Great Expectations: New Organizational Models for Overworked Liaisons Based on the UNCG Libraries Liaison Collections Responsibilities Task Force

摘要

Liaisons (subject specialists) keep getting busier. Research instruction, embedding in classes, outreach, collection development, weeding, assessing teaching and collections, promoting scholarly communication issues, and creating online learning objects are all potentially part of what a liaison is expected to do nowadays. So we hope every liaison is very interested—and very good—at all those responsibilities. Is that realistic? And does a liaison have time for all those things?At University of North Caroline at Greensboro (UNCG), library administrators decided it is time to examine how liaisons are organized to manage all of these competing responsibilities. The library formed a Liaison Collection Responsibilities Task Force to benchmark how other libraries might be handling the complexities of liaison responsibilities in innovative ways and to recommend several possible new organizational models for the collection development and public services work of liaisons.Members of the task force will review their benchmark findings and invite the audience to provide their own examples. Then we will present our recommendations for new organization models. Some recommendations will reflect incremental changes; others will be radical. We will ask the audience for feedback on the recommendations and suggestions for other models.