Co-authored with Brian Sullivan
In A. Koziura & A. Tureen (Eds.), Making values-based decisions in the academic library. ACRL (in press).
Abstract
As interprofessional organizations operating within the context of higher education, academic libraries find themselves pulled between competing forces with regards to both policies and values. Departmental, unit, library, division, university, and professional interests all hold sway over a library’s decision-making and its implementation of policies and procedures, making balancing these tensions a complex endeavor. When faced with a backlog of needed policy revisions and a campus-wide review by the Provost’s office that resulted in additional policy update requests, the authors formed a policy committee within their library’s faculty governance body. This chapter details how we kept organizational values in mind while establishing the committee and its procedures for soliciting and crafting policy updates. As the committee began its work, these values-based processes supported the alignment of existing promotion and tenure guidelines with the values of our organization, campus, and profession. We discuss some of the significant changes we made to our documentation and the values and reasoning behind the changes. While adherence to policy can often be used as a justification to ignore organizational and professional values, this chapter provides readers with a guide to enshrining their library’s values within its policies.