Library Plan

Vision

The University of Bahrain Library aims to become a centre of excellence that supports and promotes high academic standards in undergraduate and postgraduate courses and in research. It will participate in building a knowledge society in line with the aims of the Bahrain Economic Vision 2030.

Mission

The Library will make a fuller contribution to the life of the university by providing the necessary information to support learning, teaching, and research programmes. It will empower students by establishing information literacy programmes.

Objectives

Objective 1:     Develop learning and teaching resources

Objective 2:     Develop information services to users

Objective 3:     Develop information literacy programmes

Objective 4:     Establish programmes and activities to encourage students to read

Objective 5:     Make information available and accessible for learning and research purposes

Objective 6:     Improve infrastructure and quality of information services

Objective 7:     Establish a robust marketing strategy of library services

Objective 8:     Empower library staff and enhance their skills

Objective 9:     Improve the quality of library services as well as management tools and procedures

Objective 10:   Improve services to the wider Bahraini community and institutions

UOB Library Strategic Plan 2015-2019

Executive summary

The University of Bahrain Library aims to become a centre of excellence that supports and promotes high academic standards in undergraduate and postgraduate courses and in research. It will make a fuller contribution to the life of the university by providing the necessary information to support learning, teaching, and research programmes.

The UOB Library will make its collections accessible to users directly within the library premises and remotely via its digital library portal discovery system.  It will endeavor to empower students by establishing information literacy programmes; and will assess and improve the quality and effectiveness of its services.

Although it faces important challenges budget and staff expertise wise, the UOB Library will endeavour to provide high-value services to its users and to enhance the skills and professionalism of its staff.

Essential to its success, the UOB Library will work during the period of the strategic Plan towards improving its services to users. It will continue to develop information collections both in print and electronically. It will contribute to the move to a more analytical learning approach by providing a variety of electronic information resources. It will install further technology at all locations to enable users to self-access all available services. It will encourage independent learning by continuing to provide the necessary information literacy classes to users. It will start a dynamic marketing exercise to encourage users to further use library services and resources. The library will also start the implementation of its regional benchmarking programme through LibQual+; and measure the effectiveness and efficiency of its services to the UOB community. It will continue also to provide expertise and support to a number of libraries in the Kingdom.

Objectives:

Provide a collection of information resources relative to the needs of the programmes and the faculty by: 

1.   Developing learning and teaching resources to support the teaching and research programmes.

2.   Enhancing collection development in the new fields of study and to support courses that are working towards gaining academic accreditation.

3.   Developing high-end academic collections of resources to cater for faculty involved in research programmes and to support the graduate studies programme.

4.   Developing a repository of UOB research output that would include faculty publications, conference proceedings, in-house digitally created documents and reports, and students’ theses and dissertations.

Strengthen information literacy skills and life-long learning skills programmes for students that:

1.     Help students acquire the necessary skills to retrieve information, evaluate sources of information, cite sources, avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism and understand the values of academic ethics and copyright laws.

2.     Help students develop independent learning skills and adopt an analytical, creative and innovative approach to learning.

Strengthen the library’s systems for locating and obtaining electronic information by:

1.   Further developing tools to access electronic resources both directly through hand-held devices and remotely to support the e-leaning programmes.

2.   Making accessible pertinent resources required to support the graduate and undergraduate programmes remotely online.

3.   Improving the library’s discovery systems and working towards a library that is fully self-service available to users 24/7.

4.   Marketing the services to ensure that users are fully aware of the available resources and savvy in ways of benefiting from them. 

Assess the quality of the services provided to users by:

1.   Conducting periodical assessments in order to improve the services the library provides to students and faculty through the use of internationally recognized library assessment tools like LibQUAL+, which will enable the library to respond to the real needs of the university community as well as benchmark its services at regional and international levels.

2.   Conducting assessment exercises targeting particular groups of users (like undergraduates, graduate, or faculty) or services to evaluate the effectiveness of the services provided and ways to further develop and improve their quality.

Provide an environment that encourages learning and research by:

1.   Modernizing the library premises and furniture and equipment available to students and faculty.

2.   Creating quiet-study zones to help individual learning.

3.   Enhancing and modernizing the group-study areas and equipping them with state of the art technology to ensure that students are able to access the tools they need to support their work.

4.   Creating special hubs within the libraries, reserved for graduate students, faculty and researchers.

5.   Training library staff in order to improve their skills and expertise, which would in turn improve the services and the support they provide to students and other users.

Initiative

Enhance high quality library resources to support the learning and research programmes at the university, and empower students with life-long learning skills.

Tasks

Ø  Develop learning and teaching resources to support the teaching and research programmes.

Ø  Empower students in developing independent learning skills and adopting an analytical, creative and innovative approach to learning.

Ø  Further develop tools to access electronic resources both directly through hand-held devices and remotely through the discovery system.

Ø  Continuously assess and benchmark library services in order to improve their quality and to tailor them to the needs of the student and academic communities.

Ø  Create special hubs within the libraries, reserved for graduate students, faculty and researchers.

Ø  Train library staff in order to improve their skills and expertise, which would in turn improve the services and the support they provide to students and other users.