For any sunsetting you’ll need a communication plan. Our background is in technical products and projects, but we’ve found that what needs the most lead time in sunsetting projects is the development of the communication plan.
Part of this is internal communication, for the affected teams, departments or the library as a whole. The projects that get sunset are often someone’s baby, and they reflect significant achievements in people’s careers. It can be difficult to let go of things that have been part of someone’s professional identity and sensitivity to that for internal communication plans is an important consideration.
Users, faculty, campus partners, etc. all may be impacted by sunsetting. What options exist for data export or migration to other services? What services do you provide for them going forward? Part of this work should be the exploration of alternative options, if any, for a user to have their remaining needs met. Before you communicate with your users you’ll need to develop some migration plans. How do we still direct our users to services that will meet their needs? We don’t want to abandon our users. We’ve ended up not needing these migration plans for some services, but they were a good safety net to ensure we avoided issues for our users.
You then may want to consider how to do external communication within your profession or domain. How do you communicate that some things you sunset were still successful projects? In some ways communicating with the external audience in this way also communicates clearly to internal colleagues the value of the work they’ve done. How do boost the good work of your colleagues even after the application or service is no longer live or being practiced?
In the technologies of sunsetting section we’ll mention some of the common approaches to support these kinds of communication including pickling and tombstoning.
Page Updated: 2018-04-10