Death and Transfiguration

“Get me another beer!” said the director to the waitress. The library staff with her laughed as the waitress retuned and poured.

“Speech!” yelled one of the librarians. “Oh, Lord, no,” said another.

“Well, I do think the occasion deserves a few words,” said the director, “and since this is only beer number two, this is probably the time.”

She looked around the table. “I have to tell you; five years ago this was not the vision I had for the library. I saw more librarians, doing more teaching, with instruction being our focus. I knew that traditional services were on their way out—circulation, interlibrary loan, and reference—and I honestly thought that bibliographic instruction was the answer.”

“In fact, we were midway though the original course correction when the wave hit, weren’t we?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” said one of the librarians who had been through it. “We staffed the reference desk with paraprofessionals in 2004, and we changed interlibrary loan to copyright compliance around then, too.”

The director nodded. “Then, we spent a lot of 2005 and almost all of 2006 trying to integrate with the teaching mission. And when we were done, we weren’t much further along than we had been. We were busier,” she continued, “and that was good—better than the downward slide we had seen before we got ourselves out there. But it was certainly a struggle.”

“What made the difference?” asked one of the several assistant librarians sitting at the table. “What was the change?”

The director took a swig of her beer. “It was a lot of things, but frankly, I can pinpoint the day the change happened, at least for me. I was coming back from yet another meeting where I was there ‘in hopes’ of something coming up that we could work on, when I realized that I could do great things for the library if I could get out of being a librarian.”

“She means, ‘If I could move into management,’” an old friend on the staff said. The group laughed.

“That’s right; I wasn’t the director at the time. But that wasn’t the issue,” the director said.

“And you are a librarian,” said the AL. You’re one of the biggest library geeks I know!”

The director laughed. “In 2006, being a librarian meant working with faculty, working with the schools, meeting with students. We were expending a tremendous amount of energy and reaching only a fraction of our patrons. On the way back from that meeting, I realized, if I could get out of being a librarian, I could get into projects that had major impact.”

“Like the new catalog,” one of the staff threw in. “That went live in mid-2007.”

“That’s right,” agreed the director. “One of the first things I did after my epiphany was suggest that we devote as much money and staff to our electronic presence as we did to our physical facilities. Of course, my old boss laughed, but the idea started to take hold. We abandoned federated searching as a dead end and instead hired a systems librarian who integrated an open source ILS, a DSpace install, and our open source course management system into one big digital library database.”

The programmer chimed in, “And then we got that huge NLM grant to make it work with PubMed! Usage went through the roof! It’s been a huge success.” There were murmurs of agreement, as they were actaully out celebrating their most recent award for the project.

“The annual stakeholder analysis has been a big deal,” said the librarian responsible for assessment. “Every year, we base our planning on that analysis. It’s like we’re in a constant state of change.”

There were some uncomfortable looks around the table. The director just laughed. “Yes, we added and then killed virtual reference; we did a reconfiguration on the ground floor even though we just completed a remodel in 2005; we’ve tried and abandoned a lot of things. Why stick with something just because? If we’re not really serving the patrons, who cares? The annual analysis has also shown that patron satisfaction is increasing every year. We went from about 75% to almost 90% satisfaction rates, and this year’s goal is 93. It’s a sea change.”

The assistant librarian piped up again. “I still don’t see how you ‘got out of being a librarian.’”

The director smiled. “In 2006, there were really two kinds of librarians: the kind who waited for patrons to come, and the kind who went out and essentially drummed up business. I got out of doing the traditional ‘stuff’ that librarians do and was able to actually make a meaningful difference. I wasn’t sitting at the desk or sitting in faculty meetings; I was working; I was thinking. I was able to do great things for the library by not being a librarian.”

The AL still looked confused. “But, we do those things. We teach classes and do tours and all that stuff. We have three people on the desk these days, and one roving around upstairs. That’s more than there were.”

The director caught the eye of one of the other librarians and winked. “Yes, you do those things. That’s hugely different from 2005, where librarians were still intimately involved in those activities. We made a policy to hire competent paraprofessionals and new MLS holders to do that kind of work. Librarian work. The librarians plan it, design it, and oversee it, and you do it. It doesn’t mean the work isn’t important, or that what the librarians are doing now is somehow more important than that day-to-day patron touch. It’s just different.”

“You made the librarians management and made the paras librarians,” one outspoken staffer said. “You essentially killed the librarians.”

The director winced. “That’s an apt analogy, although I would argue that the librarians as they were would have died with or without my help. We transformed the librarians and transformed the library. And the numbers don't lie; it's been a huge success.”

After a bit of silence, she said, “Death and transfiguration. It awaits us all. Now, my beer is empty and this conversation has gotten entirely too heavy. We're here to celebrate! Jamie, what’s the news with your two-year-old?”