EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Over the period of this Five Year Plan (2001-2006) the Library will improve both the relevance and effectiveness of its collections and its services in order to support and to promote high academic standards in undergraduate and postgraduate courses and in research. The Library will make a fuller contribution to the life of the University.

User environment 

Particular effort will be needed in the next five years to deal with the growth of the student population, and in responding to the implications of the rapid increase of the availability of digital information.

Increasingly, the students will need access to the benefits of modern Information Technology and Educational Technology applications to support e-learning. 

Strategic goals

Whilst seeking to maintain and to improve its information support for University research programmes, the Library’s high priority will be to improve and develop its services to support students.

Objectives

A closer Partnership between the Library and the Colleges of the University will be developed. This Partnership will focus on:

We shall build on the good progress already made in both libraries to provide full-text electronic information through external databases and through the Internet. The Library will greatly increase the number of terminals available for direct access to electronic information sources (including Internet) and deliver these across networks.

(Section 3)

There will be a major programme to modernise the Library’s Arabic and English bookstock in order to provide an up-to-date selection of published materials to support and enhance academic standards across all courses of study and research within the University. We shall improve the display, subject guiding and access to resources and services in order to encourage their fullest use. (Section 5)

Emphasis will be put on training a team of subject librarians who will give particular attention to teaching students research strategies and provide them instruction on library resources.

The Library will play a fuller role in inter-library collaboration within the Gulf region. As the largest academic library in Bahrain, the Library will adopt a “consortia approach” to both encourage and participate in projects which help to coordinate and enrich the library resources and services of the Nation as a whole as well as bring benefit to the University.

The Library will continue to develop its Digital Library site and make full-text databases and journals available to users over the network and remotely.

(Section 3.1)

The Library extension in Sakhir will be completed by 2002. Further extension of the buildings will be completed later on in the Plan in order to accommodate the growing student population. This will include setting up  a library within the College of Law and building a new library for the Colleges of Science and IT.

The Library will build on the successfully implemented Horizon Library Management System by integrating its Horizon Information Portal (HIP) search capabilities to include full-text journals available within the Digital Library.

The necessary computer labs will be established to support self-learning.

(Section 3.2)

To meet these objectives it will be important to maximize the contribution of members of the Library Staff. There will be a particular need to provide training and development for all the library staff so that they may reach their full potential.

(Section 3.3)

An important requirement will be improvements to the quality of management information, including the use of library user surveys.

(Section 3.4)