About Us

Our team is passionate about understanding what kind of changes libraries want to make with their collections and helping them achieve their goals.

We’re here to support libraries that need to make changes on a large scale and on a time-constrained, project-basis. We support branch consolidations, remodeling, library closures and digital transformations.

Our areas of expertise include

  • library collection consolidations and relocations

  • assignable space planning, scenario modeling and shelving space analytics

  • collections analysis and dispositioning

  • coordinating surge support for temporary or permanent removals, digitization, shared print contributions and donations

Interior of a modern library with wooden accents, multiple bookshelves, and a large spiral wooden staircase, natural light coming through skylights.

We thrive at combining desk work (analytics, scenario modeling) with on-the-ground, real world operations support, including site visits, statistical sampling, recalculation of altered shelving capacity, space design, collections triage, project sequencing and overseeing collection shifts.

We work closely with architects, contractors, digitization agents, shared print programs, book remainderers and storage vendors to reshape library collections to support new or evolving research needs and curriculum.

Collaborations with additional third parties in the Bay Area and California allow us to bring wrap-around services to libraries on the move.

A laptop computer on a reflective surface displaying a dashboard with analytics and graphs, with a wooden door and shelves in the background.
A woman with curly brown hair and blue eyes wearing a blue checkered shirt, standing outdoors with a blurred background of trees and buildings.

Library Evolution is a woman-owned small business serving academic, research and corporate libraries in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Founder Emily Stambaugh brings over 20 years of experience working with libraries and library consortia on research collections, shared print archives, collections analysis algorithms and systems. While she has consulted widely across the academic library sector to form shared print programs and adopt risk management strategies for retaining, digitizing or consolidating physical collections, she entered this newer space of supporting individual California libraries directly in recognition of an important gap in services between the network level of library collaboration and the local level of enabling change.

It has been an idea in the making for some years, initially as a response to the increasing rate of university closures in the Bay Area, often with no plan to rehouse the library collections including the semi-rare materials that had been committed to shared print programs.

Her more recent work with the Graduate Theological Union revealed a more nuanced, albeit non-trivial, library transformation and curriculum transformation underway in the heart of the humanities collections (philosophy, religion, theology). Always seeking opportunities for innovation, two sequential projects there helped hone the core services that are missing in the library sector (as well as the architectural design sector) to assist libraries with structural change to their collections. These have become the foundations of Library Evolution’s consulting services.

Emily has transformed library collections, library spaces and technologies for the University of California Libraries, California Digital Library, Western Regional Storage Trust (>70 U.S. academic libraries), SCELC member libraries, Council of Prairie and Pacific Libraries, British Columbia Research Libraries Group, Rosemont Shared Print Program, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Menlo College and the Graduate Theological Union. She looks forward to helping libraries in California to continue to evolve and thrive.