About Us
Vision and Mission
The library will be a place of engagement, learning, creation, and belonging. Through ongoing dialogue with our campus community, we strive to contribute meaningfully to diverse literacies, responsible critical inquiry, and equitable access to knowledge, both at the University of Winnipeg and beyond.
The library’s mission is to sustainably develop, preserve and make accessible UWinnipeg’s knowledge and cultural resources in support of teaching and research. We are a core academic service that provides the spaces and services necessary for our students, faculty, and community researchers to discover, create, access and use these resources.
View our What We Do page for more information about our work and our staff.
Library Focus Areas
The Library Focus Areas are high-level priorities that help steer operational planning. Understanding that campus priorities evolve over time, the Focus Areas are aspirational guidelines intended to shine a light on the work we do and the initiatives we are focused on.
Select an area to learn more about our plans:
- Renew the library facility to provide the workspaces and technologies students require to be successful.
- Refine the library’s community access policies in alignment with campus strategies.
- Continue to ensure visibility of Indigenous perspectives in displays, spaces and collections.
- Create and safeguard access to spaces, resources, and services for equity-deserving students, faculty, staff, and visitors.
- Continue to assess and improve accessibility for collections, services, and spaces, both physical and digital.
- Review front-line service models to match student needs with library supports.
- Strengthen partnerships with student services across campus.
- Bring the library to students at the point of need.
- Integrate Indigenous knowledges across the library’s services, resources and spaces.
- Align the library’s reference and instructional services with UW academic integrity strategies.
- Build Open Access infrastructure and resources, locally and nationally.
- Partner with other universities and organizations in sharing collections.
- Promote and support the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER).
- Enhance subscription assessment workflows to ensure evidence-based investment.
- Strengthen capacity to improve discoverability of special collections and Indigenous resources.
- Collaborate with Research Office to provide service at point of need.
- Develop and implement an Open Access strategy.
- Help UWinnipeg-run scholarly journals remain sustainable.
- Upgrade and promote WinnSpace for maximum value to authors.
- Support and promote Indigenous research methods, relationality, and Indigenous led initiatives surrounding data sovereignty (OCAP - Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession).
- Prepare and launch a library and archives digital asset management strategy.
- Ensure adequate physical storage for UW library materials, archives and art collections.
- Ensure digital preservation tools and infrastructure for theses, scholarly works, digital archives, and oral histories.
- Develop protocols surrounding Indigenous cultural materials.
- Ensure strong stewardship, preservation and promotion of special collections.