Greetings from the 2012 NCLA Leadership Institute. It began Thursday after lunch and runs through lunch on Sunday. Having the institute run through the weekend wasn’t the planning committee’s original plan, but the limited availability of rooms at our country retreat required it. The institute seems to be going well. Everyone is fully engaged and contributing ideas and observations. The food is good. And my six mentees seem to find our small group meetings fruitful. Alas, I lost good-mentor points for leading a large posse of institute hikers at dusk down what turned out to be a dead-end trail past the spooky paintball course. And perhaps offering up one of the more diminutive institute participants to any bear we might encounter was not the most emotionally intelligent solution to that potential problem. Ah well. Mentors can still learn too.
Here’s a quick update to the liaison task force report we finished in late August. The dean and assistant deans at UNCG met with the task force members on Wednesday to discuss a few details of the report. The meeting concluded with our dean deciding to write up charges for two implementation task forces. One will work on a plan for our Acquisitions Department to take on the work we would like the hypothetical collections development staff to take care of – work that should relieve a significant amount of work from liaisons.
The other task force will work on a plan to retire our current Reference department and replace it with a Liaison department. (Our dean would like a more descriptive department name than that – one that would make sense outside the library. Perhaps “Teaching & Outreach?”) The key aspect of this team’s work will probably be making sure this change is transformative, not just rebranding. Our worthy head of reference is on board with this and will be on the task force too. Will the work of this implementation task force be harder than its predecessor? Is this going to be a “be careful what you wish” scenario? Maybe! Exciting times ahead…
