 I am Judy Ruttenberg, Program Director at the Association of Research Libraries. And I have directed, and for the last three and a half years, a program called Transforming Research Libraries, which is a complicated portfolio of a lot of activities, but almost every conversation leads pretty quickly to a transforming workforce. So this is a lot of what, where this effort has come from. So how did we get here to Cornell in this beautiful day, and a couple of days together? There was a report published by ARL, by Karen Williams and Janice Jagaschefsky at the University of Minnesota, New Roles for New Times Transforming Liaison Roles in Research Libraries, and very well received. The report was a long time coming, and it had a couple of publications leading up to it, Ann Kenny's Ethica SNR brief that she just mentioned, and the initiative of Redivine, and others, who came to ARL and said, there's something here to talk about in a broad way. There's some need to get the community together around this liaison issue. And so we had two meetings, one at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia, another one at Annual in Las Vegas, and more than, you know, something like 50 or 60 people came to those meetings who were the supervisors or leaders of liaison programs in ARL libraries, really, really wanting to talk about this issue. And so, and many of the things that Ann mentioned came up in those meetings. And then, as Ann mentioned as well, we convened a smaller group of people, Barbara, Rita, among them, in October at ARL to talk further about, okay, what are we going to do as a community around these big, important questions about what is liaison? So that's recently how we got here. But of course, this is a longer conversation, and it's a long conversation among all types of academic libraries. So I'm focused on ARL libraries, but there's a long literature and many conference presentations and many types of libraries have talked about this role of liaison. But in ARL, before the Janice and Karen's report, they had done a research library issues brief in 2009. There was a spec survey in 2007, and then one in 1992 liaison services, which was really interesting to look back at. And then, of course, this comes so the conversation goes far back, and it goes forward, right? Ann published in March a piece in College and Research Libraries, which I think you've read as part of the preparation for this. And we have a forthcoming spec survey, so 92, 2007, and 2015. So this spec survey should hit your campus in July. Hopefully many of you in the room will participate in it. It will be published in November, the report, and then there'll be kind of webcast in December. So we've been looking at this for a while, the question of what a liaison librarian does. Okay. And then, of course, just reading last night and over the last week or so, the University of Toronto's report, which I think also pushed the report of the assessment of your librarian program or liaison program, which adds further to this conversation. So I thought I would look a little bit at the ARL's data, you know, that's what we do as an association. We collect data about our industry. So who are you, liaison, not you in this room, but you broadly, the 18% of our professional workforce in ARL University Libraries, about the 10,000 or so total professionals in libraries, 18% are identify subject specialists. And with an average of about 16 years of experience in the profession, and that average is right in line with the rest of positions. So that's right there. And according to the most recent salary survey, this is how you break down. No subgroup, pretty big group of you. And then you can see the rest of how you shake down in terms of the subject areas that you are specialists for. So in, this has a mistake in it, which I prepared, I changed on my own slides, but this is actually from 2010. The salary survey we do every year, in every five years, so including in 2010 and then this year, we collect further information about the workforce, including educational attainment. So in addition to MLIS, subject liaison librarians, 29% of you have subject masters, 14% of you have a doctorate in the field other than library and information science, and 1.4% of you have a PhD in LIS. And so I was talking with Rita last night, and this is, I think, the subject masters, the second subject masters is less common in Canada, as I'm led to understand. So had I known that, when I prepared the slide, I might have done just to see how that changed the percentage if we had just done the U.S. ARL member libraries, but this includes both. So I'm not sure how that number would change, but it was a little less than I thought. So that was sort of interesting. It was a surprise to me. But of course you're not just subject specialists. That's not all who in the room here today, and not all who are responsible for liaison programs. So there are, we also, some of you are digital specialists. And here are the groups that you can see and how they break down. And this, yeah, some of you are functional specialists. And these are new job codes in the last couple of years. Archivists are a huge subgroup of functional specialists, but some of you, so hopefully with these, we've captured just about everybody who's in the room, anybody not see what they do in these? Okay, good. So as I said, this conversation's been going on for quite some time. And so I want to look back at the view from 1992 and why we were concerned about liaison programs back then. It was the dawn of networked information, digital networked information. This is, can you see the University of Iowa's library webpage in 1992, which is who remembers Gopher at the time? It was awesome, right? I mean, it was what we had. And so, but here's what they said in the spec kit, in a setting where access to information is infinite, the role of liaison as a knowledgeable guide grows in importance. And that's what they were talking about in 1992. And I think that's amazing. So, and it was also pretty forward looking speculation about what, why we were looking at this program. So they talked about assessment that in that 1992 spec kit talked about, we are going to need to figure out how to assess the effectiveness of this activity. And they talked about expanding roles for liaisons as contributing members of research teams and instructional programs. So this video, it's linked to a video, maybe you've seen it, but when we published the new roles for New Times Report, Janice and Karen's report in 2013, they did this lovely video with Jonathan Cofill, who's a medical librarian at the University of Minnesota. I don't think you can see that. It says, I think a few of the interesting things that I've been working on lately, or novel things, is with the residents. I participate in morning report and patient rounding. So, but, you know, which sounds really, it's really out there. And yet, they were talking about, I think, or could envision a situation far out where this is what, how embedded liaisons would be. So, great video if you haven't seen it. So what else is going on in 1992? Michael Buckland publishes his pretty visionary manifesto redesigning library services, talking about the transition from an automated library to an electronic library. And then, again, the spec kit as the physical collection becomes less central. Gopher, which said Gopher. The user is becoming the focus of library services. And in that 2013 new roles for New Times Report, this was, again, you sort of see echoes of talking about the engagement model as less about what librarians do and more about what, you know, collection development teaching outreach and more about what users do, research teaching and learning and how we can support that. But again, user becoming the focus of library services. So here's a library liaison job description from, because we collect that in the spec kits, from 1992. And it's pretty traditionally framed, I think. Liaisons will become familiar with instructional programs, become aware of programmatic developments in current research, keep department informed, and is available for assistance with faculty and graduate students. So pretty traditional looking library liaison job description. So going ahead now, so the next time we really do a survey with the membership is in 2007. And lots of talk about what the challenges for liaisons include. And these probably look familiar to you. Time constraints, competing responsibilities for what you have to do. Too many departments or departments outside expertise. So I was a liaison librarian once. I have a master's in library science. I have a master's degree in African-American history. I was liaison to the nursing department, to cognitive sciences, to criminology law and society, and for African-American studies. That was a treat. But this is the reality of many of you who do subject liaison work. And then keeping up with changes. That was reported as a high challenge. Keeping up with changes in pedagogy, in digital technology, in the disciplines themselves. These were what liaison librarians felt were challenging them. And it was an interesting shift. What was noted in 2007, because they had gone back to look at the 1992 spec kit. I don't know if you can read that, but I just liked the charmingness of the 1992 publication. But what we had was, on receptive faculty, you can't get their attention. That's a problem. But over-demanding faculty was one of the, they just want too much from us in 92. And then by 2007, you really don't see that over-demanding faculty. You see this overwhelming notion of we are trying to get their attention. And so sort of what Anne said, the blogs, the emails, the notices, the alerts, it's like we're trying to get in there to some very, very busy people and get an establishing and maintaining contact is this concern. So here's a job description from 2007, which really reflects that urgency of getting in front of faculty. A high level of proactive interaction is essential, seek opportunities. This is in the job description for partnerships with assigned departments. So they're recruiting for this position, are very aware that this is an issue. And then this I just love because look at this mandate for liaison. Analyze trends, keep current with the scholarship and use this knowledge to respond to departmental needs. That is the challenge, right? So in the last few years, we really have been talking about this engagement framework. University of Minnesota developed the position description framework and modeled and built upon by many other libraries. And echoing the slide you saw earlier from Ann, the really models of what engagement looks like and how many of you feel like you are involved in multiple of these activities that you see here just by a show of hands, more than one? Yeah, okay, more than two? Okay, good, I won't go all the way through that. But this is what liaison or engagement looks like. So what we heard in 2014 at ALA, when we had those two meetings, when we brought a smaller group together in DC, need to clarify service expectations. And I saw this in the Toronto report. What are the levels of service? What are we, how can we agree on that? Needing to rebalance responsibilities. People are sliced in just too many different ways and can't become the kind of experts that they wanna be in those different areas. Again, the importance of teams. And also, if you haven't, has everybody here read the Toronto report? Has it been, okay, we'll encourage you to do that. If you haven't, but importance of teams and the way it's expressed in that report, teams, not just static teams of people who you were on this team, you do the service, but teams that are brought together to solve a problem. To say no one person can provide all the services that are required by a department of discipline, a faculty member. What can, you know, you have a pressing need to partner in digital scholarship and something. We need to get the right people together and it's gonna be a copyright person and it's gonna be a digital specialist and it's gonna be someone with subject expertise and we're gonna be a team to solve that. The importance of, or the need for training as these new responsibilities are called for, how are we gonna provide training? And a great need for tools and tools that would, that the community can use and embrace for assessment, customer service and collaboration. So this is a lot of what we heard again that kind of has led to us being here together. So a job description, I like job descriptions, and from 2015, also again, you see reflecting what, where this direction is going. So you insert whatever subject you work in but coordinates discipline services provided by a team, investigate and integrate creative or emerging technologies and services into the library and then you see data support services for faculty but invoking teams quite outside the library and on campus itself. And then this one recently, there were four library, four science librarian positions advertised at UC Davis and this is really also it, right? Be able to work effectively with faculty, students, research and staff to develop a shared vision for library services and collections aligned with the university's mission and vision. This is the present day expectation of liaison, right? So we are here, gathered here. We have fabulous energy commitment on the part of your directors to bring you here and on the part of you to get on buses and come here and spend a couple of days here and helping write the next part of the story. And here are just some of the questions I would urge you to think about as with our time together. What will your primary responsibilities be? How will liaison be described? Had you envisioned it will be described, we'll see this next back kit come out this year. What skills will you need? How will you get it? What tools do you need to do your job? And who is on your team for the kinds of activities and the kinds of engagement you're going to be doing with your students and faculty? That's it. Thank you very much.