Goal 4: Focus on efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability
Continue to support, facilitate, and manage the faculty and staff of the College Libraries as they provide excellent academic services and supports to the College community.
Consider the need for and then develop a plan to reorganize around our current and expected staffing levels.
Explore, clarify, and redefine the work and workload of each member of the library faculty.
Define and affirm the value of mentorship, creativity, continual learning, innovation, and collaboration as a part of every staff member’s work.
Develop and implement a strategy for creating sustainable innovation and excellence in our Information Literacy teaching program, considering and including:
Normalizing appropriate workloads for Information Literacy librarians by defining a reasonable scope for the SUNY Potsdam information literacy program,
The potential for adding additional librarians to the teaching team through use of modules, tutorials, and templates, or other innovative paths to efficiency,
Participation in appropriate General Education projects and discussions,
The need to support information literacy skills for online and distance students and courses.
Fully implement, train for, and assess the current staffing model in Collection Building.
Re-examine the original Collection Building plan for ILL and Acquisitions and consider any short-term steps towards achieving those goals.
Evaluate work assignments and daily workflow in combined ILL and Acquisitions roles.
Improve clarity in expenditure and budget processes.
Continue evolving the role of the Shared Services ILL Specialist, inclusive of the relationship with SUNY Canton.
Affirm and make explicit the role and responsibilities of the Crane Librarian in the College Libraries administrative structure, parallel to analogous work done by the library faculty as a whole regarding workload and distribution of responsibility.
Carefully and thoughtfully integrate the ITC into the management and operational structure of the College Libraries, building on mutual strengths and assessing gaps to be filled.
Review and revise as appropriate the mission and goals of the ITC, and begin integrating ITC functions and philosophies with the College Libraries.
Review and adjust College Libraries service desk staffing plans, considering the use of permanent staff and the increasing minimum wage, making recommendations for necessary changes to hours and services as warranted.
Finish the ongoing transition to a single service desk training and staffing model for Crumb and Crane Libraries, inclusive of hiring, training, staffing, communication, and management tasks.
Plan and implement minimum modifications to the Crumb Circulation Desk to accommodate new workflows.
Continue exploring methods of balancing efficiency in student employee training and time use at all service points against the need to fully use all employee resources effectively, while ensuring that productivity standards for all student employees are consistently applied regardless of department.
Formalize our work toward marketing and programming in the College Libraries.
Write and implement a College Libraries marketing plan.
Implement a broadly constituted Marketing and Programming Committee to distribute the tasks of planning and executing of events and outreach programming across multiple engaged staff members.
Normalize outreach and marketing efforts across both Crumb and Crane Libraries.
Expand College Libraries technology training for staff.
Implement an effective internal communication infrastructure for libraries staff.
Consider and evaluate the appropriateness of moving to a CMS – either stand-alone or the College template – instead of a page-built site.
Provide support and assistance to CTS-driven campus technology infrastructure projects that will improve and stabilize College Libraries’ technology services, including but not limited to enhanced wifi deployment and cloud-based student printing.
Formalize and regularize our deselection processes, and reinstate and regularize government document deselection projects.
Move all student and faculty financial transactions to the Student Accounts office, allowing the Libraries to eliminate Aleph blocking workflows for fees, and bringing Libraries processes in line with emerging campus standards for cash collection.
Develop and implement a plan, including a sustainable budget, for unified large-format printing for Academic Affairs.
Resource Dependent Action Items:
Showcase libraries’ use of Moodle for student employee management as a campus best practice.
Expand the Technology Help Desk service, in conjunction with the CTS Help Desk, to cover more hours of need.
Continue improving and upgrading technology furniture to facilitate appropriate use of campus technology resources.
Investigate the feasibility and potential campus desire for additional measures that would help facilitate student use of archives, including but not limited to online tutorials and an archives-focused undergraduate course.
Investigate, pursue, and implement donor and grant opportunities to fund a project archivist position that will encompass the processing and digitization of the major composers of the Crane School of Music (beginning with Arthur Frackenpohl), the David O’Brien Martin papers, and the Bertrand Snell papers.
Develop a plan for the efficient processing of previously acquired non-accessioned materials, and fully appraise and accession the backlog in storage.
Develop and implement a minimal standards digitization workflow for patron requests, project digitization, and in-house use.
Draft appraisal guidelines to assist the archivist in the selection of archival material at the time of acquisition, and develop a collecting policy to help guide the collection development of manuscript and book special collections.
Develop a plan for the efficient processing of previously acquired non-accessioned materials, and fully appraise and accession the backlog in storage.
Begin creating and converting finding aids in compliance with Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) and Electronic Archival Description (EAD) standards.
Develop and implement a workflow for the acquisition, preservation, and the accessibility of born-electronic records.
