“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” This presentation will describe how two librarians newer to the University of Tennessee Libraries refreshed collection development workflows at the Libraries after a reorganization. This reorganization broke up some tasks that had been traditionally handled by one person to be handled by several people. In this new matrix environment, more communication was required to achieve desired outcomes, but more buy-in was also needed from constituents such as the subject librarians. This presentation will describe how a new Collections Committee was formed to make decisions on high-dollar resources; what information was added to the traditional request form to facilitate the committee’s decisions; what information was asked of vendors at the point of trial or initial interest; and how this fed into a new collection development policy. By revamping the workflows to ask for more information up front, the presenters were able to help the new Collections Committee obtain all the information needed for decision-making at the point of decision. Attendees can expect to gain insight into how organizational changes can be used as an opportunity to instigate workflow changes that help libraries acquire resources more nimbly and flexibly.
