Mission

The mission of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library is to help our students, faculty, and staff succeed. We do this by providing unparalleled service in managing, delivering and teaching the use of scholarly content and information technology.

Vision

Wake Forest University library users will have many choices for information in the next ten years. Scholarly books and journals that used to be available only in print will be increasingly, and sometimes exclusively, available in digital format as well. Scholarly journals, in particular, will be almost completely transformed to a digital form. Changes in promotion and tenure requirements and the culture of each discipline will drive changes in scholarly communications in every field of academic inquiry. The Z. Smith Reynolds Library will lead the evolution and adaptation to changing information technologies. As new technologies become available and are adopted by scholars in the field, the Library will lead the campus in accessing, assessing, and teaching the use of new sources of information that are critical to the mission of the University.

The Library also recognizes its responsibility as a cultural institution to preserve the unique primary resources in its care. While the digitization of these resources is highly desirable so that they may be used by a global audience, their preservation as physical cultural artifacts is equally vital.

As a physical place, the Library will further its evolution from a container of books and journals to an active learning place that is the academic center of campus. Students and faculty will choose to come to the library to learn about new resources, obtain help in using them, and collaborate with others to produce creative new expressions of ideas.

A simple statement of this vision is:

The Z. Smith Reynolds Library will be the first and favorite source for Wake Forest users in their quest for knowledge.