 Organizational Strategies for Deep Change remarks by Gary Strong and Jill Murkey at the 2012 ARL Fall Forum, convened by Louis Pitschman. I am pleased to welcome our two other speakers, Jill Murkey. Jill is the director of Human Resources for the University Library at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. As part of the library's senior leadership team, Jill provides leadership, direction, and expertise for the management of the library's human resources. Over her 10 years with the University Library, she's contributed to the significant transformation of the library's organizational culture and workforce through the design and implementation of key people strategies in alignment with the library's strategic directions. She leads the development and updating of the University Library's people plan, which sets ambitious strategies for library employees and for the libraries in general. She's a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan with a bachelor's degree in human resources and holds the Certified Human Resources Professional Designation, Canada's National Human Resources Professional Certification. Our other speaker this morning is Gary Strong, and I've already apologized to Gary. I cannot read his bio nearly as quickly as our colleague did yesterday morning. Both speakers' bios, by the way, are in the program, and I will be brief. Gary's been UCLA University Librarians since September 2003. He previously served as the director of the Queensborough Public Library and was a state librarian of California. Gary was the chief executive officer of the California Library Services Board and established the California Research Bureau. At UCLA, he serves on the Council of University Librarians, the UC Press Board, the Information Technology Planning Board, and the Advisory Board on Privacy and Data Protection, as well as a number of campus-level policy groups. He's been president of a number of library organizations and has been widely honored and recognized by our profession. In preparation for their presentations, our panel has been asked to talk about the organizational strategies that they've used at their institutions to bring about change and the impact of these changes on services, programs, and staff. They've been asked to talk about the critical issues they've addressed that have resulted in significant rethinking and transformation. Some questions were shared with them to consider for their presentations, and those were, why was transformation critical in your organization? What were the triggers? What has been the impact of the changes that have been implemented? What has been your role as the director in bringing about deep change? How has the senior leadership team been involved? What is not done, or in other words, what is next for the libraries in terms of transformation? Please join me in welcoming our speakers and we'll begin with Jill Murkey. Excuse me, Gary Strong will be our first speaker. It's all about how we cope with change, you see. It's a real pleasure to be here and to have a chance to share a few things with you this morning about the changes that have been going on at UCLA over the last nine plus years. I do believe that the library of the future inspires and supports students, faculty, researchers, and staff in all facets of their pursuits to dream, to learn, to create, and to share knowledge. That has been the driving drivers, if you will, behind the changes that have been going on at UCLA. It is about shifting our focus away from an internal looking, which is good to do, to an outward looking of how we engage our users and our constituencies. If we frame the future around that, we think in the context of our collections, the research role of the university, about teaching and learning, about space and place, and then about the strategies that we will engage to move us forward. In the context of, and that's the framing of our strategic plan over time, which has now we look at as a process not as a document, and I think that's the other fundamental piece about how we have moved to incorporate what we do into the fabric of the library. And of the university, I hope. If we look at our research collections, we are about transforming the research collection. When I came to UCLA, we had about seven and a half million volumes, just as a frame of reference, and I leave with about ten and a half million. And a part of that is we haven't acquired all of that. A piece of it is that we've really looked hard at getting all the stuff that was in the basement and in the closets exposed, looking at what the value was of the information and knowledge that resided in those backlogs and blowing it open. Jim Billington used to say he wanted to try to figure out how to get the champagne out of the bottle. Well, we make wine in California, so, or in beer, I guess. Making our specialized collections more widely available and supporting and advocating change in the scholarly publishing process. And it is about looking, I hope someday the University of California will adopt an open access policy. We've continued to operate and push forward on that basis. We regularly engage, we're working on a set of forums right now with the full Academic Senate and the Library Committee, the Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Provost. And we are taking the lead from a presentation at ARL. Last year we're putting forward an open access teaching initiative, hopefully by spring. As I look then at who have we brought in, how have, has the workforce changed, and this is about the workforce, and I really appreciated the summary yesterday to do in terms of what you had discovered, and I know some of this you may have come across, but certainly not all of it. Over the last three to four years at UCLA, just in the collections arena, a copyright and licensing librarians, collection manager of special collections, our council on library and information resource postdoctoral fellows with collection building responsibility, the Center for Primary Research and Training fellows, some of whom are from information studies, but many are from other areas. We've now had over 100 graduate students who have come through the Center and have worked with and have processed collections that we could not have touched, given language and other kinds of knowledge expertise that we just don't have in any other way. Temporary archival processors and metadata teams, and now our CLIR Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation. And that one's going to appear in a couple of places, because this is about our collection and about thinking about the collection in new contexts, data being one of those contexts that we need to expand out and begin to look at in new and different ways. And then our honorary curator of medieval manuscripts. So these, this sort of example of refocused positions are really important to us moving our collection management strategies forward across a whole set of challenges and platforms. For us it is about how to maintain a collection of record in the university and within the system and what steps UCLA needs to take to examine that in a more broad based scope. If we look at transforming research services, there are a couple of points here that I would really like to call out in particular. And that's really about supporting the complete life cycle of research. And how we engage faculty and graduate students in doing that, both in bringing them into our spaces and into our virtual space, but also engaging them in providing appropriate tools and contexts to support the research experience. And team approaches to research support, especially with interdisciplinary projects. What we're discovering in our renovated spaces is that we now have become the center for interdisciplinary focus, because most of the disciplines, as you can expect, build their own clubs and it's hard for people to penetrate the walls of those clubs across the campus and increasingly they're using the library as a platform to do that. Oh my goodness, I didn't plan to do that. Are we okay over there? They were all going to run out of the room. It's all about change. It's all about change. I'm almost afraid to say another word. It's also about how we encourage peer to peer learning and increased library research collaboration. And if we look at the positions that we have, oh no, this is something I wanted to share. This is from the new student recruitment booklet. And we talk about library marketing and about getting our story out. This is now a part of the major university focus. And I love this one because of its juxtaposition with medicine research. And these are the spaces in our new collaboration space in the research commons in the research library. And for us to be put on a context across how we support research in new and different ways on the campus is really an exciting place to be and a recognition for what it is that the library is doing to change its outward focus. If we look then at some positions new again, the library and for digital research and scholarship within the research libraries, the library and for advanced research and engagement. This is a person who is now looking outward and building liaison responsibilities. The digital research and scholarship librarian is someone who brings in and works with faculty in our spaces and builds the bridges across to our collections. What we've found is that many of the digital humanists that are now using these spaces and increasingly in the sciences that they're really interested in the artifact as something that students can hold and look at and then move into the digital arena to begin to manipulate and work with those things. Again, our postdoctoral and data curation who is the Sloan fellow is beginning to look at how to build electronic notebooks for research. And that will be one of her major projects over the next period of time. And then we have also a postdoctoral fellow in digital innovation that is working with us to look at how do we bring in these massive new databases. We just added the communication studies archive which ramped our digital library from about a million images to 9.7 billion images overnight. And the ability to search those against the captions that are embedded within those images. And then how do we do data mining and research around that? Not to just look at the broadcast, but to look at events occurring particularly as a part of our Collecting Los Angeles initiative. So minority movements, other kinds of things that are going on within that arena. And then potential career, potential collaboration with our campus diversity officer to create a Center for Diversity Research which will actually be housed in the library. And looking at diversity as it affects all across the campus. If we focus on teaching and learning and I know there were references made this week to the importance of digital, excuse me, information literacy. But we have really wanted to move beyond that role to look at the entire student experience. Fostering a spirit of inquiry and analysis through engagement with primary sources. That means a closer tie with special collections. And particularly as students who are under the senior level that are now required to do capstone projects, 80% of those are research papers requiring the use of primary sources. Advanced digital technologies, events and demonstrations. Making student research widely visible and accessible. We're looking at how do we create and put peer reviewed student research into the institutional repository, but also use that to engage with students in managing their own intellectual property going forward. We see our role partly as creating the next generation of scholars and how does the library engage in doing that. Again, interdisciplinary connections, ethical participation in civic and local engagement. And enhancing access to library collections and services in online learning environments and course management systems and engaging with and contributing to new pedagogical services and practices. We've just brought up our new website on teaching methodologies and how the library needs to embed itself with faculty. And we're beginning to do increased research and work in that arena as well. Another one of the images from the student handbook. This being the retunda of the Powell Library, the undergraduate library. And again attempting to look at how we inspire, how our spaces inspire the role of the university. Again, if we look at the positions that we have put in support of these activities. The director of teaching and learning and head of the college library, coordinator of teaching and learning services. A new writing librarian who will work with writing programs in the college base, head of the East Asian library looking at a much broader focus of East Asian engagement including science and medicine. Instructional librarians through temporary appointments because of some of, I won't go into the budget things that we deal with. And then research data, RDAs from the library school who work and men and women are reference desks and are research pods and increasingly engage within the research commons. And reassignment this year of an instructional librarian from the undergraduate library to the research library to work with the increased numbers of undergraduates who are coming to the research library to access primary source materials and other research materials that have not traditionally been in the college library. And for us to begin to look at how do we engage the provost at one point told me or suggested to me that in our strategic plan, we were not addressing how we would use the word educate. I'm not sure we educate graduate students, but how do we prepare graduate students to better participate in the academy and to use deep, deep research resources in the library? And so we're looking at that, how do we deal with transfer students who come and they've not gone through the first two years of experience in our clusters program at undergraduate levels and how do we engage so that they get up to speed as juniors and seniors and as transfer masters and doctoral students coming into the UCLA academy? We have been rethinking the library as place. You saw one of the images a moment ago with respect to the research library. We've been blowing these spaces open. My commitment to the provost and the chancellor the previous was that if they would provide a space to move and locate our behind the scenes operations, we would devote these freed up spaces for faculty and student engagement. We weren't about to give them over to somebody else. And we wanted to create new experiences for scholarly engagement within the library space. Creating virtual spaces that blow open access to our staff and our services and our collections. And to create learning and research environments that make scholarship and the scholarly process very visible. I was taken by the comment, well our laboratory for digital cultural heritage for example is right out in the open commons. We have a new pod for media production for the Digital Humanities Center in the space. We have a sandbox in which faculty now come together to do rapid prototyping projects along with our staff and along with graduate students. We embed institutes and conferences into the space. And we're seeing more and more faculty coming in. We serve as an interdisciplinary collaboration ecosystem for the campus and make specialized collections and experts that support research and teaching that offer customized user experience in these new secure environments. If we look then at staffing that supports that. What I don't have on the list is our new usability and user experience folks down on there. I say we encourage students in collaborating mobile and web applications that they will use. That is really our simulate project which has now been going for about four years where I fund a core of five to eight graduate students. One would think only from computer science but very few actually come from that. They're coming from information studies from other areas of graduate studies. And my only challenge to them is create stuff you'll use. Not stuff I think you will use but things that are of interest to you. So they've developed all of our mobile applications, which are now on iPhones, Droids, and Kindle Fires, which was an experience of going through campus patenting, which I will never wish to go through again. And they are coming up this year with, so we took all the real time stuff like hours and laptop availability and locations and what not. That's all now on mobile applications. And we are about ready to bring up our expanded catalog search and article search strategy. And then we have offloaded a collection of about 250,000 volumes that are the most used in the collection. So that those can be searched and located to the shelf across the library. And then a new application that they're developing called Stashit. How many of you can read anything on your iPhone? My eyesight's so bad I can't read that itty bitty type. But if I find it, I can hit my Stashit button. And that URL, or that particular piece of information, is captured in my library account. And when I get back to my desktop, I can bring that up and actually see what it is within the context of the UCLA library. And these are things that students were interested in having in their fingertips, and most of it is stuff I would never and most of us would not have thought about. We've embedded our new director of library public programs into this space as well in looking at how we will enable faculty and students in libraries where they can engage with, use, and create new collections. Look at enriched educational technology. And I want to make a point here that one of the failures that I think we still are dealing with in this change is how to integrate AV specialists and IT specialists so that we can actually use the technology to move large data files. And data files in the humanities are very different from computational data files we're discovering. We've crashed our wireless network more than once, which is kind of interesting because they said we'd never do it. But when you're doing computational data, you're sending commands to a computer off somewhere else. The computer does its computations and sends you back the results. When we're doing visualization of the Roman Forum, for example, and we're building avatars within that space, and we want to send it from the space, the laboratory where it's being created into the presentation space in the same building. This is like moving a Mack truck across the central lobby. And it takes either a lot of time or it crashes completely. And so we're re-looking at how do we build the network, the backbone within the library that will support the movement of large file data in the humanities and the social sciences into presentation spaces and whatnot. We also want to take newly created content and push it out into our media scapes on the street within the library that we've created. And that, the technologist, the AV technol, and the IT technologists are having trouble figuring out how they're going to do that. I go see it other places. I can't understand why this particular consulting group is having some trouble coming across and dealing with that. We've pretty much given them the bye-bye and we're going to tackle that set of issues ourselves. So underlying this in terms of new staffing are technical staff that have the expertise and bring the skill set to the library that allow us to achieve the things we want to achieve. So it's about the library staff, but it's also about our support and technical staffs coming together to do that. If we look at strategies then, it takes time and commitment, well, and money, but that's just sort of a given. We have to establish the vision and develop the strategic goals that we're moving toward. And as I said, we've built around this shift from inward looking to outward looking and to user engagement with us. It is about building and developing a research agenda that covers some of our own issues. There isn't a lot out there we've found that is looking in some of these arenas and so we're engaging in our own set of research and gathering. I do debriefing session now at the end of each quarter with all of the faculty that are using our spaces. And it's astonishing what we are learning from them about how they want to use these spaces. There has been the approach of embedding librarians elsewhere. Our approach where that we're beginning to think through and I would appreciate any thoughts is, how do we embed faculty with us? How do we create spaces that bring the faculty? I don't have enough librarians anymore to send out one on one on one. We still do that and it works very, very effective. You're gonna hear from one a little later this morning and that's very effective, but we don't have enough of them. So how do you bring in faculty into these spaces that allow them to expand what it is that the library experience can be for themselves but also for their students? How do we nurture a responsible and responsive organization? And then how do we build organizational capacity with visible succession plans? I'm looking at that with great interest at the moment for an obvious reason. Prepare and recruit the next generation of librarians and library workers. I was very taken with the earlier presentation this morning about systemic change and meta change and how that must work within an organization today. Just because we used to do it really, really good doesn't mean the really good is still needed. Demand that units make annual unit plans and that each individual understands where they fit into the library and what they will do to further the unit plan and the library strategic plan as a whole. And we now measure against that. We've been at that for about seven years and those unit work plans are all up on our internal server. Every staff member can look at them. They can see them. We don't post the individual plans but we do now 100% evaluation of staff against those work plans that are established each year. I'm often asked how do you get people to stop doing things that, you know, it's very hard for any of us to give up what we love and what we enjoy doing. Or sometimes I think they don't enjoy doing it but it's what they're used to doing. And we try to push that down into that annual unit work plan assessment and evaluation. And that's where we are. I'd appreciate any feedback. All right, good morning. So let me see if I can advance this slide. There we go. So what I'd like to share this morning is I'd like to start with a brief overview of the University of Saskatchewan to give you a sense of who we are. I'd like to step back in time and give you a sense about what some of our challenges were and the triggers for why change was needed. I'll then overview the various strategies that we put in place to bring about a transformation to our organizational culture and our workforce and the impacts of those strategies. And then I'll talk about what's on the horizon. It's my beautiful campus. So first of all, talk about the University Library at the University of Saskatchewan. So first of all, the University of Saskatchewan was established in 1907, two years after the province was founded. And we are the largest university in our province with approximately 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The University Library is composed of seven physical locations across campus. We employ 150 full and part-time employees as well as 60 student employees. And these are some of the photos of our locations. The picture at the bottom of this slide is actually a drawing of our new Health Sciences Library which is scheduled to open in the spring of 2013. So the year 2006 marked the arrival of a new leader at the University Library, Dr. Vicki Williamson. Now I came to my role as Director of Human Resources four years prior to Vicki's arrival in 2002. That's 10 years ago now. And looking back, I would characterize the University Library as a pretty sleepy place where attempting to affect any sort of change was really like pulling a rusty nail out of a piece of wood. There was a lot of resistance to change. The composition of our workforce was primarily made up of librarians and library technicians who had been with the University Library for over 25 years and a large number of those planned to retire within the next 10 to 15 years. Legends and traditions were alive and well and passed down from generation to generation. Employees knew their jobs well. They were not particularly interested in changing what they were doing or how they were doing it. There was very much an us versus them mentality. A real division between librarians and support staff and little interest to work collaboratively. They were not interested in sharing ideas, problem solving between those two groups of employees. Decision making was largely through consensus among the librarians. So decisions were very slow in being made and that was hindering our library's ability to be nimble and responsive to change. And then along came a new leader, Dr. Vicki Williamson, in the spring of 2006. So you can only imagine the trepidation that employees, particularly librarians, felt about the arrival of a new leader and especially a leader who had an ambitious vision for the transformation of library services, collections, facilities, as well as its organizational culture and workforce. Dean Williamson knew early on that in order to achieve this vision, our library needed its employees to behave and think differently. Without a change in the attitude and behavior of employees, our library would struggle to remain relevant in this dynamic information environment. Shortly after the arrival of Dean Williamson, the university also put in place a new policy for recruitment, requiring that all faculty vacancies be filled at the junior rank. This meant we could no longer recruit externally to fill our management positions. We therefore needed our librarians to step up into these leadership roles. But overall, our librarians did not feel equipped to do so. Four months after Dean Williamson's arrival, we undertook our first ever employee opinion survey to obtain some benchmark data. 72% of library employees participated in the survey and the data told us a lot of things, but most notably, only five and 10 employees were engaged with the library. They were beavering away in their own little silos or bubbles with no real sense or interest in what was happening at the organizational level or in our external environment. Employees generally had no clear sense or collective understanding of where the library should be headed, where we were going and what our priorities should be. There was a general lack of leadership at all layers and levels. Communication was lacking. Employees heard about most things through the grapevine rather than directly through their manager or supervisor. And of course, there was a lot of misinformation floating around. The data also told us that we were not modeling our organizational values in our decision making or in our interactions with one another. The data reinforced for the Dean and I the necessity of putting in place some very deliberate people strategies. And we use the data in our communications with employees to highlight why these strategies were needed. So what did we do? Well, we started with the development of a three-year people plan in 2009, which we've just updated this last spring. And that resulted in an inspiring vision for our people. The vision is we pursue excellence by learning through discovery and inquiry, being exceptional practitioners and scholars, not mediocre or average, exceptional. Embracing creativity, innovation, and risk-taking, and demonstrating outstanding leadership. And there's a URL there to our people plan. Now within the people plan, we identified four core strategic areas to focus our efforts. Learn and develop, relationships and collaboration, appreciate and celebrate and conversation and communication. And within each of these four areas, we identified actions that we would take over the coming years. Some of these actions included strengthening our investment in training and development. Our biggest investment was the design and delivery of an in-house leadership development program for all employees. The program consists of six two-day modules delivered over a 10-month timeframe. Core to the program is the philosophy that any library employee can exercise leadership where they stand. One does not need to be assigned to a formal supervisory or managerial position to be a leader. In just under four years, approximately one half of our employees have graduated from the leadership development program. And even more have engaged in other leadership skill development activities, including our leadership book club, a community of practice on leadership, and half and full day sessions that build on the topics that were introduced in the program. In addition to leadership, we are providing training in the areas of customer service excellence, connecting with technology and working in the e-world, relationship building and communication. We've been having conversations throughout the library about our organizational values. What do they mean to us and how can we live the values in our daily work and interactions with one another? We are making the values real rather than just words on paper. We have put in place robust communication strategies to ensure that employees are receiving information and news in a consistent and timely way. We have done work to articulate the accountabilities and level of authority vested in our management positions. This includes the creation of job profiles and discussions with librarians in these roles to ensure a shared and common understanding of what is expected. We've adopted a project management methodology for use with all major projects. And this has helped to identify clear accountabilities and has fostered teamwork and stronger communication across library branches and units. We have emphasized creativity and innovation and through our efforts, we are becoming a learning organization where we seek, create, and share knowledge, where we reflect, learn, and grow from our experiences. So what has been the impact of all of these strategies? Our latest employee opinion survey data from 2011 tells us that 72% of our employees are engaged. So this compares with 54% back in 2006. There's a significantly greater understanding and buy-in with the library's strategic directions. Employees are stepping up and exercising leadership. There are daily, daily examples of leadership in action, including eagerly raising new ideas, looking for efficiencies, identifying solutions to problems, and engaging in positive and productive conversations, rather than getting mired down in negativity, whining, and complaining. Employees are stepping up to formal leadership roles and are feeling equipped to undertake these roles. There is improved communication and collaboration at all layers and levels. People are talking, sharing ideas, and valuing perspectives. The silos have broken down. The us versus them mentality is less prevalent and seems to remain only with a dwindling minority of people. Teams are functioning more effectively and are forming organically. There's a greater commitment to lifelong learning and the understanding that as library employees, we are expected to continually learn and develop our skills and our expertise in order to remain, in order for our library to remain relevant in this dynamic information environment. There's a greater focus on client services with a customer service vision of delighting our clients. And as a result of our investment in employee development, employees are more self-aware of their personal preferences and styles and are more aware of the impact of their behaviors on others. Although the Dean had a vision for the transformation of our collections, services, facilities, and our organizational culture, she could not have achieved all that we have achieved by herself. It first of all required the commitment and buy-in of leaders at the top. This commitment and buy-in began to take shape through our senior leaders involvement in the leadership program. Their participation in the program helped them to see things through a different lens. They began to see the bigger picture and understand the reasons why, as an organization, it was absolutely essential that we needed to change. They began to model leadership through their behaviors and their words, and they became champions for the change. And as we cascaded the leadership program down throughout the organization, other employees began to see the change and share in the vision for change. They too began to model leadership and we began to see a real change in thinking and behavior. The philosophy of our leadership program that you can be a leader no matter where you stand, what position you're in, began to take hold and people began to exercise leadership in their daily activities. So, what is next for our library in terms of our organizational strategies for deep change? We will continue to sustain our commitment to leadership development. We will be launching our fifth leadership program in the new year and we will continue to offer opportunities for employees to grow their leadership skills. We will also be focusing on supervisory and managerial skill development. In the next two years, we will be working to design and implement a personal development planning process. The goal is that every employee will have a PDP. A PDP is a map of an employee's self-development journey. It is a goal-setting practice, but specifically for the area of personal and professional growth and development. The objective of a PDP is for an employee to plan their aspirations in regards to their development at work. The PDP process will involve ongoing conversations between an employee and their manager around four areas. Setting individual work goals, which will help to align the work of employees with the library's strategic directions. Secondly, to provide opportunities for feedback, especially positive, which will give the employee an indication about how they are doing. Third, to discuss appropriate professional development opportunities to help employees to enhance their skills and abilities. And fourth, to have a conversation about the employee's career aspirations, to help them build skills to be better poised to take on future roles. We will continue to build a culture of accountability within our library and the PDP process will help us with that. We will continue to seek out opportunities for cross-training and skill development, particularly amongst our library assistants, to help with succession planning and the sharing of knowledge. We will continue to improve our processes and to become more efficient and effective in our operations and our services, including looking for areas for disinvestment. We will continue to transform our physical space and our services. And finally, we will be working to develop a diversity awareness and inclusiveness strategy in alignment with the university's imperative to make our campus a more welcoming, culturally sensitive and nurturing environment. The offering of an Aboriginal librarian internship will be one of our early initiatives commencing in the summer of 2013. It has been quite the journey since 2006 and as a human resources professional, I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished at my library. Our people's strategies have brought about a significant transformation of our organizational culture in a mere five years, which is impressive, knowing from the literature how difficult it is to change organizational culture. It takes strong leadership, which means including the library's human resource professionals in people's strategy development. It takes a clear and compelling vision, perseverance, and a significant commitment in human and financial resources to affect such a substantial change in a relatively short period of time. So I would like to thank ARL for this opportunity to share the University of Saskatchewan experience. I have to say, Jill and Gary, you make it sound both so easy and so inviting. I envy both of you. Maybe if you have any vacancies, you'll let us know. But it probably has not been an easy road. It has not been an overnight experience. I'd like, with that, I'd like to open up the floor for questions and comments from others. Anyone? Well, I'll start with one, and that is our previous speaker talked about the transition from clipperships to steamships. So I guess I have a question for both of you. How did you avoid moving from a clippership to a carnival line cruiser? I think the start for us was our strategic planning process. When Vicki came, it signaled a very deliberate attempt to put in place a robust strategic planning process and not a process that was going to develop a strategic plan that we would put on the shelf and dust off every year. It signaled a very different way of working. I think people in our library were probably skeptical to begin with and were taking more of that sit back and let's just see approach. But really, I mean, we aligned our resources with our priorities and if something was not in our strategic plan, it was not going to get funded. So I think it took some time. It probably took about two years for people to kind of get that concept. I would really echo that, that the context built on a planning process that leads toward change or that change is embedded within. I don't know whether we're on a clippership or the Titanic and we're merely rearranging the deck chairs, but I think we're still afloat and we're floating better than we've ever been, even in the context of facing tremendous reductions in cutbacks and a part of what I would say about that is that as the campus, we had to do some things along the way to sort of wake up the campus. The most significant was cutting some hours. We eliminated Saturday, for example and we eliminated our 24 hour spaces, not just as retaliation, but we really didn't have the campus resources to continue to do those things. We'd cut all of the behind the scenes stuff we could cut, we'd consolidate, we'd merged, we'd done, we'd brought interlibrary loan units together, we'd done a lot of those things and it was finally time to say enough, we've tortured the staff into these new changed arrangements virtually overnight and it was time to do something else and it was interesting in our campus situation where the student leadership came, they're all political scientists, so they came and sat down with me and when we talked about where our budget came from and strategies about how to restore some of that, they took the campus leadership and went directly to the chancellor. The chancellor put up some money, a parent donor put up some money in that immediate year, particularly to restore the 24 hour access and the students put up $25,000 out of their own money out of the campus ASUCA Life Funds and that brought us to a campus level discussion that it's cheaper to invest in the library than it is to support, if we were raising tuition, which we did, that there needed to be some payoff back to students out of that increased tuition and it was cheaper to do that than to outfit another science lab, frankly. And the chancellor and the provost reinvested in us and we not only restored the hours but we brought in additional money to support student user services and that began to raise this discussion then to a higher level at the campus that the library wasn't just sort of a hidden closet away that there was real need to support and engage. When we went, we looked at how to renovate the spaces that we've been doing, we had some money that was gift funds but that was right at the same time the market did its dive and the chancellor actually loaned us the money to make those changes and to go ahead with our rethinking plans about space. I don't have to pay that back but they have forgiven the interest interestingly which is not insubstantial, it's a fair amount of money. So to get the campus to invest in us, maybe the whole campus is gonna sink but I feel pretty good about us being on the agenda for the campus now. I think we started by talking about innovation and creativity within our leadership program and giving employees the challenge to talk about how could we as a library be more innovative in our services in how we do our work and talking about innovation and creativity. So it started with more of a brainstorming exercise. We've also offered sessions, training sessions right in the workplace so for people who cannot or did not go into those leadership programs they at least could join in and have conversations about creativity and innovation and also back at the workplace so within the teams at each of our libraries again having discussions whether those are facilitated or just led by the branch head about how could people be more innovative and creative. So I think it was just about dialogue really and just encouraging dialogue and making it well known that that's what we want from employees. That's what we expect. We want people to be innovative and creative and think outside the box. And I think giving people permission to do that was maybe part of it, maybe a big thing. That's always an interesting context success and failure in the same breath. I think the hardest thing has been to sustain the attention. And if anything that has been the most difficult. I mean when we first started the planning process we had a lot of people very interested in participating now because they could sense something was going to be different and so the success was we got it done. And we changed the fabric of our discussions. The disappointment in a way are those who now at times feel they didn't get everything they wanted in that process. And the other is how do we incorporate new people into the thinking process? We've had a lot of change. In the nine years I've been there I've appointed 180 librarians in some kind of post, temporary, permanent and otherwise. And that is the hardest part is how do you build and sustain a process after that first flush of excitement and or fear and how do you overcome the fear? I think the other disappointing thing is still the little bit of subset of staff who still don't feel good about what they do with us. And some of that probably is the library but some of it I think is just the whole context around how higher education is viewed and pressured in this environment in which we live right now in terms of state funding. Mark. Mark Haslitt, Waterloo. This is for Gary I guess. Gary I was struck at the end of one of your slides. You said that you wanted to establish a vision and develop a strategic plan. Now in the context of the previous talk one of the things that I would like us to be able to do is eradicate the two words strategic plan. It strikes me that what the talk was about the previous talk and this is a meta issue or a meta narrative issue is that we're trying to create a narrative or a story. So we've been going through a strategic directions process or a strategic planning process but I'd be very careful not to talk about a strategic plan per se because I think the use of those words in fact start to lock us into a certain way of doing things and don't actually allow us to start telling our stories or creating the narratives that are gonna allow us to move forward. So I'm wondering in light of the previous talk would you change some of the way because I do think those words matter. Would you change some of your, you're looking at some of those things? And I probably should have because we're really looking at how to sustain a planning process and a visioning process that is over time. We do a fair amount of work with building personas and that's kind of another way of approaching telling stories. And we're not good at that yet and we do a fair amount at the senior management level of looking at scenarios, what ifs because it is a set of choices that we are faced with. Put your head in the sand and scream bloody murder run screaming from the room or look at day to day what the landscape is and move toward that. What we haven't done when we began to revise our plan and all these plans get posted and they've got years on them and whatnot. What we thought about was that our focus, the big points were still the same. It was about the details and the focus that was becoming different. And then we began to look at adding two principles. One was the research agenda and the second was building the sustainable organization. And it is through those, maybe strategic plan you're right, maybe the wrong word. It is, but it's about a commitment to ongoing thinking. It's a commitment to ongoing looking at what are the portfolio of things that we have at our disposal to make a difference at UCLA. And yes, words matter. They matter a whole lot, but it's for us, it's more about the process. And I'd like to go back to Geeltas if she didn't get a chance to put into that last question as well. Just to respond to Leo's question over there. Around one positive unintended, I guess, surprise or whatever, we worded it. I think for Vicki and I, it was really around the leadership program. I mean, we knew we needed to build leadership capacity, but we didn't anticipate the, I guess, the way it would take hold and kind of just, you know, it just like an infection. It just kind of went through the organization so rapidly that people just really were so hungry. They grabbed hold of it. They engaged with leadership learning. You know, we, I think we initially thought, okay, let's just get our top senior leaders and our line supervisors through two cohorts. Well, by the time we got started on cohort two, we had people lining up saying, okay, when are you offering the next program? So we're like, okay, okay, we'll look into that. So then all of a sudden number three comes on board and halfway through three, we've got more people lining up saying, when is the next one? And here we are now already starting in the new year with a fifth cohort. So I think, you know, that was our biggest surprise is we really were hoping that we would just start building leadership skills with our management layer, but that other people throughout the organization just were jumping up and down and really wanting to engage and develop leadership skills. I think maybe the negative or the other flip side of the coin was probably when we had our budget cuts in 2009 just due to the economy. You know, that was right in the midst of our first leadership cohort. It was right in the midst of our first people plan as we were developing it and going, oh my God. You know, we're trying to affect some significant change here and we're gonna have to lose some positions and we know that morale is not gonna be the best and how are we gonna ride it through? How are we gonna come up in a better place at the end of this? So I think probably the disappointment there was, maybe we just didn't quite communicate or prepare the workforces as much as we could because we did have some people, you know, that are still harboring some resentment from the decisions that were made. We've had people exit the organization and we've lost some good people. We've also lost some people that needed to go. So, you know, I'll just have a coin but that I guess would be my answer. I'd like to comment on that last in terms of the change and we've actually had a couple of folks as well exit the organization, one in particular in protest over the appointment of a unit head, well, fine, and that, you know, I wasn't overly crushed. I'm sorry to see that person leave the organization with the feelings that they did. On the other hand, you know, the question that hasn't come up in this session yet is the, you know, of all those positions I put up, how many of them are true MLIS folks? And I could divulge that, I guess, if someone is interested, but we're looking more and more and more at the range of talent we can bring into the organization with fewer and fewer positions available to fill. And my preference always is finding someone with a library background. But I also see some new and different routes for folks to gain that library background and come into working in a research library. It is this broad scope of talents that we need to have, particularly around scholarship and research, but also, frankly, around teaching. One of our newest staff has won international awards in teaching and comes with an incredible background around teaching and learning, which was a skill set that we desperately needed to have as we were looking at retooling our undergraduate programs. Other questions or comments? Yes, Ann. Two questions. The first is in providing feedback loops with your staff, do you allow anonymous feedback or not? And the second question is, I was struck by John Sealy Brown's comment about the culture of consensus and collaboration and consultation, but not the process. And do you have any good ideas about how to do that? Well, the latter, practice, practice, practice, practice and create, and I do both town halls and open fora, not often enough, frankly. And it's only been astonishing to me in the last couple of years where staff are beginning to speak up in those. And I had probed a little bit earlier and there was an underlying culture that folks were told, don't speak up, you'll get in trouble. Don't offer up, you'll get, won't be positive. Thank God a couple of those folks have retired that were advising that sort of thing. And I do a blog and it's interesting that most of my comments come from new staff. Most of the feedback I get in my email come from new staff and the new blood that's coming into the organization. And I find that invigorating. I mean, it is challenging and it is invigorating. But the open fora are beginning, I wish in a sense I had another five years, maybe we could make that work better. The unit work plan planning process is structured to where we want more and more of that kind of discussion to happen at the unit level around the work that needs to get done, as well as the big kind of issues for the library as well. The only time we do not allow anonymous comments is around, recommend our comments on incoming academic appointments, people who come applying for our jobs and our comments come in as a result of the open sessions we hold around those. And I have stopped accepting any anonymous comments around that process. The rest of it's just gonna, I really believe in the grapevine and I often knock around, wander around and listen in and hear things that are going on. And a lot of that's anonymous as well. The other thing that's fascinating is the new kind of, I eat in our cafe now, a couple of times a week. And it's astonishing the number of staff who will stop and talk to me there and never approach me anywhere else. It is not the dean's practice in our library to accept anonymous comments or feedback. The only time she does is through our employee opinion surveys because we do want people to be able to fill out those surveys in an anonymous way. So there is the opportunity to provide the dean with feedback at that point. But if anybody is wanting to comment or provide feedback on anything else, they do need to put their name to it. And I think that's part of building our culture of accountability and transparency. That if you're gonna say something, you need to own up to it and say it in a respectful, courteous way. So that's been our approach at our library. How do you do it, Ann? I was struck earlier this week about the comment that the student newspaper, what is it, that UNC no longer allows anonymous comments. And I do think that while it can provide an opportunity for someone who has a fear of speaking up to add their comments, it also is a breeding ground for a lot of disproportionate discontent representation around comments. So I'm wavering back and forth about that. And I have over the years as well. And for me, moving from a public library environment and a state government environment into the academy, I am impressed with the faculty view, which we've tried to bring somewhat into the library that in the academy, we are responsible for who we are and what we think and what we put forward. And if we're truly going to be a part of that community, then I think we have to mirror some of that as well. I like the idea of the staff survey and the ability to occasionally be anonymous. I also, though, sit on the campus data and privacy and data protection board. And the UC system is in the process of trying to do a climate survey anonymously in a very diverse campus system. And they cannot guarantee that the individual, because they're asking a lot of demographic questions and whatnot, and we've pushed back vigorously against the methodology that is being used to gather that. So I think context is really, really important. But I also think the academy ought to be a place where we have this honest discourse of variant ideas and that people own up. I also think in some cases, and I mean this with all fairness, I think it's a self-esteem issue sometimes as well, that people need to feel as if they are not going to be attacked for having a point of view. And as a university librarian, I have a responsibility for helping set that tone where people don't get attacked for having a point of view. Not always successful, it's really hard. I'm always struck by the patient bill of rights when you go into a hospital and you read it and it says, oh yes, I have access to my records and great medical care, but at the bottom it talks about my responsibility to the doctors and the physicians who help me, which is honesty around my condition, blah, blah, blah. So I think having that sort of idea of a library staff bill of rights that gives them some protections but also some responsibilities. But we also have a culture within libraries to protect the privacy of those who are asking questions and borrowing our material. And I don't think we've made the appropriate, maybe context in which we don't necessarily just extend that to our staff for day-to-day operations of our business, of our part in the academy. We still must protect that privacy. I would never bridge across that gap. Tom Hickerson, University of Calgary. Neither of you in your presentations spoke specifically to aligning with enunciated institutional priorities. And I wonder the degree to which obviously you respond to the environment as you see it and the responses in support of interdisciplinarity is a good example of that. But do your institutions have clearly identified divisions and priorities and to what degree do you shape your planning to align with that? At the University of Saskatchewan we do institutional planning every four years. And actually in 2012 was our year to do institutional planning. So the institution sets their broad areas where they want areas of focus I think is what they call them. And we then in each of the colleges we need to submit a strategic plan in alignment with those four areas. And we need to tell the university what we're doing to support those four areas of focus. So our strategic plan for the library which what we submitted as a four year plan is then approved by a planning committee on campus. And they give us feedback about where we can make some tweaks or where we can strengthen our focus to align with the institutional plan. In the library we do strategic planning every year. So even though we've submitted a four year plan to the institution we still every year plan and make tweaks. So our plan that we've submitted is pretty much, it's not as specific perhaps as what our internal strategic plan would be it's more about looking out four years and what are some broad areas of emphasis broad strategies not the specifics of how we're going to get there that's more for the strategic plan in the library. So definitely we are we have to be aligned. If you look at the UCLA website you will not find a campus strategic plan does not exist. It exists in the embodiment of all of the unit college division work plans and strategic plans across the campus. And the chancellor has and provost have rolled those up into a variety of rethinking documents that are on the provost's website. We are complicated because we're part of the UC system. And UC itself is going through massive changes one of which will push theoretically more and more action to the campus level and money theoretically and then the office of the president will tax us to cover its operations and for UCLA actually the amount of money they will take back from us is larger than the amount of money they used to keep from us. And so that financial arrangement is driving us. At the system level there is something called I think it's the dashboard. Is that right Brian? The dashboard that is this huge aggregate deep pile of tables that are available to the regions and others then to look at every sort of aspect. The libraries have an itty bitty chunk of that in aggregate and so ours is complicated by the fact that we are individual campuses trying to survive on our own and the system that lays down and the new is it work smarter initiative? I can never remember the work smarter initiative. Thank God most of the working smarter attention has been paid at Berkeley not at UCLA. You know we're kind of south so it takes a while to come down and then you're right into the Tahachapi mountains and Brian's in even better shape because he's clear down in San Diego and Laurel is in Irvine and that's sort of off the 405 so you don't quite get there either. So it's really, I wish in a way there was clear direction but we're all so terribly different in terms of where we are in terms of the programs we offer. The degrees we offer. I think we have time for one more question. Was there one over here? I think Gary if you could tell us very briefly a little bit more about the non MLIS people you've hired. You alluded to that but I think you withheld something. Well. Like for example how others have been encouraged. Let me start with the context. We hire strict librarians strictly under the memorandum of understanding and the academic personnel manual. And within that the qualifications for a librarian are the MLIS or equivalencies. And at UCLA every librarian appointment I make also goes before our internal committee on appointments promotions and advancement. So there is a peer process that looks at the appropriateness of the individual and their qualifications to be appointed as a librarian and the rank into which they can be appointed. So with that context we have appointed if you looked at that list that I put up the new head of the college library and the director of teaching and learning all come with doctorate degrees in other fields. One of those the new head of college however was a CLIR postdoctoral fellow with Karen Wittenberg at the University of Virginia for five years there. And so comes with that kind of background. Our new head of the collections research services at the research library was a postdoctoral fellow with UCLA and comes out with PhDs and degrees that are relevant to the research structure. Our librarian for digital scholarship comes out of the digital humanities but also with a great deal of library experience but not the degree. The user experience person is also one that comes out of the IT and web services field. We're not getting enough graduates and we recruit internationally for some of these positions if we wanna make the changes. And that's, you know, all of those have stood through the process of selection through searches and then ultimately a recommendation from the internal capital. So it's a factor that's there. We just don't have sufficient training streams within California to fill the jobs we need at the levels that we need them in the research library arena. I've been given the high sign that our time is up which I regret since change in academic and research libraries I think is not only the biggest challenge we have but perhaps the most interesting issue we deal with on a daily basis. Please join me in thanking our speakers for a very interesting program. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org.