Everywhere I've gone lately, everyone is saying to take the level of work in
cataloging and take it down a level in responsibility - "Higher" level
cataloging duties need to re thought and reassigned to other staff. I am
stuck on the "politically correct" way of phrasing this but something like
taking some of the duties away from degreed librarians in the
cataloging/metadata offices and giving it to undegreed, library technicians.
This is to free up the librarians to do other things in the metadata arena
that are needed.
I got slammed when discussing this because of pay compensation
disagreements. We (the profession who always has said we don't get paid
enough) want to assign work that has usually been regarded as "professional
level" to people yet not pay them "appropriately".
Is anyone else hitting this? Is it cost savings to reassign high level work
to lower paid staff and then get slapped with a union suite?
Or, is what we held as "professional level" or some of what we had been
assigning to the professional librarian actually not degreed level work?
Beecher Wiggins has outlined some changes they are reassigning at LC. But I
believe they must be upgrading the positions of the technical staff.
Do more with less - ouch - The trickly down method is looking like we are
going to puddle on lower rungs of the ladder - the technicians work isn't
going to go away... I'm thinking of the work along the lines of database
maintenance (transfers withdrawls physical processes) some of which we have
to do for pure inventory reasons - and need that human touch. And then
heaping upon them more of the cataloging tasks that also need that human
touch.
Received on Thu Jul 12 2007 - 05:29:48 EDT