Library Vision, Mission & Values

Library Vision

It is the vision of the University Library to be an essential partner in the research, teaching, and learning endeavors of our diverse community.

Library Mission

University Library's mission is to inform the IU Indianapolis campus and wider community of learners through our educational resources, technologies, and expertise; connect people with our resources, our services, and each other; and to transform the lives of our community members by facilitating discovery, creativity, teaching, learning, and research. University Library actively partners in the transformation of information to new and more accessible formats.


Library Values

Advancement of Knowledge

We value human curiosity and the useful application and open sharing of knowledge. We recognize the critical role libraries serve in the knowledge creation cycle through our provision of access to it, expertise to locate and apply it, tools to make it meaningful, and platforms offered to share new knowledge openly.

Collaboration

We value deeply connected work with our primary communities:  IU Indy students, staff, faculty and library colleagues, the citizens of Indianapolis and Indiana, and our wider professional library colleagues.  This work is a symbiotic, side-by-side pursuit of a common goal that values and takes advantage of the strengths of all invested partners and results in impactful outcomes.

Diversity

We acknowledge that systemic, detrimental bias against individuals from underrepresented groups exists.  We are intentional in embracing diversity and eradicating human value disparity through our teaching endeavors, content provision, daily interactions with colleagues and communities served, as well as our hiring and retention efforts, training and professional development.  

Equitable Access

We value every individual’s pursuit and use of information.  We participate in leading a global effort to eliminate barriers to any individual’s ability to access information necessary to their success and well-being.  We support scholarly systems that technologically, structurally, and philosophically make possible the open reuse and sharing of knowledge.

Great service

We value exemplary service to all our communities. Every Library employee recognizes their individual and collaborative role in creating a welcoming library environment and supporting success. We each strive daily to fulfill our service philosophy.

Innovation

We value novel, useful, creative application of existing and new processes, theories, structures, skills, space and technology. We embrace calculated risks in pursuit of our communities’ success, seeking insight from all outcomes. We are a hive for our communities’ brainstorming.

Open

We support and promote the concept of open culture. This includes research, digital collections and data, publications, scholarly products, and technological resources. In doing so, we seek to create, curate, and share, whenever possible, work that is barrier-free and immediately available to anyone with access to the internet.

Student success

We value current and future IU Indy students’ pursuit of learning, high quality of life, community engagement, independence, critical thinking skills, and career goals by providing access to research, expertise, space, technology, and employment experiences necessary to attain these goals. We embrace our role in the successful recruitment, retention, and graduation of IU Indy students, while affirming that earning a diploma is not the only measure of student success.