Search

In the spring of 2019, the Montana State University (MSU) Library embarked on a large-scale inventory project that involved weeding and moving portions of their collection to an offsite storage facility within six months in order to create more student study space in the Library. The department primarily responsible for leading the project, Collections Access & Technical Services, the result of two departments merging, was also simultaneously navigating their new structure and a remodel of their workspace thus adding further challenges to the project. This poster session demonstrated how MSU Library approached and completed this project by advocating to their Library Administration for additional resources, including hiring a project manager and third-party companies to assist with the inventory and moving of the collection. It also discussed the types of work groups formed to identify new workflows (i.e., retrieval of offsite items) and modify existing ones, involving student employees in the project, and internal and external collaborations that took place. Additionally, presenters shared strategies used to communicate to their campus community, and the impact this project has had on our patrons. They also included statistics that were gathered during the project including deselection figures, the number of materials that did not have barcodes and were not accounted for in the Library’s catalog and discovery layer (Ex Libris’ Alma and Primo), and what subject areas currently remain in the main library building.

Discovery services have evolved to include not just books and articles, but databases, website content, research guides, digital and audiovisual collections, and unique local collections that are all important for their users to be able to find. Search and ranking remain at the core of discovery, but advanced tools such as recommendation, virtual browse, ‘look inside‘, and the use of artificial intelligence are also becoming more prevalent. This group of panelists discussed how content in their discovery systems can change based on the context of the user, using as examples Primo and Blacklight, and how content is populated, discovered and requested by users through differing customizations and workflows. The session also explored what tools are available today or may become available in the coming years that may be used to highlight different collections and material types in a library discovery system. As this topic impacts many stakeholders—libraries who need to make content discoverable and satisfy the needs of their users, content providers who want to make sure that their content is visible and used, and discovery providers who need to develop their systems to support the changing needs—the panelists posed questions to the audience to encourage conversation around the challenges they face with making their unique content collections discoverable and to share solutions.