January 30, 2024
February is the return of Documentation Month!
By Nancy Adams
What would happen if you won the lottery and could leave your job tomorrow? What information would the next person doing your job need to have? What information would you leave behind to help that person pick up where you leave off?: Documentation!
Documentation is important because it helps to preserve institutional memory, allows future you to get up to speed, and can be a useful resource to share with colleagues. Yet this important activity is often neglected. Whether you’re not sure where to begin or because we’re all faced with perennial deadlines and constant day-to-day tasks, documentation all too often falls to the bottom of our to-do lists. To give everyone a chance to focus on documentation, the Professional Development Committee is hosting its fourth-annual Documentation Month this February!
Documentation toolkit
To support the community in creating documentation, members of LPC’s Professional Development Committee have created a Library Publishing Documentation Toolkit. It consists of four sections: Getting started with documentation, Planning a documentation day, Suggested documentation projects to tackle, and Sharing documentation beyond your institution. The toolkit is available in PDF and as a Google Doc.
Workshops/Community Calls
We will also be hosting a series of workshops/community calls focused on the theme of documentation and accessibility. We have four calls planned for four Thursdays in February:
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PDF Accessibility and Documentation, Thursday, February 1st (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Angel Peterson
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Video Content Accessibility and Documentation, Thursday, February 8th (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Matt Vaughn
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Google Docs Accessibility Documentation, Thursday, Feb 15th (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Erin Jerome and Adam Mazel
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Accessibility and your Campus Institutional Repository: A Conversation, Thursday, Feb 29th (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Carmen Mitchell and Amy Carpenter
Scheduling information and call details for these events will be sent out each week to the listserv. Please feel free to share widely within your institution, but these calls are open to LPC member libraries only, so please do not share outside the community.
Happy documenting!
From the Documentation Month planning group (Erin Jerome, Adam Mazel, and Matt Vaughn) on behalf of the LPC Professional Development Committee.
“I feel extremely humbled and honored to have been awarded LPC’s Award for Exemplary Service this year. It was a true pleasure to serve on LPC’s Board and while the work I did as the Treasurer over the past two years, and last year especially, was challenging, I am thankful for the opportunity to help serve our community. The care, thoughtfulness, and support that my fellow Board members and the community provided during the challenging season of having to rethink our financial model and increase our dues for the first time was so exemplary and made my job much easier than it could have been. It’s a beautiful example of why I love and value this community so much! I have grown significantly through my service as Treasurer, and I’m thankful that I was given the opportunity to help our community navigate through this change and help to position the LPC for continued success and stability for years to come. Thank you!”
LPC is delighted to announce the publication of Version 2.0 of An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing. A dedicated task force worked for two years to draft this update to the Library Publishing Coalition’s 2018 Framework. The result is a remarkably different document, structured to orient library publishers to how they might proceed toward ethical thinking in their discipline. The form, scope, and direction of this Framework are entirely new; we’re looking forward to hearing from the community about how it is used and how it can be improved — please email