From Zero to 60: Lessons Learned From Setting Up Digital Initiatives in Small to Mid-sized Academic Institutions

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Working Session (lunch)

Session Description Have you started a new job at a small liberal arts college—and are suddenly responsible for establishing a digital repository? Do your needs and service demands exceed your staffing capability? Did you wish that you could have had more time to design a strategic plan before taking the plunge into providing digital program services? Or are you just curious as to what happens when a small archives or library is placed under these kinds of constraints?

In this three-part panel, speakers from small to mid-sized academic institutions will describe how they initiated digital initiatives within a short time frame with limited resources, what kinds of challenges were encountered, how they chose to address those challenges, and the outcome of that process. Following the presentation, the speakers will discuss common trends across the case studies, past mistakes, potential strategies and how their experiences affect future plans for their respective institutions. During the last section, attendees will be asked to design their own solutions to the scenarios presented by collaborating in speaker-guided groups.

Session Leaders Eugenia Kim, Emerson College Cinda May, Indiana State University Sasha Griffin, Denison University