Stewardship

The libraries serve as trusted keepers of the intellectual and cultural record, collecting, describing, providing access to, and preserving a broad universe of materials, including physical and digital collections, rare and unique books, manuscripts, archives, ephemera and the products of scholarly enterprise at Temple. 

Personalized & Proactive Services 

The libraries provide learning and research services that are anticipative of and keyed to the unique needs, desires and characteristics of the constituents they serve, both through interpersonal interaction and through user-responsive technologies. 

Intellectual Rigor 

While the libraries serve students and faculty by simplifying access to resources that support learning, clinical practice, and research, they also recognize a mandate to value complexity and to facilitate tackling the challenging question rather than finding the easy answer. 

Openness

The libraries embrace as core to their mission: 

• Barrier-free access for our community to a rich array of physical & digital resources to support learning and inquiry;
• The unfettered flow of ideas, scholarship and knowledge to support learning, clinical practice, and research and to stimulate creativity and intellectual enterprise;
• Engagement with faculty to leverage and create open educational resources for broad distribution and sharing;
• Collaborative development of open source standards, tools, and software to meet the needs of the scholarly, library, and cultural heritage communities;
• A climate of organizational transparency to engage and energize a professionally sophisticated staff.

Historically-Informed, Future-Directed Library & Publishing Practice 

Informed by their historical commitment to collect, organize, disseminate and preserve the intellectual and cultural record, the libraries and the university press act aggressively to transform their focus and approach for the digital age. 

Innovation & Experimentation 

Moving to the tempo of the digital age, the libraries and press are agile and quick to explore, test, and adopt where appropriate new and emerging services, tools and methods, in a spirit of trial and error, continuous learning, and ludic exploration. 

Partnership & Collaboration 

The libraries and press commit to work in partnership and collaboration with individuals, departments, colleges, the clinical enterprise, and community groups across the institutional, local, national, and global landscape to develop the best new services to support learning, research, and creativity. 

Civic Hospitality

The libraries and press recognize their role in providing a welcoming environment for community members in North Philadelphia and the greater Philadelphia region, including access to technology, lifelong learning & life skills development, and cultural programming. 

Diversity & Inclusion 

The libraries and press strive to engage, include and serve the full diversity of the Temple academic and local communities regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion, socioeconomic status, veteran status, political affiliation, or (dis)ability. We commit to inclusive practices in our spaces, services, and resources, and to the recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce. 

Accessibility

The libraries and press commit to making their resources, systems, and services universally available to all who need to use them. 

Accountability

The libraries and press commit to evidence-based planning, decision-making, financial stewardship, and management and to the regular evaluation of organizational performance in addressing the education, research, and civic and cultural outreach needs and priorities of Temple University at large. 

(Revised and Re-affirmed, September, 2017)