International Project Management: Another Challenge for Librarians. How Well Prepared Are We for This? TRAIN4EU Project Case
Creators: name: Wolodko, Anna
name: Wiorogórska, Zuza
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: Parallel Session 2 - Getting Down to Business: active approaches to library challenges
project management
higher education
academic libraries

description: Abstract European Universities Initiative (EUI) was established in 2017. Its ambition is to strengthen strategic partnerships across the EU between higher education institutions by building networks of universities across the EU which would enable students to obtain a degree by combining studies in several EU countries and contribute to the international competitiveness of European universities (European Education Area, 2022). In 2019, EUI opened its first call for HE institutions’ alliances, next calls were in 2020 and 2021. At the end of 2022, there were already 41 European University Alliances gathering 340 HE institutions (European Education Area, 2022a), and the latest call closes in January 2023. In each of these Alliances, academic libraries are members, too. They are already involved in intra-alliance projects, and most probably it will happen more often due to the EU’s project-driven approach, as mentioned earlier. Even though in the past, there were some projects where libraries participated (Górski, 2000), the volume of international projects has grown significantly in the last years, and still for the majority of libraries, this is the first time when they participate in joint, international (so also multicultural) projects that have specific requirements, terminology, and workflows driven by grant agreement requirements and expected outcomes. This practice paper is to the authors’ knowledge the first attempt to describe another challenge that European academic libraries currently face, i.e., project management practice. Familiarity with the theoretical principles of EU project management and in general, project management methodology greatly facilitates the preparation of the proposal and the work of the project. It also allows more effective management of the project as a whole or its individual parts (work packages, tasks, milestones, etc.). Just as in the case of, for example, a research data management plan, working on it allows for deeper reflection on what data to collect and for what purpose, so conscious planning of project management methods at the stage of preparing a project application helps in more effective implementation of its subsequent stages. The paper is based on the example of the work experience on the project TRAIN4EU (4EU+, 2022), co-lead by the academic librarians from the University of Warsaw Library (Poland), run by 4EU+ universities in the framework of Horizon 2020 (4EU+, 2022a), as well as on the analysis of the literature on project management that might apply in library-led projects and to strengthen the communities of purpose (Bartlett, 2021). It discusses the usefulness of agile (Denning, 2018; Todaro, 2019), waterfall (Mounir, 2018), and hybrid (Tolbert &amp; Parente, 2020; Wysocki, 2014) methods of project management. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations based on TRAIN4EU practices, lessons learned, as well as better-to-avoid paths.