculty scholarship.
  
• Transform into an organization encompassing the full range of information resources and services needed to support learning and teaching. We will continue to expand our expertise in the management of text, visual and sound resources, data and other genres as needed.
  
• Experiment with new service models in response to changes in scholarly communication and faculty and student needs. We will adapt our services to meet new user needs, take advantage of emerging technologies, support changes in pedagogy, and contain costs.
  
• Advise the campus community on information-related issues. We will contribute our expertise on topics such as interface design, intellectual property, research skills, and the evaluation, acquisition, organization, production, and archiving of information.
  
• Support a college-wide effort to create an institutional repository to archive and disseminate the college’s unique digital assets. We will provide leadership to ensure perpetual access to the college’s unique scholarly output and other digital assets related to academic and cultural programs documenting the intellectual history of the college.
  
• Unify disparate information resources into a single system with an intuitive search interface. We will implement a system that allows users to search for books, journal articles, images, archives, data, and other resources from a single search page.
  
• Expand the library building to connect with the CMC, creating spaces for quiet reading and research, group work, technology-rich classrooms, and new services. We will work closely with faculty, staff and students to design spaces where learning and teaching takes place across disciplinary boundaries and the organizational structure of the college.
  
• Create a dynamic learning environment offering students an easy to navigate configuration of resources, services and tools in a single location. We will explore creating a joint service program among academic service units in the expanded library.
  
• Enhance intellectual life on campus through a lively program of interdisciplinary discourse that celebrates books and ideas, nourishes intellectual curiosity, and provokes a sense of wonder in the liberal arts. We will focus our programs of art, cultural events, and exhibits to contribute to learning and teaching in specific courses, to the visual literacy and aesthetic development of students, and to fostering a “consciously creative community”.

(Adopted 2006)