MSU Libraries Collection Values

Alignment with University Research, Teaching and Practice

We strategically build collections in various formats, languages, and depths to meet the present and plausible future needs of the MSU community, changing our collection policies and strategies along with the university’s changing priorities.
We build collections that are based on and support both quality scholarship and intellectual freedom*, recognizing that different subject areas have different needs and practices.
We support the university’s land grant mission and outreach by providing access to information resources for the wider local and global community when feasible.

We seek out historically underrepresented and marginalized voices, identities, and perspectives to diversify and fill gaps in our collections and participate in dismantling racism, sexism, and other biases.
We provide various formats to serve different users and expect that vendors of electronic resources meet established accessibility standards and make collections discoverable.
We recognize that a historic academic collection contains problematic, superseded, or harmful content. We keep and provide access to these materials so as not to erase the past but support scholarship to learn from it. (See the policy on challenges to materials in the collections)
We purchase and provide access to course materials as much as possible to help the university be inclusive of students from all economic backgrounds.
We respect the privacy of the diverse users of our collections and work with vendors of electronic resources to protect this privacy where feasible.

We use collections money wisely with strategic coordinated purchasing and licensing of materials to achieve cost savings and sustainable pricing and make the best use of staff time.
We balance the needs of the present with the needs of the future, primarily purchasing materials for perpetual long-term ownership, yet providing short term access to other information resources when appropriate.
We support the exploration of new models for making global scholarly communication more sustainable, including agreements to increase open access publishing and provide opportunities for MSU authors.
We build and maintain physical collections, considering space constraints and deaccessioning materials when needed.

We acknowledge that the MSU Libraries cannot provide access to everything nor preserve the entire information record for the future, so we work collaboratively with other libraries to build and maintain both electronic and physical collections and infrastructures for those collections.
We share our collections with other libraries and insist that vendor licenses allow for interlibrary loan.
Selectors make decisions about their collections and policies informed by overall strategic decisions within the Libraries and collaboratively with the Big Ten Academic Alliance and other libraries in the state of Michigan.

We acknowledge that choices about collections sometimes involve conflicting values (above) and that we must weigh each decision pragmatically.
We strive over time, often collaboratively with other libraries, to change problematic systems through negotiation and discussion with vendors and with our user groups.

* The meaning and understanding of the value of "intellectual freedom" for our collections work is an ongoing discussion.