Posts by Rachel Vacek

Over the past 20 years, the University of Michigan Library has led the way on creating digital collections and establishing best practices around digital preservation that have become benchmark standards for other libraries. However, as our web presence expanded, it became increasingly difficult to adapt it at scale, keep pace with the changing needs of research, and create cohesion between a growing number of applications, sites, and services. It eventually became clear that a new model for web governance was needed. In this post, learn about the library’s history around its web governance and what led us to establish a new committee to create a vision and strategy for our web presence. You’ll also read about some of the committee’s accomplishments so far and learn how the committee’s members are supporting the recently launched Library Search application and the ongoing website redesign.

Like many academic research libraries, the University of Michigan Library has a promotion process for its librarians. And, like many libraries, the policies need to be reviewed on occasion. The Promotion and Appointment of Librarians (PAL) Task Force was charged by the Librarians’ Forum with reviewing our promotion process and making recommendations to better align what we do with the goals of both individuals and the Library. This Task Force utilized various qualitative and quantitative research methods to get the best data (described below).