Christopher Holly

Well, hello and welcome. Today, we'll be doing future proofing your library. My name is Christopher Holly. I'm one of the directors of software as a service innovation here at EBSCO.

I wanted to talk a little bit about what we'll be covering today in future proofing your library. It can cover such a gamut of things. And today, we plan to explore a lot of the complex challenges of planning, adapting, and changing in various areas within libraries. So joining me today are three panelists covering a range of institutions to hopefully provide you all with some good perspective around this.

I'll have them introduce themselves and their institution first, and then after that, we'll explore these themes through a series of questions. Stephanie, take it away.

Stephanie Kaceli

Great. Thank you, Christopher, and thank you for inviting me to be on this panel. I enjoy being able to have this conversation with you and look forward to what we have to say. I'm Dean of Educational Resources as well as the Director of Masland Library here at Cairn University.

We are a small institution. We have fewer than a thousand FTE for our student population. However, with our headcount, we're actually at the highest we've ever been. So we serve a lot of people between faculty, students, staff, alumni, as well as our community members.

Serving that large group or small, large group to us is a small team of three librarians, and then we have a couple GAs, and we have our student workers that we rely on. And we, as a group, are committed to curating a growing print and e collection. I think that's always important to remember. We don't stay stagnant even in our collections, and we put a lot of value in our print as well. So our print is still a small one at about a hundred fifty thousand and growing items, and then our e content is always growing.

And so we have about a hundred a million or more e-books, a good solid e-journal collection, as well as those squarely streaming media items that are very hard to count.

We were asked to kind of talk about what our key systems that we're using. And when I think about that, obviously, it has to be our library system, and that's EBSCO FOLIO for us. And then discovery, I put a lot of things in discovery, and we can have a debate about that if we want. But we think of Discovery as EDS and Locate, but also Bibliograph and Third Iron. And even our website, we can fall in we kind of put into the discovery.

For consortia, our lending and borrowing, we do mainly through reshare with Palsy for our returnables, and then we use WorldShare ILL and Rapid ILL. And our WorldShare contract ends the end of June 2026. Just saying. And our authentication is OpenAthens, which we've had since 2017.

That's been a key feature for us for a very long time, and we're very grateful for it. And then our current initiatives of how for us what we're focusing on, one is stacks, which we've had for a very long time. But when we moved to FOLIO, we lost some integration. And in the next weeks and months, we're working on bringing that back to where we were with added integration because of FOLIO.

And then which I always feel like this is the next thing, what we always have our eye on when we're a FOLIO is the next release. So in particular, we're really looking forward to getting that integration with Mosaic for our e content purchasing. We are an alpha tester, and it is phenomenal, and we can't wait to be able to get to do that real time.

And then for our Bibliograph, which is a wonderful tool, and we want to keep working on our workflow. We want to keep refining, figuring out how to train more staff on how to use it to build collections so that we can get that out to our patrons, our customers, our community, and that we can use it in many different places, as well as using it for collection development.

Then finally, the library assessment piece, and it's out there with our talk, but I do think it's something we want to focus on, and I'm looking at because we have to be willing to revamp our reporting to align with some of the changes with the accredit with the accreditors where, for example, MSCHE, there's one reference to information literacy there. Well, what does that mean for the value of the library today, and how can we change what we're reporting on or report better on and demonstrate better through our KPIs and other things for the library's value for our leaders? And I think those are all really important pieces here, and I hope that I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Christopher Holly

Great. Thanks, Stephanie. And on to Jeff.

Jeff Daniels

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jeff Daniels. I'm the electronic resources librarian at Grand Valley State University.

Grand Valley State University has about 22,000 students. We're a public liberal arts college in Southwest Michigan. Our classifications are professions focused, undergraduate, graduate, and large medium institution.

We work with EBSCO to host FOLIO for our library management system. We have EBSCO Discovery Services for discovery, including Locate. We use that as a card catalog. And we also use EBSCO for the back-end e-resource management.

Currently, the initiatives I'm focusing on at the library are enhancing the research accessibility and usability for all users. I think one of the ways that we can future proof our libraries is to demonstrate return on investment to the university. And we one of the ways we can do that is being instrumental in the research both our students and our faculty are accomplishing. And then also, everybody's very favorite thing who works in academia, we're working on our next five-year strategic plan. And unfortunately, that will include a planned reduction in our collection spend.

Christopher Holly

Great. Well, thank you all for the introductions. I hope that gives everyone a chance to get a better sense of your institutions, your own background, and helps inform a lively discussion this afternoon. So I'm going to kick this off with a couple of questions and we'll take the discussion from there.

So to start off, how do each of you define future proofing? It can be kind of a buzzword out there. So I'm just sort of curious how each of you might define it in the context of your own work. Is it about technology, workflows, staffing, something else entirely?

And we'll kick it off with Stephanie.

Stephanie Kaceli

So I would say yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. To all of those. Right? I mean, I think it's everything.

But I do think one thing is that's really important is to adding in the relevancy and value. And for all of our initiatives and everything that we want to do, it's making sure we're relevant to our people, our constituencies, and also value. Like, what do we bring to people? And then how do we share that?

And so at the heart of future proofing to us, it means to be remaining useful, resilient, and successful.

And what I look at as future proofing in a lot of ways is going to be different, obviously, than GVSU. But I also think we have these common threads that I'm excited to be able to look at. And for us, everything that we do at Cairn, we've gotten into a habit of asking the question, is it missional? Is it manageable? And is it sustainable?

And so I think in some ways, because of that, we've subconsciously already baked in future proofing for us because we're asking those questions from the start.

And for us, it's kind of where the rubber meets the road is being willing to ask, is this working? And even if it is, are there tweaks to our current tools, resources, and our workflows that are a better fit?

And we can't have it all. I mean, let's go back to the fiscal issues. We all have constraints. We can't have it all.

And so in terms of sustainability, we have to ask that fiscal question as well as the human resource question because we 're all struggling with staff too. And if we add something new, reality is we can't just add something new. Something has to be taken away. So how do you how are you able to ask those questions, or how are you going to answer that?

And then asking those hard questions of, is there a better way to facilitate I ILL? Is there a better way to get your metadata and manage your metadata? Like, asking those questions and being willing to hear answers that may not be exactly what you want to hear.

Christopher Holly

I love what Stephanie was saying about missionable, manageable, sustainable.

And then you're kind of taking it to that that personal level of what does it mean to me. So I think that's a great way to think about it for ourselves. It's like, okay.

How am I going to adapt to this situation? How can I translate what I know?

You know, I think they're all that sort of looming. Is artificial intelligence going to overtake us or somehow replace my job or something like that? I don't think that's the case. But I do think it's important for us to be proactive about what it means to me, how I translate that, how does this fit in, what I'm doing to our mission as an organization. So, yeah, I think you all made some really salient points there that make a lot of sense. Moving along, when you think about future proofing your library, what external forces like I mentioned artificial intelligence already, we could bring that into the picture again, AI.

We talked a little bit about funding shifts in some of the comments already. But if we look at sort of technology like AI, funding shifts, policy changes, what if what if those kinds of things are top of mind for you right now? And I'll start off with Jeff in this case.

Jeff Daniels

Well, you know, you mentioned funding. We've all, I think, mentioned funding at one point in our answers. And so I won't belabor the point, but our budgets, we're lucky if we get a flat budget year to year at the library.

Unfortunately, it's often cuts. But at the same time, our books, our software, our databases, our journals, they're going up at a three to five to seven percent every year. And long term, that math just doesn't add up. So funding is a real concern for us.

But one of the things that we're talking about here today is new initiatives. And that's a that's a thing that we're focusing on quite a bit on my team. How do we have the ability to support new initiatives long term in a sustainable way? Ai is the perfect example.

If we really wanted to take a deep dive into AI, we don't have anyone on our current staff that has the time to do that. So as one of my colleagues has already mentioned, what do we stop doing if we want to invest time in these new initiatives? And then I always have to throw a plug in there for open-source software. Libraries have been promoting open access and open educational resources for quite a while now, but I would throw open-source software in there as well.

If we can help develop tools at a lower cost, then we can use that money elsewhere. And, again, getting back to that time on our end, we have one full time developer on my team, and he splits his time between the FOLIO community and the digital archives community that he's a member of. We've had to give up essentially that staff member to external work, but open-source software is just as important to us as open access in OER.

Stephanie Kaceli

Yeah. And I that's a really good point because I also think it's the one of the one of the external forces, let's say, is the need or the importance of learning to stay relevant. Like, we and we are being bombarded with all these things, all these changes. I mean, everybody is every decade or every year.

There's always something new. But it's having to learn to stay relevant. And what does that mean? And how do you motivate and free up your staff to be able to find that time?

Because where is that time? That's hard to come by even on a quiet week. Right? So how do we help them do this education to be able to seek and to be interested and curious in the midst of trying to fulfill everything else.

So then where do you make those decisions? And so then that discernment of knowing when something's imperative versus nice to have and then remembering to stay on task. And, and then I'll add again, I think one of the external forces that we've got to deal with is how do we respond to accreditation bodies? How do we respond to the reportings that, you know, drop the library, like iPads, middle states?

How do we interact and deal with those forces that are coming our way?

Christopher Holly

Yeah. I think you all made some really great points there. And one thing that jumped out at me because each of you talked about staff in some way. And one thing I was thinking about is having the time and the space to be creative is key. But, you know, when we feel so overwhelmed because we've got to get all these things done and all these things done, and I never feel like I can take a break to be creative or to explore. I mean, have you have do any of you have any things that might have worked for you with your staff or even with yourself to carve out that cherished creative time?

Stephanie Kaceli

I also think, like, conferences, not online conferences. Giving people the space to go and hear what's happening and have those conversations. I remember I was at Charleston. It was a couple years ago now, and I was trying to figure out a problem in full year or how to work do something with a workflow.

And I was walking down the street or down at the river or at the ocean or whatever, the harbor. And all of a sudden, I was like, wait. That's it. And it was in it was easy, but it was it took getting out away from the day to day and going, oh, wait. I could think.

And so the ability to think outside the box doesn't come when you're working inside the box. Right? So you need to be able to get out there and hear and think. And when you don't have that time and again, you go back to funding.

So you go back to staff and you go back to funding. So how do we make that more accessible to our librarians and our staff who we want to be creative?

Christopher Holly

That makes a lot of sense. What does sustainability mean in the context of your library systems and services, and how do you build toward it? And I'll kick this one off with Stephanie. Sustainability.

Stephanie Kaceli

Oh, gosh. Your face. I'm like, oh, I wear my face. Yeah.

I think this is a it's a good question. It it's a meaty question because I think we can go into so many directions with this. And, you know, again, the easy answer is financial, but I think sustainability, obviously, as we've already talked, is so much more than that.

And I was thinking back on when we selected our next ILS, LSP back in 2021. We were making that decision.

I remember my main concern was sustainability, And I think it's a blueprint on how I kind of view sustainability now moving forward, where you have the fiscal, you have to have that conversation. But it's also the management, like the system management. How complex is it?

What does it what is it going to take in terms of time and human resources? And then for us, when we were looking at our ILS LSP was, the additional knowledge bases from the outside that we would need to be bringing in. Like, do we really need three other knowledge bases that we're managing, and is that really sustainable? And then also talk about efficient workflows with that.

And then what are the new solutions and features that are coming out? Because, really, when you come down to sustainability or future proofing, it's we've already had this conversation. It has to be adaptable. It can't take years to come out with a something new that is really just lipstick on a pig, and it doesn't really do anything extra for you.

And so it needs to be adaptable, resilient.

One of my things that we were doing during, talking about future proofing or sustainability is actually working with a vendor that gets the importance of streamlining and efficiencies. And even the simple wanting to add an NSIP connection for reshare. And the vendor we were on was going to charge us three thousand dollars a year for one little NSIP connection that would make our lives so much easier, but that's the vendor being out of touch with what we need and why anyway, it was it was really shocking to me.

But I'm not going to go work with a vendor that isn't willing to understand our need to future proof our library. So I think that was important. And I think building towards all of that, it it's not one and done. And I think that's the most important thing is future proofing is not the status quo.

Okay. We have something good. We're going to stick with it, and we're going to protect it. It's knowing and accepting your context and understanding that your context will change at times.

Knowing what you have and why, I think it's really important to know your collection.

And then it's also important to have that ear to the ground, you know, going to the conferences, having the conversations with the vendor. What Jeffrey said, is so on point in terms of working with the vendors, hearing what's going on. And then finally, you have to be willing to walk away when something is not work when it's working against your future proofing. So finding that way to do all those things is kind of how I think you build towards it.

Jeff Daniels

I would add an internal focus. You know, we've talked a lot about external sources, external companies that can affect what we do. But one of the things that we've seen over time at Grand Valley is we need to be transparent with our colleagues, with our liaison colleagues, with the frontline staff.

We have a change coming. This is what we're changing. This is why we're changing it, the reasons behind the decision, but then also being brutally honest. As we transition to one of our systems, it's not it's not important which, we had to approach our acquisitions colleagues and let them know, hey.

What you're doing today is going to take longer with this new software. And, in a vacuum, you're going to wonder what in the world are we thinking? Why would we do this? How is this sustainable?

But what we're gaining in these other areas, we really think will balance it out, and it's the right decision to make. And if you're open and honest consistently internally, I feel like right now, we're at a place, I'm on a systems and discovery team that the rest of the library trusts us. When we tell them there's a big change in coming, we tell them why. And, yeah, there's going to be disruption.

Christopher Holly

Yeah. No. I think that makes a lot of sense. The common theme I keep hearing is the people, and it's so interesting hearing this come up again and again.

And it really is something that we value and adaptability, transparency is key with that. Feeling comfortable with discomfort, I think, is a key in that too. So let's dive into an area where I think a lot of people do start to get uncomfortable, and that's the idea of rethinking metadata practices. You know, we've been working with Mark for longer than I've been alive, and it's really interesting to think about linked data and BIBFRAME and other kinds of ways of moving forward and to improve discovery or to help with specific collections.

How are your specific institutions working through some of these ideas and changes? And I'll kick it off with Stephanie.

Stephanie Kaceli

Oh, the possibilities.

But I'll first say, we are I mean, we are such a small fish in this big gigantic sea. Yet, I know I've listened to the conversation for however long being at conferences showing, you know, prototypes of Ferber in action and getting excited because you could see the possibilities with it, right, and how it could work. But it never really came into play within our library system itself. So now with FOLIO embracing BIBFRAME and being willing to make that adjustment or that change and really come into that and make it something real is exciting to see on the library side.

But then, you know, it's not all of that pie in the sky anymore, and it hasn't been for a long time, but seeing it in action has been great. And then leveraging the linked data is actually why we added Bibliograph, which is a it I hope it's getting legs. It's something we've been trying to use in our spare time and trying to make time for it because I think it's a really important thing. And it's in the improvement stage.

And then as I'm thinking about it's in the improvement stage, I feel like these that should always be the response for these things. It should be in the improvement stage, because it should never be at completion, because it should be changing and adapting with what is out there. And with Bibliograph's potential, seeing how it exposes our collections in ways that we hadn't expected, being able to find a Lord of the Rings collection and make a really quick, easy, embedded link that we can then put in, and then it can be, it can be added to a LibGuide. It can be added to your web page.

It could be sent over to a faculty, and they can just look at Bibliograph and reminding people we have these collections that then encourages them to discover new collections, new connections, and grow. It can happen everywhere. So get them into and let them discover.

And I think that that's been really important. And it's also why we at Cairn, I put a lot of things in that discovery bucket because we need efficient and reliable ways to get to our community and get our community to our resources. And we don't have the luxury to build a lot from scratch. So I think it's important how we can meet our customers where they are and encourage them to dig deeper to do that that finding and that serendipitous research.

So you're using linked data to do something that you wouldn't have thought you would be doing with linked data in that. You know, it's supposed to be getting people to your collection, you're like, wait. Wait. We have some holes. Let's get that let's get that fixed. And I that's been a neat use of Bibliograph that I didn't expect we'd be able to do because I'm also the acquisitions librarian.

Christopher Holly

Yeah. That is really interesting, Stephanie. I had hadn't even thought of that myself, but, yeah, to find where your gaps are. That makes a lot of sense.

Stephanie Kaceli

And the ISBNs are there, so you can pop those in and get those ordered.

Christopher Holly

Anyway, Thank you all. I this was so fun. I the time flew by for me. It was it's so interesting to hear what's going on at each of your institutions. And so thanks again, everybody. Appreciate your time.