Shaping the future together

Employee participation in the strategic process of the user department at Göttingen State and University Library

Abstract

A decline in lending, an increasing number of visitors and decreasing inquiries at the reference desk stand in contrast to an increasing number of consultations about literature search and reference management, and, more recently, about statistics, programming and, on an university-wide level, digital skills in general. All of these factors require a reorientation of traditional library user services.
In recent years, the Göttingen State and University Library's user services department was streamlined in terms of staff and its profile concentrated more strongly on basic services to allow opening up new fields of action in other areas of the Göttingen State and University Library. This led to a shift in priorities and a loss of significance for some service areas, so that in mid-2018 the user services department started a strategic process. The aim was to analyse the fields of action of the department with various methods and questions in order to work out future perspectives, identify both potentials and challenges and finally plan and implement the resulting measures and projects. This article describes the strategy process of the user services department within the overall strategy of the Göttingen State and University Library 2018–2021, which involved the entire department in this participatory process.