Reorganization revisited; or, is acquisitions an endangered species?

Pergamon

Libra,, Acquisitions: Practice &Theory, Vol. 20, No. I, pp. 77-84, 1996 Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Lid Printed in the USA. All fights reserved 0364-6408/96 $15.00 + .00

SSD10364-6408(95)110082-8

FEATHER RIVER INSTITUTE 1995

REORGANIZATION REVISITED; OR, IS ACQUISITIONS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES? ELEANOR I. COOK Appalachian State University Belk Library Boone, NC 28608 Intemet: [email protected]

I'm going to begin by giving you an overview of Appalachian State's library reorganization process and where we are right now. Then I'm going to describe what is happening in the technical services area in general. Finally, I'll close by speculating how traditional acquisitions functions will fare in this new environment. The initial details of how we developed this reorganization plan are described in a paper that Pat Farthing and I have published in Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, volume 19, number 4, 445-461. I will only highlight this aspect of the process. The initial stages were lengthy. We developed a new library mission statement, then we identified and studied various organizational models, adapting them to our needs. Three variations of similar models were presented to the library staff and faculty and one was eventually chosen for implementation. This process took well over a year and a half. During the summer of 1994 everyone in the library participated in implementation groups that submitted reports identifying key work activities and levels of staffing needed to support these functions in the new organization. Then an implementation coordinating committee and a space task force worked on issues related to the process of recommending personnel assignments and physical layout of the building. The library administration gathered all this information, along with ebeek sheets completed by all library employees, indicating their preferences of assignments in the organization. In December 1994, before the semester break, new assignments were made. During the. spring semester of 1995 we began to implement the new team structure. Everyone in the library has participated in some way during the process, though the work is far from complete. We are entrenched in the toughest part of the transition, in my opinion. In fact, I would observe that a reorganization of this magnitude is similar to childbirth; people can tell you all day long what going into labor is like, but until you have experienced it yourself you cannot appreciate the sensation. Last year while attending the NASIG conference in Vancouver, B.C., I had a chance to talk with colleagues who were going through significant reorganizations at their 77

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institutions. These people shared amazing stories with us and seemed shell-shocked by their experiences. Naturally, this concerned Inc. I wondered if I too would end up in a zombie state in the coming year. That year has passed and I am here to testify that I have survived, but I will admit that if I had not been forewarned by others' experiences and if I had not done much reading and preparing on my own, I might have been in much worse shape psychologically. Appalachian's library reorganization has been complicated by the introduction of a new integrated library system. Our former system, LS/2000, was being phased out and our consortia, the Western North Carolina Library Network, was in need of a more powerful, versatile system. Appalachian State University, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and Western Carolina University comprise this network, which we call WNCLN. In the spring of 1994, WNCLN began the transition to Innovative Interfaces, Inc.'s system, INNOPAC. All components of INNOPAC are operational now with the exception of the acquisitions module at Appalachian and Western Carolina; at these sites the acquisitions system is to be implemented this coming fiscal year. Appalachian's former organization was a typical hierarchy with a split between public and technical services (see Figure 1). The basis of the new organization depends on a system of cross-functional teams, especially in relation to library faculty responsibilities. Librarians no longer work within single-function positions. Instead, each library faculty member chooses two or three assignments, with one usually being primary. In addition, each librarian is assigned a subject area to cover for collection development. Specific subjects are grouped into the broad teams of business, education, humanities, social sciences, and science/technology. Before reorganization, collection development was juggled by

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two librarians who handled monographic and serial formats, along with a library advisory committee and some support staff. Academic department representatives responded directly to these librarians concerning orders. The new arrangement spreads out the work and gives all librarians the opportunity to get involved in collection building in all formats within their subject specialty, and allows them to work with academic faculty one on one (see Figure 2). Instead of department heads, there are now "Coordinators." There is one Associate University Librarian now, instead of two. Some library staff have new job duties, though most have retained similar assignments. A complete revision of staff position descriptions is expected in the coming year. Since library faculty have tenure-track status, evaluation procedures for them have to be reviewed with this in mind, in order to adhere to university regulations. Accommodating these various personnel shifts within a team model will be a challenge within the larger framework of a state bureaucratic system, which is not team-based (see Figure 3). Reference is moving towards a tiered system, with staff working at an "information kiosk" for basic questions and CD-ROM assistance. Librarians will be available for reference consultation in an office or by appointment for more in-depth service. We still have a traditional, all-purpose reference

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desk, though by the end of the summer the new system should be ready to phase in. Bibliographic instruction assignments will include librarians who have never been involved in instruction in the past, and will eventually be tied into their subject assignments. Right now we are in a state that can only be described as chaos (see Figure 4). Several major library collections are physically moving this summer, and most work units are either moving or reconfiguring their space. When the fall semester of 1995 begins, returning students will not recognize Belk Library as the place they left in the spring. In my opinion, it is amazing how well we are coping with the many layers of change happening simultaneously. However, it is going to get worse before it gets better. All but introductory team training sessions were suspended this spring while we implemented portions of the new online system and attended to critical day-to-day matters, such as state-mandated staff evaluations, university-mandated annual reports, expenditure of the materials budget before the end of the fiscal year, not to mention providing service to library users! Even though we are supposed to be operating in the new team environment, with new titles and new responsibilities, we have not yet as an organization or as individuals internalized the new team model. In addition, many people are having to carry on their old responsibilities in part while learning new ones. There are various levels of acceptance to the new model. Some people are dead-set against it, while others are finding renewal in their new assignments. Still others are simply stunned or confused.

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Now that I've described the background, let me discuss in more detail the impact these changes have had on general technical services operations (see Figure 5) Appalachian's formvr technical services departments included acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, and serials, all reporting to an Associate University Librarian for Technical Services. The person in the position of AUL for Technical Services left Appalachian in July 1994, and the position will not be refilled as such. How the position will be reconfiguwxi in the future is still unknown. A temporary position for the rest of this fiscal year was filled internally by someone who had experience with personnel training. In that capacity, this person coordinated team training and handled miscellaneous administrative duties left vacant by the position. This person is now Coordinator of the Access Team. Most technical service functions handled by the four former departments are now brought together in a single team called Materials Processing. Library faculty collection development responsibilities arc in a separate team under the umbrella of "Interpretation," which includes the reference and bibliographic instruction teams. A new library faculty team called "Information

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Organization" includes some technical service aspects such as database analysis, creation, integrity, and maintenance functions, though these are not yet clearly defined. The former Head of Cataloging is both Coordinator of Information Organization and Cataloging Specialist. The former Head of Collection Development is the Coordinator of Materials Processing. The former Head of Serials is both Assistant Coordinator of Materials Processing and Serials Specialist. The former Head of Acquisitions is Acquisitions Consultant to Materials Processing but is spending more than half of his weekly hours at the reference desk and is basically away from the technical services areas except on an "'as needed" basis. The new Coordinator of Collection Development is a former reference/government documents librarian. Other librarians have had major shifts in their duties, but I will not attempt to describe all of them here. The new Materials Processing team includes most of the same staff who worked in the four former technical service areas, with a few exceptions. The traditional functions of acquisitions preorder searching, ordering and receiving, gifts processing, approval plan coordination, copy and original cataloging, serials cbeck-in and holdings maintenance, binding, marking, labelling and repair are still going on as they have before, more or less. Government documents processing and check-in, basic authority control, loose-leaf filing and maintenance, and claiming of all types of materials are areas that will definitely need new staffing and work flow analysis because no one has time to do them now. In addition, using the INNOPAC acquisitions module will create some fundamental changes in the preorder verification of bibliographic records since we will now be able to show order records to the public and also must have a bibliographic record present to generate an order record. Our old acquisitions process was based on a frustrating, barely automated system handled by our campus computer center. We are happy to see it phased out. Acquisitions staff will have an opportunity to learn new skills as part of using the new system. Complicating matters is the fact that the online catalog is shared with two other schools. While each school has a separate accounting unit for acquisitions and serials check-in, we share bibliographic records in the catalog. This shared database will soon alter the acquisitions process in ways it never did before. So how will this new organization affect acquisitions in particular? This is where I am going to speculate, since it has not actually happened yet. The subtitle of this presentation asks if acquisitions is an endangered species. I must say that indeed it is NOT, but instead, cross-breeding will create a new animal altogether. At Appalachian, we now have staff with acquisitions, cataloging, serials and collection development expertise working in a combined environment. Since they are no longer "departmentalized," they are getting to know each other better. This intimacy was hastened recently by the move of serials and binding into the main technical services room from a adjacent area now being retrofitted as an electronic library lab. This has created a sardine-like situation and we are proud to say we are getting written up for breaking fire code regulations. However, the Materials Processing Team is rising to the occasion by developing plans to reconfigure the space more effectively. Will acquisitions be de-professionalized? Can one librarian, half-time, coordinate what used to be four separate departments? I think it has become clear that at least for the present, two faculty positions are needed to assist with the day-to-day operations of Materials Processing. Certainly other portions of professional time are being devoted to the area as needed also, including time spent o n professional cataloging activities and collection development. It is also clear that vendor relations and budget monitoring and projection are still professional activities. In a recent conversation with Joe Hewitt, University Librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, and author of the seminal article, "On the Nature of Acquisitions" [ 1], he observed that vendor relations have become increasingly complex. Acquisitions and serials specialists have the type of expertise that administrators depend upon when making decisions on how to spend tight budgets [2].

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Is outsourcing something to be dreaded? It's become a loaded term, but really, we've been doing it for years; LC catalog cards, proof slips, CIP, OCLC catalog cards and tapes, and approval plans are all types of outsourcing. A program such as OCLC's PromptCat might create more time and space for our copy catalogers to work on our growing backlog. To give you a comparison, Wright State had a backlog of 5,000 items, with a cataloging department of 2 professionals and 11 copy catalogers when they decided to outsource cataloging [3]. Appalachian has a backlog of over 6,000 items, 2.5 professionals, and 3.75 copy catalogers. Should we outsource all our copy cataloging? Not necessarily. The team model could help us work through these challenges and come up with solutions that work for us. Staff of all levels will have to take responsibility for these decisions. Coordinators and specialists can assist and guide in the process, but should not be dictating solutions. The implementation of the INNOPAC acquisitions module will require overall participation of the team, and will also raise awareness of how the acquisitions process is a valuable piece of the work flow. To conclude, I think as long as libraries exist in some form, acquiring resources will also continue. I look forward to seeing the acquisitions process become less of a mystery to those not directly involved with it. I also think the decentralization of OCLC access and being able to download bibliographic records at point of order will assist in breaking down barriers within the technical service workflow. I expect to work with subject specialists and acquisitions staff in discovering new ways of obtaining information about desired items via avenues on the Internet such as AcqWeb. Most especially I expect to find satisfaction in working with a dedicated and skilled staff who come together and solve problems and figure out solutions together. We're definitely on our way to moving from a "supervisory centered" environment to a "team-centered environment."

REFERENCES 1. Hewitt, Joe A. "On the Nature of Acquisitions," L/brary Resources & Technical Services, 33 (April 1989), 105-122. 2. Telephone interview with Joe A. Hewitt, May 16, 1995. 3. Hirshon, Arnold, Winters, Barbara and Wilhoit, Karen. "A Response to "Outsourcing Cataloging: The Wright State Experience," ALCTS Newsletter, 6 (1995), 26-28.