Biz of Digital — Library Equipment Lifecycle Planning & The Triple Bottom Line: Initial Steps Towards More Sustainable IT Management at an Academic Library By Carolyn Sheffield (Associate Director of Library Technology and Digital Strategies, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-2964) <csheffield@umbc.edu> Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Acquisitions and Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-6754; Fax: 410-455-1598) <flinchba@umbc.edu>
Abstract Environmental sustainability, while not new to the library profession, continues to warrant more focused planning, particularly as climate change accelerates and has increasing impacts in both local and global contexts. These impacts include several extreme weather events already this year that have damaged homes, businesses, and communities, and can contribute to food insecurity, making climate change as much a social issue as an environmental one. Indeed, as part of the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) adoption of sustainability as a core value of librarianship,1 ALA committed to the “triple bottom line” framework which calls for measuring impacts of business decisions not only on the financial bottom line (i.e., profit) but also on social equity (i.e., people), and on the environment (i.e., planet). (https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2019/05/ ala-adding-sustainability-core-value-librarianship) This article presents recent efforts to incorporate the triple bottom line philosophy into equipment lifecycle planning at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The author shares resources identified and incorporated into workflow planning for equipment lifecycle management, focusing on low-to-no-cost and low effort opportunities for other libraries to pursue similar initiatives, and challenges identified for further enhancing incorporation of environmental and social sustainability considerations into IT & Digital Strategies planning.
Background The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university serving a student body of approximately 13,600 and employs over 800 faculty members. UMBC is committed to environmental sustainability and was one of five recipients of the 2021 Maryland Green Registry Sustainability Leadership Award https://mde.maryland.gov/ marylandgreen/pages/leadershipwinners.aspx. The Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, where I serve as the Associate Director of Library Technology & Digital Strategies, serves all UMBC faculty, staff, and students, as well as scholars from other University System of Maryland campuses and the surrounding community. In my role, I am exploring and implementing strategies to incorporate environmental sustainability into our IT planning. I want to share what I have discovered here because I believe it is important that the library profession collectively think about and address sustainability. This article will outline how I perceive the triple bottom line in relation to libraries, introduce some easy-to-adopt strategies I have begun to implement in my own planning, which I see as low-barrier opportunities for others to consider adopting; and
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it will also highlight some of the remaining challenges I have encountered in my planning.
Triple Bottom Line & Libraries The triple bottom line is a framework that calls for the social and environmental impacts of decisions to be given the same weight and consideration as financial returns. Attributed to sustainable business author John Elkington,2 the framework is often distilled as the three Ps: People, Planet, and Profit. Below, I outline the core concepts of each along with my perspective of how these apply in the context of academic libraries. People: The employees, customers, partners, and community members that will be potentially impacted, positively or negatively, by decisions being made. In an academic library, this would include library employees, library users (physical and remote), employees of the parent institution, internal and external partners, and the surrounding local community. More broadly, it can also include people in different parts of the world impacted by supply chain decisions and methods of businesses with which libraries work. Planet: This refers to any environmental impact that decisions may have. For libraries, the most obvious ones might be the local impact in terms of waste management or electricity use. Less obvious ones might again include the impacts of decisions made by vendors within the library’s supply chain for collections, technology, office supplies, or other materials. Our day-to-day operations contribute to overall greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to impacts on the planet overall. Profit: In a library or other non-profit driven organization, profit can be reframed to think about services and goals. Even if our end goal is not to make a profit, the decisions we make should still be guided to ensure we continue to successfully provide the services that enable us to achieve our mission. With the limited budgets available to most libraries, seeking economical options, assessing cost-benefit ratios, and focusing on return on investment are already familiar to many librarians with purchasing and other decision-making responsibilities. In identifying opportunities to more prominently center the people and planet bottom lines, it is important to recognize that most libraries operate under the auspices of larger entities. Some parent organizations, such as universities for academic libraries or county governments for public libraries, may provide both high-level guidance on or direct support of sustainability (e.g., energy efficient practices) and access to specific resources (e.g., recycling services or other enterprise-level solutions). Using the technology purchasing phase of equipment lifecycle planning at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery as a case study, I will share examples of some of the resources and guidance available to
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