Workshop on “Evidence-based planning & decision-making in academic libraries”

AMICAL is planning to organise several upcoming workshops for our members.

The first of these will be a workshop delivered by Roger Schonfeld and Nancy Fried Foster of Ithaka S+R, a non-profit research service that helps the academic community navigate economic and technological change.

The workshop will take place 22-23 January 2016, hosted by John Cabot University in Rome.

About the facilitators

Nancy has worked with many of our libraries already on participatory design and ethnographic methods for understanding the real behaviors of our user communities. AMICAL invited both her and Roger last year to give a webinar on tools and methods for understanding our library communities. We’re excited to be working with them once again, and we hope that many of you will be interested in participating in this workshop. We believe it will be of great use as you lead your libraries’ responses to the shifting environments of higher education, scholarly communications, and academic libraries.

The workshop

Like other academic libraries, AMICAL libraries face budget limitations and cutbacks while also managing shifts in teaching, learning, and communication technologies. In such an environment, it is risky and potentially costly to base plans and decisions on assumptions or guesswork. The alternative, and the topic of this 1.5 day workshop, is to use existing data, supplemented with locally gathered information, to identify needs, develop and select among possible solutions, and conduct ongoing assessment.

The overarching theme of the workshop is Managing Change and the main topics will be Technology in Small College Libraries (e.g., library systems and infrastructure as well as digital collections such as ejournals and ebooks) and Library as Space (policy, purpose, and design).

The workshop will include:

• An environmental scan drawn from Ithaka S+R survey and project data, to frame the workshop topics and provide a rationale for making evidence-based decisions
• Group discussion of strategies for incorporating evidence most effectively into institutional decision-making on workshop topics
• Tools to use in library planning and decision-making
• Group discussion of participants’ institution-level data, including what is useful and what is missing
• Session to begin formulating institutional plans for structuring evidence-based decision-making processes with regard to either space or technology issues

Participants will benefit from this workshop by improving their ability to incorporate evidence into decision-making processes, in general, and by developing the first draft of a project plan for use at the home institution.

The workshop will run for approximately ten hours delivered over two days. It will be limited to 14 participants, and applications to participate will be reviewed by the Ithaka and AMICAL organizers.

Who should attend?

Library directors and other staff from all AMICAL member institutions (Full, Affiliate & Network) are eligible to apply to participate.

We recommend that the primary participant from an institution be the library director. If a second person attends, there may be a gain in how well the two can remember and implement what they learned when they get back to the home institution. It may be helpful if the second person work with library IT or facilities.

Application instructions and financial support information were sent by email to all AMICAL representatives on Oct 21. If you have misplaced that email, contact us and we’ll send you the details again. For more information contact your local AMICAL representative.

Key dates

• November 15: Deadline to apply
  
• November 20: Responses sent to applicants