Strategic planning

The vision for a digital program

Since the mid-2000s, digital library projects have moved from being strictly the domain of large, research libraries to being integrated into academic libraries of all shapes, sizes, and budgets. What was once the domain of researchers and computer scientists is now being seen as a core function of many academic libraries. With shrinking budgets and the Googlization of the information landscape, digital repository work is becoming more central to libraries, not less.

The trick is to build a program in a meaningful way, one that directly serves the needs of your institution's core constituents while also being respectful of budgets and resources. I highly recommend investing a significant amount of time and effort in proper planning. Good planning will allow you to purposefully, carefully define your program. What is its scope? What needs is it designed to serve? What are its boundaries? What types of projects fall outside of this scope? How will you handle requests that are not manageable - either outside of the program's scope, not feasible in terms of resource allocation, have significant copyright issues, or simply are too costly? Having a well-crafted document laying out the vision for your program, addressing the collection policy, identifying what the program can (and won't) support will make it easier to explain decisions down the line.

While every institution has a great deal of objects ripe for digitizing or born-digital materials that could go into a collection, think about the overall collection, much like how we think about print collections in libraries. What is the purpose of the program and how does any particular set of content (or potential new project) fit into the overall collection?

Write a collection development policy to articulate what types of projects the program will support. Work with existing strategic planning documents: a strategic plan for the institution, one from the library, and one from the IT department. How do the objectives you are considering align with the strategic direction already set out for the institution?

If your institution has already built some collections, it is not too late to take a step back and conceptualize the program and document user needs, a mission statement, a collection development policy.

Strategic planning is not a linear process. Several key areas need to be evaluated, all of which can happen simultaneously:

 alignment with institutional and organizational strategic plans

 core constituencies' needs

 resources: staffing and budget

 infrastructure: systems, hardware, software

 content.

These evaluations should include some overlap in terms of personnel, but they do not need to all be conducted by the same person or group of people. However, if one individual is serving as the program coordinator, that person should lead this process. Ideally, a planning team will be commissioned, with a subset of members forming a working group. The planning team should comprise a combination of library and IT policy-makers, a systems administrator, other key members of the library staff (possibly including someone from special collections or university archives), and those who are most likely to be directly involved in the day-to-day digital repository work including a program coordinator. Faculty input is critical, although whether or not a faculty representative should be part of the planning team depends on the culture of your institution.

The working group should be an offshoot of this team and should be charged with most of the data gathering and document writing work associated with strategic planning. The planning team should have a kick-off meeting to discuss the upcoming process, goals and objectives, and assign roles and responsibilities to team members. As a whole, this group will be responsible for making big decisions such as defining the scope of the program, coming up with the basis of a mission statement, identifying individuals and groups to talk to throughout the user assessment process, and setting the overall direction for the planning process and ultimately, the digital program.

Without getting into details about budgets at this point, it is important to have some sense of the resources that will be available before working group team members begin discussions with members of the university community. Will there be enough support from the library to handle multiple projects per year or is the repository program going to be much smaller? It is imperative that those engaged in discussions with community members are not over promising.

This chapter is dedicated to strategic planning at the program level: gathering relevant data, assessing users' needs, articulating the mission and focus of a program, and bringing the right people together to make those decisions. In contrast, Chapter 6, 'Collection building: project proposals, planning, and implementation,' focuses on project-level planning and implementation.

Core constituencies' needs

Often a digital repository program is started because several specific needs have already been identified. Get input from all of the key stakeholders early in the process to be sure you develop a program that will meet their needs. Some typical stakeholders and potential projects are listed below.

Academic departments

 Art/art history department: transitioning from teaching with slides to teaching with digital images.

 Music department: store audio files used for teaching; collect and disseminate original compositions authored and performed by students.

 Department of education: lesson plans written by students, electronic portfolios necessary for students' teaching accreditation.

 Repository of learning objects created by faculty from across all disciplines.

Administrative departments

 Art gallery: creating a digital image collection to showcase selected items from the permanent collection to the general public; creating a database to store information about works of art owned by the gallery.

 Public relations: photographs used in various types of advertising materials - the university's website, calendars, mailings, formal solicitations, etc.

 Sports: photographs, videos of teams, individuals, and events.

 Data warehousing or electronic records management: supporting the business needs of an institution. Usually not considered part of a digital repository program, although the two areas are closely related. The relationship between the two should be discussed if an institution has these services or programs or plans for such services.

Students

 Student publications: literary magazines, newspapers, and yearbooks. (Also of interest to alumni and development/ fundraising departments.)

 Theses and dissertations, masters papers, senior honors papers by undergraduates.

Faculty

 Open access repository of peer-reviewed articles.

 Support for new open access journals with faculty editors.

 University press publications.

Library and archives

 Often the library or an archive is the key player in some of the projects mentioned above. In other cases, this is a new opportunity for collaboration.

 Archive of born-digital objects related to the history of the institution: e-mail newsletters, faculty senate meeting minutes, committee meeting minutes, departmental newsletters, etc.

 Oral history projects.

 Historical photographs of the university.

 Mechanism to organize and present various miscellaneous items appearing at the library: student videos from a class, tapes/files of interviews.

Some of these groups are mentioned because they are policy-makers or departments that can potentially help a program gain momentum and support from the administration. Departments such as public relations/communications or athletics are often overlooked during the early stages of building a repository program, yet they can be valuable allies. These two departments usually generate thousands of photographs a month, many of which often eventually migrate to the university's archive. During the transition from print photographs to digital, this migration to the archives may have broken down. Plus, the quantity of photographs being generated each month has probably tremendously increased from the print photograph days. These departments are often quite eager to have some assistance from a repository team to learn how to better manage, catalog, store, and archive their materials.

Other groups listed are potentially sources of projects considered early on in repository planning stages....