Thursday, April 19, 2018

In difficult times, incremental change is often not the answer to challenges facing a library. Sometimes, deep and bold changes are needed to innovate and improve the library despite the risks. Hemstock focuses on three bold changes that his law library recently made: shifting hosting and design of its independent website to the larger university, rebuilding a for-credit research course to include focuses on social justice and other student interests, and moving ebook collection development in new directions. Each of these changes required “crossing the Rubicon” moments and had unexpected complications, but resulted in increased student engagement and satisfaction, a more efficient website, and enhanced usage of ebooks. Hear how! Bower discusses how one public library with 400 staff members spread across 21 branch and multiple office locations helped bring together the staff for collaborative learning and projects. She shares how they used SharePoint Online to build an interactive intranet, the tools staff built, lessons learned during the project, and how these lessons can be applied to intranet or internal communications projects at your library, regardless of size or the specific platform being used. Harris focuses on a flexible approach for building a new data services model, using three pilot projects to illustrate the process: research that faculty conduct with students developing digital humanities journals and community-engaged research repositories and research data management needs for accreditation. She discusses having clear expectations and an understanding of what “piloted services” means by all parties, taking a community-building approach to developing new services and integrating with existing services across campus.