Mapping Member Strategic Priorities
Background
In 2024 the WEST Executive Committee & the Operations and Collections Council (OCC) articulated a need for WEST to create new and expanded communication resources that enable member libraries to advance their shared print and collective collection goals at their institutions. In order to create these kinds of communication resources, it was first necessary to understand the strategic priorities of WEST member institutions. Therefore, in early 2025 the WEST Project Team conducted an analysis to map member strategic priorities to the WEST Strategic Scenario identified in the 2023 Future of WEST report, and then map those priorities and opportunities to current communication resources so that we could see where we met member’s communication needs and where additional work would need to be done.
Methodology
This analysis looked at the most recently published strategic priorities of all of WEST’s current member libraries, when those were not available, vision statements were used, and in the case where neither was available, values were used. The collected data was then analyzed in R to determine the most frequently occurring nouns, most frequently occurring verbs, cooccurrence of nouns and verbs, cooccurrence of verbs and adjectives, and cooccurrence of nouns and adjectives.
The WEST Project team conducted the analysis early in 2025 and presented findings to the OCC and the Executive Committee. Findings are now being used to refine WEST communication resources to connect WEST activities more directly to WEST member priorities.
Findings
What we found was that libraries prioritized things like student, staff, and faculty success and engagement, providing equitable access, and local and global collaboration across the scholarly community. Below you can see the visualizations created as part of this analysis. The darker, wider lines in the first three visualizations indicate words which frequently occurred together.
Some of these frequently used words and phrases map well to the WEST Strategic Scenario presented as part of the future of WEST report. This highlights areas where we want to continue to focus our efforts in WEST.
Other clusters of words like student, staff, and faculty success, experience, and support don’t map to existing WEST strategic priorities or communication resources. This highlighted for us that there is an opportunity to update our communications to reflect this member priority.
What’s Next?
WEST’s OCC, in conjunction with the WEST Project Team, is updating WEST’s communication resources to reflect the priorities that we identified for WEST users. At the WEST Member Meeting this summer, we will present a brief update about this analysis and the work on communication resources among other exciting topics. Please see our previous Save the Date blog post for information about how to register and keep an eye out for the full agenda later this month!