The evolving liaison model at Mount Holyoke College1
Abstract:
This chapter describes the changing role of the library liaison at the Mount Holyoke College Library and Information Services (LITS). The chapter provides an overview of the history of organizational changes in LITS, the creation of a liaison role with blended library and instructional technology responsibilities, and organizational models that best serve the needs of faculty and students. A blended liaison model with flexible, integrated teams has proved effective for enhancing communication between the library and its constituents on campus.
This semester students and faculty at Mount Holyoke College have taken to writing on an interior window in the College library. A tub attached to the window contains dry-erase markers of various colors. At the top of the window is the simple prompt to “Ask LITS.” Patrons write to weigh in on the temperature of the building, to ask for help finding articles, to ask for advice on solid state vs. electromechanical hard disk drives, to check on rumors about the College admitting men, to play word games, to hold each other accountable for the quality of questions, and to express love for and concern about the library’s spokes-goose “Jorge.” Patrons are confident posting questions of all sorts, relying on a simple guideline: don’t be mean. Patrons are largely oblivious that a blended team of librarians and instructional technology consultants tap the merged Library and Information Technology Services (LITS) unit and the College as a whole to find answers and to bring about change based on what they hear on the “Ask LITS” board.
While the “Ask LITS” board is a playful space for student feedback to LITS staff, it is indicative of deeper realities in the ways LITS and the Research and Instructional Support (RIS) department is ready to respond to student and faculty research and teaching needs, in a flexible arrangement that gives them “one-stop” access to all that LITS has to offer students and faculty. How did we get to a point where faculty and students are comfortable writing anything on the wall and where the organization can respond constructively and playfully to the items posted? This low-tech social network is a small product of a decade and a half of effort by this blended team to provide increasingly responsive and appropriate teaching, learning, research, and collection support to Mount Holyoke College.
Situating the College and LITS
Established in 1837, Mount Holyoke College is the world’s longest-standing institution of higher education for women. From its founding, Mount Holyoke sought to give a first-rate education to those who had been denied access to such opportunities. In keeping with that tradition the College continues to offer a liberal arts curriculum in small classes, with plenty of individual attention and mentoring from outstanding faculty who set very high standards for achievement. An increasingly diverse and productive faculty2 offers this curriculum to a diverse group of women students: 28 percent of domestic students identify as African American, Asian American, Latina, Native American, or multiracial, while 26 percent of students are international citizens. In the 2011 edition of the Princeton Review Guide’s annual guidebook The Best 373 Colleges the College was ranked first in the category of “best classroom experience” (Princeton Review, 2011).
The information services needs of the faculty and students demands a commitment to preservation of “venerable” traditions, while also being actively engaged in the “hip” information services of the future. In 1996, to better serve the campus in times of dramatic change, and to facilitate this dual commitment to be “venerable yet hip,” Mount Holyoke was one of the first colleges to merge its IT, media, and library organizations. Since then, the LITS organization that formed as a result has gone through several rounds of reorganization to adapt to both the changing needs of the campus and to the changing information services environment. Today LITS is divided into five major departments reporting to the Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of LITS:
Campus Technology and Media Support (CTMS), which provides a coordinated approach to lab, classroom, desktop, and campus event technology support.
Discovery and Access (DnA), which manages the circulation, acquisition, cataloging and processing of material including archives and rare materials, e-resource access, library systems support, and resource sharing functions.
Digital Assets and Preservation Services (DAPS), which oversees digital repository systems, standards, policies, and workflows.
Research and Instructional Support (RIS), which provides library research and instructional technology services and resources responsive to teaching, learning, and research, and builds the library collection.
Technology Infrastructure and Systems Support (TISS), which supports and guides the technical development of the campus network, administrative systems, and technical aspects of the web.
Each one of these departments has a story to tell about how it has developed to better support the campus. The narrative that follows will focus on the RIS department, which most directly supports the teaching, learning, and research activities of students and faculty. In particular, this chapter will consider the liaison’s evolving role, which is at the heart of the RIS department’s functioning. Liaisons and their organization are key to bridging the variety of disciplinary and pedagogical approaches found at the College, with appropriate information, technology, services and resources.
When it comes to supporting the teaching, learning, and research needs of faculty and students at small, selective, liberal arts colleges such as Mount Holyoke College, it has been increasingly difficult to draw a line between technology support and library support. The lack of clarity creates uncertainty for faculty and students about where to turn for help and, in the worst case, can lead to the disuse of available services. For IT and library staff this lack of clarity can simultaneously lead to duplication of effort, gaps in support, and extra time spent negotiating boundaries. It can also lead to a loss of professional satisfaction. For instance, professional staff might be asked to cover such a wide range of information services that they never feel the pleasure of becoming expert or exercising leadership in any one area. At the same time professional staff can feel trapped in narrow areas of expertise without enough opportunities to explore new topics or to see how their work fits into the larger context of the department or the College. While the overlap between technology and library support creates challenges, the areas of intersection between disciplines and professions can also become a fruitful place for collaboration and innovation. In the 15 years since merging the IT and library organization, LITS met the reference services, collection development, and instructional technology consulting needs through three increasingly intertwined organizational approaches: two separate departments with parallel liaisons; a single merged department with parallel library and technology liaisons; and a single merged department with blended liaisons.
Separate departments and parallel liaisons: project-based collaborations
During the first years after the merger in 1996, LITS maintained separate Reference Services (RS) and Curricular Support and Instructional Technology (CSIT) departments. These departments maintained parallel, independent relationships with academic departments and the faculty and students in them. Following the LITS merger, collaboration between the RS and CSIT liaisons was primarily associated with specific projects. For instance, Juliet Habjan Boisselle and Susan Fliss (at the time a librarian and an instructional technologist at the College) along with colleagues from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst wrote about one such effort in the article “Talking toward Techno-Pedagogy: IT and Librarian Collaboration – Rethinking Our Roles” (Boisselle et al., 2004). Librarians and instructional technologists along with their faculty and student collaborators participated in the three-year “Talking Toward Techno- Pedagogy” project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and hosted by Bryn Mawr College. In the article, Boisselle and Fliss describe the success they found collaborating with each other, with a faculty member, and with students to redesign an Experimental Methods in Psychology course. This and other collaborations helped them recognize “the vast resources available from different constituencies on campus.” They also saw that “constituents can continue to learn from one another and navigate this sea of constant change together. Specifically, librarians, instructional technologists, faculty, and students should not plod onward in isolation” (Boisselle et al., 2004). While Boiselle and Fliss applauded the changes made possible in the affected course and the bonds that were strengthened between members of the project, they wondered “how to re-create that opportunity on a busy campus?” This was a common refrain on campuses that were experiencing the benefits of grant-based collaborations between people across library, IT, student, and faculty roles: they were hard to sustain after the end of those specific projects.
As a partial answer to this question, in 2003 Mount Holyoke merged the RS and CSIT departments to form a single Research and Instructional Support (RIS) department within the larger merged LITS organization. The hope was that moving from project-based collaboration to sharing organizational locations and physical office spaces would allow for “almost seamless” movement between instructional technology and library questions (Boisselle et al., 2004). The merged RIS department was one of the elements that supported Mount Holyoke College’s ACLR Excellence in Academic Libraries Award application in 2005.
Merged department with parallel liaisons: collaboration on a daily basis
For the first years after merging, the RIS department continued to assign parallel instructional technology and library liaisons to each academic department. Thus, for each academic department a separate individual was assigned as the library liaison and another as the instructional technology liaison. As the RIS department hired new staff members as explicitly blended “Library and Instructional Technology Consultants” the RIS department simply assigned them to both roles for the academic departments they served.
This configuration of parallel liaisons within a single merged RIS department produced notable successes, providing more integrated library and instructional technology support. Bringing librarians and instructional technologists together to share office space did indeed allow them to share solutions and to “hand off” faculty or students in need of help to another staff member with different expertise. Doing such work daily allowed the group to offer more consistent support for innovative work at the intersections of technology, library, pedagogical, and disciplinary innovation.
Converting the campus from WebCT to Sakai learning management systems was a major project the department led in this period. The project exemplified the effectiveness of this improved configuration. Building on the enhanced connection between library and instructional technology perspectives from the beginning, the group utilized the period of transition to address both traditional library and instructional technology needs of the faculty. Sakai was introduced as a way to better meet the instructional technology needs of the campus as a replacement for course websites, discussion forums, and other online assignments. At the same time it was also rolled out as the replacement for the library’s e-reserves system, and as a way to serve as a link to the discipline- or course-specific research guide needs of students. In addition, Sakai, or “ella” as the system is affectionately called on campus, became the first major system supported at a comparable level by both librarians and instructional technology consultants. Since all RIS staff could help with most issues, faculty did not need to wonder whom to approach with questions.
At the 2007 Educause Annual Conference Mary Glackin, an instructional technology consultant, and Juliet Boisselle presented on the conversion in their talk “Into the Frying Pan: Lessons Learned Deploying and Supporting Sakai in a Liberal Arts Environment” (Glackin and Boisselle, 2007). At the peak less than 30 percent of courses took advantage of WebCT. In the fall of 2006 the plan was to offer a limited pilot serving 20 courses. However, by the end of the semester faculty had asked to have 86 courses moved to Sakai. By the following spring 2007 semester more faculty had adopted Sakai for their courses than at the peak of WebCT’s use including 50 percent of faculty who had never before used a learning management system. In the fall of 2007 60 percent of courses had adopted Sakai and by the fall of 2008 adoption reached a plateau at about 80 percent adoption. While some of this success can be attributed to improvements in the software, much of it can also be attributed to the momentum created by solving both library and instructional technology needs at the same time. This increased the attractiveness of the move, increased the number of support staff faculty could draw upon for help, and allowed the librarians and instructional technology consultants to offer more individualized desk-side coaching. This helped to ensure faculty learned how to use the LMS to meet their specific teaching and learning objectives.
While merging allowed the RIS department to guide the campus through this substantial migration and, in many other areas, it also brought challenges for relationships and expectations both internally and externally. Internally to the RIS department, the parallel liaisons had to expend effort negotiating responsibilities. This was especially challenging because RIS staff represented a wide range of training and experience. The RIS department included staff with titles from “traditional” reference librarians, and “traditional” instructional technology consultants to those with new, blended titles. This range made it difficult to find equitable workload balances and expectations. Meanwhile, external to the RIS department, faculty and colleagues in other units within LITS reported that it was often hard to know whom to contact about what, and to be confident that a problem submitted would be addressed. While the parallel liaison relationships promised to give faculty the depth and breadth of support they needed to accomplish their work, it also allowed for a lack of clarity and accountability. From the faculty perspective it meant they felt the need to determine when to approach whom for support even as technology and library questions increasingly overlapped.
Merging departments brought many benefits. Nevertheless, by the summer of 2008 the RIS department was asking itself how it could build on its previous successes to serve the teaching, learning, and research goals of the faculty and students even more effectively. The RIS department began a process of looking for “the most effective, proactive model(s) for integrating and supporting library research and instructional technology services and resources into the academic program,” and generated a short document outlining RIS Opportunities and Challenges.
In 2008 the department included:
librarians, instructional technologists, and dual or “hybrid” professionals;
librarians with faculty status and instructional technology consultants with staff status;
positions with different types of responsibilities (e.g. liaisons, Reference Operations Manager, Director, and plans to also incorporate the Director of Collection Development);
student assistants – “tech mentors,” video consultants, reference desk.
The RIS department also identified several balancing acts with which the staff was engaged:
physical service points/hours (drop-in support) with consultation appointments;
generalist with specialist models of support;
faculty/technology-related support with student/research support;
finding the time to effectively handle the range of responsibilities, including collection development, delivery of effective programs for faculty and students, engagement with faculty and the academic program, library and learning management systems development, technology support, R&D, and so on;
faculty/student support, staff/administrative offices/centers/co-curricular support;
realization that support has become more reactive with a desire to return to a more proactive approach.
Merged department with single, blended liaisons: toward a (high-)performing team
In summer of 2009 the RIS department held a retreat. Working with a facilitator the RIS department explored models for organizing its work through theoretical frameworks and through activities. Drawing on the work of Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith the facilitator helped the department to recognize that it could better tap the unique contributions of each member by operating as a more integrated team. For Katzenbach and Smith a “performing team” is “a small number of people with complementary skills who are equally committed to a common purpose, goals, and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”3 Compared to “single leader groups,” teams are better able to serve the changing, highly complex, and interconnected information service needs of the faculty and students by tapping each member’s unique contributions within this context of shared vision and accountability. The department further charged itself with becoming a “high performing team,” which is a performing team that “has members who are deeply committed to one another’s personal growth and success.”
The department left the retreat with enthusiasm for and commitment to operating as a team. It also left it with new skills in group work process and a shared sense of accountability. The first task the department tackled as the “RIS Team” was how to better organize the team’s work.
Single liaisons
In examining the role of liaison, the RIS Team recognized that the primary purpose of the liaison is to develop a strong relationship with the academic departments and the faculty and students in them. As one faculty member said in the spring of 2009, “I just want to be able to contact one person and know that they will take it from there. I want that person to have a can-do attitude and to follow through.” Toward that end the RIS Team now assigns just a single liaison – instead of separate IT and library liaisons – to each academic department. Assigning just one person to each academic department is meant to clarify, simplify, and deepen the personal relationships and accountability between academic department and the liaisons. At the same time the move to a single liaison is meant to clarify and simplify responsibility and accountability within the RIS Team. The move to a single liaison for each academic department was also one step in better balancing each liaison’s work load.
In this single liaison model the primary duties of the liaison shifted from specific areas of expertise to broader duties to facilitate communication between their assigned academic departments and the RIS Team:
Liaisons are responsible for developing strong, trusting relationships with the faculty.
Liaisons are responsible for tapping those relationships to know the needs of the faculty and the departments.
Liaisons are responsible for meeting those needs either through their own abilities or by tapping those of others within the RIS team or elsewhere in LITS.
Assigning liaison duties then hinges less on specific skills and more on the ability to develop strong relationships and to serve as an effective conduit. With that in mind each RIS Team member was asked to rank their ability to serve as an effective liaison to each of the 48 academic departments from very strong to very weak. Based on this information the team assigned 37 academic departments to liaisons who listed a very strong ability to serve. The 11 remaining academic departments were assigned to individuals with a positive sense of their ability and by considering the complementarity of departments, the liaison’s specific skills, and balancing the number of faculty each liaison served.
This organization charges each liaison with supporting a list of approximately 30 faculty members. Practically, this means that the liaison is put at the center of communication with the faculty members on that list. Most communication from RIS to the faculty, whether concerning the collection, library research instruction and support, or instructional technology consulting, is routed through the liaison. This reinforces the liaison as a resource for the faculty. It also allows liaisons to tailor communication to better reach specific academic departments and faculty members.
While the RIS Team encourages the routing of all outgoing communication to the faculty through the liaison, it recognizes and welcomes the fact that communication from the faculty to the RIS Team will be routed through a variety of channels. Rather than insisting faculty contact their liaison, the RIS Team works behind the scenes to either meet the immediate need (and include the liaison in any subsequent communication) or to hand off more substantial requests for the liaison to oversee more completely. Thus, faculty can use any method to contact the RIS Team including the RIS email list, chat, online request forms, the research help desk, or another liaison. The team takes responsibility for routing the need appropriately while at a minimum always keeping the liaison in the loop.
The RIS Team’s work to cultivate the library’s collection offers a good illustration of how this works. Each liaison is responsible for selecting for the academic departments under their care. This is the case whether the liaison’s title is instructional technology consultant, librarian, or both. The liaison is charged with getting to know the collection needs of the departments and of the individual faculty in their care. This knowledge is written out in a collection statement liaisons develop for each academic department in their care. The collection statement is a living document intended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. The statement is revisited any time the department or the liaison thinks the academic department’s needs have changed sufficiently to warrant re-examining previous decisions. The statement begins with the liaison’s description of the academic program, including the liaison’s understanding of the substantive areas of focus and the pedagogical approaches of the academic department. The rest of the statement then describes how the liaison uses this understanding to make selection decisions. Most importantly, the collection statement serves as the basis for conversations with the academic department and with individual faculty members. It is a tool liaisons use to help them to better listen to the needs of the departments they serve. At the same time the academic department learns about the collecting decisions being made on its behalf and has the opportunity to shape those decisions. More important than the “final” document is the understanding and the relationship the liaison develops with the department in the process of writing and revising it.
To tap and reinforce this relationship, when major collection-related questions arise the liaison is the primary communicator and guides the decision-making process. Thus, for instance, the College has a budget line through which it can meet new ongoing commitments such as journal subscriptions for junior faculty. The liaisons are responsible for working with new faculty members and their departments to identify gaps in the collection. They also help the new faculty members, who often come from recent graduate work at research universities, to understand the nature of the Mount Holyoke collection and its focus on supporting faculty teaching and student research. They work with the faculty member to make the curricular case for any proposed new additions to the collection. Similarly, as publishers’ pricing models change – for instance for paper and electronic subscriptions – liaisons work with academic departments to decide on the best use of resources to meet their specific substantive and pedagogical needs for the titles in question. As these conversations are built around an ongoing relationship that focuses on the academic department’s goals and approaches, they can focus on a nuanced understanding of “fit” rather than on simplistic notions of budget cutting or formats as ends in themselves.
The liaison also benefits from being in the stream of information associated with smaller faculty collection requests. Thus, the online book request form submits requests to the RIS Team’s email list. The responsible liaison is charged with selecting the item through the web-based acquisition and collection development tool. Along the way, the liaison has the opportunity to learn of new areas of interests to faculty in their departments. In addition, often faculty include valuable information in the comment fields describing a new course or area of interest that can be very valuable to the liaison, while it would not have been useful to the acquisitions staff who used to process the forms. Finally, the liaison is responsible for confirming that the order has been placed and for communicating this to the faculty member. This simple follow-through helps the request form not feel like a black box and reminds the faculty member that the liaison is engaged with and responsive to their needs.
As mentioned above, not all liaisons are experienced in collection development, and the “traditional” instructional technology consultants have no formal collection training. The instructional technologists brought deep subject knowledge to most of their liaison roles and, as a result, they took on book selection with relative ease. The shared offices mentioned above provided a setting for immediate consultation on collection questions for those liaisons with less experience. Those questions served as “teachable moments” that were more effective than a comprehensive training program. In addition, the liaisons’ focus on building strong ties with the departments, understanding their needs, and building trusted lines of communication with the departments create a solid foundation for the Director of Collection Development to provide more substantial guidance and support for aspects of collection development beyond selecting books. For instance, preparing for a journal review proved more challenging when the questions were less about content and more about the many variations and implications of publishers’ models, such as “big deals,” aggregators, “deep discount pricing,” and pay-per-view. Yet these were opportunities to gradually develop and refresh liaisons’ understanding of this changing environment. In addition, while maintaining ultimate responsibility for meeting the collection needs remained with the liaison for each department, in the first year of the single liaison model some less-experienced liaisons “sub-contracted” some selecting duties to more experienced RIS teammates. This allowed the liaisons to focus on building the relationship with the department and on developing their skills while actively collaborating on the selecting process with the more experienced teammate. After the first year of startup, all liaisons, whether librarians or not, are now handling all selecting duties for their assigned departments.
While the primary responsibility of the single liaison was to develop a strong relationship and knowledge of the needs of the academic departments, they were also still responsible for delivering an extremely broad range of services, from collection development, research instruction, and support to instructional technology consulting. While the RIS Team carefully matched liaisons to departments where they could be most successful, and while in the area of collection development the RIS Team was able to tap the formal leadership of the Director of Collection Development, the team needed a way to provide support and leadership across the full range of responsibilities by tapping the team as a whole.
Pods
To allow liaisons to focus on building relationships with the academic departments they serve, to provide backup for areas in which individuals were not expert, and to allow liaisons opportunity to develop depth of expertise and leadership in narrower areas, the RIS Team developed a second organizational system of “pods.” Pods are sub-groups within the RIS Team made up of two to six liaisons who take responsibility and leadership for specific substantive areas. Initially the RIS Team generated a list of nearly 50 separate areas that called for such attention, though by December of 2009 these coalesced into nine active pods: communications, computer images, digital asset management, ella (LMS), ethnography, language teaching and learning, multimedia, reference services, and student staffing. In the spring of 2011 the video conferencing pod became the tenth. Within those areas the pods support the liaisons by taking responsibility for four key tasks:
Pods define the base level of competence in a given area and help bring the rest of the RIS Team to that base level of understanding.
Pods provide support for higher tier needs and questions that go beyond the base level of competence in that area expected of all liaisons.
Pods take responsibility for watching the horizon for developments in the area of responsibility, and for helping the RIS Team to make decisions about which developments are important to pursue. As such, pods lead most new initiatives.
Pods are responsible for serving as the contacts with other units within LITS or the College as a whole.
Given the wide variety of technical and organizational topics covered by the pods, each of them is organized slightly differently and has placed a different emphasis on the four charges.
Are pods just a different name for committees? For the RIS Team the shift in language was helpful in creating a new beginning that emphasized: action; pods as places where work happens; not being ends in themselves but rising and falling with a need; flexible structures, makeup, and meeting schedules in a way that allows the best work to happen with the least overhead. To the extent that committees do that, they might be the same as pods. For the RIS Team it was useful to break with the history of committees and a way to breathe fresh life into such collaborations.
The multimedia pod
The multimedia pod includes three members who lead the pod as a triumvirate. They include two instructional technology consultants, and one librarian and instructional technology consultant. Two of them have an MLS and one a PhD. All three have substantial expertise in a range of video-, image-, and audio-editing tools. The pod meets only as needed though two members share an office and the group makes good use of electronic methods to track and coordinate its work. Each member of the pod serves as liaison to one or more departments that make heavy use of multimedia tools including Art, Psychology and Education, English, and Film Studies. The variety of pedagogical uses of video represented by these departments helps give the pod a very broad understanding of the role of multimedia. The members of the pod recognize that a growing number of additional departments are introducing multimedia tools in the curriculum. To support the work of liaisons in departments only just adopting multimedia into their work, the pod has identified a key set of applications and concepts that each liaison should understand. The multimedia pod offers workshops to help liaisons develop this base level of competence. Within a semester of forming the multimedia pod all liaisons had developed a base level of competency in the entry-level iMovie application to be able to answer many of the most common questions. More importantly, the pod helped liaisons become knowledgeable enough to be able to offer first tier advice to faculty considering multimedia projects in their courses. Of course, some projects or faculty interests outstrip the base level of competence each liaison developed. In cases where the projects are just outside of a liaison’s abilities, members of the pod serve as partners. In other cases where projects are well beyond the current abilities of the liaison the pod will take on the project as a sub-contract for the liaison while keeping the liaison in the communication loop.
The multimedia pod also leads the RIS Team’s efforts to stay up-to-date on multimedia hardware and software developments. This means that the pod regularly reviews alternatives to the entry level and high-end video editing tools and recommends the campus standards to be adopted each year. The pod also takes the lead in identifying new experimental tools and in determining when experimental tools should be adopted more widely. Since the RIS Team knows the multimedia pod is responsible for keeping up-to-date in this area, the team is free to focus on other areas, confident that expert and trusted colleagues are tracking multimedia software and hardware developments.
The multimedia pod also serves as a conduit to other departments within LITS on topics related to multimedia support. For instance, the RIS Team depends heavily on the hardware purchased, supported, and circulated to faculty and students by the CTMS department. The multimedia pod works closely with CTMS to anticipate major projects that will put demands on equipment circulated and on support offered by CTMS. The multimedia pod also works closely with CTMS to evaluate new technologies and to plan hardware purchases in support of the curriculum. In this way the multimedia pod has been able to develop a much more productive and proactive collaboration with CTMS while clarifying and simplifying the relationship and accountability between the RIS Team and the CTMS department.
Reference services pod
The reference pod includes five members, one of whom chairs its regular meetings. They include two reference librarians, and three librarian and instructional technology consultants. All members have an MLS degree. The reference pod is responsible for defining the base level of competence expected of individuals who work at the research help desk or who offer library instruction. They are also responsible for training those who work in this capacity, including fellow liaisons, student staff, or interns. The reference pod also schedules the major service points and ensures that less experienced individuals have a more experienced backup to turn to when they encounter questions beyond their level of expertise. Members of the reference pod have also helped to develop instructional curricula, and oversee the creation of other support materials, including disciplinary and course-based guides within the College’s LibGuides environment. The reference pod is concerned with best practices and changes occurring in reference support and instruction. For instance, as the College moves to a new discovery layer, the pod is researching how similar changes have altered research support and instruction needs at other institutions. The reference pod has also played a leadership role in relation to the library’s physical spaces. Growing out of questions and comments heard at the research help desk, for instance, the reference pod initiated a project to open a previously restricted computer classroom to serve as quiet work space when not in use for workshops.
The reference pod serves as the primary contact to the DnA department fielding and routing questions about the functioning or availability of e-resources, changes to interfaces, or user behavior in relation to specific tools. Beyond Mount Holyoke College the reference pod also is the conduit to the Five College Research, Instruction and Outreach Committee. This committee collaborates on professional development activities, on research guides for multi-campus departments and programs, and on other initiatives that improve the level of research help available across the five colleges.
Student staffing pod
The student staffing pod includes four members who rotate the chair role. Three are instructional technology consultants, and one a librarian and instructional technology consultant. Two of them have an MLS and two have a PhD. Meetings happen more often during times of hiring and training, and less frequently at other times of the year. When it was first launched, the student staffing pod reviewed all student staff positions reporting within the RIS Team and developed a more coherent and integrated Research and Instruction Student Employee (RISE) program. The pod aimed to “move towards a system of RIS student employment that broadens what it means to be a RIS student worker by increasing the students’ understanding of the mission of RIS as a whole, building connection with other RIS students, and setting out pathways that allow movement across different kinds of RIS employment and advancement to higher level student positions” (RISE, 2010). In short, the pod has worked to create a team environment for student staff along the lines that the RIS Team developed for the professional staff. In doing so the pod took responsibility for reviewing and consolidating the job descriptions, and for developing a model for hiring entry-level students and developing them through a series of advancements that prepare them for greater leadership. The pod also supports individual liaisons when they are hiring student staff to guide them through the hiring process. The pod works with the student staff members to maintain a student staff handbook and runs workshops for all RIS student staff to ensure they have a base level of competence.
The student staffing pod also works with other pods to develop new models for working with student staff. Thus, for instance, as the reference pod has begun to expand the use of students at the research help desk the reference pod has worked with the student staffing pod to develop a student supervising model to help leverage liaison time while offering substantial job experience to the students and expanded research help desk coverage for patrons. Similarly, the student staffing pod is able to use its knowledge of student workers across the RIS Team to direct unusual requests or project work toward students with appropriate training and available time. Finally, the student staffing pod also coordinates with similar groups in other departments within LITS.
Ethnography pod
The ethnography pod includes five RIS Team members who have participated in one or more workshops taught by Nancy Foster, an anthropologist at the University of Rochester. They include the Director, the Director of Collection Development, a reference librarian, a science librarian, and also the Director of the Language Resource Center, which is not part of RIS or LITS. Three of them have an MLS, one has a master’s and one has a PhD. The pod meets when other pods, the RIS Team, or LITS as a whole have questions about the way students and faculty work and how they use LITS spaces and services. Through collaborations with many individual liaisons and with other pods the ethnography pod has helped to shift the way the RIS Team asks such questions and has increased its willingness to engage in many small-scale “studies” to inform decisions. Thus, one set of interviews helped the RIS Team to better understand the collection needs of the computer science department, which relies much more heavily on conference proceedings than on academic journals. Another led to the reference pod renaming the reference desk to the “research help desk” to make its purpose clearer to students. More importantly, the work of the ethnography pod has brought with it a more substantial shift toward a patron- and user-centric perspective that recognizes the expertise and wisdom faculty and students bring and to tap this as a guide to improving services, spaces, and tools.
Richness at the intersections
The combination of assigning single liaisons to each academic department with an internal support structure of pods has addressed many of the challenges the RIS Team had faced in previous organizations. As one liaison put it:
I feel a clearer sense of ownership with the academic departments. Focusing on communication and building relationships between the people in the departments helps me recognize them as “mine.” Focusing on the relationships and the support within the RIS Team makes it easier for me to say to my departments “I am RIS and I will take care of that.”
At the same time, the pods – and especially areas of intersection between the pods – have become hotbeds for creativity and new initiatives. If a RIS Team member has an idea, there is almost always a pod where the idea can be floated, developed, and supported. For instance, in the spring of 2011 the reference pod created a small, portable, cardboard reference question board. This simple board generated a some good reference questions and some playful exchanges between students and the RIS Team. However, the board quickly started to look tired and the pod was asked to come up with a more pleasing solution. Encouraged by the relative success of this small reference pod pilot, and fuelled by the kind of questions being asked by the ethnography pod, the communications pod’s design sense, and its hope to connect more widely with the community, they developed the idea to create the “Ask LITS” board on an interior window where students and faculty could ask anything without worrying whether they asked at the right service point. Together the pods developed the design, developed a triage system for questions of different types, enlisted contacts in each of the other LITS departments, and launched the board in time for the fall semester. The key to the board is not a specific technology or design, but the responsive and patron-centered organization behind it that ensures that, whatever the question, it will be addressed.
For better or worse, the model and this chapter do not directly address the question of where professional identities fit, and what the future of the library and instructional technology professions are for Mount Holyoke College. One blended librarian and instructional technology consultant wondered recently if we might be producing a new type of “creature.” She described a hedgehog and tortoise who, according to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, taught each other their respective defense mechanisms and in that process became armadillos. The RIS Team has not become the professional equivalent of an armadillo. The aim of the current organization is to put the teaching, learning, and research needs of students and faculty at the center, then to fully realize the value of the professional education and experiential differences that each RIS Team member brings. For the instructional technology consultants operating within a very young profession this represents a more familiar point of flux. Individually the “traditional” instructional technology consultants came with doctoral training and experience as faculty and researchers and so already see themselves occupying multiple professions. The librarians have the deepest and richest professional history and ties to sustain them. Individually they combine this with disciplinary training and personal engagement that has helped them to respond creatively to the call for the library profession to renew itself in light of the dramatic change in information services. The RIS Team hopes for a different ending to Kipling’s story that preserves both the hedgehog and the tortoise by not just learning from but also tapping each other’s unique strengths.
References
Boisselle, Juliet Habjan, Fliss, Susan, Mestre, Lori S., Zinn, Fred. Talking toward Techno-Pedagogy: IT and Librarian Collaboration – Rethinking Our Roles. Resource Sharing & Information Networks. 2004; 14(1/2):123–136.
Glackin, Mary P., Boisselle, Juliet Habjan. Into the Frying Pan: Lessons Learned Deploying and Supporting Sakai in a Liberal Arts Environment, 2007. http://www.educause.edu/Resources/IntotheFryingPanLessonsLearned/162234 [Available from: (accessed November 2011)].
Katzenbach, Jon R., Smith, Douglas K.The Wisdom Of Teams: Creating the High-performance Organization. New York: Harper Business Essentials, 2003.
Princeton Review. The Best 373 Colleges. Framingham, MA: The Princeton Review; 2011.
RISE. The RISE Program Draft Proposal for RIS Student Employment Model, 2010. [25 May Internal document].
1Thanks to the RIS Team for their creativity and commitment, and to the rest of LITS for its confidence and support for our experiments. Thanks especially to James Burke, Janet Ewing, Kathleen Norton, and Alice Whiteside for the comments and critiques of earlier drafts. If the chapter includes elements you like, they probably came from one of them. If you don’t, that is likely because I didn’t follow their advice.
2Twenty percent of Mount Holyoke College’s faculty are persons of color, over 60 percent of the science faculty are women. Faculty at the College have been awarded $10.5 million in National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and two Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers from 2000 to 2010. The faculty also include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and three Guggenheim winners.
3Stephen Butler handout drawing on Katzenbach and Smith (2003).