Sabbatical plans! Book forthcoming in 2026!

After two dozen years of academic librarianship, of which seventeen have been served at tenure-stream institutions, I have finally managed to apply for and take a sabbatical. For those at home less familiar with faculty life, this simply means that I have planned poorly. Generally, the path is: you get tenure (six years) and are then eligible for a sabbatical; thereafter, you are eligible for sabbatical every six or seven years, depending on how exactly your institution counts things. But if like me, you change positions at certain cadences, you can manage to go two decades until you are actually eligible! Ha!

Anyway, the happy news is that my sabbatical is for the entire year of 2025. As I approached the end of the first quarter of the year, I suddenly remembered that I have this website and that it might be an appropriate place to share about my sabbatical research plans.

I've got a few things in the hopper:

• An as-yet untitled project analyzing chat (instant message) reference transcripts to investigate terminology initiated by patrons and terminology initiated by librarians to refer to eight library tasks designated as high priority (or “top tasks”): Books, e-books; Journals, e-journals; Articles; Library catalog; OneSearch [local branding for web-scale discovery layer]; Databases, indexes; Off-campus access to library resources; and, Interlibrary loan.
• Open Access as Understood by Undergraduate Students
  The objective of this study is to ascertain how undergraduates understand the term “Open Access” and whether their conceptualization of the term aligns with the common discourse within academic and scholarly publishing spheres. A secondary objective is to learn in what contexts undergraduate students may have previously encountered the term, in order to learn more about how this terminology is surfacing in their lives.
• Library Web Content Strategy: United Kingdom & Ireland
  This project is interested in whether, and to what degree, academic and research libraries web professionals working in the United Kingdom and Ireland have integrated the practice of web content strategy into their organizational structures and professional activities, and will build on findings of a previous study (McDonald & Burkhardt, 2021) focused on practices in North America.
• and, last but not least: a book forthcoming in 2026. Huzzah!

Strategic, Sustainable Web Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians

Heidi Burkhardt and I are at it again. We are under contract with ACRL Press so we have the privilege of working with the wonderful Erin Nevius. The drafting of the manuscript is underway!

I'll sign off with this blurb from our proposal.

Strategic, Sustainable Web Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians is functional and modular, designed to support any library worker tasked with creating and maintaining web content. We (the authors) have worked as web and user experience librarians for decades combined and have been conducting research around the practice, methods, and maturity of web content strategy in academic libraries since 2019. Even as long-time practitioners and researchers, we’ve had to figure many things out on our own. Whether you’re making a plan to improve a specific element of your web content, looking up a specific tool or method, or creating an entire website content strategy, we’ve created the Practical Guide to go along with you. This is the book we both wish we’d had.

Why do you need this book? Libraries have a complicated relationship with web content, specifically library-authored web content, defined as “collectively owned and authored content that represents the organization as a whole”¹. You know: research guides, FAQs, websites, that sort of thing. Libraries carefully manage and curate their physical and electronic collections, but without strategy, library-authored web content quickly becomes unmanageable and unsustainable. 

The Practical Guide will provide a framework and tools to approach library-authored web content strategically and sustainably — a means to work smarter, not harder. We outline the elements of web content strategy, discuss how to move through levels of maturity in each, and reference the relevant tools and methods that can be applied. We’ll prompt you to assess the current state of your library’s web content ecosystem, including its web content strategy maturity. We’ll introduce and build on the Content Strategy Maturity Model for Academic Libraries² which serves as both a diagnostic and planning tool. This model presents the elements of content strategy (e.g. planning, creating) articulating five additive levels of practice for each. 

The Practical Guide walks you through understanding web content strategy — how content is created, published, maintained, and evaluated — and then applying it in the library context. After a brief introduction, you decide where to begin: read the book straight through or start at a specific area of interest or need. Choose your own web content strategy adventure!

¹C. McDonald and H. Burkhardt (2019). “Library-Authored Web Content and the Need for Content Strategy,” Information Technology & Libraries 38(3), 16. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i3.11015.

²C. McDonald and H. Burkhardt (2022). “Web Content Strategy in Academic Libraries: Methods and Maturity,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 22(4), 1004-1005. Openly available at: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/articles/mp48sf19w