Final Assignment

Due Wednesday, December 12th, 11pm CST

Assignment: Write a Vision, Mission and Strategic Plan including Goals, Objectives and Tactics for a real or fictitious library.

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is for you to demonstrate your ability to apply all you have learned during this course to produce a strategic plan for managing a library. Findings developed for your mid-term project will form the basis for this project. You may add data as needed. At the conclusion of this assignment you should understand how to develop a Vision, Mission and Strategic Plan, the difference between goals, objectives and tactics and how to prioritize them, and how to develop and allocate resources to implement your plan.

Deliverable: Select a real or fictitious Library for which you will develop a Vision, Mission and Strategic Plan which covers a 1, 3 or 5 year period. (In other words you may have Goals and Objectives requiring multiple years in which to execute your tactics to achieve those Goals and Objectives.) If basing your paper on a real library, you MAY NOT use a Library which has already has a published Strategic Plan. The Plan should be for the entire library system, not just a department. It can be for a specific branch if that branch is new.

Include in the plan a minimum of 5 - 8 Goals, corresponding Objectives and Tactics (including how you will obtain the needed resources) for reaching those objectives. Methods for clearly evaluating the success or failure of the plan at the end of a 12 month period should be included.

You must justify why the components of your plan are the correct ones for the library so begin with a description of the Library setting for which the plan is developed and cite any data collected on which the plan is based. Do not include all of the demographic data and/or description from your Information Audit but only those facts that justify why your plan is appropriate for this library.

Submit the plan as a Word document - see Formatting directions under Course Syllabus in WebCT.