Stopwatch Session 5

Karlene Nelson (University of the West Indies, Mona Campus) & Yolanda Tugwell (University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica)

Keywords: Electronic Resources; Marketing; Academic Libraries; Caribbean Libraries, User Study

Electronic resources form a significant amount of a library's budget. The idea that if you buy it, they will use it cannot be relied on by libraries. As a result, the marketing of library resources has become a significant management concern. University libraries must devise creative methods to boost usage. Faculty and students should be advised of the various resources available at their fingertips.

In order to improve the utilization of electronic resources, this paper describes how a Caribbean university library conducted a virtual e-resource fair to inform faculty and students about the wide range of electronic resources available to them.

The fair was evaluated using a mixed-methods approach. First, an online survey was used to record participants' perceptions of the effectiveness of the fair in creating awareness. Participants' comments and questions were captured during the virtual event and served as a source of qualitative data. The usage statistics for two popular multi-disciplinary databases for the previous two years were also analyzed to determine whether there had been a marked difference in using these electronic resources at the institution.

The findings indicated that the fair was successful in raising awareness of the electronic resources available at the Library. Overall, the use of electronic resources increased over the period.

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Courtney McAllister (EBSCO)

Keywords: change management; library culture; communication; hybrid work

Managing change has always revolved around careful and purposeful communication. The process of getting buy-in, outlining a change plan, managing stress or hesitation, and then implementing a change is fundamentally communication-intensive. However, the face-to-face interactions that often fostered cohesion and enabled change leaders to monitor complex situations and subtle emotions have been supplanted by hybridized work and shifts in communication patterns. Instead of getting everyone in the same physical space to engage in a workshop or ideate as a group, change leaders must adapt new techniques and strategies that appeal to remote and on-site workers, without creating silos or splintering the work culture.

In this session, the presenter will draw on her research on change management (published in Change Management for Library Technologists: A LITA Guide) and update some common change management practices and communication strategies to address the needs of hybrid work environments. Regardless of your institution’s size and scope, change communication needs have shifted and new preferences and pain points have emerged. While the session will briefly summarize some key theoretical concepts related to change management, emotion, and communication/perception, practical suggestions will be the focal point. Session attendees will have access to guidance and sample communication templates via Google Drive to help support concrete, real-world application.

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Kaci Resau (West Chester University)

Keywords: Succession Planning, Library Management, Organizational Management

Conversations around succession planning are typically reserved for corporate or government organizations and focus on planning for leadership positions. For libraries, succession and workforce planning can look a bit different, or non-existent. This original research, informed by qualitative semi-structured interviews, investigated the experiences of 63 library leaders in academic libraries in relation to workforce and succession planning in libraries. The presentation will share the preliminary findings of this research, including general thoughts around leadership and succession planning, the positive and negative aspects of planning, as well as potential ideas to begin creating or adjusting succession and workforce planning within organizations, no matter what the scope or size.

The research posits that workforce and succession planning can help shape internal policy and processes, outline consistent transfer of knowledge, allow for clarification of job duties, create mentoring opportunities, provide internal promotional opportunities and decrease the amount of time spent in crisis mode following abrupt organizational transitions.

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Erica Barnett (Hunter Library, Western Carolina University)

Keywords: documentation, project management, knowledge sharing

Workflow and process documentation has its benefits, especially to anyone newly stepping in or just trying to better understand a workflow or process. However, to experience those benefits, documentation should be created, reviewed, and updated often. Setting time aside to create, review, and update documentation when many of us are already doing so much can be a challenge and quickly become a ‘backburner’ project. With an increase in turnover, there should be an increased emphasis on documentation so that as we fill vacant positions or shift workloads to others, there is support on how to complete workflows and processes successfully. This session will take the audience through the process of how one librarian, with the help of others, brought documentation to the front burner with the hopes of inspiring others to do the same.

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Julia Gelfand (University of California, Irvine)

Keywords: Open Access; Transformative Agreements; Library Publisher Relationships, Article Process Charges

Transformative Agreements have been the medium and arrangement many libraries and institutions have developed with publishers and societies with whom they have developed strong partnerships for their researchers to share their scholarly outputs via open access options. As more authors are inclined to want to publish their submissions in some means of open scholarship, they are interested in having institutional options about how to make this happen. The typical fees, known as Article Process Charges (APCs) are usually paid out of sponsored research awards or by some allocation from the author and their institution. The prices can be daunting, especially in STEM fields or niche journals and if there is no funding from these sources, the author must consider additional options.

In recent years, libraries and consortia have formed transformative agreements that bring together subscription commitments to sourced materials and made available to their faculty and researchers this stream of scholarly communication that promotes open access at time of publication. Publishers have worked together with institutions committed to their output to make this happen, often as a trial or pilot project to promote journals and open access programs to be in sync during the submission process.

Prior to an agreement, data is compiled that demonstrates the benefits of such a program to both institution and publisher. Once an agreement is signed, it becomes the responsibility of the campus to inform its affiliates about the details of the transformative agreement and the potential it has for scholars and readers. Tying all the details together with the full picture of OA on a campus, whether it be through an institutional repository, a campus mandate, citation trends and promoting the right mix of sources is often the role of subject and scholarly communication librarians. This presentation will suggest how that can be achieved.