During the Fall 2019 semester, the library began work on a 2.5-year strategic plan to help guide our priorities and activities. The Olin community has given us tons of feedback and ideas to steer this process, and we hope that you’ll keep it coming. With your needs at the center of our process, we think we’ve made a “P4” (pretty pandemic-proof plan). You can see the plan at http://library.olin.edu/strategic-plan.html, or read the Frankly Speaking article from March about it: franklyspeakingnews.com/2020/03/library-changes-with-callan/

Part of the strategic plan framework we’ve adopted is creating yearly action plans. These are useful because they give us specific tasks to focus on each year and make our values and mission more tangible. As we’re getting close to the end of the time period covered by our first action plan (January-December 2020), we wanted to share an update on the progress our team has made.

I’d also like to give a huge personal thanks to Maggie, Mckenzie, and all of our student workers past and present for making all of this possible. Never hesitate to reach out to our team if we can help in any way.

How have we been honoring our commitments and values?

As always, we’re providing free, confidential access to information to everyone with no strings attached and encourage information literacy, democracy skills, and critical thinking. We’re making resources–course reserves in particular–available for those who can’t afford them, and are providing ebook access or print upon request for visual and cognitive accommodations. Our approach to acquisitions and collection development continues to be community-driven with an emphasis on diverse authors. We’ve provided cultural heritage displays, workshops, and other forms of community engagement. All of us are also striving to be transparent and constructively critical about the library profession’s failures and lack of diversity.

What have we been doing?

After we conducted community surveys and focus groups about the library in the fall of 2019, we organized our plan into three main themes: Culture & Serendipity, Studying & Gathering, and Research & Access.

Strategic Plan Theme: Culture & Serendipity

Last year, we created the new Community Engagement Librarian position and hired Mckenzie Mullen. We began offering workshops and regular events, such as the Fall 2020 intergroup dialog workshop series, weekly creative/crafting time, and unstructured hangouts. As soon as Stephanie Milton joined us as Director of Diversity and Inclusion & Title IX Coordinator, we worked with her on events, reading lists, read-outs, and resource lists. We improved our book displays and tried some totally new things, like our pop-up library in the dining hall. Rather than sticking to the “traditional” model of ordering books recommended by other librarians and in our trade publications, we’ve focused on continuing with patron-driven acquisitions (i.e., we buy the things you ask us to buy) and are conducting a diversity audit of our collection. When COVID struck, we started an asynchronous library hangout space on Slack for everything from pet and bread pics to reading and listening recommendations, and we would love to see you there <olinlibraryhangout.slack.com>.

In response to how frequently the upper floor of the library is used for community events, we have tried to make the layout as flexible as possible with our current furniture. We eliminated most of the shelving up there except for five units to store course reserves, fiction, graphic novels, poetry, and DVDs. With the help of our amazing student workers, we shifted the entire photography collection to the Quiet Reading Room and moved all of the art and design books downstairs. To increase findability and make it easier to check things out, we relabeled DVDs, cameras, and tools. For the first time in the history of the library, we weeded our collection, meaning we removed thousands of books, CDs, and DVDs; they were donated to local libraries and to a global book redistribution service called Better World Books.

Strategic Plan Theme: Studying & Gathering

Most library policies were updated and rewritten in Spring and Summer 2020: <http://library.olin.edu/policies.html>. Before COVID days, we began a new system of encouraging stewardship throughout the library, including cleaning out the workroom in the summer of 2019 and creating a new process for removing and labeling projects.

Respondents to our surveys identified the lower level of the library as a space in need of some major rethinking. We removed many of the large rolling chairs from the lower level and bought new tables and chairs to increase flexibility of the space. The sewing area also needed attention, so we repurposed old newspaper racks as sewing storage and will soon expand the sewing area to where the 3D printer area was, providing more work surfaces and storage. (Note: We worked with The Shop to move the library’s 3D printers to the MAC to simplify access–and because we don’t have the greatest lighting or ventilation on the library’s lower level.)

Strategic Plan Theme: Research & Access

The Olin College Library officially joined the Minuteman Library Network on July 1, 2020, giving our community access to over six million items at 40+ area libraries, increased support for our staff, and other resources, including a user-friendly ebook collection. We subscribed to a new service in early 2020 to facilitate off-campus access to our subscription database products (who knew how much that would come in handy, now that we’re mostly off-campus these days!). To enhance accessibility and make it easier for us to create high-quality documents for course use, we obtained a professional-quality book scanner from the Boston Public Library.

Throughout the year, we’ve been trying out new processes for collecting database usage information and tracking current subscriptions using Google Sheets and Pinboard. This sounds boring, but has helped us make informed decisions about products to keep or get rid of this year when there was added pressure to reduce spending (budget adjustments/freezes; accommodating ebook spending).

With the help of Jack Greenberg ‘23, we have been working on rebuilding our digital archive using an open source solution created by library professionals. The live site is here: <http://ec2-184-73-148-144.compute-1.amazonaws.com/node>. It still needs much more work, but it’s searchable and browseable now.

We’ve been trying out new ways of helping people get in touch with us and utilize the library, especially now that we’re in a remote setting. Last semester, we tested office hours on Zoom in Spring 2020, but are going to be shifting to an appointment-scheduling model using Calendly. We started using a service called Niche Academy for video tutorials: https://my.nicheacademy.com/olin

Library staff have been continuing our own professional development, and we’ve all attended a number of training, conferences, and workshops this year. We’ve utilized what we’re learning in our instruction sessions, collection development practices, and more. Callan presented at eight library conferences this year and wrote a book for ALA Editions, Responding to Rapid Change: A User Experience Approach <https://www.alastore.ala.org/content/responding-rapid-change-libraries-user-experience-approach?_zs=pbaiW1&_zl=PDc97>. We began meeting routinely with the directors of the Wellesley and Babson libraries and have been working with Wellesley Free Library to batch-enroll Wellesley and Babson College students in Minuteman (this will streamline getting library access to cross-registered students).

If you have any questions or comments, want to tell us what we’re doing right (or wrong–don’t worry, you really won’t hurt our feelings), just want to say “hey,” or get some great pet pics, reach out to us at library@olin.edu. Remember: The library isn’t closed, it’s just somewhere else right now.