Building the future depends on having a solid foundation in the present. Sometimes the most effective way to reach the future is to shore up cracks in that foundation. This poster will use the case study of the Associate Dean’s (AD’s) actions at the James Madison University (JMU) Libraries to present an example of how to approach dramatic change in a large organization by focusing on maintaining strategic priorities in the now.

In the spring of 2018 the JMU Libraries started an eighteen-month period of great change, including the dean’s resignation and an associate dean’s retirement. A newer Associate Dean and two Interim Associate Deans, working with an interim administrator with no library experience, lead and managed the organization during this period. This included helping the organization process the previous dean’s departure, maintaining our high service quality and strong relationships on campus, and preparing for the selection and arrival of the new dean.

The interim administrator had a clear mandate to “press pause” on new programs and services. This was to avoid creating conflicts with any vision or changes that a new dean would want to put into place. However, no organization can truly pause its development for a significant amount of time. Over this 18-month period the Libraries changed its organizational name, released a completely rebuilt website, hired 20 new staff and faculty including a new dean (~14% of the total staff), developed needed foundational policy and procedure documents, and prepared for substantive progress in areas such as digital scholarship and scholarly communication.

The ADs addressed the tension between maintaining and innovating services by focusing on modeling transparent and collaborative leadership. This started with the development and sharing of six strategic priorities on which the ADs would focus during the interim period. These six priorities provided a framework for the administration’s work, as well as for communicating out what was on pause vs. what was moving forward during the period. For example, work in one priority, “Continue to develop a shared understanding of roles and expectations particularly in the area of decision-making,” included improving equity in making resource allocation decisions for space, positions, and finances. Second, the ADs dramatically increased the quantity and variety of communication that they shared with the organization. This was to counter concerns about the organizational culture, which was tending towards untrusting and anti-inclusive, and to better recognize individual and team accomplishments. Third, they leveraged a collaborative leadership model to accomplish this sometimes difficult and political work in the most transparent, equitable,and sustainable way possible.

This poster will present a brief visual of the JMU Libraries case, followed by example activities and programs tied to each of the six priority areas. It will conclude with thoughts about collaborative and transparent leadership as a means of surviving and thriving both in the now and in the future.

A community of practice (CoP) is defined as a “group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott, & Synder, 2002). In other words, people learn more effectively when they are engaging in practice with others. This provides an opportunity for members to informally share their varying levels of knowledge, sills, and experiences and to create an environment rich in diverse perspectives. This can be particularly useful for librarians wishing to learn more about the practice of effective facilitation of library-based and online teaching and learning.

A common challenge with busy librarians is finding a time to physically meet and share/create new knowledge. A possible solution to this dilemma is to create online communities of practice centered around relevant teaching and learning topics. This could provide several benefits for librarians, such as:
• Allowing for greater accessibility across a variety of librarians, communities, and time.
• Adapting quickly to meet the unique needs of librarians while teaching.
• Sharing curated resources from a variety of places and perspectives.

In this poster, I seek to apply the concept of an online CoP in an effort to suggest how librarians can join together as a community to learn and to share ideas, strategies, and tools related to effective teaching and learning. It is through this practice that I hope librarians in a community of practice generate a newer or deeper level of knowledge through the sum of the group rather than independently. These communities will be initially organized around topics such as meaningful and measurable objectives, learner-centered instructional strategies, formative assessments that drive instructional practice, and inclusive teaching practices that create positive learning environments for students.

Additionally, I intend to provide practical strategies and resources that librarians can take to create their own communities of practices in online environments. This will include topics such as encouraging dialog and varying levels of engagement, combining familiar and radical perspectives, and creating a rhyme for the community (Bates, 2016).

At a large research university in the southeast, strategic planning and a culture of assessment are key factors that drive the library’s efforts for continuous improvement and change. The library’s strategic plan is organized directly from the university’s Academic Affairs Plan, which flows from the university’s Institutional Plan. The Institutional Plan is a subset of the state’s university system plan. The University Library Advisory Council (ULAC), which consists of the deans and directors of the state’s 17 university system libraries, created its own strategic plan structured on the system plan; hence, all of the plans are aligned. The cohesion between the individual libraries and system goals has led to significant progress in major initiatives across the libraries.

Increasing accessibility is a major goal in all of the plans. In support of the library’s strategic goals to improve accessibility, several efforts have been underway, including:

1) Establishing a library Accessibility Committee,

2) Collaborating with the university’s Office of Disability Services to survey students to identify physical access barriers in the library (to be addressed in 2020),

3) Maintaining representation on the campus disability services/accessibility committee, which monitors physical and online accessibility best practices (these connections are helping the library address major accessibility issues to an early-1960’s building), and

4) Completely redesigning the library’s website with a user-centric, task-oriented approach after a year of usability testing.

Simultaneously, the ULAC Accessibility Committee assessed and developed best practices for the 17 system library accessibility web pages. In Summer 2020, the chair of the library’s Accessibility Committee will supervise a library school fellow to review the system library web pages and provide feedback to each library. The fellow will also draft an accessibility plan for the library.

The outcomes of the accessibility initiatives demonstrate a culture of assessment in an individual library, a university, and a system to the direct benefit of students. Connections with the Academic Affairs accessibility team, Disability Services, and Facilities are helping improve library accessibility. At the ULAC/System level, accessibility initiatives have provided consistent information on how to access system libraries for all populations.

Planning and intentionality are key to the success of the accessibility projects at multiple levels. Engaging a library-wide Strategic Planning Committee to identify the goals, objectives, expected performance outcomes, and tasks and tracking/adjusting them throughout the year helps keep the library moving steadily forward. Linking planning and assessment reinforces the importance of assessment in everything we do. Presenting reports from assessment projects to library staff, campus committees, and system leaders creates understanding of the importance of the assessment cycle, closing the loop, and library improvement. The library, campus, and system clearly understand the power of the assessment cycle to continuously improve efficiency and student success.

New employee development is an essential task for any organization, especially service and knowledge-based organizations where a highly skilled and capable workforce is central to the organizational value proposition. Ensuring that new employees have the competencies required to perform their jobs and to integrate into their new workplace culture is essential to organizational success. These goals are achieved through new employee development programs designed to socialize and train employees in order to help them function in their new role and workplace culture. This poster describes the redesign of a new employee development program for research / reference librarians in a special library setting. The Research Librarian Development Program is a year-long development program which was initiated in the library in 2012 in order to offer consistent training and development opportunities among all new research librarians. The program was redesigned in 2017-2018 to shift its focus from tasks toward competencies following competency-based management model. The program redesign included the creation of a new competency-based development grid, refinement of shared training plans, and the establishment of program milestones. The poster describes program changes, provides an overview of the development program with an emphasis on the types of learning activities undertaken by new employees over the course of their first year through this development program and offers lessons learned from reference services managers to guide the creation or modification of a new employee development program. These lessons can be applied to any new employee development program, regardless of library type. The specific set of competencies for research librarians and training approach at the Library of Parliament will be of interest to other reference services teams.

This project assessed the performance of two of the print suppliers for the University of North Texas Libraries: a major library book vendor and a large online retailer. The two measures used to gauge performance were (1) turn-around time to fulfill orders and (2) discount off list price as found on the library book vendor’s website. During the data collection period, we ordered the least expensive print book that was in stock at either of the vendors included in the assessment and recorded the ordering information. Following the data collection period, we analyzed the results and made a final recommendation for the ordering unit’s preference regarding print suppliers.

The University of North Texas Libraries subscribe to 1000s of different journals, e-books, and database packages, generally with annual payments. While some publishers insist on contract/license terms that prohibit disclosure of pricing information, many do not.

In 2017, following in the footsteps of the University of Alberta and Simon Fraser University, the University of North Texas Libraries elected to create a “Transparency List” of pricing for ongoing subscriptions for the sake of giving as much information as possible to inform decisions regarding collections.

Each year, the Collection Development Department in the Libraries amass pricing information for a rolling 3 years, and post it as a spreadsheet and a dataset in the institutional repository. It includes a ‘data dictionary’ describing the various fields. When publishers prohibit disclosure of their pricing, we have redacted the costs, and included a statement as to why. So far, the online Serials Transparency List has been viewed over 1,430 times.

With this information, we anticipate library liaisons and university faculty might look at pricing of journals in their fields for informed decision-making, and also use the data in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. We also make this public to the world in our institutional repository and through the SPARC Big Deal Knowledge Base in hopes that it helps other libraries with their negotiations and collection management decisions.

As the information profession addresses ways to un-silo assets and operations within our organizations, information managers are realizing the critical need to engage collaboratively to solve problems and make more strategic decisions. The authors will discuss a case study that addresses this need and exemplifies a new model of collaboration. Through examining a library digital asset system migration implemented via a team approach, the presenters will share several empowering possibilities that are created when information technologists, metadata experts, and managerial professionals learn to work together as decision-makers. The team experienced challenges; and these challenges will be described as scenarios with multiple perspectives, challenges and approaches. Using visualizations, the presenters will illustrate the spectrum of organizational perspectives and associated assumptions and delve into common fears and perceived threats when negotiating resource commitments. With these themes exposed, the presenters will offer recommendations for navigating each scenario with a focus on improved and inclusive communication. Recommendations will focus on techniques to encourage healthy debate; particularly in regard to respectful assertion of preferences, effective translation of complex concepts, and streamlined decision-making in flat hierarchies like committee and team structures.

Scholarly research gives us insight into the future of libraries.  However, collaborative research projects may crash and burn if not well planned.  Learn how to choose team members, facilitate collaboration and organize all the elements of a project to create a successful publication or presentation.  Also included are administrative responsibilities, thoughts on handling problems, examples of delineating responsibilities. 

There are multiple reasons to collaborate on scholarship – use others’ expertise, mentorship, reinforce accountability, and get motivated. Also, research indicates that there is a higher acceptance rate for multi-authored papers than single-authored papers. However, there are things to look out for in choosing collaborators – consider compatible work habits, receptivity to criticism, and commitment to fulfill responsibilities.

There are also multiple decisions to be made. These include where to publish, in what order authors’ names will appear, and how the manuscripts will be written. Who will coordinate? Who will write what? Who will revise?

Technology can be used to facilitate collaboration, and everyone should be aware of relevant deadlines. This poster presentation will also cover how to address problems – missed deadlines, less-than-stellar quality, how to say “no” in the future, and what to do if YOU are the problem collaborator.

During the summer of 2019, Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Florham Campus Library undertook a twelve-week Training the Trainer Program for librarians to teach each other about current trends in academic librarianship and share our individual areas of expertise. Created and lead by the Library’s Associate University Librarian & Director of Public Services, the purpose of the Program was to inspire her team of librarians to reflect upon their teaching practices, embed the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in their one-shot information literacy classes, and increase awareness of current pedagogical theories and practices relating to academic librarianship.

Participation in this program was mandatory for five librarians with teaching responsibilities, including the Associate University Librarian & Director of Public Services, but was open to all library staff interested in attending. Each of the five teaching librarians were required to present on at least one topic, with some librarians presenting up to four topics. Topics for presentations included the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, Legal Research, PowerPoint Best Practices, LibGuides, Instructional Design, and Special Collections & Archives. Presentations occurred once a week and lasted about one hour. While the presentations typically occurred every Tuesday at 10am over the twelve weeks, the small size of the program allowed for some flexibility with scheduling in the event of previously scheduled meetings, vacation time, or other unavoidable conflicts. The Training the Trainer Program was created in-house, therefore there was no financial cost. Because it was held over the summer, it did not interfere with teaching responsibilities and rarely interfered with reference desk coverage.

An anonymous survey at the end of the program demonstrated that while the program was considered to be too time-consuming, the participants greatly enjoyed and valued the opportunity to improve their knowledge of library trends, teaching best practices, and useful software and technology tools for reference and teaching. Participants also appreciated the time to collaborate and exchange ideas with their colleagues. Many of the topics covered during the Training the Trainer Program were adopted by the teaching librarians in their information literacy instruction afterwards during the fall semester. FDU’s Florham Campus Library plans to hold this program again in the summer of 2020 during a more manageable six-week period.

In the Spring of 2018, the Carl S. Swisher Library restructured it’s student worker program from one general student worker position to five unique roles. The change was made in responsive to a small staff size struggling to keep up with both day-to-day operations, as well as their additional responsibilities and projects. Students were designated to either work in Circulation, Collection Management, Technical Services, Archives, or Government Documents. Each role was designed to assist a staff member on the circulation team and help to make the day-to-day operations more efficient.

The poster will examine the process of making these changes, what worked, and what didn’t. It will dive into the more successful components, areas for improvement, and overall how the restructuring has made an impact on the department over the past two years. There are certainly both benefits and drawbacks to the change, but overall it has been a positive asset to the library.

Overall, the poster will be designed to help managers looking to make a similar change to their student employee structure. It is also relevant for those managing volunteers in public libraries. Because libraries are typically short staffed and running on a shoestring budget, this restructuring can help to bridge the gap between meeting increasing demands with decreasing staff size.