Remote Collection Review

Please give us a detailed overview of your session and why attendees will be excited to hear about it.  

I would like to talk about a project I embarked on during the Covid 19 pandemic when we were unable to go into our physical building for over 1 year. Being in technical services/collection development and usually working with the physical materials, it was hard to keep busy when I couldn’t be in the building.

I had been meaning to do a comprehensive review of various legal topics in the collection. Looking at, for instance, the area of intellectual property law, were there materials we could discard? Or that could be moved to storage on another floor? This evaluation would usually be done in person, but could I perform it remotely?

In my session I will discuss the steps I took in performing this remote evaluation, as well as what worked well and what I would change going forward.

I think attendees will be excited to hear about a collection development project that was performed without access to the physcial collection.  

Ensure that you let us know:

• What level of knowledge should attendees have before walking into your session

No expertise in technical services or collection developement is necessary. I will talk in fairly general terms and will explain anything that is remotely technical.

• What will your session accomplish and what will attendees walk away having learned

My session will hopefully get people thinking about the types of projects that can be done remotely, especially now that working from home is more acceptable. I would like people to start thinking about similar projects - maybe others have done similar things? I would like to hear about them!

I think collection development attendees will learn the most, especially the nuts and bolts of how to accomplish this specific review project should they be interested in trying it themselves.