Mapping the Library Landscape: Visualizing Service Portfolios
Over the years, I’ve spent time developing, launching, and promoting library services. But recently, I’ve become more interested in stepping back to look at the broader portfolio of what libraries offer—and how they could potentially evolve. The challenge: there’s no simple way to visualize the full range of services and understand how resources are allocated across them.
To address this, I’ve started building a toolset that I’m calling the Service Landscape Map. From a management perspective, it functions as both a strategic planning and resource allocation tool, offering insights into current investments and opportunities for growth. While from an outreach and communications standpoint, it helps people across the organization understand the full scope of service offerings, fostering a shared awareness and supporting alignment.
Rather than creating a framework just for my own use, I’m thinking about how it could be helpful for others, too. The idea is to provide a knowledge infrastructure (a set of templates) that enables libraries to visualize and transparently assess their service portfolio—offering a clear view of where efforts are currently invested and where expansion could align with strategic directions. Keeping the open-source ethos in mind, I envision this toolkit being adaptable and accessible, designed for collaborative improvement.
Right now, I’m developing the prototype using Miro, Obsidian, and Google Docs. These platforms allow for flexible thinking, organizing, interaction, and integration. For broader application, however, this could be built entirely on Google platforms to ensure accessibility and scalability. But I really prefer Miro and Obsidian, aesthetically.
If you’re interested in exploring this idea with me, I’d love to connect—drop me an email, and let’s collaborate during the spring semester. Or chat with me at the CNI Winter Meeting in a few weeks.
Here’s where I’m at right now.
Step One: Inventory
The first step in mapping your service landscape is to create a comprehensive inventory. I’ve started by listing 100 services commonly offered by research libraries, focusing on areas such as consulting, programming, technology, community engagement, and physical spaces. While I may color-code, tag, or group these later, they’re currently organized alphabetically. For now, I’ve set aside collection-focused services. My goal with this inventory is to capture a diverse range of offerings that represent a wide menu of engagement-oriented activities.
In Miro, each service is displayed on a post-it note. The initial task is to review each note and place it into a yes/no box, answering a single question: is your library offering this service in some capacity? This step offers a valuable visual snapshot of what your library is currently doing and where there might be gaps or opportunities. It can be revealing to see, in one glance, the breadth of services and to identify those areas that could be strengthened or reconsidered to align with larger goals.
Yes / No
Step Two: Service Provision
The next step involves documenting your Service Provision for each post-it note, gathering details on how each service is supported and staffed at your institution. This provides a high-level view of who is responsible for what and how support is distributed across the organization.
Basically — we consider how each service is staffed: Is it managed by a dedicated role, or does it occupy a portion of someone’s time? Are some services supported by teams, or is the support more ad hoc? Here’s my draft checklist to guide this process:
This step can highlight important staffing patterns across the service landscape. For instance, are there high-demand areas with growth potential that are currently covered by only a small portion of someone’s time? Conversely, are significant resources allocated to areas with declining demand? Understanding these staffing structures provides insight into your library’s service portfolio, sparking valuable discussions about how well support aligns with strategic priorities, operational needs, and user expectations.
Step Three: Service Engagement Profile
The third step is to develop a Service Engagement Profile for each service area. Think of this as a concise outline / note that captures the current scope and depth of engagement with each service, helping the library understand its strategic and operational focus within each area.
The insight offers a snapshot of “what we do” and “what we don’t do” for each service, providing clarity on how each service is utilized and resourced.
For example, multiple libraries may engage in digital humanities in different ways:
One library may focus on pedagogy, teaching digital humanities skills and tools.
Another might emphasize infrastructure, hosting and maintaining digital projects.
A third may operate a full digital humanities center, engaging deeply in grant seeking, program development, and collaborative research.
Each profile includes a set of customizable questions tailored to the specific service. For instance, a profile for Research Metrics might include questions like:
These structured questions are based on a standard set of themes shared above, helping us create a consistent logic model for each service that documents engagement and alignment. This approach is intended to capture a dynamic and comprehensive view of our current practices while allowing us to look across our entire landscape to identify patterns and opportunities.
Each profile can be customized or expanded, providing a flexible framework that aligns with each library’s unique approach or organizational structure. However, I want to offer a core template to help people get started and to encourage a consistent, concise, and comparable review across the entire service landscape.
How it helps
The service landscape map aims toward:
Transparent Resource Mapping: A clear view of where resources are currently allocated, highlighting both active and inactive areas across service types.
High-Level Portfolio Overview: For each service, gain an at-a-glance view of “what we do” and “what we don’t do,” identifying areas of strength, gaps, and opportunities for alignment with mission or strategic goals.
Informed Strategic Decision-Making: Quickly assess areas for potential reallocation or expansion, enabling high-level insights to guide discussions on priorities, resource needs, and potential organizational impact.
The collaborative capabilities of tools like Miro, Google Docs, and Obsidian add further value to this effort. Miro’s visual, interactive environment enables teams to work together in real time, sorting and annotating post-it notes collaboratively. This dynamic setup fosters shared understanding and makes it easy for teams or groups to brainstorm, organize, and visualize service areas collectively.
Using Google Docs as a central hub, team members across the organization can crowdsource responses to specific questions, contributing insights and details directly related to each service. This open document format not only gathers valuable input but also allows everyone to review, refine, and build on each other’s answers, resulting in more comprehensive and nuanced documentation. It also provides insights into areas that may be unfamiliar to everyone, helping to expand and enrich collective understanding.
Obsidian offers a powerful way to create dynamic knowledge networks, mapping relationships among services, staff, and strategic goals. This networked view reveals how various areas are interconnected, highlighting cross-departmental relationships and providing new insights into the organization’s structure—showing how different teams, units, or individuals currently engage or could collaborate in the future.
While the current phase of this project focuses on creating a comprehensive map of services, I also envision a future module or toolkit for administrators and library leaders that could incorporate metrics, KPIs, financial considerations, and other operational data. This “expansion pack,” likely based in Tableau or Google Sheets, would allow libraries to monitor service impact and resource allocation at a more granular level—tracking performance, demonstrating ROI, and guiding informed budgetary decisions.
For now, however, my focus is on mapping as a foundational exercise—one that enables an entire organization to understand who is doing what and how, and supports a shared vision for service alignment.
These tools offer a flexible, interactive approach to portfolio visualization, empowering libraries to map their services transparently, adaptively, and in alignment with strategic goals. By providing a structured, collaborative approach to understanding the full range of services, my hope is that the Service Landscape Map will help libraries make informed decisions, communicate effectively, and foster a sense of shared purpose and commitment across the organization—united in a mission to better serve our communities. Check back in Spring 2025 for updates on how this project evolves!
