On January 8, I attended the daylong ALCTS Symposium “Re-envisioning ‘Technical Services’ to Transform Libraries: Identifying Leadership and Talent Management Practices.” You can read a short summary of the symposium’s overall scope here. With this post, I wish to summarize a few of the sessions at the forum that I found most interesting.

The symposium’s keynote speaker was Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University. His presentation took a high-level view of the future of libraries and how technical services can potentially fit into that future. He first highlighted some factors that might lead to a pessimistic view about the future of libraries. Indeed, although libraries are busier than ever, budgets are often flat or decreasing and the use that libraries receive is not always related to the tools and services that they provide. Additionally, the easy availability of journal content in online formats along with the emergence of a myriad of free online research management tools means that many faculty rarely if ever come into the library. Having explained the grounds for pessimism, Webster advocated for optimism. He traced a generational evolution in which libraries have progressed from being collection-centered to being client-centered, experience-centered, and, centered on connected learning experiences. The current generation of libraries is centered on collaborative knowledge, media, and fabrication facilities; uses of library space for purposes such as maker spaces show how libraries can take on new roles while also retaining their tradition status as sites for knowledge creation. He went on to identify five trends in the academic landscape that libraries need to be aware of:

1. Evolving research workflows: Throughout the research cycle of planning, experimentation, dissemination, and ideation, free online digital services (e.g., ResearchGate, ReadCube, FigShare, etc.) have emerged that are transforming scholarly workflows. Libraries have been slow to develop tools and services that fit into these workflows.
2. Evolving communication methods: There is a trend toward increasing use of social media; increasing multi-author papers, a growing emphasis on reproducibility and the repurposing of data to enable new findings.
3. Uptake of Open Access models of publishing.
4. Open science: Researchers today are sharing research knowledge more widely than ever in the past. The article is now just one of many scholarly outputs.
5. Funding: Increasing quantities of money in academia continue to flow into scientific research; concurrently, there is an increased public focus on tuition and the return-on-investment for higher education.

With these trends in mind, Webster asked where are libraries going. He advocate for the continued migration from print to online collections, review of shelving location of lesser-used collections, repurposing of the library as a learning space, the embedding of library expertise and resources in contexts outside the libraries where they are most needed, and an increasing focus on distributed collections. Finally, Webster zeroed in on technical services, suggesting that technical services entail all of those operations that connect communities with information. He said that one of the most important transitions in technical services is one that is occurring from locally owned collections to facilitated collections. Along with this, he remarked on a trend from scarcity to abundance: books going out of print is becoming something of the past; most publishers now say that they will never allow a book to go out of print. He said that technical services departments have roles to play in supporting evolutions in the scholarly record from a focus primarily on research outputs (e.g., published article) to inputs (e.g., data sets) and he also talked about the roles that technical services can play in support of research analytics and data analytics. In conclusion, he remarked that technical services personnel have a strong track record of engagement and change and we will need to build on that track record to explore the changes on the horizon.

Another of the symposium’s speakers, Meredith Taylor (University of Texas, Austin) discussed the concept of talent management (TM) and how it might be applied within the contexts of technical services work. She defined talent management as an integrated set of processes, programs, and cultural norms in an organization designed and implemented to attract, develop, deploy, and retain talent to achieve strategic objectives and meet future business needs. TM differs from traditional HR work by being more proactive, integrated, organization-focused (rather than individual-focused), customized, and aligned with organizational strategies. Taylor said that one reason that TM is particularly relevant to libraries today is that, between 2015 and 2025, it is projected that 30 percent of the library workforce will be retiring; additionally, there are demographic shifts in library workforces and, since 2005, an 82 percent turnover rate in the executive leadership of ARL libraries. Specifically within technical services divisions of libraries, workforce trends include decreasing numbers of personnel, the outsourcing of some functions, and an increased reliance on paraprofessional staff. With these shifts, Taylor asked: Are libraries meeting retraining and re-skilling needs? Are libraries losing critical knowledge? Are libraries able to find qualified candidates to fill positions? Having posed these questions, Taylor discussed the results of an ARL SPEC KIT study that she co-authored on TM in 2014. The study showed that talent challenges included a scarcity of fiscal resources, salary inequities, retirements, inability to retrain/re-skill current workforces, and a lack of ability to find and retain qualified personnel – particularly for positions in IT and senior management. Moreover, the study showed three troubling trends in libraries: (1) a lack of a systemic approach to TM, (2) widening skill gaps in the workforce, and (3) a lack of IT skills and executive expertise. To confront these problems, Taylor advocated that libraries strive to align their HR strategy to their library strategy, collect data to support informed decision-making, and make resource decisions based on TM. Programmatic starting points for libraries include developing a competency model, completing a job analysis, and undertaking a compensation analysis and succession planning. Other starting points include identifying high potential employees for development, creating customized development plans, and developing a succession plan.

The symposium’s final speaker, Jenica Rogers (Director of Libraries at SUNY Potsdam), gave a presentation titled “Bringing the Back Room Forward.” Rogers began the presentation by describing her background in technical services and emphasizing her view that technical services work is deeply connected with public services. She then discussed the challenges that her library faced when four of the library’s nine librarian positions became vacant in 18 months. In response, she led a reorganization within the library. One position created as a result of the reorganization was the position of Metadata and Subscription Resources Librarian. The search for this position failed due to a lack of qualified candidates and, as a result, Rogers’ library made some very minor changes to the position description and changed the title of the position to Coordinator of Technical Services & Discovery, which they hoped would make the position sound more prestigious and managerial. With this second search, the position received significantly more qualified candidates. Rogers was concerned, however, to find that, with the change in job title, there were significantly less female applicants. From this search process, Rogers suggested that one takeaway was that language use (e.g., traditional versus change-oriented) impacts candidate pools and that librarians should encourage potential candidates to look past traditional boundaries. She also said that we should explore cross-boundary experimentation in technical services in collaborate in a way that honors expertise. Finally, she advocated for transformations in graduate education so that students are prepared for library positions that do not yet exist in libraries.