Technical Services Involvement with New Services: Are there Silos Within the Library? Sharon Wiles-Young Director of Library Access Services ALCTS- Heads of Cataloging Interest Group ALA Midwinter January 23, 2012

Lehigh University Libraries- Library and Technology Services Library Technical Services teams –After merger into LTS in 1996 Client Services Teams Leadership role of Team Leader and Director

Transition to Electronic/Digital Information Ejournals – open the door to user centered services –Communicating directly with TS department –SFX Link resolver, assist with database LTS Strategic plans- user focused, student/research focused –Goals-Support Lehigh scholarship and institutional memory through the creation of a digital archive of Lehigh scholarship that also encompasses distinctive Lehigh archival materials.

Digital Information/Unique Collections The digital/electronic information world has opened opportunities to cross train staff and to provide staff with new responsibilities and focus attention on redefining service needs and examining user needs BUT –What can we let go of and what should we be spending more time on? Example: gift books student copy cataloging – shelf ready books –staff move on to other metadata –digital responsibilities

Redefining the Academic Library Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services by the University Leadership Council: Library.pdf Section IV: Redeploying Library Staff “Library leadership must identify areas of activity that can be reduced or eliminated and begin to migrate staff to higher-value responsibilities”

Example 1:New Initiatives and Staffing CLIR Fellow (Council on Libraries and Information Resources) –Background in some special collections cataloging –Understood skills of cataloging staff –Metadata projects –Inventory projects materials coming from labs- documents needing sorting organization before digitized Included Head of Cataloging on the IR planning committee

Staff involvement Trained staff on metadata techniques- added keyword metadata on spreadsheets to ingest into Content DM Included all librarians in webinar and other activities to select a new software platform for the IR – Digital Commons

Future for IR Acknowledgement that TS skills will be needed specifically: Acquisitions to metadata Question: Should all librarians be involved with author rights discussions? –ACRL Scholarly Communications Road Show at Lehigh but the involvement of all librarians ended there –All Librarians and some staff have a chance to meet with faculty formally or informally should have a general knowledge and make appropriate referrals

Example 2: VuFind another Library Initiative Design and implementation of new interface to the online catalog –Sirsi webcat not updated since the 1990’s –Commitment to open sources software –VuFind chosen and developed with others Soft roll out of the new interface Systems librarian with collection development librarians- discussions held in those meeting

What Happened with VuFind System’s staff realized that the catalogers were of vital importance and talked one on one but not in meetings Asked to attend the in house demo- discovered the serials displays a problem –Need of catalogers to talk about data found in the holdings records and possible use of that information and displays of that information

Skills and Partnerships New initiatives in partnering with other libraries to assist with staffing –Have libraries reorganized internal staff wisely and built partnerships in house –Identify staff skill sets and offer training Example: Government Documents coordinator- now metadata quality control member of the Digital Team

Conclusion Eliminate some processes and services as identify new roles and new strategic goals –Problem: still in transition- print materials to storage, weeding decisions Increases Involvement of Technical Services librarians in planning of new services and examine staffing options –Another opportunity at Lehigh is Kuali/OLE development, an open source ILS system

Final Observations An important aspect of teaching and learning in higher educations is: –Collaborative learning –Provide students with effective team learning experiences Are libraries effectively using team collaboration to examine services and new initiatives ? Are libraries effectively identifying skill sets and interests of librarians and staff?