* Please excuse multiple postings*
If you are a library manager responsible for technical services, you can
help ALCTS* today by providing your feedback about library technical
services
talent management policies and practices. Responses from public and
special libraries are especially welcome.
Are you interested in understanding how libraries are incorporating new
functional areas and staff roles into technical services and other areas of
the library? Have you wondered how staff members recruited for these new
roles are supported? These and similar questions have motivated our
ALCTS President’s Program Committee to plan a program for the ALA Midwinter
Meeting in Boston on January 8, 2016, and to create this survey.
http://www.ala.org/alcts/events/mw/2016/vc2
We are grateful for support from our sponsor, OCLC. We plan to share
preliminary results at the Symposium and to publish our
findings. We will reference responses received by December 21st at the
Symposium. We will also post a summary of results to listservs after the
survey closes on January 22, 2016.
Responses recruited via listservs will be compiled separately and compared
to those of our primary respondents (see below). This means we are
unconcerned with the self-selection bias, the opportunity for multiple
responses from the same institution (or even the same individual) and
those who may not be technical services managers. The survey link is
provided at the end of this message.
Our primary respondents are specifically identified staff members at 224
academic libraries. For larger libraries, these are the associate or
assistant
dean or director responsible for technical services, a department head or
other manager in technical services, and the person in charge of human
resources. For smaller libraries, we invited the library dean or director
to respond rather than an associate or assistant dean or director. We hope
to
see whether and how these different perspectives influence responses.
This means that some of the questions may seem out of scope for some
respondents. If you think you can provide a useful response, please do,
but you should also feel free to skip questions that seem out of scope to
you.
Our survey draws on research reported in ARL Spec Kit 344 on Talent
Management in Academic Libraries. The Spec Kit includes these areas
related to talent management: talent strategy, recruitment and hiring,
retention, employee engagement, job classification management,
compensation management, performance assessment, competencies, professional
development planning, and leadership and succession
planning. Since many key roles in technical services are filled by
paraprofessionals, we are including their skills and training needs in the
survey.
The survey begins with open-ended questions about leadership and succession
planning, and continues with questions about specific skills:
technical, soft, leadership, and working style. It concludes with questions
about training needs and options. Please feel free to page ahead to get a
sense of the full survey. (You will be able to back up.)
Since this is a new area of research for our committee, we have
incorporated a number of opportunities for your comments. We have
pretested the survey and, based on this and on the reports of early
respondents, believe it will require about 25 to 30 minutes.
Follow this link to the Survey:
https://unlv.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8Dnc6kCthVej3uJ
*ALCTS is the Association for Library Collection and Technical Services, a
division of the American Library Association.
Thank you for your interest in the future of technical services. If you
have any questions about the survey or about our work, please feel free to
contact Committee Member Chelcie Rowell at rowellcj_at_wfu.edu .
Received on Tue Dec 08 2015 - 16:08:29 EST