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Public-Access Computer Systems Review Volume 03 Number 03
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The Public-Access Computer Systems Review
Volume 3, Number 3 (1992) ISSN 1048-6542
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CONTENTS
REFEREED ARTICLES
Regrowing Staff: Managerial Priority for the Future of University
Libraries
By Lois Jennings (pp. 4-15)
To retrieve this file: GET JENNINGS PRV3N3 F=MAIL
University library directors are faced with the strategic problem
of deciding what their libraries will be like in ten years from
now and what will need to have happened within the next five
years to make the transition to the future. A shift is beginning
to occur with the rapid growth of information technology,
electronic access to information, and the scholar's workstation
concept. University libraries need to develop new missions and
services as retaliatory innovation to these developments and
shift from a production mode of service to a facilitator mode.
This requires reconceptualizing the role of the university
library, the role of the client, and the role of library staff.
New staff profiles will be needed, and the task of regrowing
staff through staff development will be essential to the
successful shaping of the future library.
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The Public-Access Computer Systems Review
Editor-in-Chief
Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
University Libraries
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-2091
(713) 743-9804
LIB3@UHUPVM1 (BITNET) or LIB3@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU (Internet)
Associate Editors
Columns: Leslie Pearse, OCLC
Communications: Dana Rooks, University of Houston
Reviews: Roy Tennant, University of California, Berkeley
Editorial Board
Ralph Alberico, University of Texas, Austin
George H. Brett II, University of North Carolina
General Administration
Steve Cisler, Apple
Walt Crawford, Research Libraries Group
Lorcan Dempsey, University of Bath
Nancy Evans, Pennsylvania State University, Ogontz
Charles Hildreth, READ Ltd.
Ronald Larsen, University of Maryland
Clifford Lynch, Division of Library Automation,
University of California
David R. McDonald, Tufts University
R. Bruce Miller, University of California, San Diego
Paul Evan Peters, Coalition for Networked Information
Mike Ridley, University of Waterloo
Peggy Seiden, Skidmore College
Peter Stone, University of Sussex
John E. Ulmschneider, North Carolina State University
Publication Information
Published on an irregular basis by the University Libraries,
University of Houston. Technical support is provided by the
Information Technology Division, University of Houston.
Circulation: 4,394 subscribers in 48 countries (PACS-L) and 493
subscribers in 33 countries (PACS-P).
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The Public-Access Computer Systems Review is an electronic
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Jennings, Lois. "Regrowing Staff: Managerial Priority for the
Future of University Libraries." The Public-Access Computer
Systems Review 3, no. 3 (1992): 4-15. To retrieve this article,
send the following e-mail message to LISTSERV@UHUPVM1 or
LISTSERV@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU: GET JENNINGS PRV3N3 F=MAIL. [Refereed
Article]
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Abstract
University library directors are faced with the strategic problem
of deciding what their libraries will be like in ten years from
now and what will need to have happened within the next five
years to make the transition to the future. A shift is beginning
to occur with the rapid growth of information technology,
electronic access to information, and the scholar's workstation
concept. University libraries need to develop new missions and
services as retaliatory innovation to these developments and
shift from a production mode of service to a facilitator mode.
This requires reconceptualizing the role of the university
library, the role of the client, and the role of library staff.
New staff profiles will be needed, and the task of regrowing
staff through staff development will be essential to the
successful shaping of the future library.
1.0 Introduction
"Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which
nothing is fixed." [1]
University library directors are all grappling with the issues of
high demand for services, inadequate funding to maintain existing
services (let alone to develop new services), increasing pressure
to measure performance, and the need to attain quality. All of
these issues about the present preoccupy university library
directors, while, at the same time, they are faced with strategic
issues related to the future of university libraries. The
established roles of university libraries are being challenged by
the emerging scholar's workstation concept in which the client
has the ability to access, from a personal computer via
communication networks, information irrespective of its ownership
or location. University library directors are trying to forecast
what impact this development will have on their libraries'
missions and to predict what their libraries will be like five
and ten years from now.
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Within this context of managerial angst and soul searching,
the notion of the university library director regrowing staff may
seem to be peripheral to the real business at hand, namely the
health and survival of university libraries. My purpose in this
paper is to consider the critical need to regrow staff now for
the long-term success of university libraries. This means more
than developing essential on-the-job staff skills; it requires
reconceptualizing the role of the university library and the role
of the client, and then regrowing staff who will shape the new
direction for the library and the new information behavior of
clients.
Regrowing staff includes having the staff develop a clear
understanding of the need for the library to become a different
organization in an electronic campus information environment. It
also includes having the staff believe in the know-how that they
already possess as information professionals and reassess how
they will reorient that know-how to respond to changing client
needs. Staff must let go of the past ways in which they have
applied their skills and develop confidence in their ability to
move beyond the comfort zone of the library. While this type of
growth is partly the responsibility of the individual as a
professional, the fostering of the conditions for this growth
requires leadership from the top (i.e., from the university
library director).
2.0 Individual Growth and Outcomes
Argyris [2] observed almost thirty years ago that an individual
grows and learns at work if he/she identifies with the job, feels
self-enhanced through its performance, and sees the attainment of
its aims. If these conditions prevail, the individual will be
stimulated toward further commitment to the job and to purposeful
behavior. An organization must provide opportunities for work in
which the individual is able to define his/her immediate goals,
relate these goals to the goals of the organization, evaluate
his/her own effectiveness, and constantly increase the degree of
challenge at work. As a result of this goal-directed behavior,
staff will: (1) receive and give feedback on performance; (2) own
and permit others to own their ideas, values, and feelings; (3)
show openness to new ideas and values; and (4) engage in
increased experimentation and risk-taking.
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The need for openness to new ideas and values,
experimentation, and risk-taking have never been more crucial in
university libraries as they now face an uncertain future and
question their missions. The traditional business of a
university library has been to identify, acquire, organize,
locate, and distribute information and knowledge from external
sources that are relevant to its university's mission and goals
and that benefit staff and students. Developments such as the
Internet make it possible for academic staff (and potentially for
students) to access external information from their own scholar's
workstations in their offices or homes and to obtain copies of
documents using the file transfer and printing capabilities of
personal computers. The client is now able to pursue in part
what is seen to be the library's mission, namely providing access
to external information and knowledge.
3.0 Neutralization of the Library's Mission and Retaliatory
Innovation
Network access to external information and knowledge is an
innovation that has neutralized the university library's long
established role. Bowersox [3] suggests that neutralization of
an organization's traditional advantage in the marketplace is a
predictable stage in the process of institutional change. While
the innovation benefits the client, the organization threatened
by the change must overcome its natural tendency to resist change
and must retaliate with the next round of innovation. For
university libraries this means both a new mission that is
generic enough to survive changing modes of information access
and delivery as well as new services that ensure the library
maintains its value as a central participant in the university's
business.
A new mission for university libraries is suggested by
Dougherty and Hughes [4] in their account of a series of
workshops with library directors and university provosts on their
preferred futures for university libraries. They propose a
leadership role for university libraries in "creating a campus
information environment" for the 21st century. This new mission
requires risk-taking, shaping the new services required by
universities to support the scholar's workstation environment,
becoming fully integrated into the community of scholars, and
pro-actively adopting new and changing responsibilities, rather
than seeking direction from others.
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The mission of information for the campus has been developed
even more strongly by the Strategic Visions Steering Committee,
[5] an independent group of librarians in the United States. By
means of a series of open meetings at ALA Conferences and an
ongoing computer conference, the group has developed a strategic
vision for professional librarians as the basis for librarianship
in the 21st century. They propose a leadership role for
university libraries and suggest that they develop information
policies for their universities, apply information technology,
perform information research, collaborate with others on new ways
to access information, and educate clients to manage their
electronic information.
While each university library will have to develop its own
mission for the needs of its parent university and clientele, it
is clear that the mission will be influenced by a shift in values
that is taking place. There is a shift in values from: (1)
collection building in anticipation of needs to collection
building to meet identified essential needs, (2) ownership of
information to access to information on demand, (3) the library
as a physical entity to the library as an information system
accessible from the client's multifunctional workstation, (4) the
library as the provider of external information to the library as
an intermediary facilitating access for the individual to campus
information and external information, and (5) large central data
bases to distributed databases with mechanisms to make them
widely accessible to students and staff. The shift will be made
all the more complex by the presence of a transition period that
is unlikely to end. University libraries will be servicing both
the traditional information gathering behavior of students and
academic staff as well as their new needs as they participate in
the scholar's workstation environment.
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4.0 Strategic Questions
From my perspective as a University Librarian, the shift is
exciting and exhausting to contemplate. What will my university
be like in ten years time? What will my library need to be like
in five and ten years time in preparation for the university's
information needs? How will my library make the transition to
the future within current funding levels? Will there really be
the end of one era in library service and the start of another,
or is it more likely that there will be a continuation of the old
side-by-side with an ongoing process of change? What mission
will my library suggest that it should pursue within the
university? How will my library move into an electronic
information environment? What will be the nature of its
relationships with other service providers on the campus and with
the faculty? How will the library encourage the university to
develop an academic plan for new teaching methods in the
scholar's workstation environment? What will be the library's
input to an information policy for the campus? What will be the
library's input to the university's strategic plan for
information technology? What library services will be needed to
support the scholar's workstation environment? What new services
and structures are needed? Will academic staff and students
accept the need to reconceptualize their roles as library users?
5.0 Finding the Answers Within Our Staff
The answers to these questions cannot be found in textbooks on
librarianship, standards for professional service produced by
library associations, library school curricula, published
research in librarianship, or the practices of other libraries.
The shift is occurring too rapidly and has simply overtaken the
profession's capacity to develop appropriate theory and practice.
The answers must be found quickly by the staff working in
libraries; hence the need to regrow staff.
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University library directors need to regrow two kinds of
staff if the library is to stay in charge of its own destiny.
They must first regrow the champions among the staff who will
cross the existing boundaries and establish the library's new
position in the electronic information environment. The
champions are those select few who: (1) thrive on uncertainty and
ambiguity, (2) take risks without being risk-prone, (3) learn new
skills in an unstructured learning environment, (4) perform well
in unprescribed roles, (5) demonstrate an unerring commitment to
client needs, (6) communicate their ideas convincingly to
colleagues and clients, (7) share their knowledge and skills
openly with others, (8) and do not seek to be told what the
future will be but actively work at making it happen. These are
the staff who, by doing, will provide form and substance for the
competencies that will be needed for retaliatory innovation, and
they will establish the new relationships with others on campus.
The second task is to regrow the rest of the staff to fit
the new staff profile that will be required. These are the staff
who perceive themselves as the workers; the ordinary people whose
value lies in the contribution they make to keeping the library
running smoothly. Their role is different from that of the
champions, but they are just as important to the future of
university libraries. It is their changing role which will need
to be well managed for a successful new staff profile to emerge.
6.0 Staff Development and Goal-Directed Behavior
Staff development has existed in libraries for many years.
Trends in the literature for the past twenty years include the
use of staff development for: (1) improving productivity; (2)
motivating staff; (3) managing problem staff; (4) helping
libraries adapt to automation; (5) developing a sense of
professionalism; (6) addressing equity issues such as improved
career paths, multiskilling, and staff participation and
consultation in decision making; and (7) renewing organizations.
Strategies for staff development have included training
programs (e.g., on-the-job training, in-service courses, and
external courses), performance appraisal, staff exchanges,
professional involvement (e.g., membership in professional
associations, attendance at professional meetings, publication,
and professional networks), staff suggestions, management-by-
objectives, peer coaching programs, staff participation in the
recruitment process, internship, in-house research programs, in-
house information sharing sessions between units, mentoring
schemes, and participative structures.
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These strategies are all important if they are purposefully
set within a human resource management plan and if they help the
university library to focus on the individual and on the library,
developing the performance of the individual in a way that
contributes to the performance of the library. The individual's
progress and development in terms of work interests, skills, and
knowledge need to be meshed with the library's plans for the
individual and the library's development. The desired outcome is
goal-directed behavior for both the individual and the library.
The champions require little nurturing other than strategic
guidelines to focus their energies, genuine interest shown in
their ideas, budget encouragement to support their initiatives,
and organizational structures that facilitate their performance.
Unlike the champions, the balance of the staff need
reassurance and nurturing. They may feel insecure about change,
and they are likely to find the growth process--learning new
knowledge, developing new skills, opening themselves to different
values, and being part of experimental efforts--to be stressful.
They need leadership, a clearly defined role in a work group,
structured training, ongoing support from other staff who are
knowledgeable and able to contribute to their learning, and
feedback on their performance. Given the right conditions, the
majority of staff will grow and begin to demand the right to grow
even more as they gain self-confidence.
7.0 Changing the Staff Profile
While the decentralized access provided by the scholar's
workstation is supplanting the university library's traditional
role as the central provider of external information, a central
library structure will continue to be needed for campus-wide
information needs. University library staff have professional
know-how that will be needed in the future. They have know-how
in managing information for retrieval, analyzing client needs,
identifying relevant information and filtering out irrelevant
information, and using the market channels for the supply of
information in both print and electronic formats.
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With these sustainable competencies, there is an opportunity
for university libraries to create a new mission and provide a
range of different services, i.e., an opportunity to engage in
retaliatory innovation. To do so, however, university libraries
need to move away from a production mode of service to a
facilitator mode. The process of selection, acquisition,
cataloging, storage, and lending of library-owned collections
will continue, but decline in importance in relation to new
services that will enable clients to undertake the production
process themselves with ease and efficiency in the electronic
environment. The library's increasingly important new roles will
be to provide clients with advice about electronic information
and to help them develop skills in accessing, using, and managing
this information. There is no doubt that the staff profile of
university libraries will change if the present production-based
service declines as print collections are replaced by electronic
publishing, delivery, and access. Staffing needs will be
directed by the new principles for library service that are
beginning to emerge:
1. Emphasize the elimination of irrelevant information,
rather than the supply of all relevant information. [6]
Librarians must work as a team with academic staff,
understanding their actual information needs and the
needs of their students and filtering out information
that is not pertinent. This requires a move away from
the traditional role of building large collections
designed to satisfy all possible needs to a role of
selectively building core collections directly of
benefit to the university. It also involves
reorganizing library staff into teams, some with a
strongly focused client orientation and others with a
quality assurance orientation. The client-oriented
teams are needed to integrate, on a day-to-day basis,
the library's work with the teaching, learning, and
research activities of the faculty and other university
units. The quality-assurance-oriented teams maintain
internal efficiency and consistency in systems,
policies, procedures, equipment, collections, and
facilities to support the work of the client-oriented
teams.
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2. Provide access to finding tools (e.g., indexes,
catalogs, bibliographies, and databases) that identify
the existence of information, both primary and
secondary sources, pertinent to the university's
mission and goals. The emphasis here will be on
electronically-mediated access to information
irrespective of who owns the information. Tools that
allow students and staff to browse other publications,
such as Current Contents or copied title pages,
together with appropriate finding tools that enable
location of relevant information sources must be freely
available to all staff and students.
3. All information and related equipment considered to be
essential to support the university's teaching,
learning, and research missions should be freely
accessible to students and staff. Critical information
should be owned by the library, regardless of whether
it is in print or electronic form.
4. Repackage essential information for mass distribution
by the university when access is required by many
students at the same time or for distribution at the
workplace.
5. Provide on-demand access to secondary sources using
document delivery services, including interlibrary loan
services. These sources must be made available to
students and staff under conditions similar to (or
better than) ownership (i.e., fast delivery and no
apparent additional charges to the individual).
6. Advise clients and teach them skills in how to
identify, select, locate, and manage information as
well as to be competent users of information
technology. The library staff can contribute to the
development of quality graduates by transferring their
skills in finding and managing information and
encouraging independence in learning.
7. Collaborate with others in the university to create an
overall campus information environment.
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It is becoming evident that the competencies (i.e., skills,
knowledge, and attitudes) that traditionally belong to
librarianship will need reorientation to pursue these principles.
In a facilitator role, the ability to establish off-counter
professional/client relationships becomes more important than
ever before and requires a new level of competence in analyzing
client needs, making clients aware of electronic and print
sources of information, and educating clients in how to gain
access to them.
Clients will expect library staff to be knowledgeable about
obtaining the best sources of information available via networks
to meet their needs, getting started with the technology of the
scholar's workstation to retrieve information, transferring files
across the networks for manipulation on personal computers, and
generating information for electronic publication.
There is also the potential for library staff to transfer
their skills in classification, cataloging, and indexing to
developing electronic guides to the mass of information available
on networks and to filtering out the "junk." These skills are
also needed to advise clients on ways to manage the information
on their scholar's workstations to generate, store, and retrieve
their own customized files.
While some recruitment may be needed to import staff with
technical skills in networking and managing software (or to fill
other new positions), for the most part, the staff profile will
need to be developed by regrowing the existing staff. This
assumes the existence of a staff development plan that parallels
the library's strategic plan.
8.0 Conclusion
An important performance indicator for measuring a university's
achievement of its educational mission is its success in
preparing staff and students to access information and knowledge
and to use both for effective problem solving. Changes occurring
in the means of access and the amount of information to be
accessed are together suggesting the need for new library
services to help staff and students. These services will develop
effectively if university library directors help their staff (and
clients) to reconceptualize their roles and to grow in their
jobs.
University library directors themselves must grow in their
jobs if they are to provide the organizational environment for
the development of their staff. It is the university library
directors who must ultimately provide a clear strategic vision
for the library's role in the university and the drive to move
toward it. They must not be weighed down by the worries of
funding constraints or wearied by the magnitude of the task of
satisfying both client needs and staff aspirations.
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The pending paradigm shift requires university library
directors to move beyond their past "theories-in-use" about the
management of libraries and to provide leadership for new
organizational learning. Argyris [7] has described "theories-in-
use" as the learned perspectives that we hold about the
organization that blinker us to the reexamination of our
expectations of its performance.
There is a need for university library directors to be
attuned to innovation, risk-taking, flexibility, and the
abandonment of the obsolete, the superseded, and the unimportant.
They must work hard to develop flexible structures that can
respond to the transition which lies ahead. Drucker [8] has
written recently about the new productivity challenge for
knowledge and service workers and the need to build into the job
of every employee and work team the opportunity for continuous
learning and teaching. This must also apply to the university
library director's job, for it is important for staff to feel
inspired by seeing the boss at his or her best, flowing and
changing too.
References and Notes
1. Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (London: Constable, 1961),
27.
2. Chris Argyris, Integrating the Individual and the
Organization (New York: Wiley, 1964).
3. Donald J. Bowersox et al., Management in Marketing Channels
(New York: McGraw-Hill, l980), 337.
4. Richard M. Dougherty and Carol Hughes, Preferred Futures for
Libraries: A Summary of Six Workshops with University Provosts
and Library Directors (Mountain View, CA: The Research Libraries
Group, 1991), 11-12.
5. Strategic Visions Steering Committee, "Strategic Vision for
Professional Librarians," e-mail message from Sue Martin
(SKMARTIN@GUVAX.GEORGETOWN.EDU), 31 March 1992.
6. An approach referred to originally by Russell L. Ackoff in
the context of management misinformation systems.
7. Chris Argyris, "Organizational Learning and Management
Information Systems," Data Base 13, nos. 2-3 (1982): 4.
8. Peter F. Drucker, "The New Productivity Challenge," Harvard
Business Review 69 (November/December 1991): 79.
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About the Author
Lois Jennings, University Librarian, University of Canberra,
Canberra, Australia. Internet: LVJ@LIBSERVER.CANBERRA.EDU.AU.
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The Public-Access Computer Systems Review is an electronic
journal that is distributed on BITNET, Internet, and other
computer networks. There is no subscription fee.
To subscribe, send an e-mail message to LISTSERV@UHUPVM1
(BITNET) or LISTSERV@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU (Internet) that says:
SUBSCRIBE PACS-P First Name Last Name. PACS-P subscribers also
receive two electronic newsletters: Current Cites and Public-
Access Computer Systems News.
This article is Copyright (C) 1992 by Lois Jennings. All
Rights Reserved.
The Public-Access Computer Systems Review is Copyright (C)
1992 by the University Libraries, University of Houston. All
Rights Reserved.
Copying is permitted for noncommercial use by computer
conferences, individual scholars, and libraries. Libraries are
authorized to add the journal to their collection, in electronic
or printed form, at no charge. This message must appear on all
copied material. All commercial use requires permission.
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