On the full-fledged mission statement of the University Scientific Library

Abstract

The mission statement of an organization compiled in accordance with the definition of the term “mission” of the dictionary of the ISO 9000 quality management systems standard cannot be recognized as an effective management tool, since the ISO requirements for this document are too generic and vague. The objectives of this work were to clarify the functions of the mission statement of the university library as a management document, to develop a definition of the mission statement, consisting mainly of a list of its functions, and to develop a full-fledged mission statement of the Scientific Library of the Belarusian National Technical University based on the developed functional definition. Accordingly, the methods of work were the retrieval and interpretation of relevant scientific literature and the synthesis of data obtained from it for the development of new documents, viz. the definition of the mission statement and the mission statement of our library based on it. As a result, the intended functional definition of a university library mission statement as a full-fledged effective management document has been given and the mission statement of the Scientific Library of the Belarusian National Technical University has been crafted. The aspects of improving the efficiency of the library after the adoption of the new mission statement are briefly discussed.