Faculty

On Being a New Liaison

Please welcome our new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger Abby Flanigan, Research Librarian for Music and Performing Arts at the University of Virginia.

Last January, I joined the University of Virginia Libraries as the Research Librarian for Music and Performing Arts. This is my first professional position after graduating from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with my MSLS in May 2016, and I’ve found myself in an entirely new (to me) area of the profession: liaison librarianship. In graduate school, I heeded the advice I’ve seen echoed in every corner of the Internet about LIS programs, which is to get as much work experience as you can, and cobbled together a variety of internships in preservation, digital scholarship, cataloging, and reference services. Despite this list of jobs on my resume, I remember feeling instantly panicked when the first question in my interview was to describe my past experience as a liaison, because, of course, I didn’t have any. Luckily, I managed to collect myself and describe some other capacities in which I had worked with faculty, and ended up getting the job. Now that I’ve been here a few months I wanted to share some of my observations about what makes being a liaison both challenging and exciting as a new professional.

No two liaison positions look exactly alike. Because each academic department has different needs and histories with the library, each liaison I know works differently with their departments. Some are busy all semester teaching classes or doing research consultations with undergraduate students, while other collaborate on grants or do collection development for foreign-language sources. Similarly, liaisons are organized differently at many libraries, so it can also be difficult to directly compare positions or responsibilities with colleagues at peer institutions. At UVA, subject liaison responsibilities are decoupled from collection development, general reference, and first-year teaching responsibilities, so my day-to-day work looks very different than liaisons at other institutions whose responsibilities are split across a variety of areas. This was challenging when I first started because, not knowing exactly what I was supposed to do, my instinct was to model my strategy for engagement on my colleagues’, but it didn’t always transfer or apply.

This brings me to my second point: it takes time to be an effective liaison. Getting comfortable in any new position takes a while, of course, but the liaison model seems to benefit in particular from institutional knowledge. Part of the job is knowing faculty and students in the departments, including their research interests, information needs, and communication habits. Gathering this information can take many meetings, emails, and chance encounters; much of it is tacit knowledge that is built up over time and not necessarily passed on from a predecessor. Many liaisons also rely on the “ripple effect.” By working with a faculty member one semester, they may have more interest the next semester based on word-of-mouth between colleagues. This means that as a new liaison, I am working on laying groundwork for richer collaborations in the future. Building up relationships and projects is a longer process than I was expecting, but I think that’s a good thing because it means this is a job that I can grow into.

Finally, as I build these relationships, I’ve learned just how important communication skills are to this position. Being a liaison requires reaching out cold to people in your departments, and, more importantly, once you are meeting with them, articulating your role and value. It can be intimidating to present yourself as a resource to experts in their respective fields, especially without an advanced degree in the discipline for which you are a liaison, but over the past nine months, I’ve gotten more comfortable and confident doing so. In the beginning, I struggled to define exactly how I could help, and erred on the side of suggesting every possible way in which they might use the library’s resources. Now I try to reach out when I have a specific idea to suggest or information to communicate. After a few successful collaborations, I also have a clearer idea myself about what I bring to the table, so I’m able to more confidently offer my services.

“Liaison” is term which means very little to anyone outside of libraries (I know this from the blank stares I get from friends and family when I try to explain what I do) but can be a source of anxiety for people in them as we rethink and reorganize subject expertise in academic libraries. Being a good liaison or having a strong liaison program seems to be an ever-moving target. Stepping into a role of this nebulous nature as a new librarian can be stressful — it’s hard to know whether you’re doing it right! — but I’m learning to be more comfortable with figuring it out as I go.

Invisibility and Ubiquitousness: How Digital Libraries Should Tell Their Story.

Under pressure from the presumed loss of influence, the contemporary academic library is often in the business of staking claims on campus. We see new technology or innovations as opportunities to ingrained ourselves deeper in the future of the institution. Partially, this is a reaction to the change in the world and a move away from books but also a survival strategy in declining budgets. As the Ithaka survey on “Library Leadership for the Digital Age” last spring told us “All libraries are now digital…. Users think libraries are—or at least should be—digital.” As someone who left the print world for the digital, I can say within my own experience this is true.

What I am finding, though, as a new digital librarian, that our work is still ignorable and invisible. The reasons for this might seem contradictory. One, the digital library is not traditional library work and is seen as outside of the realm of the library’s scope. On the other hand, the internet and technology is ubiquitous which makes the behind the scenes work expected and ingrained with very little work assumed, with high levels of integration and low levels of recognition. Ubiquity, while central to our digital lives, is, perhaps, the most difficult thing to overcome. When user expect things to be there, or that the digital world should just exist around them, it is difficult to ask for their patience or their work in helping build the digital world in the library.

Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man Wikimedia Commons

And yet we need their input and their work to makes ours possible.

This tug and pull, the pressure to remain a stable part of the institution’s traditional academic world, maintaining print collections and special collections materials and being part of the on campus classroom, while being forced to compete with the google and the always on internet is difficult for our libraries to prosper. The ironic thing being: the better we do at our jobs the less visible we are and vice versa.

Take it from this excellent Futurama episode “Godfellas” 2002 where “the God Entity” explains the realities of omnipresence to Bender:

While the trend towards digital helps libraries stay relevant in this age the difficulty remains in how this information is presented. The same Ithaka report from above continues that, “Libraries are also challenged in a dramatic way to deal with the demands of our users as technology allows them to gain access to information directly rather than without any intermediation from us.”

Unfortunately, intermediation is the only way we are visible to some, and often that comes at the expense of our users. Users want the system to be there without having to feel like they are using the system. Because of google, our faculty and student expect that our services to be available always with little thought to the infrastructures that make it possible. Only when the curtain is pulled back is the process unveiled, usually with disastrous consequences.

If the institutional repository, the center of my work, works as it should, where materials are preserved and promoted with little to zero effort given on the part of individual faculty there is no one to complain or question its existence. This requires the input and the collaboration with faculty across the university. Proving that their buy in is difficult when some search engines make visibility so seamless. As a result, I often tout the visibility of the Institutional Repository in search engines like Google Scholar to show that it is “working.” The same thing exists on the technical end, if our online catalog bridges the gap seamlessly between physical location and online direction, then no one chats to complain they can’t find a book. That book, found via the Online Catalog, is retrieved with very little noise aside from the ding of the barcode scanner.

Only when things are visibly broken does our work become a point of either discussion or contention.But how then do we talk about our roles in the larger campus community if our work is largely behind the scenes?

In someways, we are forced to tell our stories to our Deans and Provosts about what we do for the library and the institution. This can be done in a number of ways, and best practices have yet to be fully established. The Digital Library Federation’s Assessment Interest group is focused on how we can assess the work that we do.

We can count the amount of money that we bring in during digitization projects or we can measure the encounters and shares as part of larger schemas of impact for promotion and tenure purposes. There are great guides to Google Analytics and Altmetrics through the DLF assessment, but this is reactive instead of proactive. And requires us to justify our existence through outside tools and after things have been posted, not to prove why the initial work is necessary.

Just as the traditional library has been praised for its collections used to foster learning and scholarship, the digital library must be used to show its importance to the larger campus. This goes beyond showing the web analytical impact, but by showing the use of the materials by people on campus. As I wrote in my piece on the library as more than a mausoleum, it is the use of materials that will save us from irrelevancy and invisibility.

There is no simple solution, but a first step is often telling our own story apart from the rest of the library. Perhaps we should be making the case in a way that shows the seams that hold the digital library together with the campus is the way to go. We should use opportunities where ubiquity gives our campus partners feelings that we’ll always be there to tell our story and look for partners. Our seams show not where we are stretched to the limit or where we lack; but where our institutional and collaborative partners can build a larger and better digital community.

We will never have ALL the answers to what our community will need tomorrow In our stories we should acknowledge both our failures and our successes and what we need to prosper in addition to build on our successes. We should show the people behind the curtain that make the easy to use interfaces and search functions work well, and increase the stake that our users play in decisions.

Digital collections are unique in our library world. Outreach, like social media or regular media, can put objects at the forefront of the infrastructure and makes it all the more likely for our users to think of us when they think about the library, but it is the structure itself that often needs visibility and part of the narrative. Without this narrative, without selling the good that we do behind the scenes, our value is lost in a sea of other sources of information. The resources do not just appear because there is work done to make them available. It is time that we start making that visible.

Building OER Momentum with a Mini-Grant Program

At my institution, we’ve been talking more about open education in the past year. Open access has long been on our agenda, but open education is such a large umbrella. We’ve begun to bring other open education-related work to the fore.

I wrote about open pedagogy in the context of information literacy in a blog post this past fall, while reflecting on Jim Groom’s visit to our campus for our Domain of One’s Own launch. Earlier this semester, Robin DeRosa came to campus to help us grow the conversation around open pedagogy and open educational resources (OER). My colleague, Lora Taub-Pervizpour, shared some curated articles and videos in two great posts (here and here) as our community prepared for Robin’s visit. These conversations have helped us focus in on our motivations for deepening our OER work. Helping to reduce financial burdens/barriers for our students by lowering textbook/course materials costs is a significant motivator for our OER interest, as is often the case. But the pedagogical opportunities OER can help to create are particularly energizing for our community, so deeply invested in teaching. (Check out David Wiley’s recent posts “How is Open Pedagogy Different?” and “When Opens Collide” for some interesting discussion on open pedagogy.)

As open education efforts on our campus continue, my colleagues and I are planning to launch a small grant initiative to help build momentum. We are imagining these stipends as a way to support faculty/instructors interested in adopting, adapting, and creating OER for their courses. We are also excited about the pedagogical possibilities that OER work might offer, so I’m particularly enthusiastic about the option we’re including to support the development of assignments in which students collaborate in the OER work of the course.

We’re developing the application guidelines and evaluation criteria for this grant initiative now. A few searches easily turn up helpful examples of such initiatives at a range of institution types: American University, Bucknell University, College of William & Mary, Davidson College, Old Dominion University, University of Kansas, and Utah State University, to name a few. These have been helpful in informing how we’re shaping and framing our application and outreach process. But I’m particularly eager to hear reflections on the successes, challenges, and outcomes of the work from those who have already taken a lap around this track. I recently revisited Sarah Crissinger’s thoughtful and helpful reflections on her OER work with faculty (part 1, part 2, part 3). Yet I’m eager for more and find myself wondering about your thoughts. I expect many of you have experience administering OER-related initiatives with similar goals. If so, how have you framed your program? What have you found to be important to your success? What barriers have you encountered? Or perhaps you are someone who has participated in this kind of initiative (or would like to). If so, what kinds of guidelines or support were (or would be) most useful? I would love to hear about your experiences and thoughts in the comments.

Microaggressions, Faculty, and Academic Librarians: a study in intersectionality

I’ve been a follower of LISMicroaggressions on Tumblr for a while now, and even managed to pick up a zine or two in person at various library conferences. Their posts are a much needed reminder that as liberal and well-meaning as we all think/hope/claim/want our libraries to be, the day-to-day experiences of library workers can be fraught with all the -isms. There’s a strong desire, particularly in our current political climate, to make our academic library spaces welcoming and inclusive to students, faculty, and staff at our institutions. What I appreciate about LISMicroaggressions is that it is a mirror for the profession, one that–to continue this forced metaphor–provides a forum to critically reflect on our own prejudices and biases as well as the everyday (however unintended) acts of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. that occur in our workplaces among colleagues.

At the 2016 Conference on Inclusion and Diversity in Library and Information Science (CIDLIS), I learned about another microaggression project spearheaded by Joy Doan and Ahmed Alwan at California State University, Northridge: Microaggressions & Academic Libraries. Joy and Ahmed are specifically examining microaggressions against academic librarians by non-library faculty or “teaching faculty.” Their project is rooted in the widely held belief that collaboration between librarians and faculty essential to the integration of the academic library into a campus community. Yet the goal of their project is to investigate the “dissatisfaction” academic librarians feel “about mistreatment by some teaching faculty.”

Joy’s presentation at CIDLIS was, to me, oddly reassuring in the same way that I find LISMicroaggressions is a comfort. Both projects are validating. They take comments or moments in my professional practice that are so fleeting that I question what exactly just happened, and yet so present as to feel oh-so-heavy. The discrepancies in age, educational attainment, gender, and scholarly background between librarians and non-librarian faculty are real, but are rarely acknowledged in the “collaboration literature.” If we can’t honestly discuss the impact of these aspects of librarian identity on our relationships with our faculty colleagues, how can we begin to include the intersectional identities of our librarians of color or those who identify as somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and the impact those identities have on collaboration? If we want to take it a step further, why not look into the labor practices and classification of librarians in academia?

So much of practice-based LIS writing implores librarians to partner with faculty, but in doing so, puts all of the responsibility on the librarian. If we just do enough outreach, learn enough about faculty teaching and research, get that second master’s degree in a subject area, say yes to just one more class, and provide enough free snacks, then BLAMMO! COLLABORATION WILL HAPPEN! Instead of writing about the duty librarians have to fight for a seat at the faculty table (despite often being classified as faculty), we should be digging into the aspects of our identities that make our position within academic so tenuous.

That’s a large part of the reason I’m so drawn to both LISMicroaggressions and Microaggressions & Academic Libraries. I feel as though taken together, these two projects are investigating the culture of academic libraries and the prejudices that make library work so emotional-labor-intensive. I know based on her presentation at CIDLIS that Joy and Ahmed have plans to analyze the data they’ve gathered according to different demographic characteristics and identities of librarians. I’m curious to learn about how our intersectional identities as librarians impact our interactions with non-library faculty. I think our profession would be well-served by building on LIS intersectionality research like Fobazi Ettarh’s excellent article, Making a New Table: Intersectional Librarianship. If you have recommendations for additional reading–articles, blogs, websites, books–please share in the comments!

Straight talk: Inviting students’ perspectives on information literacy teaching and learning

My colleagues and I received a grant from our regional consortium to develop information literacy continuing education opportunities for faculty, librarians, and other stakeholders at our institutions. As part of this initiative, we’re planning a one-day symposium during which participants can share successes and challenges in information literacy teaching and learning and that inspires intercampus dialog about our future teaching practices. We plan to include faculty and librarian presentations, discussions, and workshops. I’m especially excited about our plan to organize a panel of undergraduate students. We want to convene this panel so that we can hear directly from students themselves about information literacy teaching and learning. Some of the most interesting pedagogical conversations I have are with students about their perspectives on their own teaching and learning experiences and development. I’m eager to find more ways to facilitate these conversations.

We’re still in the early planning stages and are just beginning to think about how to invite students to participate in the panel and in what areas we want to focus the discussion. I’m so far thinking about posing questions like the following to the student panelists to help guide the session:

What information literacy teaching practices, learning experiences, and assignments have helped you learn and grow best?
What have been barriers to your information literacy development and successes?
What information literacy-related strategies, concepts, or skills have been most confusing or troublesome? Why? Have you been able to overcome those roadblocks? If so, how?
Do you think of yourself as an information consumer, creator, or both? How so?
What strategies, habits, or attitudes do you practice that help you plan, monitor, and assess your information consumption and creation?
What advice would you offer to other students information consumption and creation? About information literacy learning?

If you were to convene a panel of undergrads (or perhaps you already have), what would you want to ask students about information literacy? What do you want an audience of faculty to hear from students about information literacy? I’m eager to hear your thoughts in the comments.