An archive of Krisellen Maloney’s articles is available here.
In March, just ahead of the first Cabinet retreat, I described the three-step process by which we are drafting priorities and related budget requests for the Libraries. Things have been moving along quickly, but I wanted to circle back and talk about the outcomes of the second retreat that we had in early June.
As a recap, prior to the first retreat, the directors worked with their faculty and staff to develop lists of local priorities. At the same time, the infrastructure units conducted environmental scans to identify projects that are already in the works and ongoing work. In preparation for the second retreat in June, the infrastructure units were tasked with assigning “costs”—including staff time—to various activities. The idea here was to develop a deep understanding of local needs and the capacity available in the central infrastructure units to support those needs.
When all was said and done, we had a daunting list of almost 200 priorities (or more accurately activities) that the local units want to undertake over the next 12 to 18 months. These activities ranged from renovating bathrooms and piloting 24/5 hours at the RBHS Libraries to implementing new information literacy tutorials and purchasing new ebook and journal packages. It was important to see the lists. In addition to conveying real needs, the sheer volume of items also conveyed the frustration people are feeling throughout the Libraries. Although I believe we have made some progress towards clarifying communication and decision-making, there is more to do.
As the infrastructure units began the process of assigning costs to the priorities, some patterns began to emerge. Through a series of iterations between subsets of the infrastructure units (Tibor, Mary Beth, Jessica, Abbey, Rhonda, and Tao) and Cabinet, we identified clusters of priorities where improved infrastructure—both decision-making processes and systems—are needed. For example, the library directors identified numerous weeding projects (20 priorities worth) that require support from the holdings management unit. Members of Cabinet are not necessarily the people best positioned to make these operational decisions. In addition to overarching issues that Cabinet should be addressing, there are several rapidly changing operational factors that come into play. We decided that what we really need is a mechanism to prioritize weeding projects throughout the Libraries. As a result, we are charging a group to “recommend” a transparent process to prioritize collection management projects (weeding, moves, etc.) that takes into account the available staff.
All together, we plan to charge 8 new groups that will, collectively, address 70 of the priorities:
| Priorities Category | Group’s Charge | # of Priorities | Charges Due: | Who Is Following Up |
| Cataloging | Develop a process to prioritize cataloging projects (ongoing) | 11 | July 11, 2017 | Agnew, Askew |
| Weeding | Develop a process to prioritize collection management projects (ongoing) | 20 | July 18, 2017 | Yang, Cohn |
| Digital Projects | Develop a template for routine digital projects (ongoing) | 9 | July 18, 2017 | Marker, Anderson |
| Digital Projects | Develop a process to prioritize digital projects | included above | October 2017 | TBD |
| Web | Recommend improvements to the Web environment | 4 | July 11, 2017 | Marker, Pellien |
| Tutorials for Instruction | Investigate new information literacy modules | 21 | July 11, 2017 | Directors |
| Special Collections | Recommend system architecture for special collections | 5 | July 18, 2017 | Agnew, Yang |
| Special Collections | Recommend standards, policies and procedures for special collections | included above | October 2017 | TBD |
We anticipate that another 9 priorities will be addressed by the implementation of a new ILS or will need to be rearticulated once the new ILS is in place. Now that the contract has been signed, we will be moving forward with new groups to guide the implementation. We are working on scheduling a kick-off meeting where ExLibris will provide us with best practices related to the number of teams that should be formed for a successful implementation.
Four priorities are already underway or even complete. We anticipate one priority will be passed to the Discovery Working Group to handle and one will be put to the reference team when they are in place.
We also identified 81 priorities that rely primarily on local expertise and resources and do not require significant support from the central infrastructure units. The directors will prioritize these with their local units. The library directors will also meet with the director of communications to discuss 12 activities related to communications and marketing.
After all of this whittling, what remained were 19 activities that required clarifications about the scope or the amount of support expected from infrastructure units. We discussed these at the June 20 Cabinet meeting and you can review the outcomes in the Cabinet meeting minutes.
The overarching theme that emerged through this process is a need to continue to focus on building infrastructure, particularly in developing transparent processes for decision-making. This may seem to be highly bureaucratic, but in reality, it will push decisions closer to the work and enable people with the most relevant information to be part of the process.
