The McGill Libraries have developed Strategic Priorities for 2025–2030 in consultation with key stakeholders, students, faculty members, and staff.

Mission

The McGill University Libraries contribute to society by advancing teaching, learning, and research in a supportive and welcoming environment. We anticipate and respond to the needs of users by providing outstanding collections, excellent services, and spaces that inspire. We work in collaboration with global scholarly and library communities to enhance and facilitate access to knowledge.

Vision

To be the intellectual and cultural centre of the university.

Our Commitment

The Libraries prioritize inclusiveness, striving to be actively welcoming to all in the McGill community and beyond. We value freedom of thought and expression, respect, and collaboration.

Building on the legacy of McGill Libraries’ history, we take a value-based approach to our work, ensuring that our activities consistently embody and demonstrate our commitment to the following:

  • Proactive approaches to evolve the Libraries’ collections, services, and spaces in the context of changing university and societal needs.
  • Open and transparent communication, both in providing information and in listening to feedback.
  • Evidence-based decision making, balanced with pragmatism, to ensure successful continuous improvement.
  • Vigorously responding to the challenges of aligning our Libraries spaces, collections and services with our users’ needs.
  • Collaboration in everything we do, among library units, throughout McGill, within Quebec and Canadian library networks and internationally,
  • Critical evaluation of our collections, services, and spaces, in order to address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, and work towards reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in what is now Canada.
  • The dismantlement of structures that reinforce inequality and which create barriers to inclusion.
  • Ongoing action toward environmental and social sustainability.
  • Diversity in our collections and workforce, inclusion of multiple peoples and points of view in planning and services, and equitable access to all of the Libraries’ offerings.

Strategic Priorities

1. Be the first destination on campus

With two million in-person visits per year, the Libraries constitute the intellectual heart of McGill. Each library enriches the academic life of students by providing safe and comfortable spaces in which multiple learning strategies, collaboration, and cultural activities seamlessly coexist, and where advanced technology enhances one’s experience. Outside the classroom, the library is also where friendships are made and communities built. The library is one of the places on campus where students take responsibility for their own learning.

We will:

  • Plan and deliver the major transformation of the McLennan Library.
  • Ensure McGill Libraries provide welcoming spaces that better meet the needs of learners, scholars and library staff.
  • Adopt programs and practices to enable the McGill Libraries to become environmentally sound, socially equitable, and economically feasible.
  • Offer welcoming, barrier-free and innovative learning and study spaces, studios for content creation, advanced technologies, as well as comfortable and well-designed employee work areas.
  • Provide imaginative and captivating programming to engage the community in meaningful discussions respecting ideas and opinions.
2. Champion digital citizenship through critical thinking and the use of trustworthy information

Some sources increasingly encourage the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation. Now, more than ever, mastery in identifying credible information sources is fundamental for learning, decision making, contributing to knowledge, and in the exercise of democracy. In these turbulent times, McGill Libraries’ collections, technologies, skilled librarians and library workers offer myriad tools and expertise for accessing, evaluating, and using information.

We will:

  • Help McGill students develop critical thinking and research skills to find accurate information, excel in their studies, and become lifelong learners and creators of reliable information.
  • Grow and diversify partnerships to enhance our teaching programs and create engaging environments for our students to learn how to evaluate information, identify credible sources, and use of all types of content.
  • Foster responsible use of technology and artificial intelligence.
  • Promote a culture of inquiry and respect for freedom of expression and opinion.
3. Advance open research and education

The advancement of knowledge benefits everyone and contributes to the betterment of the world. Currently, scholarly communications are controlled by an oligopoly of five publishers. University libraries are condemned to buy back or lease research output at prohibitive and escalating costs through “big deal” package negotiations and so-called “transformative agreements.” Researchers are asked to pay exorbitant article and book processing charges. The last few decades have demonstrated how unsustainable the current model has become. Building on collective efforts and achievements of the last 30 years, McGill Libraries will contribute to enhancing the creation of and access to open access publications, open data, and open educational resources.

We will:

  • Increase awareness of the current state of the scholarly communication system and its impact on different agents in the research life cycle.
  • Advocate for open scholarship.
  • Invest to increase the volume of open access scholarly output produced at McGill, including publications, data, and collections.
  • Champion the adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs) by McGill authors to make McGill research more visible.
  • Launch open education initiatives.
4. Ensure the long-term preservation and discoverability of our collections

At McGill Libraries, we are proud of our stewardship of one of the most important research collections in Canada. We are entrusted with the responsibility to acquire, preserve, conserve, and disseminate our distinctive and rare collections for our community and future generations. Technology inevitably advances and leaves behind legacies to be updated or forgotten; indeed, digital formats created only 15 years ago can become outdated and unreadable. Long-term stewardship of print collections, digitized materials, and born-digital content is a priority. McGill Libraries should be recognized as a world leader, not only for its vast holdings of high-value material, but also for its storage, preservation, and dissemination practices.

We will:

  • Invest in a world-class digital infrastructure to ensure our unique collections are preserved for the next century.
  • Strengthen our expertise for digitization, preservation, and dissemination of digital collections and exhibitions.
  • Uphold and expand on our commitment to preserve historic and distinctive collections, both print and digital, for future generations with the creation of a conservation function.
  • Reveal “hidden collections” by implementing rigorous prioritization of uncatalogued and undescribed collections and implementing new workflows to increase discovery.
  • Broaden and diversify our collections to better align with inquiries and research conducted at McGill and make collections about marginalized communities visible.
  • Activate the Libraries’ distinctive collections with community programming and a world class exhibition program.
  • Launch ambitious Libraries’ publication and scholar-in-residence programs to enable researchers to immerse themselves in our collections.
5. Increase our presence in the wider community

Universities are transforming lives through education and research impact. At a time when we notice an erosion of trust in the public toward institutions, the Libraries can play an influential role in bringing society and the university closer. We want McGill Libraries to be places where everyone feels welcome. McGill Libraries are accessible to all and are portals to discover and engage with the University, McGill and others. Opening our doors, both physical and virtual, to the public and expanding community engagement will further embed McGill into the fabric of Québec society.

We will:

  • Organize moments of discovery and exploration around our collections with teachers and students from elementary schools, secondary schools, and CEGEPs in the greater Montreal area.
  • Increase French-language and bilingual programming to encourage engagement with the francophone community.
  • Offer programming in collaboration with members of communities that have traditionally been excluded.