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Planning Strategically for Small 
Libraries
Susan Ebertz, Wartburg Theological Seminary
Karl Stutzman, Anabaptist Mennonite Theological Seminary

ABSTR AC T Strategic planning is important for small theological 
libraries. Strategic planning allows libraries to identify goals and 
succeed in completing them. Unfortunately, there is often very 
limited staff time at small libraries, so librarians default to simply 

“doing” rather than planning. The presenters discussed some of the 
background of strategic planning and emphasized the importance 
of purpose statements and strategic plans for accreditation and 
evaluation. They also identified barriers to planning in their own 
libraries and offered practical advice for working on strategic plans 
with limited time and resources. Additionally, they emphasized the 
value of thinking strategically, which may be even more important 
than creating and executing a detailed strategic plan.

BACKGROUND

Strategic plans are vital to give direction for theological libraries. At 
many small theological libraries, much of the time is spent in doing. 
Planning becomes a lower priority and is pushed to the side. Strategic 
planning and ongoing evaluation may help focus the many activi-
ties and services that small libraries do. Let’s go over our learning 
outcomes for the session:

• Participants will find out about resources to help them in creat-
ing their own strategic plan with efficiency.

• Participants will be able to relate the experiences of the panel-
ists to their own experiences and contexts.

• Participants will be able to assess their own context and appro-
priately develop their own practical approaches.

Strategic planning started out as a corporate idea in the 1960s. By 
the 1980s, it had moved into the nonprofit world, in part through 
the influence of John M. Bryson’s Strategic Planning for Public and 



Panel Discussions  121

Nonprofit Organizations. Strategic planning typically looks at a 
longer-term future, sets priorities and goals, and allocates resources 
to meet the priorities and goals. Bryson writes that “strategic plan-
ning may be defined as a disciplined effort to produce fundamental 
decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization 
(or other entity) is, what it does, and why it does it” (Bryson 1995, x).

Small is a relative term. So what are small theological libraries? 
Basically, if you think of your library as small, you qualify! Many 
times, when we think of this designation, we are considering staff 
size: one or two staff members. Librarians from small libraries often 
go to conferences like Atla Annual and admire what larger libraries 
with more staff can accomplish, but can’t realistically do it. There 
is another side to being small though: being small can also be beau-
tiful in terms of the opportunities for creativity and flexibility in 
management.

To begin with, it will be important for you to understand our 
contexts and how we are small libraries.

Susan is at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, 
USA. Wartburg has about 180 students FTE. We have three masters’ 
programs: the MA, the MA-Diaconal Ministry, and the MDiv. About 
2/3 of Wartburg students are distance students. The library staff 
includes a paraprofessional, 36 hours of students per week, and one 
professional librarian. Wartburg has around 100,000 print volumes 
and over 525,000 e-books through the Digital Theological Library.

Karl is at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, which is 
located in Elkhart, Indiana, USA. It has about 100 students in MA 
and MDiv programs, with both distance and campus options. Two 
librarians manage a library of over 100,000 print volumes and lots 
of electronic content.

In this session, we will be discussing our mission/purpose state-
ments and planning and assessment. For a bit of additional context, 
statements and planning may not be optional anymore! Many Atla 
libraries are also members of the Association of Theological Schools 
(ATS), which accredits graduate programs in theological disciplines 
in the US and Canada. ATS is currently in the process of revising 
its standards. New standards are due for final approval at the ATS 
biennial meeting later this month (June 2020), including a section on 
libraries. The library standard includes a new emphasis on planning 
and evaluation. The very first substandard mandates libraries at ATS 
institutions to have “a clear statement that identifies its purpose and 



122  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

role in the school and the ways it contributes to achieving the school’s 
educational mission.” Further, this purpose statement “forms the 
foundation for evaluating library and information services.” The 
standard calls for library personnel to have a role in the school’s deci-
sion-making processes, “including budgeting and strategic planning.” 
The standard also calls for library personnel to “regularly evaluate 
the adequacy and use of its services and resources” (ATS 2020, 10).

IMPEDIMENTS AND POTHOLES

For small libraries, there are a series of impediments to strategic 
planning. As mentioned in our session description, small libraries 
often spend time “doing,” leaving little time to plan. This is related 
to Charles Hummel’s (1994) concept of “the tyranny of the urgent,” 
in which we tend to urgent matters rather than what is truly impor-
tant. Or it could be that we are on autopilot: we hand over control of 
our actions in the library to outside forces and allow them to control 
our future.

Potholes are created when certain factors in the environment 
are present. They make travelling down a road more difficult. Here 
are the potholes Susan experienced as she attempted to create a 
strategic plan.

• Administration wants a re-do. She began working on a strate-
gic plan during the 2017–18 school year. The administration 
wanted to see plans for the “future of our library.” She formed a 
committee of students and faculty to work on this. They created 
a plan, but Susan was told by the administration that it needed 
to be reworked. Back to the drawing board, but then she went 
on sabbatical spring semester 2019.

• Change in leadership. Wartburg’s president announced her 
departure and left at the end of December 2019. AMBS also 
faced a change in leadership at the top. As you know, change in 
leadership could mean change in direction, focus. Back to the 
drawing board.

• COVID-19. Do I need to say more? The pandemic changed our 
lives in many ways. Strategic planning was not a top priority 
this spring. There was no time to go back to the drawing board.

• New institutional strategic plan. Though Susan’s school is still 
in the presidential search process, her school approved a new 



Panel Discussions  123

strategic plan. All their plans have been two-year plans with 
modified or new goals. The plan is evaluated annually. The 
plan Susan was working on needed to be reworked to take into 
account the new and modified goals. Back to the drawing board.

So how do we move past these impediments and potholes to actually 
doing something about our strategic planning? Taking time away 
from your regular duties for this session may be a start. Part of this 
session was discussion about how librarians can actually apply this 
in their own libraries. One thing Karl has been doing is keeping the 
goal of doing strategic planning work “alive” in his meetings with 
the dean, his supervisor, who can hold him accountable for making 
progress.

MISSION AND PURPOSE STATEMENTS

A first step toward strategic planning in much of the literature is iden-
tifying a mission or core purpose statement for your library. AMBS 
has had this mission statement since a previous round of strategic 
planning by librarians in 2010:

The AMBS Library promotes the use of information resources to 
advance the AMBS mission of serving the church and educating 
leaders for God’s mission in the world. As a center of scholarship, 
reflection and lifelong learning, the Library provides professional 
services, relevant collections, and a hospitable study environment 
for AMBS students, faculty, staff, and church leaders. (Stutzman and 
Saner 2016)

At 10 years, it’s due for re-evaluation. Karl has thought about refram-
ing it as a “core purpose” statement after talking with another 
librarian and reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins (2001). 
However, the AMBS statement still covers the basics of the library’s 
role, so they might end up just tweaking it slightly and reaffirming 
it. Karl suggests, based on prior experience and some reading on 
library mission statements, that it’s best to collaborate to generate 
ideas and have one person write the statement itself based on those 
ideas so that you’re not writing by committee. One of the things Karl 
found in his research on mission statements is that they can serve 
multiple purposes, like marketing the library or communicating an 
aspirational vision for the future. Some sources suggested a mission 
statement that could be printed on a coffee cup and memorized! 
For most small theological libraries, though, printing mission state-



124  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

ments on coffee cups is not going to happen. For the AMBS library 
and many others, signaling alignment with institutional mission is 
going to be a primary consideration, especially since the ATS stan-
dard indicates our purpose and role in the school (ATS 2020, 10). The 
AMBS library mission statement displays that institutional alignment 
in the first sentence.

Wartburg Seminary has had this mission statement for a long 
time:

The Reu Memorial Library serves the mission of Wartburg 
Theological Seminary by supporting the educational activities of 
the institution; providing a place for independent and collaborative 
learning for all WTS students; collecting, preserving, organizing, 
and offering resources in a variety of formats; and teaching and 
equipping the WTS community for lifelong spiritual, intellectual, 
and personal learning. (Wartburg Seminary n.d.)

Wartburg periodically looks at its mission statement to see if it is 
still relevant. They have made some tweaks. The basic points are 1) 
support the mission of the school, 2) place (both physical and virtual), 
3) resources, and 4) teaching.

As you think about creating your mission/purpose statement 
there really are three basic elements that you need: supporting the 
mission of the school, services, and resources. If you are like Susan 
and find it difficult to come up with a statement, borrow someone 
else’s statement and make it your own. Make sure it names your 
services and resources and supports the mission of your school! 
Don’t prolong the agony by trying to come up with the perfect state-
ment. You don’t have the time.

PLANNING AND EVALUATION

Soon-to-be ATS standard 6.1 states that the library’s purpose state-
ment forms the foundation for evaluating library and information 
services. That means that, as we think about strategic planning, the 
next step after creating our mission/purpose statement is to figure 
out how we will evaluate it. Evaluation should always be a part of 
the planning cycle. Plan, implement, evaluate, plan.

Susan created goals for each of the points of her library’s mission 
statement. For example, under place, the goal was to create a virtual 
place for students. Since they have so many distance students, she 
needed to figure out a “place” for them. To fulfill that goal, they 
created a library LMS site. Students go to the LMS for their classes. If 



Panel Discussions  125

they need the library, she wanted it to be easy for them to just switch 
to the library and get what they need. The library LMS site had to 
be easy to use and include what they needed. This was not a high 
priority until COVID-19 hit. Then it became a very high priority. All 
students would be accessing the library via the site. The student she 
had working on this no longer had other tasks.

The new ATS standards talk about the purpose statement being 
the foundation for evaluating library and information services. 
Taking Susan’s example of the library LMS site, she created it to be a 
virtual place for students. In order to evaluate it, she needs to find out 
the adequacy and use. The ATS mantra is “simple, sustainable, suffi-
cient.” So how does she make this simple, sustainable, and sufficient? 
Susan doesn’t want evaluation to be complicated. She doesn’t have 
time for that. Since it is an LMS “course,” she can tell if students are 
logging into it. She could capture information at the end of a semes-
ter or she could take a sample at various times of the semester. They 
received questions from students about the site. This helped them to 
make edits which made the site more helpful and clearer. The evalu-
ation fed back into changes.

Creating something similar to Karl’s “Strategic Planning Work-
book” is also a great way to evaluate.

PRACTICAL TIPS FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING

Strategic planning can be an exercise in futility. Brian Mathews, in 
his 2012 whitepaper, “Think Like a Startup,” urges librarians to 

“build a strategic culture, not a strategic plan.” He writes that “many 
library strategic plans read more like to-do lists rather than entre-
preneurial visions.” While Karl thinks that Mathews is a bit extreme, 
especially for small libraries with limited resources, he thinks it’s 
wise to remember not to document every last to-do and instead focus 
on the big picture of where you want to go.

The strategic planning process can be as important for building a 
strategic culture as the plan itself. Michael Allison and Jude Kaye, in 
their book Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations : A Practi-
cal Guide for Dynamic Times (2014), state that the strategic planning 

“process is about building alignment and commitment” and empha-
size engaging stakeholders in the planning process. Getting buy-in 
from a library advisory board or task force is critical to a successful 
plan. Allison and Kaye state that increasing impact means “growing 



126  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

in one or more ways.” Either that is to do “more,” which requires 
more resources, or it is to work differently, either through “process 
improvement,” “design improvement,” or “strategic improvement.” 
Karl thinks part of this process improvement includes naming things 
you will no longer do as a library. This is harder than it seems! They 
also state that it’s important to produce a document that is linked to 
budget and priorities as a way to guide the organization.

In their chapter “Mission Possible: Strategic Planning for Small 
Academic Libraries,” Darla Haines, Rebecca Johnson, Jill Lichtsinn, 
and Edita Sicken (2016), all from Manchester University, outline a 
number of helpful best practices for small libraries embarking on 
strategic planning. They include devoting even small amounts of 
time to plan, researching example plans, creating institutional align-
ment on mission and vision, setting clear goals and action items along 
with a timeline, creating a visual of the strategic plan, and review-
ing it regularly. Karl knows Darla Haines as a fellow library director 
in the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana, so he checked 
in with her. Manchester’s library has gone through major staff cuts 
since the chapter was written, and Haines advised not biting off 
more than you can chew in a strategic plan, making it become a “list 
of tasks no one has time to do.” She recommended including some 

“stop doing” actions in the strategic plan as well.
For libraries that are part of a parent institution, such as a semi-

nary or university, starting with the institution’s strategic plan may 
be a helpful way to seek alignment and not have to plan from scratch. 
Karl has taken an early version of my institution’s new strategic plan 
and identified library goals and action items that aspire to the same 
basic priorities my seminary is working toward. Karl’s next step is 
to take these library goals and action items to the library advisory 
board to get buy-in and additional suggestions.

In preparation for his strategic planning work, Karl made a simple 
spreadsheet workbook with tabs for various stages of the planning 
process. This is “dumbed down” strategic planning, but Karl hopes 
it’s adequate for a small library. The first tab is an engagement plan 
for stakeholders. It lists potential stakeholders in the first column 
(e.g., library employees, students, faculty, administrators, community 
members, alumni, consortial partners) and has space to include your 
plan for engaging them in the strategic planning process (second 
column) and the date for engagement (third column). 



Panel Discussions  127

The second tab is for environmental scanning and allows you to 
list strengths (first column), weaknesses (second column), opportu-
nities (third column), and threats (fourth column), and references 
possible other documents to use in your environmental scan (fifth 
column).

The third tab is where you actually develop the strategic plan by 
listing priorities (first column), goals (second column), and action 
items (third column with at least one action item for each goal).

The final tab is a “dashboard.” You copy the strategic plan onto 
this tab and use it to track progress (add a progress update in the 
fourth column) in terms of completing goals and action items (add 
a date completed in the fifth column).

STRATEGIC THINKING

The following quote is from Bryson (1995, x): “Strategic planning 
is useful only if it improves strategic thought and action; it is not 
a substitute for them.” You may not have your mission statement 
completely formulated, but you need to start thinking about the 
elements of that mission statement. What is the purpose for your 
library? For most, they are resources and services for your students 
and faculty. If you know your end goal (your purpose) you can change 
the way you are getting to it.

Impediments and potholes get in the way. What do you do? How 
do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you get around 
a pothole? Carefully or take a different route.

A pandemic happens. What do you do? If you are thinking stra-
tegically, you know that you need to still provide resources and 
services for your students and faculty. Your method may change. 
But you know that your purpose/mission does not. If you have your 
purpose clearly in your mind, you can be creative and nimble. You 
can shift things easily because you know where you are headed.

The session then broke into small groups to talk about where each 
participant was in the planning process and how each will move 
forward (practical steps).



128  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

WORKS CITED

Allison, Michael and Jude Kaye. 2014. Strategic Planning for 
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Association of Theological Schools. 2020. Standards of Accreditation 
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Bryson, John M. 1995. Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit 
Organizations: A Guide to Strengthening and Sustaining Organi-
zational Achievement. Revised first edition online resource. San 
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. site.ebrary.com/id/10114175.

Collins, Jim. 2001. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the 
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Haines, Darla, Rebecca Johnson, Jill Lichtsinn, and Edita Sicken. 
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Hummel, Charles E. 1994. Tyranny of the Urgent. Revised & enlarged 
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Mathews, Brian. 2012. “Think Like A Startup: A White Paper to 
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Stutzman, Karl, and Eileen Saner. 2016. “Guides: AMBS Library 
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Wartburg Seminary. n.d. “Reu Memorial Library.” Accessed July 13, 
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