2017 Charleston Library Conference

In the GW Libraries we are committed to making collection development more transparent, collaborative, and responsive to our users’ needs. Drawing on principles of agile project management, and leveraging the data at our disposal, we put together year-long project teams and developed new tools to address five key areas: the serials’ renewal workflow, budgeting and expenditure, demand-driven acquisition, negotiation with vendors, and communication with university stakeholders. Each project team was cross-functional, employing staff from the following areas: collection development, research & user services, acquisitions, electronic resources, and library IT. In addition to addressing complex problems in collection management, team members surfaced valuable data about our collections, learned new skills, gained a more holistic understanding of the collections lifecycle, and practiced a transparent and iterative approach to project management. In this panel we will talk about our approach to assembling teams and identifying team leaders, share examples of our use of data to inform and communicate decisions about collections, and discuss organizational opportunities and challenges.

Attendees will:

Learn about agile project management/scrum as a framework for organizing library processes.

Explore new ways of using data and data visualization to inform collection development decisions.

Discuss strategies for re-imagining collection development processes and practices.