Identifying ARL’s Action Agenda By deliberate decision, the three-year plan omits a detailed action agenda. Action agendas are developed on an ongoing basis by ARL committees, working groups, and task forces populated largely by member library representatives. The committee structure reflects the framework of the Strategic Plan (see illustration on page 9), with three Strategic Direction Steering Committees carrying primary responsibility for defining priorities in their arenas. The Board has final authority with respect to adoption of the action agenda. The continuous communications among members of the ARL Board (which includes the chairs of the three Strategic Direction committees), committees, working groups, task forces, and ARL staff creates synergies and mitigates against the potential for efforts to become silos or miss relevant trends or initiatives. Such cohesion and synergy is also served by periodically assessing progress in the context of the large-scale problems such as those suggested above. Presented in the context of these problems, below are examples from ARL’s 2010 action agendas, efforts that tie directly to the Strategic Plan’s Outcomes and Strategies. This illustrative and thematic presentation of the action agenda reflects how the Strategic Directions and Enabling Capabilities work together. A Thematic Illustration of ARL’s 2010 Action Agenda • Influencing Out-of-Balance Intellectual Property Policies • Develop strategies to resolve orphan-works challenges. • Launch copyright-education campaigns that lead to development of a code for best practices for fair use in libraries and availability of resources for explaining author-rights options in a Google world. • Advance user rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Act. • Strengthening Mechanisms for Research Libraries to Influence Marketplace • Document and communicate the impact of the current economic environment on research library budgets. RLI 268 7 Themes within the ARL Strategic Plan 2010–2012 ( C O N T I N U E D ) FEBRUARY 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC