Monday, March 19, 2012

Words for Your Strategic Plan

I've been looking at six university library strategic plans and analyzing the frequency of their words through Word Frequency Counter. Through looking at the nouns that have appeared in the top ten of each, I've discovered:

The winning words for frequency were "library" and "libraries", which were tied as #1 on two separate lists; however,"library" was on all six lists, "libraries" reduced to four.
"Users" was #1 on one list, and appeared on one other down a way; the variants "user" and "use" appeared on one or two lists.
"Objectives" was #1 on one list, #6 (as "objective") on another.

Other words appeared in the top ten:
  • In 6 of 6 lists: "services"; "research"
  • In 5 of 6 lists: "resources"; "information"; "university"; "support" 
  • In 4 of 6 lists: "digital"; "staff"; "learning"
  • In 3 of 6 lists: "collections" (although "collection" was in 1 of 6); "strategic"
  • In 2 of 6 lists: "goal" and "goals" (both in 2 of 6); "plan"; "campus"; "state"
One word only appeared in the top ten of one list but in none other, nor in any variant form--and that was "needs".

Now that you know which words to use in your strategic plan, you are welcome to mix them in the document. Follow the advice of author Timothy Dexter, whose book lacked periods, commas, etc., and so ended it with lines of punctuation marks in order that dissatisfied readers "may peper and solt it as they plese."