Grand Valley State University (GVSU) is a dynamically growing public liberal arts university located in Allendale, Michigan, United States. In 2012, GVSU Libraries became the recipient of the ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries Award. The Libraries prides itself on innovation and taking risks to better serve its faculty and students and to improve its collections.

In step with that mission, beginning in early 2016 the Libraries began making strides to move beyond outsourcing its digital curation and to strengthen capacity and expertise for managing its own open source digital collections technologies.

This immediately involved making dramatic changes to a range of subscription-based services (including CONTENTdm, Preservica, and Amazon Glacier) in an effort to maximize resources and divert investments towards experiments with new solutions such as Hydra and Omeka.

These are true experiments for GVSU Libraries that are already moving the needle for our Libraries’ technical and curatorial faculty/staff. This presentation will:

1. Briefly describe the problems and issues that led to our strategic changes and the evaluations that under-girded our decisions;

2. Provide an overview of our new in-house curatorial workflows for digital collections and our development/testing roadmaps for new software; and

3. Summarize lessons-learned to-date and solicit feedback/advice from the community for achieving further progress.

Attendees can look forward to a full disclosure of the good, the bad, and the ugly in this case study of an emergent Library looking to up its game.