The drafting of a new policy represents a new beginning and an opportunity for an organisation to reset, but any public policy must be intellectually sound, intelligible to non-specialists, and actionable for those working with them. We will discuss this idea in the context of writing the Comprehensive Content Strategy for the University of Sheffield Library. Specifically, how this process sought to balance the competing priorities of idealism, practicality and engagement with the community. We will talk about our ‘inside-out’ approach where we choose to put consultation with our users at the end of the process.

The aspirations of the Content Strategy are far-reaching for the future of the Library – open research, inclusivity, facilitated collections. Our conclusion was that the conceptual work of addressing these issues needed to begin within the Library. Our focus was upon what we needed our Content Strategy to allow us to do, and not just to create a new collection development policy. We will talk about how we developed a framework for our strategy, how we drafted a dummy strategy and drew case studies from across the library to test it against, all before we drafted the text to present to our user communities.