The 37th NC Serials conference “Blazing a New Path,” which was held on April 6, 2018, in Chapel Hill, NC, focused on diversity, collaboration, and innovation. Session topics highlighted not only new ideas and approaches for problems in serials and electronic resources management, but also underlying strategies and concepts that lead to effective teams and services. For instance, the opening keynote address by Dracine Hodges centered on the concept of diversity in technical services by defining how we can incorporate concepts related to equity and inclusion in our everyday functions such as assigning subject headings and providing accurate description of our resources. Staff who are trained and aware have the capacity to make small changes that benefit their local work environments and the profession at large.
Numerous sessions introduced tools or innovative ideas that evolve process, improve workflows, or enhance data. Several of the special issue articles specifically focus on improving communication to better support a service or function. For example, Christman discusses the implementation of a ticketing system at Duke to help improve communication related to resource troubleshooting. Geuther and Turvey-Welch also explore communication within the context of a ticketing system, examining communication practices across library stakeholders and patrons within the context of NASIG’s Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians. Other articles concentrate on the implementation of tools or services as a means to improve process. Song and Gagliardi outline efforts to streamline and improve resource management using CORAL, an open source electronic resource management system. In a report by Ford, Adams discusses the benefits of the Get It Now document delivery service to provide ready and cost effective access to content.
Other authors examine policies or workflows as a means to support change and pave the way for innovation. Greene highlights the development of an open access (OA) policy at Duke that facilitates more effective and systemic management of freely and openly available resources. This kind of policy helps to establish these resources as a priority for the collection. Another article by Jones details a tagging system used that rates continuing resources based on usage and cost per use; this system helped to create a more effective workflow for collections evaluation.
Finally, data integrity and data metrics are used as a means to increase accessibility to library collections and to provide researchers with information related to their scholarly output and impact. In a report of one of the sessions, Samples outlines an effort to normalize and more effectively use holdings data to make Duke’s newspaper collection more visible. Another article by Abernethy and Holderied outlines a service to create research and article-level reports of researcher output. These articles identify the importance of clean data to ensure access to collections, as well as the need to provide scalable solutions for high-touch services to researchers.
None of these services, cool tools, or enhanced workflows would be effective without great effort by the people who develop and sustain them. Recognizing how people interact and intersect with the systems used by libraries is critical to optimizing the services provided by these tools. These concepts are further explored in Wilson’s report from Orphanides' closing session for the conference, which discusses limitations of systems including concepts of bias. Diverse perspectives are needed to evaluate when systems are effectively meeting human purposes. Including diversity of thought and experience is one of the keys to innovation; this increases the ability to see problems from different angles and the capacity to develop transformational solutions that evolve rather than just manage. The articles in this special issue reflect a range of strategies, projects, and tools that improve communication, champion change, and evolve practice.