Academic libraries of all types are struggling with staffing shortages driven by budget cuts, hiring freezes, and frequent turnover. In this presentation, librarians representing a small private institution (Anderson University) and a public R1 institution (Clemson University) compare and contrast their experiences navigating long-term staffing shortages and examine the ramifications of these challenges on library staff and operations. The presenters also share practical, adaptable strategies attendees can implement at their institutions to mitigate burnout and support staff well-being during periods of extended understaffing. Areas of focus include cross-training, evaluating priorities, leveraging in-house talent, and maintaining realistic expectations.
Renna Tuten Redd has served as the Interlibrary Loan Librarian at Clemson University since 2015 and oversees resource sharing and document delivery services as well as off-site storage management. Her other current library projects involve participating in the PASCAL (Partnership... Read More →
What happens when your library receives unexpected news of a significant collections budget cut? How does a severely understaffed department even begin to identify over half a million dollars in savings within three months? With a looming transition to Revenue-Based Budgeting, as well as cuts to the Department of Education and other avenues for research funding, Clemson University Libraries faced a crisis of cutting five percent of the healthy collections budget. The presenters will outline their framework for conducting collections assessment and identifying within a condensed timeframe. In addition to frequent team communication and collaboration with departmental liaison librarians, strategies included utilizing a Renewal Decision Matrix developed by the Associate Dean for Collections & Discovery and a shared Serials Review spreadsheet that calculated cost per use for each resource. Ultimately, over one hundred serial titles and nearly 30 databases were identified for cancellation.
In 2025, Clemson Libraries' Digitization Services unit migrated its digitization project management workflow built in the software platform Trello to the software platform Wrike. This transition allowed the department and its cross-functional collaborators to review essential steps of digitization workflows and leverage the move to a new system to better manage both large-scale digitization projects and small requests. Based on this experience, this presentation will provide attendees with a software-agnostic framework for determining requirements for and selecting a project management platform. The presentation will provide an example of a real-world process used to develop collaborative library workflows in a newly adopted project management platform and outline governance structures necessary to maintain a cross-functional project management system.
Academic libraries rely on data from multiple vendor platforms, yet reporting workflows are often manual, fragmented, and time-consuming. This session shares the development of a semi-automated assessment dashboard that integrates data across systems to streamline reporting and improve transparency. The presentation will outline practical steps for auditing available data, establishing a sustainable extraction process, and designing dashboards that support both internal planning and public reporting. The presentation will emphasize decision-making, tool selection, and workflow design that can scale across different institutional contexts. Attendees will learn how to leverage different tools to reduce annual reporting preparation time, strengthen shared understanding of library impact, and support more consistent data practices. Considerations related to data governance and ethical use will also be addressed.
