The Digital Library
Service Plan
Turning Dialogue Into Decisions

When the Numbers Arrive Before the Plan

Consider the director of academic library services at a mid-sized regional university. She has just received the results of a 47-item stakeholder survey distributed to 320 faculty members, graduate students, and administrative staff. The response rate held at 61 percent. The findings are not what she expected.

The most-used research tools on campus are not the library's licensed databases. They are general-purpose AI assistants and open-web search. Only 29 percent of graduate respondents rate the library's coverage of international media as adequate. Three academic departments have never activated their remote access credentials. The historical broadcast archive the library licensed three years ago shows fewer than forty total usage sessions in its log. One tenured professor in the communications department, who served on the library advisory board, did not know that archive existed.

The director has numbers. She does not yet have a plan. The findings are sitting in a spreadsheet, and two scheduled meetings are coming up fast: one with the provost and one with the faculty senate. This is precisely the moment when library strategic plan consultants deliver their most essential work: not to interpret the numbers for the institution, but to create the conditions under which the institution interprets the numbers for itself.

The difference between those two roles is the difference between a plan that gets implemented and a plan that gets shelved.

Constructing planning instruments that capture actual use patterns—including AI tools and open-web research—rather than simply inventorying licensed holdings.

Convening cross-stakeholder working groups with the discipline to separate listening from defending, so that shared institutional understanding can emerge before decisions are locked in.

Mapping coverage gaps by source type—journalism archives, broadcast material, primary source collections, AI tools—and translating that map into a prioritized acquisition sequence.

Embedding information literacy and AI-use guidance into the curriculum as a designed service, not a corrective response deployed after problems surface in the research process.

Licensing, Discovery, and Instruction

Once survey findings have been mapped against the four challenge categories identified in the planning instrument—namely access, evaluation and relevance, navigation, and skills and judgment—the service plan takes shape around three corresponding pillars. Each pillar addresses a distinct class of problem. Each demands a different kind of institutional response.

Licensing strategy begins with the inventory, not the vendor catalog. The planning instrument should capture what users actually rely on across the full range of resource types: scholarly databases, news and journalism archives, historical broadcast material, primary source collections, and the general-purpose AI research tools now embedded in everyday academic work. The last category requires deliberate inclusion. The Ithaka S+R 2025 survey found that library leaders anticipate increased demand for AI literacy instruction and research integrity safeguards, yet many institutions have not yet integrated AI into their library planning frameworks at all. A licensing strategy that ignores the tools researchers already use describes the institution as it was rather than as it is. Coverage gaps, identified by rating each source type independently rather than collapsing them into a single overall score, set the acquisition priorities. Rating each source type on its own scale prevents one strong collection area from masking a critical weakness elsewhere.

Discovery design addresses the navigation problem, which is among the most persistent obstacles in academic library use. A collection that only specialists can navigate is effectively closed to everyone else. The design of the discovery layer, including choices about interface structure, search entry points, guided pathways, and contextual help, determines whether a licensed resource gets used or sits idle. Discovery design is not a technology decision. It is a service decision that expresses the library's commitment to the non-specialist researcher.

Instructional support is the third pillar and the one most frequently treated as an afterthought. It is not. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education organizes information literacy around threshold concepts rather than procedural checklists and explicitly provides a foundation for librarians and teaching faculty to design instruction, assignments, and curricula together. The framework recognizes that information literacy is not a fixed skill set but a set of dispositions researchers develop over time and across contexts. In the current environment, those dispositions must extend to the responsible use of AI tools: understanding what a language model generates versus what a cited source asserts, maintaining citation transparency, and preserving academic judgment throughout the research process. Instruction programs built after licenses are signed will always be reactive. Programs built as part of the service plan are strategic.

Sage Publishing's research on digital library development for university librarians reinforces this sequence, noting that embedding digital resources into the learning flow not only boosts discoverability but encourages the kind of sustained engagement that justifies ongoing investment. The same research emphasizes aligning acquisitions to course reading lists so that licensed resources connect directly to learning outcomes. That alignment cannot happen unless librarians and faculty have already talked about what courses require, which is precisely what the dialogue stage of the planning process produces.

Designing the interface structure, search entry points, and guided pathways that determine whether licensed resources are actually used by non-specialist researchers or remain invisible to everyone except subject librarians.

Building AI tool guidance into the instructional plan from the outset—distinguishing what a language model generates from what a cited source asserts—so that academic judgment is preserved throughout the research process.

Mapping licensed acquisitions to course reading lists and assignment structures so that every resource the library purchases connects directly to a documented learning outcome rather than a speculative departmental interest.

What Dialogue Actually Means in a Planning Context

The word dialogue is used loosely in institutional settings to mean almost any form of conversation. In library planning, it has a specific and disciplined meaning, one developed through the work of Glenna Gerard and Linda Ellinor at The Dialogue Group and codified in P. Holman and Tom Devane's The Change Handbook. Dialogue, properly understood, is not debate, which seeks a winner, and it is not discussion, which seeks a decision. Dialogue seeks understanding. Its defining feature is the deliberate suspension of judgment long enough for genuine listening to occur.

For digital library planning, this distinction is consequential. When the director in our opening scenario brings her survey findings to a cross-stakeholder working group without first establishing dialogue ground rules, the meeting will produce a debate about which database to license next. Faculty will defend their disciplines. Administrators will raise budget constraints. The communications professor who did not know about the broadcast archive will feel defensive rather than curious. The findings will be argued over rather than understood.

Library strategic plan consultants structure the dialogue session differently. They bring the survey results to the room as starting questions, not as verdicts. Why do so many researchers use general-purpose AI tools before consulting licensed databases? What does the difficulty with archive navigation say about how assignments are currently designed? Why are international perspectives underrepresented, and who made the original scope decisions for the collection? These questions invite participants to examine their assumptions before they defend their positions. What emerges is a shared picture of the institution's research environment that no single stakeholder could have produced alone.

There is a practical benefit that most planning frameworks undercount. The same dialogue that shapes the service plan also generates ownership of it. Faculty who helped identify the gap in broadcast coverage will assign the new audio archive when it is licensed. Students whose navigation struggles were heard and acted on will return for instruction. The Ithaka S+R 2025 survey found that the ability to collaborate and the ability to manage change were the two competencies library leaders identify as most valuable in their current roles, cited by 48 percent and 47 percent of respondents respectively. Those are not technical skills. They are dialogue skills. Library strategic plan consultants apply them structurally, so that the planning process itself builds the institutional relationships the plan will depend on for its implementation.

The digital library planning framework developed through this firm's decades of practice rests on the same principle: a digital library built from stakeholder dialogue reflects what the institution actually needs. One built without it reflects a grocery list assembled by whoever spoke loudest.

Convening faculty, students, administrators, and librarians in a structured session where survey findings are treated as open questions rather than verdicts, with ground rules that require each participant to restate what they heard before adding their own perspective.

Identifying the unstated assumptions each stakeholder group carries into the room—about what the library provides, what researchers need, and what the institution can afford—and surfacing those assumptions before any resource or platform decision is made.

Producing a session record that the full stakeholder group can amend before it is finalized, creating an institutional document of shared understanding that carries more authority before an administration than any recommendation delivered from outside.

What to Do

Rate each source type on its own scale in the planning survey to prevent strong areas from masking critical gaps elsewhere. The finding that reveals a coverage crisis in broadcast archives cannot surface if broadcast archives are averaged into a single "collections quality" score dominated by a strong STEM database portfolio.

Include general-purpose AI research tools in the resource inventory alongside licensed databases. They are already part of the research environment whether the library endorses them or not. Excluding them from the planning instrument produces a service plan that describes a research environment that no longer exists.

Build the dialogue session before the platform decision. Understanding must precede acquisition. A licensing decision made before the dialogue session has occurred is a guess dressed up as strategy.

Use the dialogue session's shared record as the primary evidence base for the service plan's recommendations. This is what gives the plan institutional authority: it reflects what the institution's own stakeholders said and agreed to, not what a consultant recommended from outside the room.

Revisit the dialogue process on a defined schedule, annually or at each major renewal cycle, to keep the plan aligned with actual community use. The institution that returns to structured dialogue every year builds compounding institutional intelligence. The one that treats the plan as a completed document loses alignment with its community within eighteen months.

Embed discovery support and instructional guidance as plan deliverables from the outset, not as supplementary programs added after licensing is complete. Discovery and instruction that are designed alongside acquisitions integrate naturally into the research workflow. Those added afterward are always fighting for attention against established habits.

Connect the service plan to a structured reference portal as a practical discovery scaffold for educators, researchers, and organizational users. The portal layer translates the library's licensing investments into a navigable research environment that non-specialist researchers can enter without prior training.

Establishing the structured stakeholder dialogue before any platform or vendor selection is initiated, so that every acquisition decision is grounded in documented institutional need rather than vendor opportunity or administrative assumption.

Building the return to structured dialogue into the service plan itself, at the annual renewal cycle and at each major usage review, so that the plan remains a living framework rather than a dated document the institution has outgrown.