Skip to Main Content Skip to Footer Toggle Navigation Menu

Mission and Vision

MISSION

We at Macalester’s DeWitt Wallace Library strive to create an equitable ecosystem of knowledge, ideas, experiences, and expertise that immerses our community in opportunities for inquiry, discovery, delight, and innovation.

VISION

We boldly champion curiosity and learning: about one’s self, each other, and everything around us.

OUR COMMITMENTS

  • Center and further equity awareness and practice.
  • Cultivate sustainable and user-centered collections, services, & spaces.
  • Seek outreach opportunities & promote active collaboration throughout our community to expand and extend our impact.
  • Foster multidirectional learning and ways of knowing, elevating the mutual exchange of experiences, ideas, and knowledge.
  • Enhance communication to highlight our existing expertise as well as expand and extend our impact on campus.
  • Nurture and develop library employees through professional development, building camaraderie, and valuing wellbeing.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

The following articulates who we are when we are at our best. We and these principles will always be a work in progress. We aspire to use these principles when weighing decisions, as a framework for analyzing current practices, policies, and beliefs, and as a guide for how we prioritize our energy, time, space, and financial resources. We believe that our values, expertise, experience, learning, creativity, ideas, and aspirations all have the potential to better ourselves, our community, and society at large.  

Empower our community by:

  • Teaching critical information and research skills for lifelong learning.
  • Providing and advocating wide access to information and resources for learning and creating.
  • Increasing awareness of the social, political, and economic dimensions of information creation and to actively participate in dismantling harmful practices and systems.
  • Actively collecting and providing access to the history of the college to foster continued awareness, understanding, and informed evolution.

Seek justice and equality for all people by:

  • Listening to, elevating, and including voices, especially of those less frequently heard.
  • Working to eliminate biases, inequity, inappropriate use of power, and to decenter whiteness.
  • Analyzing, critiquing, and changing inequities and harmful structures and practices, most especially racist structures, beliefs, and actions.
  • Finding joy in and celebrating each other. 

Communicate by:

  • Sharing information and decision-making as we strive for equitable consensus.
  • Valuing and elevating the unique knowledge and expertise of others and ourselves.
  • Being direct, honest, and relying on truths to reach decisions.
  • Speaking up for ourselves and listening to each other.

Engage with the library, college, and community by:

  • Working diligently toward shared goals.
  • Actively participating in our work, meetings, and conversations.
  • Being a strong collaborator, relationship builder, and partner.
  • Striving for continued health and respect for our organization, community, and shared environment.

Care for library staff by:

  • Supporting work, professional aspirations, and goals.
  • Being patient, kind, respectful, and supportive, expecting the best of each other.
  • Valuing and supporting our well-being and work-life balance.
  • Celebrating and appreciating each other.