Mission & Vision Statements

Library Vision

      A liberal education is the soul of a university and the library, its heart.  A university education flourishes best as a great conversation among diverse voices, each engaged in solitary meditation and impassioned exchange on our common inheritance of ideas and values.  The university library is the indispensable partner in this conversation because it offers a panoramic view of human achievement in which individual disciplines can be integrated and reconciled in a shared vision of the future.   To this end, the library conserves for posterity the riches of our inheritance in tangible form, encourages engagement with that legacy through quiet reflection and personal encounter, and fosters self-understanding and compassion in a setting conducive to both intellectual stimulation and active repose.  In fulfillment of this same purpose, the library also provides guided access to the wealth of information available electronically.   It is this vision of Archbishop Alemany Library’s role that informs our mission, policies, and practices.

Library Mission 

     Archbishop Alemany Library aspires to the full spectrum of collections and services that define a University library.  As the only University library in Marin County, we respond actively not only to the research demands of Dominican’s varied undergraduate and graduate curricula, but also to the thriving intellectual and cultural ethos of the wider North Bay community.  Guided by the four Dominican pillars of study, reflection, community, and service while alert to emerging trends in information access, the Library builds an innovative future on a solid foundation of tradition.  In its personalized commitment to the educational needs of patrons, in the development of its collections, and in the design of its reference and instructional services, the Library strives to become the scholarly heart of our region and a magnet for the intellectually curious.

Library Objectives to be realized through concrete action steps incorporated elsewhere in the Library’s Strategic Plan

• Join and showcase the “Great Conversation” on the meaning of life that defines a liberal education.
• Encourage reflective reading and a sense of community through programmatic initiatives, attractive
• library design, and an expanded leisure reading collection.
• Enhance an interdisciplinary thrust in collection development as a reflection of the growing cross fertilization among subject disciplines.
• Respect the University’s Dominican and Catholic heritage.
• Foster pluralism and a diversity of perspective.
• Honor the University’s commitment to internationalization.
• Promote service learning and community-engaged scholarship.
• Provide state-of-the-art electronic access and information delivery.
• Strengthen research skills and information literacy.
• Collaborate with other local libraries and institutions in fostering a richer, more buoyant, cultural environment throughout the North Bay.
• Preserve “the best that has been thought and said” in human culture as an archival obligation to future generations, including focused special collections and attention to Marin County’s distinctive characteristics.
• Create a library atmosphere conducive to exploration and self-education.