As West Virginia University moves forward with new opportunities and program alignments to increase student success and engagement with its research and land-grant missions, WVU Libraries continues to play a crucial role in meeting the growing information and cultural needs of our campus and community. 

Private giving is essential to our ability to bolster student success, support the ever-changing needs of the research enterprise and serve the state through firsthand access to information services and cultural heritage collections. 

To meet the shifting needs of WVU students, researchers and West Virginians, WVU Libraries has focused its development priorities for 2025 in the following areas.

Accelerating student achievement

Strategic partnerships with faculty across our campuses provide curricular and extracurricular opportunities that enhance students’ understanding and engagement with our increasingly complex information landscape. Such instruction and programming allow them to achieve greater success in the classroom and provide them with critical thinking skills to succeed personally and professionally, now and after graduation.

Through paid student internships and assistantships within the Libraries, students are able to meet their financial needs while also gaining a quality experience that provides them with workplace skills for any discipline or major. They are able to increase their understanding of how information is generated, gathered and accessed, and fit it all within their busy classroom and campus engagement schedules.  

 

Investing in skilled, future-ready library workforce

Continuous learning and retooling of skills are essential for library employees as new technologies emerge and the needs of our users evolve. How do we deploy — and teach — artificial intelligence in our information services and landscapes? How do we engage with a diverse community of information seekers and information providers? What new technical frameworks and programming languages do we need to keep our tools useful and up to date? What new services are needed as technology changes how users interact with us? What best practices can we include to ensure our campus is getting the best support we can offer? What content do we need to purchase to better meet the needs of our researchers and the curriculum as it changes? All of these challenges require ongoing and timely professional development opportunities for our staff.

Increasingly, we have identified areas where new endowed positions can extend the expertise and resources available to our campus and community and will increase engagement with our collections.

These positions are crucial for our ability to excel amongst Big 12 Conference Schools and other land-grant libraries. They also help us to effectively acquire and manage specific areas of national and state importance like our University Archives, women’s archives and the William A. Neal Museum of the Health Sciences. 

Deepening community engagement

The West Virginia & Regional History Center (WVRHC), WVU Humanities Center, the Art in the Libraries program and the William A. Neal Museum of the Health Sciences provide robust cultural and educational programming and events open to all. Writers, poets, historians and prominent West Virginians and national figures have visited our spaces and added context to our materials. Along with personal connections, our exhibits are designed to facilitate community and campus collaboration and provide a venue for student and faculty researchers and artists to interact and engage the public.

Because WVU Libraries does not receive state funding to achieve this land-grant mission of outreach to the wider community, donor contributions are essential.

 

Advancing digital innovation and preservation

Preservation of and access to the unique digital assets of our history and culture require an ongoing and evolving commitment to advanced technical infrastructure. Even digital items require storage space and demand ongoing upgrades and reformatting for access through the latest technology. An upgraded infrastructure will allow for digitization projects that increase access to our deep collections, making materials available online and open to all. By deploying innovative technologies, we enhance research, learning and accessibility. 

Empowering campus researchers

Researchers’ needs evolve as technologies evolve and federal funders develop new requirements around open data, science and scholarship to make research accessible to the public. By continually evolving our expert services and developing new tools, we help our researchers step up to meet new demands. We connect them with the scholarship of their field. We help make their data and discoveries findable and accessible. We help increase the impact of their work, enhancing the University’s reputation and student and regional scientific and academic opportunities.

Transforming and adapting physical spaces 

Creating dynamic, flexible environments that foster collaboration, innovation and individual study to support diverse, evolving needs is an ongoing demand. In addition to refreshing and repurposing our spaces for our users, we also need to address the sustainability and environmental demands of our print collections for accessibility and preservation. We are gearing up for major upgrades to our historic Wise Library stacks that host our dearest and most unique materials essential to the preservation of our state and regional legacy.

WVU Libraries is evolving with the University in powerful, transformative ways. We welcome your support and would be pleased to talk with you further about how to engage with any of these large goals.

Email Director of Development Paula Martinelli at paula.martinelli@mail.wvu.edu or call 304-293-0303.