International Education Week 2023
International Education Week (November 13 – 17, 2023) is a joint initiative of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education highlighting the benefits of international education and the impact of educational exchange worldwide. This year’s theme – International Education is the Future – provides an excellent opportunity to explore the programs and initiatives at the heart of San Diego State University’s recently-adopted Global Strategic Plan as well as the contributions that the University Library makes to learning, scholarship, and engagement in the global context.
While the University Library has held international collections for many years, we have made strategic investments over the past 3 years to increase access to global information resources. For example, the Center for Research Libraries, which SDSU joined in 2020, provides unparalleled access to global collections, including international newspapers, international journals in science, technology, and engineering, archival collections from around the world, including the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the Khmer Rouge archives, and international doctoral dissertations. Through the CRL Global Resources Program, we have ongoing opportunities to participate in programs such as the Latin American Materials Project, which brings libraries, archives, and scholars together to preserve collections of rare research materials. With access to these materials, as well as to global collections available through HathiTrust, the University Library is more prepared than ever to provide SDSU students and faculty with the teaching and research materials they need to support international scholarship across the curriculum.
Investing in access to international collections that support one or more global learning outcomes for our students is just one way that the University Library contributes to the Global Strategic Plan. The Library Strategic Plan also highlights opportunities to collaborate with campus and community partners to develop library collections and services that promote international education and global initiatives, including the focus on sustainability embodied in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The University Library is currently pursuing new programs as part of the Sustainable Libraries Initiative that will support not only the Global Strategic Plan, but also interdisciplinary programs in sustainability at SDSU.
The Global Strategic Plan demonstrates many ways in which “International Education is the Future” at SDSU, as are transborder research, bi-national programs, and global perspectives on learning and scholarship. The University Library has established a strong foundation for contributing to these SDSU programs through our collections, services, and partnerships, including those with cultural heritage organizations in Mexico to build, and provide access to, digital collections. We look forward to seeing the impact of these investments continue to grow in the future.
