Earlier this fall, Drexel Libraries staff had the opportunity to get creative in a four-part writing workshop presented by colleagues from Drexel’s University Writing Program.

Last month, the Libraries' Communication Manager Stacy Stanislaw traveled to St. Louis, MO, for a 2-day conference designed for library employees involved in marketing, communication, public relations, social media and outreach in academic, public and special libraries.

Earlier this year, two members of the Libraries staff attended a two-day book repair workshop hosted by Gratz College and the Tri-State College Library Cooperative.

The Drexel Libraries hosted its annual Library Celebration Awards ceremony on Tuesday, April 24. This year recognized four Libraries staff and students for their hard work and projects completed in 2017.

In March, three liaison librarians attended the ARL's Liaison Institute, a program that focuses on examining the evolving role of subject and functional librarians within research libraries, held at Temple University.

Drexel University Libraries has been selected as a member of the 2016 Digital Library Federation (DLF) eResearch Network, a research data management community in practice. The cohort of institutions included in this program are focused on implementing research data management services, and engaging in shared skill development, networking, and collaboration. Among the members of this year's cohort are the Universities of Pennsylvania and California-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Rice University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the National Institute of Health.

In January of this year, the Libraries was approved for membership in the Library of Congress' Name Authority Cooperative Program [NACO] after successfully participating in the training and review process. This membership allows Drexel's library catalogers to directly contribute Name Authority Files to the Library of Congress - establishing national standards for consistent use of names, places, topics and more. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world by collection size and is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Though it officially serves the United States Congress, it is considered the national library for the country. The NACO program allows participants to contribute authority records for people, corporations and jurisdictional names. Libraries staff can now add new authority files to uniquely identify researchers, authors, colleges and locations at Drexel, for Philadelphia and beyond.

The combination of rising costs for information resources and the growing span of Drexel's academic programs requires attentive balancing of the Libraries' collections budget. Recently, the Libraries launched a Data Driven Management program, which provides greater capability for analysis of collections data to aid in making collections decisions.