Making Moves: Managing Deselection and Transfer Projects

Abstract

A poster detailing the development of a committee - the Deselection and Transfer Steering Committee (DTSC) - to handle deselection and transfer activities between multiple locations on and off campus. The goal of this committee was to improve the efficiency of these projects through defining a clear workflow for managing projects and assigning tasks. The committee includes key individuals from across the library involved in various parts of the collection life cycle and consults with library leadership to allocate resources to projects based on library and campus priorities. As a result of moving from handling deselection and transfer projects on a case by case basis to establishing a permanent committee, the library has handled collections projects more uniformly and built a repository of experience to iterate improvements to the workflow. The poster diagrams an example of a workflow for handling a collections project. It also demonstrates the value of the committee by discussing several major projects and their challenges and outcomes.