Project: Positioning Strategy
My Role: Strategic messaging and research
The research library at Dartmouth College has stewarded centuries of knowledge in the form of physical media and archive. With AI taking over research and archive norms, how can this historic library ensure it remains central to the advancement of the university’s research?
In collaboration with a team of organizational and graphic designers at IDEO, I co-ran focus groups and generative workshops with various stakeholders— full time library staff, IT leadership, tenured faculty, section librarians, rare book archivists— to better understand the Dartmouth community’s relationship to the research library. Through this research we uncovered important Differentiators that made Dartmouth’s Library stand out among other research institutions, and iterated on strategic messaging that would dig into the library’s strengths as a powerful research hub, and catapult them towards a tech-forward future without alienating its deeply respected traditional roles on campus.
This strategic messaging was successfully implemented the following year, and resulted in a significant budget increase for the Dartmouth Library, after five years of dwindling allotment.