Project Management in Libraries

In this class, participants will review the skills and experiences needed to be exemplary project managers in a library organization. Interactive and dynamic activities such as discussions, reading assignments, and class exercises will accompany each week's lectures. The four-part topical tour of project management will culminate with a final project management principles. The course is self-paced. 

Learning Objectives:

• Issues facing new and existing managers who need to create project management plans.

• The importance of project champions, administrators, and cross-departmental staff will be covered in depth.

• Effective communication (written and verbal), training staff, managing cross department projects, delegating tasks, and being the middle manager. Leading literature will be uncovered, reviewed, and discussed.

By the end of the course, participants will be prepared to assume both leadership roles and managerial roles, in relation to effective project management.

Instructor:

Debra Lucas-Alfieri Retired with Distinction from her position as the Head of Reference, Interlibrary Loan, Public Services, and Information Analysis and Instruction, at D’Youville University in Buffalo, NY (2002-2020). Debra’s research, practice, expertise is demonstrated in her book chapter, Project Management in Libraries: An Overview for Middle Managers, which appears in Middle Management in Academic and Public Libraries (2011). She authored Marketing the 21st Century Library: The Time is Now (2015), a librarians’ textbook, published by Chandos, an imprint of Elsevier. She also published academic journal articles in Collaborative Librarianship, the Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve, the Journal of Library and Information Science, and Library Leadership and Management. Additionally, she served as an editor for the Journal of Library Innovation. For fun, she crafted and published encyclopedia articles the Encyclopedia of Power, the Encyclopedia of Time, the Encyclopedia of Anthropology, and the 20th Century Encyclopedia of Pop Culture. Alongside clinicians, university faculty, and university students, she co-authored and published articles in the nursing and pharmaceutical fields

Debra has been teaching online library science classes, seminars, and webinars for over a decade, working with national organization such as ALA RUSA and Library Juice Academy. She has presented web-based symposiums for organizations in Florida and Montreal. Debra has vast experience and knowledge of the history of libraries and its’ mission, her research and philosophies are highly regarded, studied, and cited across the world. Through teaching and writing, she has impacted students and scholars across the globe.

Before she Retired with Distinction from D’Youville University, she was appointed Faculty Senate Parliamentarian and served from 2018 until she retired in 2022. During her tenure, she was awarded a Sabbatical and Faculty Research Grant in 2014, a Faculty Fellowship Award in 2015-2016, and a promotion to Full-Librarian Academic Rank in 2016. Her retirement created the synergy to collaborate with countless librarians who will then drive our profession and institution of libraries successfully and strategically into the future.