Using digital environments to design inclusive and sustainable communities of practice in academic libraries

While promoting professional development among library workers is a priority for many academic libraries, library administrators often discuss the challenges involved in designing flexible, sustainable professional development programs that meet the diverse needs and interests of library workers. With investment in professional development around online teaching and learning becoming an institutional priority upon the onset of the COVID-19, we set out to create a flexible and sustainable professional development program that could facilitate conversations around teaching and learning in our libraries and that could be inclusive of all library workers throughout our distributed, multi-branch university library system. In this paper, we share our approach to developing virtual, miniature Communities of Practice (Mini CoPs), describing in detail the process of designing these groups and the formation of two distinct leadership roles within this program, the Community Coordinator and the Community Facilitator. We then describe our program evaluation strategies and findings from the first cohort of Mini CoPs. Based on our findings, we suggest that this program design presents a model for developing inclusive and sustainable professional development programming for librarians and library staff that has applicability even beyond the current constraints facing higher education. We close with a reflection on some of the potential limitations of our model, along with proposed next steps to consider.