[Original posting on this topic appeared in COLLDV-L no. 1690 and is
reproduced below; the summary of responses follows it.]
From: "Tony Schwartz" <tony_at_delphinus.lib.umb.edu>
I would appreciate hearing from academic libraries that,
during the 1990s, shifted personnel organizational models
for collection development from (a) many selectors with
several other duties to (b) relatively few selectors for
whom this is their primary, nearly full-time responsibility.
On one hand, the rationales for spreading out collection
development responsibilities have been job enrichment,
subject expertise, and the ways that collection development
and reference work interact. On the other hand, a main reason
for centralizing collection development in a few hands is that
this responsibility, lacking immediate time pressures, gets
crowded out' by never-ending daily pressures of public services.
Posting brief queries on list serves can be extremely useful. A few
years ago, I asked about the prevalence of cost-per-use decision
making in serials management and received 53 responses. I hope this
query will elicit such consideration. Please respond directly to
me and I'll summarize for the group.
Thanks, Tony Schwartz (University of Massachusetts-Boston)
==================================================================
From: Tony Schwartz (University of Massachusetts-Boston)
Summary of responses to Feb. 8 query about academic libraries'
shifting collection development organizational models from (a) many
selectors with several other duties to (b) relatively few selector
for whom this is their primary, nearly full-time responsibility.
John McDonald (Virginia Commonwealth U.) alerted me to a chapter by
Bonnie Bryant (SUNY-Albany) on "Staffing and Organization for
Collection Management in a New Century" in a book just published,
_Collection Management for the 21st Century_, edited by G. E. Gorman
and Ruth H. Miller (Greenwood Pr.). Bonnie found great variation and
complexity in organizational models--too much for anyone to point to
a main pattern of change this decade. (If my overview of responses
does not cover the kind of detail one would want, just read Bonnie's
chapter.)
Laura Walters described a shift to full-time selectors at Tufts
University, chiefly to enable the selectors to take on broad and
thorough budgeting responsibilities. They are not required to be on
the reference desk, but Laura encourages them to serve a few hours a
week.
Jonas Barciauskas at Boston College, and Alan Ritch at the U.
of California--Santa Cruz, described a mixed models in which a few
selectors in the social sciences and humanities) are full-time,
whereas the majority of selectors do collection development as a
secondary assignment to reference work.
Colleges that sent in responses tended to have just one or two
people do all collection development, with reference doing little or
none.
Finally, I am appending, with permission, Paul Metz's interesting
note on how Virginia Tech University Libraries have managed
processes of change in this area:
> We have been through three models in the 90's. First, we had all 15+ people
> in public services and collection development assigned a handful of
> departments in complementary areas. These might be areas like family
> development and psychology that were related though in different colleges.
> Librarians were responsible for everything (library instruction, advanced
> reference, home pages, collection development and management) for their
> clientele and co-reported to me and the head of public services. It was a
> pretty successful model, but people were spread very thin and yes,
> collection development did have a way of coming in last in people's
> priorities. The matrix or co-reporting was never a problem: the public
> services head and I worked smoothly together, kept an eye on total load on
> people, and avoided sending mixed messages.
>
> About five years ago we split collection development and management off
> from public services so that we could find the positions to start our
> Collegiate Librarian program. Collegiate Librarians (CL's) had
> responsibility for everything in their colleges except collection
> development and management. They had offices in their colleges as well as
> in the library. They reported to the head of public services. A smaller
> number of (more or less) full-time bibliographers reported to me, and
> obviously did the colldev work for the disciplines covered by the CL's.
>
> Two years ago we made one more change, and I think we got it right this
> time. The collegiate librarian model has been highly successful. Deans
> squawk if they don't get their share. We almost immediately began to hear
> complaints from CL's that here they were knowing more about their faculty
> than ever before, but not being able to exploit that knowledge in
> selection. They felt dumb having to pass faculty requests along. And they
> didn't know the collections as well as they wanted. On my side of the
> street, people were maybe a little bored with only colldev on their plate,
> and possibly a little under-employed.
>
> So now our CL's do everything. Larger colleges have two or even three CL's.
> About 2/3 of our public services people are CL's, co-reporting as before
> (and again, no problems) to me and the head of public services. The other
> 1/3 of public services librarians are "functional specialists" in such
> areas as microforms/docs/maps or library instruction or reference automation
> or online services. They have no departmental/college clientele and report
> only to the head of public services. A few non-college based areas in
> colldev like law, human medicine, or Slavic are assigned to whomever has
> the right skills and interests. This scheme works very well for us.
>
>
> Paul Metz, Principal Bibliographer, Virginia Tech University Libraries
> P.O. Box 90001 / Blacksburg VA / 24062-9001
> Phone: (540) 231-5663 FAX: (540) 231-3694
> pmetz_at_vt.edu
Received on Mon Feb 16 1998 - 15:44:04 EST