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Elizabeth Szkirpan, MLIS

She/Her/Hers

Library Preparedness and Pandemics:

A Documentation and Project Management Approach

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February 2020: New Director of Bibliographic Services hired, replacing a 30+ year employee

Long-standing issues with the catalog and Discovery layer

Supervisory misunderstanding of eResources management

March 2020: COVID strikes

Employees are sent to work from home

The library has to pivot services offered and develop new solutions for book checkouts and deliveries, instruction, and space utilization

April-August 2020: Majority of library employees furloughed

Library Leadership Team takes over ALL library tasks: Book checkout, instruction, all cataloging and acquisitions tasks, eResources management

September 2020-Present: Stabilization including:

Evaluation of electronic resources and management

Evaluation of ILS

Evaluation of Discovery layer

Playing catch up on orders, cataloging, catalog clean up, reports, statistics

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Reactionary, not proactive: In a perfect world, we would have been more prepared, better trained, and had written documentation to refer to.

Catch up can take years: A museum near my university was working on cataloging WWII-era donations in the year 2012. They were working on scant documentation, often did not know where the items had come from and if they had legal ownership of them, the items were in a state of deterioration, and they didn’t know what they had.

We don’t know what we don’t know: What did we miss? What did we do wrong? How long until we catch up on our backlog? How long until we find our mistakes?

BUT ALSO: We had a number of new employees in charge of library takeover. We’re now grappling with some of the decisions made without our experts at our disposal.

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Examples:

Manuals

Step-by-Step instructions on how to collect stats once a year

Explicitly outlining who does what and who does not do what

Fleshes out sparse vendor documentation

Records local policies for current and future employees (e.g. cataloging standards for the institution)

e.g. If you create a Roles and Responsibilities matrix, which you’ll see an example of here momentarily, you can clearly delineate who does what and tie what each person does back directly to the mission of your institution or essential services provided by your library. Outlining explicit position responsibilities also points out any gaps in coverage, need, or an area of service that the library needs more help with.
e.g. Even the most dedicated of employees want to step away from their jobs to enjoy vacation, a conference, et cetera. Documentation allows their backups to keep the lights on so everyone has the opportunity to fully disconnect.
e.g. Decisions recorded on a project, weird fixes, how we set up our systems, why is there a giant marble statue in the Dean’s office.
e.g. If a new employee takes a year to write a manual for their job but their predecessor already had a manual that was not able to be located, we’ve invented the wheel twice, wasting both time and resources.

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Project charters are a component of project management practices.

1. Project Charters record:

The project you are undertaking
Why you are undertaking a project (Does it relate to institutional goals? Does it fix a huge problem in the library? Did someone tell you to do this?)
Who is participating in the project and their role
What is the end goal of the project or what is outside the goal of the project
Costs associated
Risks
Changes to the project plan or planning documents

Project charters are great because libraries often make decisions in the middle of our projects that can have consequences in future projects or abilities to make decisions. For example, if you have a temperamental library system and need to migrate records to a new ILS in a very complex way, that may have an impact on your ability to extract records or migrate records in the new ILS next time. Recording who made decisions and why or the purpose of the project allows us to revisit these decisions in the future, which can save time and frustration.

Traditional Project Charter: Multiple pages and addresses everything from team members to risks.

One-Page or Simplified Project Charter: A high-level overview of your project that often fits onto a single page.

Something Custom: You can create something that will truly fit you and your organization in Word, Excel, Canva, or by cutting-and-pasting from another source.

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Heavily related to project charters are project step documents, such as a Work Breakdown Structure, often called a WBS, and a Gantt Chart or Gantt Chart Program.

WBS: Iterates every step necessary to complete an overarching goal or project. The details often speak to the importance of the project themselves.

WBSes can be used in place of a project charter if the steps of the project are self-explanatory, if you like to fully-flesh out your steps (e.g. writing the responsibility owner of the task on each step), or in conjunction with a project charter if your project has a huge amount of steps in order to be completed.

Gantt Charts: There are a myriad of paid (Microsoft Project) and free (ProjectLibre) programs to track each step of your project and its purpose. You can make charts, tables, timelines, et cetera.

Gantt Charts are a tool that shows the responsibility for reach step or task in a project, along with the estimated duration, start date, and end date for each step. Many Gantt Chart programs work in place of a project charter since they often have sections to fill in relevant information. However, Gantt Chart programs themselves can be expensive. Luckily, there are a number of free templates you can find on Google or ProjectManger.com, Google has a completing product, called Tables, and you can also create Gantt Charts in Excel and Word. You can also create something similar using a table in Word or Excel!

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Explicitly outlining the roles and responsibilities in your library is another great way to prepare for the unexpected. If we know what someone is doing exactly, then we have a checklist for when they are on vacation, if they have left the institution to pursue new opportunities, or if furloughs/layoffs happen. I also love these documents to identify who is NOT doing a specific task so we can advocate for new hires, or to recognize areas that need additional backup to ensure library continuity in the event of an emergency.

The first template example of a responsibilities document is a RACI Chart, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. The font is small, so as a quick summary, from left to right on the top of the chart is: Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, and Elrond. Listed from top to bottom on the left side of the chart are the responsibilities, which include: Decide on what to do with ring, Create fellowship, Get the ring to Mount Doom, and Distract and defeat enemies.

RACI Charts are often created specific to a project or set of tasks when using the actual RACI language, but similar to the Lord of the Rings example, they are also great to determine the core tasks or services within an organization and identify who is responsible for participation or oversight in those areas.

I personally prefer a responsibility matrix, which is the document displayed on the right side of this slide. Responsibility matrixes demonstrate reporting structure, all positions listed in a unit, and their core job tasks necessary to the library’s continued existence. These are great to highlight all requirements under a job, be it training, cross-training, documentation, et cetera. I love responsibility matrixes in particular because they can be as customized, detailed, or high-level as needed.

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1. Lastly, a universal manual template is a great thing to have on hand. I generally break this down into two categories: manuals hosted online in a website or LibGuide, or a manual stored a word or PDF format in a local system of some sort. I like having a template that everyone refers to so all documentation is equally robust and familiar in terms of navigation. If you’re looking for inspiration, definitely Google to find what other similar institutions are doing. My own manuals were inspired by a beginner’s cataloging manual found on a library association website that I expanded on and personalized to work for my own library. I then hosted my manual on LibGuides to ensure that it would be easy to find, and my manual format became the standard for other manuals created on our team, both in terms of organization and robustness.