Aim: to draw together the business case components into a coherent form, expressed in the extremely compressed format of the imaginary elevator pitch.
General hints:
- pick a target audience from your stakeholder analysis. Are you talking to senior managers? Your IT department? Students? Library staff?
- think of they key ideas or themes and show how they run through the whole pitch, don't swamp the listener with too much detail
- run through the pitch a few times to make sure it flows. Aim to speak for around 30-60 seconds.
Structure (based on http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/
)
1. Describe who you are
Hello, I am the Director of Library Technology. My department runs all of the computer systems in the library, including our digital preservation system, web site, and library search interface.
2. Describe what you do
We provide long-term digital preservation services. This includes making sure digital objects such as text documents, images, and data sets are readable over the long term, and that they do not become obsolete due to changes in software or hardware. The digital objects can be ones that were digitized from analog sources or that were born digital. The library also adds additional descriptive metadata that describes the objects and makes them searchable through the Libraries' web site. We are a leader in this area. While many other Universities are talking about digital preservation, we are actually doing it; we were the first University Library in the world to get Rosetta, a digital preservation system used by leading institutions such as the National Library of New Zealand, The Getty, and ETH Zurich.
3. Describe why you are unique
There are three types of collections that we work with. Special collections, University archives and institutional memory, and thirdly, faculty and student research. By digitizing and preserving special collections materials we ensure that scholars will be able to access them over time, and in many cases remotely. Preserving the University archives and newsletters, magazines such as Inside BU, and other items such as the University Photographers' photos is important in keeping the institutional memory of the university strong. It is also a great way to reach out to alumni who are interested in not only what is happening on campus now, but also like to reminisce about when they were attending Binghamton.
The first two are important, but I am most excited about the third type of content we are working with. We are preserving faculty and student research is becoming extremely important. Right now we have projects with RG, HZ, and DL. Not only would some faculty lose months or years of research and data if somehow their digital objects were destroyed, many funding and granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation are starting to require data management plans and in some cases long-term preservation of data. The Libraries can help researchers meet these requirements.
4. Describe your immediate goals
We have a core team in place and they do a great job, but now we need to ramp up our efforts. We need to get the word out about what we can do to help faculty with there digital content. We also need to expand our operations which may require additional equipment and additional staff. Staff wise, a softwre developer to help make custom interfaces to faculty and student collections would be great. Also, we may to ramp up digitization and file format conversion efforts which will require additional software and hardware including scanners and equipment that can digitize analog audio and film recordings.