Dear colleagues,

Since the October release of documentation for our twelve partner libraries, the Library Publishing Workflows project team has been focused on supporting workflow documentation within the wider library publishing community. Today, we are excited to share a set of tools to help you document your journal publishing workflows and use that documentation to reflect on your programs and practices.

The Library Publishing Workflows Documentation and Reflection Tools are a set of guides, reflection tools, worksheets, and other resources to aid library publishers in the documentation and assessment of their library publishing workflows. 

The documentation tools will guide you in the work of describing your current publishing workflow:

• Documenting Your Journal Publishing Workflow, a guide to creating detailed documentation about your journal publishing workflow. 

• Diagramming Your Journal Publishing Workflow, a guide to help you to create the type of graphic representation of your journal publishing workflow that we included in our partner documentation packets.

The reflection tools will help you use that documentation to reflect critically on your practice in a number of areas

• Are Our Values Reflected in Our Workflow?, a tool for reflecting on your publishing program’s values and how they are reflected in your publishing workflows

• Is Our Work Sustainable and Scalable?, a tool for reflecting on capacity and costs

• What Standards and Policies Are We Using?, a tool for identifying where standards and policies are enacted and where others could be added

• What Other Documentation Do We Need?, a tool for helping you identify where you may benefit from additional documentation

We hope that you find these tools useful! They are released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so you are invited to share and adapt them. We also encourage community members to share your resulting workflow documentation with fellow library publishers. The purpose of the Workflows project is to support peer learning and allow library publishers to build on each others’ work, so we hope to see many more shared workflow documents!     

We couldn’t have done this work without the financial support of the IMLS, and without the work of University of Alberta Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library (Atlanta University Center), California Digital Library, Claremont Colleges Library, Columbia University Libraries, Ames Library (Illinois Wesleyan University), University of Michigan Library, Pacific University Libraries, The University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, Armacost Library (University of Redlands), University Libraries at Virginia Tech, and Wayne State University Libraries.

Best wishes,