Library Mission and Vision

The KSU Libraries are committed to supporting and furthering Kennesaw State University’s mission of being a powerful, diverse, student-centered, and research-driven university. The University Libraries carefully cultivate resources, services, and spaces that enhance teaching, learning, scholarship, and creative endeavors for our users. These efforts focus upon supporting student success--especially advancing undergraduate programs, supporting the graduate programs, furthering research with relevance, and promoting lifelong learning. 

The KSU Libraries will advance student success, lifelong learning, and research with relevance through teaching, access, and discovery with the expertise and dedication of our professional faculty and staff.  

The faculty and staff of the KSU Libraries strive to embody the University System of Georgia's Core Values of integrity, excellence, accountability, and respect in addition to the American Library Association’s Core Values of access, confidentiality/privacy, democracy, diversity, lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, preservation, the public good, professionalism, service, social responsibility, and sustainability. Our Professional Values Statement reflects our organizational culture and shared beliefs, which guide us in our courses of action and form a foundation for our overall effectiveness.

Student Success: We focus on creating a user-centered organization that places the success of our students as our highest priority. We strive for service excellence in pursuit of this value. 

Lifelong Learning: We promote and support the lifelong pursuit of knowledge and are committed to the academic success and personal growth of our students, our faculty, and our staff. Our focus on developing information literacy skills for our users prepares them for futures beyond their matriculation at KSU and ensures lifelong success for KSU students. 

Innovation: The KSU Library System encourages creative solutions and the utilization of new technologies and pedagogical strategies to improve our resources and services. We seek innovative ideas and approaches in our pursuit of continuous improvement in supporting student success and research with relevance. 

Diversity and Inclusion:  The KSU Libraries value diversity and inclusion in our services and resources. We believe that diversity strengthens an organization and we strive to ensure that our employees and users feel valued, supported, and heard. 

Collaboration: We strongly believe in collaboration and teamwork, both internally and with other departments, colleges, and institutions to achieve common goals. The University Libraries actively pursue and support interdisciplinary initiatives.
 
Research with Relevance: Building on our professional values and expertise in information science, we promote and support research with relevance for the KSU community. To this end, we actively pursue collaborative endeavors with faculty, staff and students across campus, continuously curate and develop library resources, offer research assistance and support for the KSU community, and encourage the scholarly activities of the KSU Libraries' faculty and staff.

The KSU Libraries advance professional values of intellectual freedom, intellectual property rights, user privacy and confidentiality, accessibility, collaboration, and user-centered service.  

To accomplish this, we will:   

• Resist all efforts at censorship. 
• Protect the right to privacy and confidentiality of library users.  
• Support the University System of Georgia’s general education goal of promoting data fluency and information literacy through targeted information literacy instruction to the KSU community. 
• Respect intellectual property rights and advocate for the balance between the interests of information users and the rights of information holders through policy and educational programming.  
• Ensure responsible stewardship of funding and resources by containing costs and optimizing efficiencies.  
• Promote diverse voices in our resources, services, and staffing.  
• Support academic integrity and deter plagiarism through user education.  
• Remove barriers to accessibility of resources and services. 
• Commit to a user-centered approach and demonstrate the centrality of users in all aspects of service design and delivery in the physical and virtual spaces.  
• Collaborate across campus and institutional boundaries.   
• Pursue initiatives to promote cost-savings for students, such as Affordable Learning Georgia and the Textbook Transformation Grant efforts.  
• Support lifelong learning through the promotion of open educational resources.