From: "Whatley, Kara" <kara.whatley_at_ttu.edu>
Thank you all for your responses to my question about reorganizing our
Information Services Department here at TTU. Many of you expressed
surprise that we are reorganizing in such a way because you recently did the
opposite. I received a few organizational charts and documentation. I'm
not attaching those, but please feel free to contact me directly if you are
interested. I'll pass them along. Below I've included the responses I
received.
Kara Whatley
_________________________
Ms Whatley:
While Florida Gulf Coast University is much smaller than TTU, you may be
interested in a couple of our organizations documents.
Please feel free to contact me if you have specific questions.
Peace,
Daniel
_______________________
Kara,
My library has just undergone a reorganization in the opposite direction--
from subject divisions to centralized reference, with separate departments
for instruction and collection development. My job has not changed all the
much in reality, except that instead of sitting at a desk on the 5th floor,
I sit on the 1st floor for my desk duty. I still do instruction and liaison
work also. The reason for the switch was that we no longer had enough staff
to cover all the subject divisions.
__________________________
Kara,
Most of the CD work here is done by the Resource Services
Librarians (RSLs). We work within the Resource Services Department. The
department (with the nebulous name devised by a former director) is run by
the Head of Resource Services. Then there are four Coordinators:
Collection Development (myself)
General Reference
Science Reference
Instruction (including our web sites).
We also have an Electronic Public Access & services person.
Each RSL does liaison to assigned departments / programs. (I do Near
Eastern Studies & History of Science). Each selects, takes referrals,
does classes & constructs web sites for the appropriate units.
On the CD side, aside from looking to budgets & processes, I am liaison to
most of Technical Services.
_________________________________
I was asst. head of CD in 1990-1998, at a mid-sized ARL and land grant and
we had it both ways. The structure of Public Services (reference/BI) and Tech
Services (collection mgt and cataloging) was retained, but Subject Teams
were overlayed onto that structure. I headed the Life Sciences and
Agriculture Subject Team, which had 2 fulltime cd people, appropriate branch
heads, 2 ref libns with life sci/ag BI assignments, & the cataloging libn
who did largely sciences. We met about once per month to keep current. It
worked fairly well to improve x-dept functions to serve patrons. The
organization came out of an ARL/OMS Collection Analysis Project done in
the early 1990's. I've always enjoyed working with
sci/tech types because there is an intellectual synergy around science
among those with that cognitive style, BUT you must also guard against
tribalism between/among the subject teams for the same reasons, i.e.,
too much grouping by cognitive style, and that people do not come to see
themselves in factions, rather than in unity for the overal mission.
________________________________________________________
**My email address has changed to kara.whatley_at_ttu.edu.**
Kara M. Whatley
Subject Librarian for Agriculture, Biology, Chemistry, and TIEHH
Texas Tech University Libraries
Box 40002
Lubbock, TX 79409
Tel: 806-742-2236
FAX: 806-742-1964
EMAIL: kara.whatley_at_ttu.edu
Received on Thu Nov 14 2002 - 07:34:24 EST