ARL Strategic Directions and Enabling Capabilities 2010-2012

For immediate release:
March 11, 2010

For more information, contact:
Kaylyn Groves
Association of Research Libraries
202-403-4936
kaylyn@arl.org

ARL’s Agenda for 2010-2012

Special Issue of RLI Presents Strategic Plan

Washington DC—A special issue of Research Library Issues focuses on the Association’s new Strategic Plan adopted in fall 2009 by the ARL Board of Directors. The plan calls for ARL advocacy and action in three strategic directions: Influencing Public Policies, Reshaping Scholarly Communication, and Transforming Research Libraries.

In an introductory essay accompanying the plan, ARL Executive Director Charles B. Lowry highlights some of the challenges that ARL will address during the next three years ”where ARL can play a role in finding a solution that can be achieved principally through collective action and with modest resources.” Lowry cites four large and long-term problems that ARL is addressing:

• Out-of-Balance Intellectual Property Policies
• The Absence of Mechanisms for Research Libraries to Influence the Marketplace
• Policies and Practices that Inhibit Innovation and Enduring Access
• The Need to Reconfigure Research Library Organizations and Services

From ARL’s 2010 action agenda, Lowry provides examples of the Association’s efforts to address these problems, efforts that tie directly to the Outcomes and Strategies targeted by the Strategic Plan.

Research Library Issues: A Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 268 (February 2010) is freely available on the Web at http://publications.arl.org/view/rli/r26s2/default.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.