A department for “E”
Bonnie Tijerina March 22nd, 2007
As “e” becomes more prevalent, we are shifting workflows, but how about the creation of a new department focused solely on electronic? At the ER&L Conference we heard a few libraries are doing that, one being UCLA. Sharon Farb, Angela Riggio and Andrew Stancliffe presented on how they used the workflow diagrams from the ERMI Report to create the Digital Collections Services Department. I am interested to see how this relatively new department grows/changes. This presentation brought up a few questions for me that I don’t have answers to but are on my mind:
- Are we putting appropriate time, effort, resources into what is (or is becoming) the majority of what we spend our materials budget on? If not, why not?
- What changes should we be making in resource allocation and, more importantly, how do we convince those who allocate resources?
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I would also like to suggest that the current models of staff training, if we have them at all, are poorly equipped to deal with the changing e activities of staff. Whose responsibility is it to train librarians on digital library tools? Do we have methods to educate staff on changing copyright issues especially as it pertains to ILL, digital collections, and repositories?
These are great questions. Here at GA Tech we definitely haven’t figured this all out, but we have 2 people with the same job title: E-resources Coordinator. Elizabeth Winter is on the tech services side and I on the pub services side. That has helped Tech identify the changing needs from many angles. I think between the two of us we really do “coordinate” with just about every library department to do our jobs.
Those who created my public services position used the ERMI Report to identify all areas not covered in the job description of the Acq position and made those my duties.
Even though we used the same report, this is a very different model than UCLA where they bring together the expertise of digital collection management, licensing, metadata, acquisitions and even their e-scholarship librarian into one department.