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Mission

The Library advances the mission of the college by supporting teaching, learning, research, and other forms of intellectual engagement.

We do so through extensive electronic, digital, and analog resources; welcoming physical and virtual facilities; innovative and inspiring programs and events; and excellent customer service. We empower students, faculty, and staff with critical information literacies, vital technology skills, and a positive user experience to further their academic success and sustain successful lifelong learning in an ever-changing world.

To fulfill our purpose, we seek to:

• Understand and meet the diverse information needs of our faculty, students, and staff
• Employ universal design to provide our users with seamless, equitable, and enduring access to the world of knowledge
• Teach our constituents how to navigate the complexities of the scholarly information and communications landscape to ensure their success
• Foster and support new research by our faculty, student, and staff and make it widely available and easily discoverable to the global community through open and equitable access
• Collaborate with both internal and external partners to advance the college’s mission of community and service engagement within Los Angeles
• Sponsor creative and inclusive publications, exhibitions, and programs that are designed to stimulate curiosity, captivate audiences, and lead to new scholarly collaborations
• Support our entire staff of librarians and information specialists to constantly improve our advocacy for user needs by continually developing our knowledge, skills, and expertise

Our Core Values

The Library is a human enterprise at its core. We practice and value honesty, ethical behavior, and trustworthiness in all of our interactions, transactions, and communications. As library and information professionals, we strive to create a place which belongs to everyone and where everyone belongs. The Academic Commons brings together many important partners. As stewards of the Library, we partner with students, faculty, staff, and administration in support of the common good by:

Providing equitable access

• Openness & Sharing: All resources—human, physical, and electronic—are shared with the entire campus community for curricular and co-curricular usage. We believe a culture of openness and sharing results in scholarship that is more equitable and inclusive, producing better results.
• Discovery & Usage: We provide fair and equitable access to relevant, appropriate, accurate, and uncensored information. While we acknowledge that our resources are chosen by persons and may include some bias, we represent a vast range of opinions that reflect the depth and variety of resources available in our current information landscape.
• Efficiency: We strive for excellence in our response to requests. We aim to answer all queries with professionalism to ensure timely services to meet patron needs. We welcome ongoing conversations with our colleagues and patrons across campus in order to respond efficiently to continuously evolve and improve our services.
   

Fostering connections between and among people, ideas, and resources

• Inclusion: As a diverse community of learners, we strive to ensure that all members of the community feel included, welcomed and represented in our programming, services, and collections.
• Community & Collaboration: We strongly affirm the collaborative nature of teaching, learning, and research. We aim to be effective partners with the College’s various stakeholder communities. We recognize that including many different partners in the process of research will lead to thoughtful and insightful results.
   

Being a force for creative innovation

• Curiosity & Inquiry: It is our goal to inspire and encourage inspiration in paths to learning and researching. Through our collection development, spaces, and conversations, we strive to engage with user’s curiosities, and help develop and answer all we can. We know that questions will lead to new questions, and we will be colleagues who participate in the processes of inquiries. 
• Information literacy & Life-long learning: As library and information professionals, it is important for us to engage with the information literacy framework for higher as defined by the Association of College & Research Libraries (). We understand that “information” is vastly defined to be analog and digital, and crosses modalities to include textual information, visual information, and quantitative information, among others. We believe that information literacy is the foreground to a culture of lifelong learning. 
• Risk-Taking & Experimentation: As a learning organization, we recognize that no success comes without some risk. We value thoughtful risk-taking and turning unexpected outcomes into learning opportunities. We assess trials and errors in line with the goals, processes, and ideas of the college and our professional affiliations.