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Mission Statement

Mission:

The Hannah V. McCauley Library provides quality collections and information services in support of the Ohio University - Lancaster's educational and research missions. The Library also contributes to meeting the information needs of the citizens of Lancaster, the scholarly community in Ohio and worldwide. In fulfilling this mission, the Library selects, acquires, organizes, preserves, and provides access to collections in a broad range of formats, facilitates access to collections owned by other institutions, serves as a gateway and contributor to global networked information resources, provides assistance and education in information retrieval utilizing current technologies, assists in helping our students become information literate and responsible consumers of information, and provides facilities conducive to learning and research.

Values:

The Hannah V. McCauley Library is governed by the core principles outlined in the Ohio University - Lancaster Identity Statement. We are an open admissions campus, offering associate's, baccalaureate, and master's degrees to a culturally and economically, if not age homogeneous population. Many of our students and faculty have multiple responsibilities, and it is therefore imperative that the Library provides services that are flexible and adaptive to our patron's needs.

The Hannah V. McCauley Library is mindful of the excellent reputation of Ohio University and its regional campus system, and strives to maintain the same high standards in its library services. In all of our activities we seek to meet or exceed our users' expectations. We set high standards for the contribution we make to the University's pursuit of knowledge and educational excellence. To meet future challenges, our staff will strive to be resourceful, innovative, and flexible professionals, partnering with our faculty and administration to fulfill the educational mission of Ohio University - Lancaster.

Intellectual inquiry is at the heart of an academic community, and as such it is imperative that our Library's collections represent a wide range of opinions and ideas even if those materials prove controversial. The Hannah V. McCauley Library supports the American Library Association's Bill of Rights, its Intellectual Freedom Statement, and its statement on Challenged Materials.

Vision:

Academic libraries face a tremendously exciting future. As technology is revolutionizing the scholarly communication process, libraries are taking the opportunity to engineer major advances in information delivery. The traditional perception of the library as the heart of the university can be greatly enhanced by virtual library services, where a broad range of information is accessible directly to the user via computer networks. The McCauley Library continues to expand access for our patrons to these kinds of services and resources through our partnerships with OhioLINK and other national networks.

Along with our expansion of virtual services, we must be mindful that our Library still serves a significant role as a place for our students and faculty to conduct scholarly research and to find people skilled in assisting them in these pursuits. The Library staff's professional skills and experience position us to play significant leadership and support roles in the development of quality information services within the University's academic programs. The staff of the Hannah V. McCauley Library commits themselves to an ambitious vision for the Library's future.