Forming liaison subject teams (our reorganization continues)

The school-wide graduation ceremony took place on Friday. I’ve actually never gone, which I feel a little guilty about especially when marketing students ask me if I’ll be there. But I’m still trying to move along some projects before taking a summer vacation (at least that’s my excuse this year).

One of those projects is our ongoing liaison reorganization. On Wednesday the liaisons met to form our subject teams, consider what functional leadership teams we need, and brainstorm communication plans and first-year goals for the teams. This is nothing radical to those of you who are used to working in a team environment but an important step for us as we phase out our Reference & Instructional Services department and replace it with a liaison department. (We haven’t discussed what our new name will be yet.)

This planning meeting turned out to be collegial and even a little exciting, I think, as we explored the possibilities of our new organizational plan and how the plan could address some weaknesses in our liaison program we identified last summer. Part of that excitement though is a little undercurrent of anxiety from not knowing exactly how the plan will turn out (ex. how well each team is going to work together). Our current organizational structure is very familiar and safe, even if now dated given new prioritizes and roles of liaisons.

We ended up forming three subject teams:

• Arts & Humanities
• Social Sciences/Professions
• Natural Science

Not very creative, but these categories seemed logical for us to adopt too. Given liaison assignments at UNCG the natural science team will only have three members (including a librarian not yet hired), while the humanities team will have at least seven and possibly nine. The planning committee will ask that large team to discuss whether to break up into two smaller teams or remain large.

We had a longer discussion of what functional leadership teams to begin with. We did decide to have an Instruction Team. We already had an interdepartmental Instructional Technology Team, so we really just broadening the scope of that existing team a bit. Our Instruction Coordinator, DE Coordinator, and First-Year Instruction Coordinator will be the nucleus of this team.

We considered teams for Scholarly Communication, Data Curation, and Collections, but need to wait until our new Assistant Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication is hired to learn what thoughts that AD has on those possible teams.

For the conclusion of our planning meeting we brainstormed possible team goals and the parameters of those goals. Our strengths and weaknesses document from last summer provided some guidance here.

Parameters for team goals:

• Realistic
• Defined duration (ex. one semester or one year)
• Measurable/assessable outcomes
• Share team goals & outcomes with other teams

Ideas for goals:

• Map the skill sets available in each team
• Assess academic departments for instructional and outreach needs
• Review and reconsider in a holistic, intentional manner our liaison assignments
• Prioritize which academic departments need more attention than others; customize needed liaison services department by department
• Collaborate with Special Collections & University Archives (Humanities team)
• Develop a plan to more holistically collect liaison stats
• Begin collecting liaison success stories and using those collected stories to better promote our services and value
• Train new liaisons
• Integrate our Diversity Resident Librarian into the Social Science team for her second year
• Integrate our Reference Interns into the subject or functional teams as appropriate

Next steps:

On June 17 a UNCG Communication Studies lecturer who specializes in team dynamics will provide the liaisons with a 90-minute training workshop. Before then, each subject team will meet for the first time. The suggested agenda will be:

1. Choose a team leader for the first year. (Our liaison department head wants to meet with each leader soon)
2. Begin discussing how the team would like to communicate and in general work together
3. Begin discussing possible first-year team goals and, if possible, choose some.
4. Share your notes and decisions with the other teams so that we can learn from each other

I’m excited to see how this experiment with grass roots reorganization turns out. Updates coming later this summer.

BLINC in Asheville: Fermentation sciences and other regional economic themes

Fourteen members of BLINC assembled at WCU’s new Asheville branch on Friday for our spring workshop. I drove up on Thursday after lunch with two librarian friends for a hike at the NC Arboretum near the Blue Ridge Parkway and dinner downtown. All three of us enjoyed the two-day break from spring busyness. Exams had just begun at UNCG, ending a long semester of research consultations and classroom work and I was a little burned out. I came back refreshed and ready to tackle a few more peer review evaluations, science liaison search committee work, and liaison reorganization planning. (Tomorrow the liaisons meet to form our subject and functional teams and set preliminary team goals and communication strategies. Details in my next post.)

WCU’s Betsy Clementson and WFU’s Mary Scanlon, our chair, did a wonderful job of planning the creative BLINC workshop agenda. Our morning speaker was Scott Hamilton, President and CEO of AdvantageWest, Western North Carolina’s regional economic development agency. There are seven such agencies across the state. Mr. Hamilton described AdvantageWest’s areas of focus: advanced manufacturing, entrepreneurship, films (ex. “Hunger Games”), the green economy, and food and natural products. In terms of consumers the later area of focus is most associated with the Asheville area. In relatively short time 13 breweries and 3 distilleries have opened, with cider and sake producers coming in this summer. Sierra Nevada will be opening its first east coast brewery in the area next winter; New Belgium will follow in 2015 with a downtown site.

Mr. Hamilton also discussed some bio-energy start-ups and the need to encourage more young people to enter manufacturing careers. He noted that while the number of manufacturing workers has dropped significantly in the state, the total wages for manufacturing have not dropped much, reflecting the growth in well-paid manufacturing jobs. Mr. Hamilton added that such jobs are increasingly clean, varied, and interesting and are now no risker for longevity of employment than most other industries.

The BLINC librarians discussed with Mr. Hamilton how he and other job creators use library resources (or not) and other data sources. He and Betsy may collaborate in the future. He also gave us a heads-up on the state entrepreneurship conference this fall in Charlotte; BLINC and NC LIVE will try to get together to have a presence there.

Next we spend ten minutes on BLINC business and then heard ASU’s Leslie Farison recap her recent semester in China learning about how academic libraries work over there. Then we went to lunch.

After lunch we drove over to the Highlands Brewery on the edge of town for a tour and discussion of their supply chain (supporting several family businesses and farms at both ends of the chain, ex. using hops waste for feed) and local economic impact (ex. hosting local music as well as creating jobs). The tour reflected some key points in Mr. Hamilton’s discussion of supporting entrepreneurship, developing local niche industries that can become nationally known, and promoting manufacturing. And it was fun. BLINC is a really cool group to provide networking and educational opportunities like this.

What our liaisons think about workloads and prioritizations

Is the semester over yet? It feels like it should be. And this would be another 6-day work week starting today, Sunday, except that on Thursday we have the NCLA Leadership Institute 2013 follow-up meeting and discussion at the neat High Point Public Library and I’ll be taking Friday off as comp time. Next week Friday BLINC will rendezvous in Asheville for an intriguing workshop agenda; at the microbrewery we will toast the advent of summer!

The NCLIVE 15-year celebration web site came out, and includes the video of me talking about NCLIVEs’ economic development goals and the NCLIVE-BLINC partnerships. Elon University’s excellent Business Librarian Betty Garrison is also pictured.

The Export Odyssey presentations in MKT 426 concluded last Thursday. By happy coincidence the two presentations attended by our Small Business and Technology Development Center representative were the best ones of the semester. I had met this SBTDC rep at ExportTech a while ago when we were both attending that event as consultants so it was nice seeing him in the context of my normal librarian work.

Meanwhile in ENT 300 there is one week to go in the final presentations of the feasibility plans. I enjoy those presentations – the students seem genuinely enthused about their business ideas. But maybe that enthusiasm is a problem sometimes. So far no team has concluded that their plan is not feasible. One of the SCORE reps expressed concern with how the students (most of them of traditional college-aged) seem to deem it a failure to declare that based on their research a business idea might not be worth pursuing after all. Perhaps that will happen this week – a couple of teams are working with entrepreneurs whose business ideas are based on passionate interest but don’t seem be too sustainable as a business.

Then there are the increasingly last-minute research consults for other business classes, science librarian search committee work, and our ongoing liaison reorganization.

Today’s topic

Two months ago I wrote about our survey for liaisons that “identifies how they spend their time on all their responsibilities, asks what frustrations they have, and asks what work they could give up.” I wrote how this survey “relates to our need to prioritize the responsibilities of liaisons and to help liaisons deal with work load issues.” The survey asked five questions:

1. The mix of time spent on each liaison responsibility (ex. teaching, consulting, collections, etc.)
2. Which of those responsibilities are the highest priorities for your academic departments?
3. Which responsibilities or opportunities do you feel need additional attention or time?
4. Which responsibilities would you like to see dropped from your plate? Why?
5. What other thoughts or ideas regarding liaison responsibilities do you have?

There are a few more details about the survey in that February post.

A week ago our small reorganization planning team reviewed the surveys and presented the results to the liaisons. While we told the liaisons that they were welcome to keep their responses anonymous, most of us provided useful examples and details from our own liaison work and therefore outed ourselves. But the planning team kept the responses anonymous in the survey summary. (My colleague Lynda Kellam has blogged on her thoughts in response to the survey.)

Our agenda at the discussion:

1. Prologue: Reminder of the liaison reorganization timeline & the need for the survey
2. Executive summary
3. Results from the 5 questions
4. General discussion of the results
5. Discussion of the next steps in the reorganization (summer tasks)

The executive summary:

• Most liaisons spend the most time on teaching & consulting.
• Most liaisons report that teaching & consulting are also the highest priorities of liaison work for most academic departments.
• There is much interest in having more time for outreach.
• There is wide (but not universal) interest in dropping title-by-title selection & no longer having to spend out departmental firm-order book budgets each spring.
• There is significant interest in leaving scholarly communications expertise and training to a specialist.
• There is some concern about liaisons spending less time on the reference desk.
• There’s growing embedded work; the liaisons with embedded roles reported having the highest percentages of consultation work.

While there was a clear consensus on most issues, some minority opinions were expressed in the surveys too. The concern about the slow shift of reference desk staffing from subject specialist librarians to staff colleagues (the point of the penultimate bullet point above) is one example.

Details on the first question:

Our time-usage question asked the liaisons to use the five main categories from our liaison task force report. Under each question are the average percentages reported by the liaisons:

1. Teaching and learning (instruction sessions; developing assignments, tutorials, guides, etc.; embedding in classes; assessment):
–Around 35% on average. High 65%, low 2%

2. Research support & consulting (consultations to students and faculty in-person or via email, chat, etc.)
–Around 25% on average. High 35%, low 10%

3. Collections (developing print and electronic collections, reaccreditation and program reviews)
–Around 15% on average. High 50%, low 5%

4. Outreach and promotion. (outreach to academic units, Learning Communities, attending meetings and other events)
–Around 10% on average. High 20%, low 0%

5. Scholarly Communication (promoting open access, NC DOCKS, author rights and current publishing trends)
–Around 5% on average. High 10%, low 0%.

Second question: Which of those responsibilities are the highest priorities for your academic departments?

The survey said:

• Teaching 8 (includes embedded teaching)
• Consulting 8
• Outreach 2
• Collections 1

There were some ties.

Third question: Which responsibilities or opportunities do you feel need additional attention or time? Why?

Results:

• Outreach/reaching more departments 9
• Scholarly communication 3
• Assessment 2
• More learning in subject area 2
• Instructional technology 2
• Consultations 2
• Collection development 1

There were a number of interesting comments for this one. Several folks advocated for a more intentional and holistic approach to liaison work (this idea first came out last summer when we developed our task force report). Several expressed concern that some academic departments aren’t getting enough attention due to our lack of time and staffing — another idea that came up last summer. Other folks mentioned wanting to have more time for increased embedded work, teaching skills development, and subject knowledge learning and updating. All worthy goals! (If only we had the staffing or time.) There was also one concern that some faculty will feel neglected if we’re not paying as much attention to book collection development.

Fourth question: Which responsibilities would you like to see dropped from your plate? Why?

• Collection development 6
• Scholarly communication 3
• Reference desk 2

There is wide (but not unanimous, as you have seen) interest in dropping title-by-title selection by liaisons and not having to worry about spending out departmental firm-order budgets each spring.

Some would like leaving scholarly communications expertise to a specialist, given that scholarly communication as well as data curation are very complicated, technical and fast evolving areas. I should add here that these liaisons are not advocating for no longer supporting these initiatives, but are concerned that all the liaisons are expected to become experts in scholarly communication and data curation. This is an issue for which there will be further discussions once our new AD for Collections & Scholarly Communication is hired.

Other comments from question #4:

• As mentioned in the summary, there was one concern expressed about liaisons spending less time on the reference desk.
• Meanwhile, hope was expressed that our head of Reference & Instruction Services would soon be able to focus exclusively on being the head of our liaison initiatives and not have provide oversight for our reference services.
• Other liaisons wrote that title-by-title weeding doesn’t have to be done by liaisons if we have subject-specific weeding policies that staff or student workers could faithfully follow.
• There was hope that big collections projects could be limited to the summer when liaisons are usually not busy with teaching and consulting.
• Finally, a wise liaison noted that we will never have enough time to do everything.

Final question: What other thoughts or ideas regarding liaison responsibilities do you have?

• We need more liaison positions. The campus has grown dramatically in the last 15 years, with many more students, faculty, and PhD programs, but the number of fulltime liaison positions has not grown in response. (This is a pet peeve of mine; another liaison noted the same problem.)
• We need more training in best practices of running meetings.
• There is some lack of awareness by administrators of our work patterns as well as our accomplishments as liaisons. (I wonder if this is common concern for liaisons at other libraries. Much of liaison work takes place out of the library, making it harder for admin types to know what is going on, perhaps? Then we liaisons need to do a better job of telling our success stories. Something to work on…)
• There was concern from one liaison about embedded librarians not being in the library as much to support drop-in reference questions.
• We need to continue to support book buying; faculty are not always spending time to do this despite some big interest in some departments in developing book collections.
• There is high value & measureable outcomes of being embedding in classes; embeddedness increases demand for consultations and research support.
• I am looking forward to our subject team approach and the potential for more holistic approach to liaison service (ex. instruction).

Discussion

As we knew going in, there is wide support for trying out our new proposed model of liaison organization with its emphasis on instruction, outreach, and research support. Our administration supports those goals. There is a bit of dissent regarding reduced priority for the reference desk and book selection; that dissent corresponds to generational differences in our department. But our subject teams could be set up to leverage the various strengths of the liaisons. For example, a liaison who excels at book selection and other collections work could take on increased responsibility for that work across an academic discipline, while other teammates focus more on teaching. We presented such a scenario in our task force report last summer.

(At ACRL this month Lynda and Jenny Dale from UNCG and Lauren Pressley from Virginia Tech discussed their idea of “library personas” and included a discussion of how subject teams like ours could take advantage of personas. See Lynda or Lauren’s post for their slides.)

We will need to continue to work on creating more time for high priority liaison work by reducing the time demands of reference desk service and routine collection development tasks. And the new AD will need to work with us on our evolving model of scholarly communication outreach (add data curation to that starting this fall).

Onward

In early May the liaisons will reconvene to create our subject teams, functional teams, and their initial lineups. We will also begin to discuss (could be more a brainstorming session at this early point) about how the teams will work together and interact with the functional teams. Finally, we will begin discussing how the teams could address the issues & ideas expressed in the survey.

Production houses, craft brewing, & adult stores research

My newest research question worthy of being saved for teaching and training purposes came from a Master of Fine Arts candidate in Film & Video Production. She emailed me reporting that she is…

working on a feasibility plan and was wondering if you could offer some assistance….I am trying to do market research such as industry size, growth potential, industry trends, competition profile, etc. [My professor] explained how to access the IBISWorld database but I am having a hard time figuring out what industry my idea falls under. My venture plan is for a non-profit production house that offers youth media training workshops in filmmaking. We will also offer equipment rentals and video production services to other non-profits.

What industry this idea falls under is an excellent question that once again illustrates the need to reach beyond 6-digit NAICS-level data if possible and also include data from any proxy industry for which 6-d NAICS data does exist. I asked her if she has thought about partnering with the public library.

Meanwhile I learned from our latest IBIS usage report that among the most popular industries researched at UNCG was craft brewing. That’s a new one for us, although wine and breweries have long been popular too. I shared the report with the Assistant Dean for Research at the business school who was amused that “Adult Stores” had a single view. I didn’t tell him that that user was me — checking out what exactly that report was covering. (That one is in IBIS’ “Specialized Industry” collection that we were able to recently pick up; craft brewing is from the same collection.)

The AD then shared the usage report with his research council. It’s nice to get that content-level usage data beyond the merely click-through level data the library tracks for all subscriptions. I would like to get detailed usage reports like that from more vendors. I should make more of an effort to ask them about this possibility…

Research roundup: the case for short & multiple research sessions

Hooray, March is almost over. I had my last rounds of one-shot instruction last Thursday and the science librarian search committee has begun to conduct phone interviews. Scheduled and drop-in consultations from marketing, entrepreneurship, and management students are still plentiful but will climax in a week or two as final presentations draw near.

In MKT 426, the Miss Jenny’s Pickles team has already received credit for making an export sale! Miss Jenny used the team’s preliminary research to contact a retailer in the UK and make a sale. She has been featured recently on 60 Minutes and entertained one of our U.S. senators at the pickle plant, so this sale is a big deal.

Today I just have a morning coffee chat with the new business librarian at the Greensboro Public Library, and a discussion of the presentation outline in MKT 426 after lunch. So today should be a nice transition into Easter weekend.

Next Friday I drive to Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte to help plan a Metrolina information literacy conference program with three J&W librarians who invited me to join them. They just finished a book titled Fundamentals for the Academic Liaison (coming this fall), which will be the basis for the panel. We will also submit this panel for the NCLA Conference in October. For past NCLAs I’ve recruited librarians for discussion panels on embedded librarianship  and upper-level library instruction, so it’s a nice change to be invited in to a panel someone else has organized.

Keeping up with professional literature is not a priority for me during the fall and spring semester but I did take advantage of some quiet time today to download new articles from Evidence Based Library and Information Practice and Collaborative Librarianship. Both are open-access journals.

“By and for Us: The Development of a Program for Peer Review of Teaching by and for Pre-Tenure Librarians” and “Co-Teaching Relationships among Librarians and Other Information Professionals” [as opposed to co-teaching with a professor] from Collaborative Librarianship look interesting and I downloaded them to look at later. Amy Harris our Coordinator of Instruction would like us to start doing peer review of teaching as we transition into our new liaison organization, so that article may help us out.

I did read one article from the other journal right away:

One-shot or Embedded? Assessing Different Delivery Timing for Information Resources Relevant to Assignments
Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2013, 8.1
Amy Van Epps, Megan Sapp Nelson
Purdue Engineering Librarians

The authors’ objective was to learn if the timing of research workshops impacted the quality of students’ research. They contrasted teaching a “single, 50-minute lecture early in the semester” for one section of class with teaching four short (12 minutes) lectures scheduled right before work on each assignment began for two other sections.

(So providing four short workshops equals embedded librarianship according to the authors. Given how broadly defined “embedded librarianship” can be, I don’t have a problem with that. Evaluating the students’ deliverables can be considered embedded work too.)

The total research instruction time ended up being the same for the two classes, and the same content was delivered. Different librarians taught the two sections, but with similar teaching styles, the authors indicate.

The Purdue librarians conclude that

“More frequent and timely interaction between students and library instruction increases the quality of sources used and the completeness of the citations written.”

They based that conclusion on the average number of citations in each report and the quality of citations (rated high, medium, or low by the librarians). In particular, students in the one-shot section use more web pages while the students in the librarian-embedded classes used more articles.

The authors also note the value of the embedded librarian being present when the students received their grades and feedback:

“While the same content was presented, the librarian offering the mini-lectures noted the ability for quick follow-up from the preceding assignment and a progression in the learning about library resources. While this practice generated a small difference in delivery, it was a natural outgrowth of repeated visits to the class and a desire from the students to understand why the sources for the preceding assignment were not adequate for the current assignment” [emphasis mine]

So the embedded librarian joined the conversation between the professor and students regarding evaluations on the assignment and then was able to increase the relevance of the next “mini-lecture” based on that conversation. Students were probably more engaged with the remaining research instruction too.

The authors note that these sections had different course instructors, which certainly could also have impacted the quality of the students’ work.

Based on my own anecdotal experiences I have thought that multiple short instructional visits are often more effective and productive than one long research workshop. Thanks to the Purdue librarians for testing that idea.

Searching for the next stellar science liaison

Spring break is here. I’m at work for two days before flying up to Michigan to visit family. There’s not too much on my plate before then. This afternoon an intern from NC LIVE will be videotaping interviews with another UNCG librarian and me. The interviews will be part of a video in celebration of NC LIVE’s 15^th anniversary. I will be talking about NC LIVE and BLINC working together to promote the contribution of libraries to economic development in the state. By tomorrow afternoon I will review the applications for our new science position (more on that below) and finish this blog post.

Last week ended early but eventfully. On Thursday in MKT 426 the students turned in their trade data split-share analysis, and Professor Williamson and I began discussing their “First Interim” assignment, in which the students do extensive research into the exporting market strategies of U.S. and non-U.S. export competitors. Since most of that work is centered on database searching, and since Professor W. had to leave early to serve as a panelist on a faculty forum concerning technology transfer/innovation commercialization and the promotion and tenure process, I was the lead teacher for the period and the solo teacher for the second half. At the end of class I had to deal with a quite upset student who had begun this assignment early but hadn’t noticed that Prof. W. requires the students to provide evidence of each keyword search used in each database and search engine as well as the preliminary search results. (My interaction with that student would have been another good case study in the book chapter I recently wrote regarding the communication triangle between the co-teaching librarian, professor, and students.) Over the weekend that student emailed me an apology for being upset. This student makes some of the most interesting points in discussions so I’m glad he’s feeling better about the class.

I was able to shut down my office by 5pm and then head to the Greensboro Coliseum for the ACC Women’s Basketball Tournament. My wife and I played hooky from our libraries to catch three games on Friday. Now back at work after the three-day weekend and watching our team win it all on Sunday.

So back to reviewing applications. I’m chairing the search committee for our new Science Liaison Librarian position. We have long had a health science librarian position, but the other sciences haven’t really been a priority in terms of outreach-oriented liaison work. This new science position is our first liaison search since our task force report was written and affirmed by Library Administration.

The position description reflects many aspects of our reorganization of liaison work:

• Work collaboratively with science faculty to develop, deliver and assess information literacy for science student in a variety of formats and platforms.
• Work with science faculty and students to develop data management and data curation plans for their research.
• Educate and inform faculty and graduate students on scholarly communication issues such as open-access initiatives, digital publishing and copyright.

The position description also mentions more traditional liaison work like creating research guides and providing research consultations.

Absent from the description is our new department name (which doesn’t exist yet) and a reference to our upcoming emphasis on working in subject teams. I should have suggested something like “experience with working with teams” in the job posting when our AD for Public Services shared a draft description with me; that would have made a good “preferred qualification”. But the search committee can ask candidates about that in interviews.

Also absent from the description is an expectation that the liaison will be providing general reference services. By 2014 it seems likely we will have a triage model for the reference desk. I would guess our new science librarian will spend a little time on the Reference Desk for 2013-14 (as I do) but general reference work will never be a significant part of his or her time.

Collection development is listed in the description (“Develop print and electronic collections in liaison areas”) but only as the 6th bullet point under “Responsibilities”, reflecting the trend to deemphasize such work for liaisons.

We had the usual discussion about how much emphasis to place on having a science degree and science librarianship experience. Many other academic libraries are searching for science librarians right now too – it’s interesting to see what decisions those libraries have made regarding the science experience. It looks like we ended up with a moderate stance.

So far the pool of applicants looks pretty good, despite the historic challenges of hiring librarians with science backgrounds (particularly for positions based in general libraries). So fingers crossed.

p.s. Hmmm is it harder to hire a good science librarian or business librarian? Could be a good discussion to have in a bar during a library conference sometime.

Liaison reorganization: beginning the implementation process

Here’s an update on our liaison reorganization. No big new ideas in this post. Instead this is a summary of the next steps taken as we begin to implement our new plan based on our time line.

We created a small team to coordinate the reorganization process: Kathy Crowe (AD for Public Services), Mary Krautter (head of Reference and future head of the liaison department), and me (as chair of the team that lead the creation of our liaison recommendations last summer). A collegial and nimble group! We will collaborate with the liaisons, other public service staff, Acquisitions, and Administration as needed on our goals:

• Coordinate the steps of the recommended timeline with input from liaisons and other stakeholders;
• Coordinate the implementation of liaison reorganization and establishment of liaisons’ priorities and responsibilities;
• Recommend a structure to Library Administration that supports these responsibilities and priorities;
• Coordinate this proposed structure in conjunction with the Service Desk Task Force [which concerns new staffing models for our circulation, reference, and security desks]

Kathy, Mary, and I are working on two projects this month:

First project:

The first is utilizing the Acquisitions Department to lessen the collections management workload of liaisons.

We met with our head of Acquisitions Christine Fischer to review our recent large group discussions regarding collections work load issues. The liaisons have (rather happily) not had any major special collections projects since last spring. But we know that someday we will have more big weeding goals and other large projects. Part of the problem had been lack of policy and guidelines for making decisions on weeding or what to do with print journal runs corresponding to our last ejournal backfile purchases. In the past we liaisons had to check and make a decision on every title. If our emerging subject teams create some guidelines for such situations then hopefully most of the review work could be accomplished by Acquisitions staff (or even student workers in Access Services for some weeding projects), with the liaisons called in only for the challenging or surprising situations.

Meanwhile we continue to see the evolution of book ordering mirroring that of journal subscription selection: more ebook packages and consortial packages (like the Big Deal for journals) and alternative access options like PDA e-books, which we started doing four or five years ago (like PPV for articles). Perhaps the next trend will be the deemphasis of departmental book budgets for firm ordering in favor of larger book budgets shared by disciplines like the humanities, or in favor of just having one big happy pot of money for firm-ordering. (Older librarians tell me that once journal subscriptions were budgeted by academic department.) There were a couple of programs at the Charleston Conference last November on this emerging book budget practice in action. Many liaisons here dread the slightly manic need to spend out book budgets in March even though we are often very busy then with classes and consultations. To spend out budgets quickly requires ordering lots of expensive and/or obscure books in contrast to the books already brought in by the approval plan or made available through our PDA program. That’s not an ideal use of our limited collections budget in my opinion, nor of the time of a busy liaison.

The coordination team discussed that each subject team (humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, most likely) would have a team-elected collections expert. Those experts (liaisons very experienced and very interested in collections work) would form a functional team along with the AD of Collections & Scholarly Communications and Christine to cover routine collections needs. This team would replace our current Collections Management Committee that involves over 15 people and meets monthly. Only for big topics would a full liaisons meeting be called. This organizational model mirrors that of some of the libraries we benchmarked last summer.

Second project:

The second project is to develop a questionnaire for liaisons that identifies how they spend their time on all their responsibilities, asks what frustrations they have, and asks what work they could give up. This relates to our need to prioritize the responsibilities of liaisons and to help liaisons deal with work load issues. The survey will ask about:

• The mix of time spent on each liaison responsibility (ex. teaching, consulting, book ordering, etc.)
• Which of those responsibilities are the highest priorities for your academic departments
• Which responsibilities would benefit by having more time to devote to them
• Which responsibilities would you like to see dropped from your plate? Why?
• What other thoughts or ideas regarding liaison responsibilities do you have?

We hope to have a good discussion with all the liaisons in response to the survey findings, and Mary also plans on using these questions in her annual evaluation meetings with the reference librarians/liaisons in terms of helping us at a personal level with work load issues.  Mary’s private discussions with each of us will be very important given the personal nature of dealing with heavy workloads and stress. No two liaisons respond the same way to heavy demands on his or her time. However I’m hoping that all of us really embrace the opportunity to prioritize our liaison responsibilities and get better at saying “no” to requests to do more work or join more committees.

The next project:

Soon the coordination team will talk to Amy Harris, our Coordinator of Library Instruction, regarding the role of “functional coordinators.” She agreed to be the ring leader of our various coordinators. Amy identified such positions for Library Instruction (herself), Data Services, First-Year Instruction, Distance Education, and Electronic Resources. Research Support could be a new one too – we just posted that position. A lot of folks! (Most are liaisons too.) We’ll see if their large number becomes an issue with communication as our teams get set up. Amy has already led a discussion of all the functional coordinators.  They discussed how they could work with the subject teams, and could work with Mary as a leadership team for the liaison department.  They also discussed the coordinators’ role with annual reviews and perhaps peer-observations.

I hope everyone is having a good February.