committee work

Musings on Search Committees

Job applications and interviews are nothing new to ACRLog. Violet finished off her series on being unemployed and interviewing in February, there are older posts about how to interview, and more recent ones about AI in the job search. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about things from the other side: how do search committees work and how do librarians get hired?

Hailley wrote about chairing search committees and how that impacted her other work. There’s also a lot of scholarly literature out there about search committees broadly and about librarian search committees specifically, including how search committees can work more effectively together and how search committees can push to integrate better interviewing practices and more diversity.

I write from a slightly different angle, wondering what the point of search committees really is. Having served on several at this point and been interviewed by a few more, I find myself with questions about the entire system.

Search committees, in theory, make the process of filling an open position at a library a group effort. To an extent that undoubtedly varies between institutions, they determine the criteria to judge candidates, conduct multiple rounds of interviews, evaluate and discuss candidates, and more. This is unquestionably a lot of work, especially if the search committee is thinking critically, properly screening candidates, and consciously working to bring in diverse and qualified candidates for interviews.

Doing this work effectively will also likely involve hard discussions and compromise. Search committees must work through how everyone on the committee perceived each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses and what these impressions mean when paired with the library’s needs. This is not easy work, nor is it clear cut. Different candidates will bring different things to a job, and it’s entirely possible that more than one would be able to do the job well.

What, then, is a search committee to do? Listen to each other, compromise, and try to work out what recommendations to make in a situation where there is no single right answer—at least if it all goes well.

But herein also lies one of the oddities of the search committee (in my experience anyway—every institution is different and I have no idea what else might be happening out there, which is partially why I’m writing this post). The search committee makes recommendations, but ultimately decision-making power likely rests elsewhere, possibly with upper library management or possibly with the university librarian or someone in a similar role. It can then very much be opaque as to how final decisions are made.

From what I’ve gathered on the subject, based on talking to people, my own experiences, and combing through the literature (though, to be honest, there isn’t a lot out there), it seems that those who make the decisions do everything from simply rubber stamping a committee’s decision, to making it clear what their preference is, to simply thanking the committee for their work. All of this is down to the institution and the individual in charge.

But it all leaves me a little troubled. Again, search committees, when they work well, are doing a lot of work. What’s the point of this work if, ultimately, the committee is only advisory? What, especially, is the point of this work when the committee has made efforts to remove biases and seek out diverse candidates if the committee are not actually the ones who can hire said diverse candidates? Are all the papers about more effective search committees missing the mark?

Cynically, I might say yes, but I understand that there’s nuance. For the diversity question, inclusion has to start at the bottom—in this case the search committee—and rise up through all levels of the organization. It is not a waste of time for search committees to make interviews more accessible and to interview diverse candidates. University librarians are also not constantly placing their thumbs on the scales and making their own decisions. Or, when they are, perhaps they have good reason to do so.

But still—is this a good system? This is a question that, in the land of academia in which we exist, can probably only be answered at the level of an individual institution: are search committees working well in this individual library? And, if not, what would librarians at this institution want to see improved?

Change, of course, is hard. In this case, any sort of change or even analysis of the situation should likely come from conversations about how things are working, including what’s going well. Any proposals for change would eventually need to go through the proper channels, be that a working group, a steering committee, or something else.

I’m not advocating for a complete overhaul of the system (unless we think collectively that’s a good idea), but there might be small changes that could have a positive impact. For example, the role of the search committee could be made clear to candidates during their interview—are they making the decision or is someone else? To the extent it’s possible, other factors impacting a decision could be shared with the search committee, bearing in mind, of course, that there are things that need to remain confidential. All it might take is setting clear expectations for the search committee, those making hiring decisions, and the candidates. To me, it seems that much is left unspoken, but as so many of the details vary from library to library, being more explicit does not seem unwarranted.

What about you? How do search committees work at your institution? How have they worked when you’ve interviewed? What’s worked well? Is there anything you’d change?

Across Divides: Librarian as Translator

Editor’s Note: We welcome Jennifer Jarson to the ACRLog team. Jennifer is the Information Literacy and Assessment Librarian and Social Sciences Subject Specialist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Her research interests include information literacy and student learning pedagogy and assessment, as well as issues regarding communication, collaboration, and leadership.

A few weeks ago, I facilitated a few discussion sessions with faculty at my institution who had participated in a recent information literacy study. Together, we reviewed and interpreted some of the more significant themes of the study’s findings. We discussed, for example, evidence of students’ competencies and sites of their struggles, our teaching and learning goals and the gaps between our goals and our realities, and so on. As we identified areas of students’ disconnects, some faculty began to identify a disconnect of their own. We need help, they said, to better understand conventions and ways of knowing outside our own disciplines. We recognize that disciplines view and value source types differently, for example, or cite differently, but we don’t know how and why. As the discussion continued, faculty described wanting to better understand the perspectives that students from different disciplinary backgrounds are bringing to their classes. In core courses within their departments, faculty described comfort with their own disciplinary traditions, of course, traditions in which their students are becoming knowledgeable or are already well-versed. Yet, in the increasingly interdisciplinary areas of our evolving liberal arts curriculum — first year seminars and cluster courses, to name a few — faculty described feeling a little more at sea. So deeply steeped in their own disciplinary traditions, they asked for a little help interpreting other disciplines’ points of view and the varying research approaches through which students might be passing on the way to their classes.

This request — for librarian to operate as translator — is not unfamiliar territory. We librarians frequently work as translators, as interpreters. In fact, it seems rather like our home turf. Facility with different ways of knowing and organization is our wheelhouse. Decoding those schema and perspectives for our different user groups is a language in which we’re fluent. We interpret our users’ needs when we engage in a reference interview. We translate their needs into search strategies to best fit database structures or into relevant subject headings in a catalog. We interpret for students an assignment’s purpose or their professors’ expectations. We interpret for faculty points of research/information literacy confusion and difficulty commonly experienced by students. We decipher for users the elements of citations and clarify their means of access. The librarian-as-interpreter (or perhaps we should say negotiator?) paradigm holds in navigating relationships between faculty and student, faculty and faculty, discipline and discipline, and information resource and user. It’s in my sphere of public services that I’ve given this topic most thought, but the librarian-as-translator trope doesn’t end there. The parallel surely continues in cataloging, systems, web design, and beyond.

So what is it about librarians that situates us in this role? And serves us well in it? It’s the nature of our work itself, no doubt. By working with our users, we see through their eyes. It’s the philosophies and values at our profession’s core (Ranganathan, anyone?), however debated our philosophies might be. With deep respect for our users and our resources alike, we aim to bridge the gaps between them. It’s the nature of our location, at the intersections of so many points in our information ecologies and our campus landscapes.

Access to these points — these viewpoints, these skill sets — is not something to take lightly or ignore. Our unique position affords us opportunities to reach across divides of perspectives, stakeholders, and disciplines. At the same time, we must take care to evaluate our neutrality in such a position; we must recognize the role we play and our responsibilities in these acts of translation. With an ear tuned accordingly, we can bring a diversity of voices to our varied campus tables.

What are you hearing? For whom and how are you interpreting? I would love to discuss your thoughts in the comments…

Wearing Different Hats: Academic Service and Librarianship

Like many academic librarians, I’m on the tenure track, and with that comes the opportunity and requirement for academic service. I genuinely enjoy most of my service work, which ranges from membership in our faculty governance body to work on committees dealing with academic technology and curriculum development, among others. Right now I’m in the midst of a five-year commitment on a large grant-funded pedagogical project at my college. My time is devoted either to the project or to my work in the library on different days of the week, with some exceptions. I joke about taking off one hat and putting on another from day to day or meeting to meeting.

My library days are structured along similar lines as they were before my involvement in the grant project. But on my grant days I often don’t feel like a librarian: no library instruction, no reference, no information literacy program planning, no library meetings — only work related to my other service obligations. On those days I sometimes wonder: what does it mean when I spend more time outside of the library than inside?

Despite occasionally feeling as if I’m being pulled in different directions depending on which hat I’m wearing, I’m certain that my service work augments my work in the library. College service makes me feel connected to the institution, and allows me to gain a more complete understanding of and contribute to the college’s mission, going beyond the work I do in the library. I also think that academic librarians taking on service commitments can bring more visibility to the library on campus, almost a stealth form of marketing. Faculty in other departments whom I’ve met on various committees will sometimes contact me to ask a question about the library, and I hope that makes them more likely to send their students to the library as well.

My academic service outside of the library also helps inform my work as an information literacy librarian. In my roles on college-wide projects I’ve become much more familiar with the programs and majors available for our students, which facilitates making connections across the curriculum and planning information literacy outreach. College service work increases the number of faculty from other departments whom I meet who can be potential collaborators, too. I’ve drawn on these colleagues when we’ve wanted to pilot different initiatives for library instruction, and have sometimes sought feedback from them on our programs and efforts.

I hope that being in this space at the intersection of multiple identities can help push me to think in new ways about the role of academic libraries and about myself as a librarian and an academic. But despite the benefits of college service work, the crowding of these multiple identities that I inhabit is not always entirely comfortable — sometimes I wish I had two heads for my two hats. If you’re a librarian involved in academic service, what strategies do you use to reconcile your two roles?