Through our partnerships and strategic initiatives, we're building community and transforming scholarly communication.
Bridge to 2025
Against the backdrop of a pandemic that has changed the way we work, the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries has embraced an opportunity to build upon the initial set of goals shared in the university’s Strategic Plan 2025. While our ambitions are great, this list represents the priority areas that are most feasible in the Libraries at this time, subject to recovery from the pandemic and the availability of sufficient funding. To ensure that the expertise, collections and services of the Libraries are best positioned to navigate this current period of uncertainty and emerge stronger than ever, we will focus available resources on the following priority areas:
- Design and facilitate transformative educational experiences
- Accelerate research & creative inquiry in the digital age with tools, technologies and expertise
- Create and cultivate a healthy, just and inclusive community
- Leverage our resources to support innovative library infrastructure
- Foster valuable partnerships for alumni and community engagement
- Evolve our collections to enable CMU’s students, staff, and faculty to discover, access, and use scholarly information
The first five years of our ten-year strategic plan focused on reimagining the Libraries’ physical spaces and on hiring a talented team of faculty and staff who are central to our ambitions. This second period of our plan builds upon our earlier investments and on our sense of current and emerging academic priorities at Carnegie Mellon. The priorities set out in the Bridge to 2025 reflect a blend of work that is already well underway and plans for the future.
Read the Bridge to 2025 Strategic Plan.
Sustainability Initiative
The Sustainability Initiative fuels Carnegie Mellon University’s collective commitment to sustainability in the pursuit of a more sustainable future for all. This is achieved by incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, into education, research, and practices across the campus community. As an unwavering commitment of the Office of the Provost, we partner with the University Libraries to amplify our efforts toward environmental protection, social equity, and economic justice.
The Sustainability Studio, housed on the first floor of Hunt Library, is a collaborative space meant to promote this initiative. It is an area designated for resources, guidance, connection, and discussion across disciplines to bring the community together in pursuit of a more equitable future.
Spring 2023 programming will feature weekly office hours with staff, faculty, and community members, open studios focused on different facets of sustainability, and more. Stay up to date with all of the events on the Instagram page @sustainablecmu and find more information on the Sustainability Initiative website.
dataCoLAB
The Data Collaborations Lab (dataCoLAB) at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries connects the research community across disciplinary borders, and facilitates collaborations between data producers and data scientists. The program connects researchers who want more from their datasets with individuals who have data and computer science skills, creating opportunities for people with different technical and disciplinary backgrounds to work together. The ultimate goal of the dataCoLAB program is to help build a strong community and a healthy data ecosystem.
Learn more about the dataCoLAB or join them during weekly office hours.
Open Initiatives
The term open access describes materials that are freely accessible online and quickly discoverable in an Internet search. Open access is strategic for Carnegie Mellon, disseminating as broadly as possible works authored by the CMU community, encouraging use, and increasing citations and impact. It also enables the CMU community to access works authored elsewhere around the world, many of which the University Libraries cannot afford to purchase. Providing open access to research and scholarship has become a worldwide movement serving the mission of higher education and the Libraries have a number of initiatives to support this movement.
- Open Access Publishing Support (APC Fund) provides funding opportunities, processing discounts, and individual author members so that scholarship and research produced by CMU authors can be published open access.
- CMU Open Access Licensing Agreements with Publishers: As a world-leading research institution, Carnegie Mellon is a major creator and consumer of scholarly materials. Through the Libraries' efforts to champion new forms of scholarly communication, we have focused on building relationships with publishers that prioritize open access and sustainability through licensing agreements that ensure CMU publications are published open access by default.
- The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service (LPS) provides an infrastructure to publish and host born-digital scholarly content to maximize open and free access to scholarly publications and products in a sustainable fashion for the benefit of scholars, students, and the general public.
- The Libraries' Open Science and Data Collaborations program provides services and infrastructure for open research at CMU through digital tools, training opportunities for research tools and practices, collaboration opportunities on data science projects, special events and advocacy, and a team of experts available as research consultants and collaborators.
- The CMU KiltHub Institutional Repository, collects, preserves, and provides stable, long-term global open access to a wide range of research data and scholarly outputs created by faculty, staff, and student members of Carnegie Mellon University in the course of their research and teaching.