At The Seattle Public Library, we see Seattle as a city where imagination and opportunity thrive. Our mission is to bring people, information and ideas together to enrich lives and build community.
A city where imagination and opportunity thrive.
The Seattle Public Library brings people, information and ideas together to enrich lives and build community.
The Library’s Strategic Direction is designed to help us achieve positive outcomes and lasting impacts in individual lives and throughout our community, and to ensure we have the right tools, resources and organizational structure to support that work.
The Strategic Direction calls for us to focus our work in three areas:
Individual Growth
Deliver core Library services to support individual needs. Every patron who comes through our doors can expect to find robust collections, welcoming and comfortable libraries, effective staff assistance, compelling programs, and a wide range of technology resources.
For each individual we serve, we will provide opportunities for individual growth in the following four areas:
Community Impact
Achieve lasting community impacts. We have focused on these Service Priorities for the last several years and we want to keep it going to ensure we make a difference community-wide in the following five areas:
Institutional Performance
Build the internal infrastructure necessary for the Library's institutional success. This work will provide us the tools and resources needed to make better decisions and more nimbly respond to community concerns. We will focus on the following five business model areas:
More About the Strategic Direction
Executive Director and Chief Librarian Marcellus Turner held several Community Conversations around the city to hear directly from patrons what they wanted and needed in their Library system. Staff have hosted many "community listening" sessions throughout the city as well. All of this feedback helped Library leadership and the Library board of trustees develop a Strategic Direction to guide the organization's work for the next three years.
We call this a Strategic Direction rather than a Strategic Plan in order to reflect a shorter timeframe of three years and to allow the Library to be more flexible in responding to patron needs. The Strategic Direction gives us a blueprint for operating in a rapidly changing environment. Based on community input and feedback, the Strategic Direction moves the Library toward achieving outcomes and creating impacts in our community and building the organizational infrastructure needed to support that work.