 Hello, I'm Leanne George, a coordinator of the spec survey program at the Association of Research Libraries. And I'd like to thank you for joining us for the fourth in a series of spec survey webcasts. Today we'll hear from the authors of the survey on the evolution of library liaisons. And the results of this survey have been published in spec kit 349. Before we begin, there are just a couple of announcements. First, everyone but the presenters has been muted to cut down on background noise. So if you are part of a group today, feel free to speak among yourselves. And we do want you to join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box that's in the lower left-hand corner of your screen. We'll pause about halfway for questions and then again at the end of the presentation. And we'll be reading the questions aloud before the presenters answer them. The webcast is being recorded and we'll send all registrants the slides and a link to the recording in about a week. Now let me introduce our presenters. Rebecca K. Miller is head of library learning services at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Lauren Presley is director of the University of Washington Tacoma Library and associate dean of university libraries at the University of Washington. Use the hashtag ARL spec kit 349 that you see in the lower right-hand corner of your screen to continue the conversation with them on Twitter. You can also use that to submit questions during the webcast. And now, let me turn the presentation over to Rebecca and Lauren. All right, thank you, Leanne, for that wonderful introduction and welcome everyone. Lauren and I were just talking before the webcast started. It's so nice to see so many friends and so many coworkers past and present with us today. So we're really excited to have a conversation with you all. I just wish we were sitting in the same room so that we'd be able to actually exchange comments. But I do just want to iterate what Leanne just said. Please don't hesitate to ask questions or throw in a comment. Lauren and I will speak for Lauren here real briefly. We don't necessarily consider ourselves the top experts on library liaisons but we consider ourselves very vested stakeholders in the whole conversation. So we really look forward to hearing from you a little bit, your thoughts, your questions. As we share with you some of the things that we thought were the most interesting highlights from the findings from our report. But again, you all have probably either already read or you'll have the opportunity to read all of the findings. So our goal with this webcast is to really wrap all of those pieces of data in some meaning and to give you some of the background and what we are thinking and how we thought it may actually be integrated into our work lines as librarians and as library administrators. So again, we are really excited to be able to share with you some of our favorite survey findings. But we also wanted to share with you first a little bit about what particularly drew us to this topic. When we submitted the proposal for this spec kit way back in July of 2014, so almost a year and a half ago, Lauren and I both had different jobs that we do now. We both worked at Virginia Tech Libraries and we see some of our Virginia Tech colleagues here. So hello to you all, we miss you. I was actually in the interesting space of being both a library liaison and supervising library liaisons. And as a manager I was also participating in a lot of administrative decisions about what our liaison program should look like. And through all of these experiences and through all of these decision-making processes and conversations, it really felt like liaisons were being pulled in a lot of different directions. And as a liaison myself, I was feeling pulled in a lot of different directions so I could really sympathize with how everyone else in the library was feeling as well. Because of our increasing responsibilities and because of the numerous things that we were being asked to sort of add to our plate, it really felt like liaison work was more important than ever before. And in casual discussions with colleagues at other universities, it seemed like everyone else was experiencing the same thing. And our idea for the SPEC survey really seemed like a great opportunity for gathering some real data on what we were sort of casually or unofficially experiencing through different conversations. Lauren, would you agree? Oh yes, of course. Like Rebecca, I was thinking about the future of liaison programs because I found myself in a library that was rethinking what a liaison program should look like. And that wasn't the first time in my career that I had been at a library that was rethinking my liaison services. My first library was a mid-sized private institution like Forest University. And while I was there, the program changed in a sustainable way. Virginia Tech was an ARL library at a large public institution. And as different as it was, I found it interesting that two very different libraries were confronting the same changes. And I was interested in how their treatment of the issue converged and diverged. Then a bit later in 2014, I had the opportunity to attend a leadership program. And every participant in that program either had gone through, was about to go through, or saw in the future an imminent change to their liaison program. So realizing that people across the country and in different types of libraries were all thinking about how to do the liaison shift better, it really created a sense of urgency for me around this project. So with that little bit of context, I'll give the floor back to Rebecca to talk about how we'll structure this webinar. Excellent. Thank you, Lauren. So another interesting piece about both me and Lauren is that we both come from a teaching and learning background. We were both instruction librarians before we sort of stepped into the roles that we have today. So of course we're starting out today as presentation with our learning objectives for what we're going to be talking about. And you can just sort of see here that this is the framework that we're going to be using to sort of share with you again some of our favorite findings from this particular survey. We're going to talk about who library liaisons are and what exactly they're doing. And because we actually have data from a 1992 survey, a 2007 survey, and our 2015 survey, we can actually track some trends and we'll be able to discuss what this evolution of how library liaisons work really looks like. And then again because we have this information about the evolution of library liaisons, we're going to pull out some of the major changes in future directions that this data really showed us, sort of to let us end our discussion with a forward-thinking sort of momentum. So another sort of interesting piece about this particular survey was when Lauren and I put in the proposal for it back in 2014, I don't think we were aware that there had been another survey as recently as 2007 or that there was even a 1992 survey. It was when we were doing our literature review that these popped up and we realized what a wonderful opportunity it was going to be to actually look at some of the data points and track them across 23 years, which has actually turned out to be completely fascinating. But let's go ahead and jump into the who and the what piece, who library liaisons are and what library liaisons do. So I'm going to turn it over to Lauren now to start us off by talking about some of the service models that we're seeing. All right, so we'll take a look a little bit at what library liaisons do and how they do it. And there's a lot that we can talk about here, but we're going to focus on a few main topics, specifically service models, liaison core duties, skills and outlooks, tools, position descriptions, and staffing models. So with that, when Rebecca and I started talking about how to frame the content for the webinar, we realized that we really wanted to differentiate between service model and the duties or services that liaisons might provide. This quote from Anne Kenney's 2014 Leveraging the Liaison Model highlights an aspect of that differentiation. She says that an emerging theme in the development of the liaison model is to shift the focus away from the work of librarians to that of scholars and to develop engagement strategies based on their needs and success indicators. This is essentially positing liaison shift as an understanding of the work of scholars and faculty and then identifying how we as librarians can engage with that work in order to help the faculty meet their needs and find success. A strong understanding of scholarly practices, environments, and production should be the starting place for creating our service model. And that service model should drive the duties that liaisons carry out in our daily work and are evaluated on in our annual reviews. Services should drive duties, which Rebecca will cover in the next section. So first, let's take a look at how the service model has been framed in these three reports. This chart shows the top responses for questions that attempted to get at or define the service model librarianship in each of these surveys. You can see that outreach really became a specific category in 2007 and continues to be a high priority in liaison programs today. Collections seem to be shifting downwards in the priority list while reference and communication seem to be shifting upwards. This is interesting through the lens of the service model that Kenny described because you can see that it's rooted more in the work of the departments and faculty. Outreach with the departments, communicating with them, and reference as a service which can be much more consultative and nuanced and based on a specific user's needs rather than a sort of one-size-fits-all library-driven approach. So with this framework, I'll turn it over to Rebecca to explore the core duties. Excellent. Thank you. So just as Lauren stated, service models and core duties are really sort of two sides of the same coin. And while we have attempted to pull out some themes of the report in order to give some meaning to these data points that we're going to be talking about, a lot of these themes are very interrelated, just like core duties and the service model are. So while we may refer to one thing in this part, we'll probably come back to it here in a minute when we talk about another particular theme. So just sort of keep that in mind as well. We've sort of had to make this fake structure in order to be able to talk about some of these themes, but everything is very interrelated. So again, Lauren commented that service models really drive the duties and responsibilities of individual liaisons. So we're definitely going to see some overlap in the topics that Lauren just addressed in the previous slide. However, by talking about core duties, we're also talking about individuals and how individuals prioritize, balance, and negotiate this ever-growing portfolio of responsibilities. The 1992 spec ended with this call that you see up here for library liaisons to expand their roles, which, when I read it out here in a minute, basically sounds like we're adding more things for people to do. Effort should be made to continue exploring nontraditional and expanded roles for liaisons as contributing members of research teams and instructional programs. So when you sort of take that apart and think about what's in there, there's a lot in there, a lot of responsibilities, a lot of duties, a lot of pieces that involve continuing to grow and being proactive and sort of forward-thinking. We'll talk more about those in a minute. If we aim, though, really to become contributing members of research teams and instructional programs, which our 2015 data show that they absolutely have been successful in this, then this is really going to impact the duty skills and perspectives that liaisons bring to their roles. So let's dive a little bit deeper into what the evolution of the library liaison role and core duties actually looks like. So just like the table that we looked at before, and actually this looks very similar to the table that Lauren showed us, we have some things on here just sort of tracking the evolution of specific core duties of liaisons over the past 23 years. And one of the first things that jumps out to me when I look at this table is that it looks like the lists get longer and longer as we go along. The 2007 and 2015 lists actually have the same number of duties in it if you go through and count that up. But what we've listed here is actually an order of popularity. So in the 2015 category, when we look at research consultations at the top, 99% of the responding libraries to our survey listed research consultations as a core duty for library liaisons. And the ones beneath it aren't much lower than that. 97% of libraries have liaisons managing collections. Also 97% have librarians involved in outreach and communication in some way. 96% have librarians involved in one-shot information literacy sessions and so on and so forth. The data management and support is the one that we're still seeing as a growing area. But as many as 63% of the libraries that responded to our survey actually have liaisons involved in this area. So that is a good chunk more than half. Let's move forward though and look at some additional responsibilities that we see being added as we go forward. These are some things that we see as completely new in the 2015 report. So in addition to listing those duties identified as core, the majority of respondents also named at least eight additional services, these ones that you see listed up here, that are now on this menu of liaison activities that we see liaisons involved with. 88% of libraries indicated that liaisons are involved with offering assistance on scholarly impact and metrics. 83% of libraries also indicated that liaisons were involved in promoting the institutional repository on campus. 82% indicated that liaisons were involved with consulting on open access issues. 80% indicated that liaisons were working with web-based learning objects and so on and so forth. With the new literacy of education we saw about 58%. So again, still over half of the libraries that were responding had liaisons involved with that. So we're really seeing more and more things being added to this menu of liaison activities. And in fact when we offered the opportunity for our respondents to give a narrative response to other services that liaisons may be offering, we got a whole nother list of things because what you see up here were some things that we listed as options for people to check off or identify. So within the narrative responses we got examples of things like data visualization support, GIS support, help with systematic reviews, text mining, and promotion of open access journal development. So clearly one librarian cannot possibly do all of these things. That was one of the clear themes that we saw coming out through the data in this report. So we were really curious about how liaisons and their administrators are balancing the shift in roles and responsibilities. Clearly some sort of renegotiation has to happen. So when we're looking at the core duties, in order to accommodate some of these new duties, liaisons are giving up or sort of shifting away from what we may think of as some more traditional roles. In particular, staffing service points and specific aspects of collection management are the two things that we really saw a lot of liaisons and liaison programs moving out of that piece of core duties. For example, while library liaisons and 99% of responding libraries offer the one-on-one research consultations, which we just went over, only 61% of these libraries are currently asking library liaisons to staff the in-person reference desk. So we have this image up here from Duke University Archives of an old traditional reference desk. We're seeing less and less of library liaisons staffing these. In collection management liaisons are taking a more hands-off approach and relying more heavily on patron-driven acquisition programs and approval plans. Interestingly, in both of these situations, technology is enabling us to rethink our responsibilities and core duties and sort of integrate some new things into what we're doing. But the thing that we really want to emphasize here is that this renegotiation of what is on that plate of core duties or what is on that menu of liaison services, renegotiating that is really imperative if we're going to be able to move forward and think proactively about new ways of engaging on campus. Related to the core duties, we also want to talk a little bit about the skills and outlooks that liaisons are bringing to their roles. And this is the part that I kind of like to call what characteristics make a good liaison librarian or a good library liaison. And when I look at this list, I think my absolute favorite response is from 2007 where they've listed availability as an important characteristic of a library liaison. And while I last, when I saw that, I think it's often very true when we think about how individuals get assigned to liaison departments. In my past life, I one time served as a math department liaison which was definitely related to my availability because I think if any of my middle or high school teachers knew that that's what I was doing, they would probably think that was hilarious. But really, with the way that these roles are evolving, it does take a special suite of skills to be effective in a liaison role. 96% of the respondents from the 2015 survey identified communication skills as an important qualification for library liaisons. And this is interesting because even back in 1992, communication skills was identified as a key qualification for library liaisons and that report even indicated that graduate degree programs and library science should be addressing this because it's so important for the effective librarian to be able to communicate well. Other qualifications that were identified multiple times in the current survey include collaborative or teamwork skills, a user-centered focus, and teaching skills. So overwhelmingly, respondents regarded subject expertise as the primary reason for deciding how a liaison receives a department assignment. About 97% of libraries that were responding gave us that answer. And about 67% make decisions based on the liaison's position. And many libraries consider additional criteria like a specific need or a gap in the library's coverage of departments and of course the liaison's specific interest or passion. If we were going to combine this list of interesting skills and outlooks with the list of evolving core duties that we just looked at, I think we could probably identify a few additional characteristics from these ideas that library liaisons need in order to really be effective. For example, increasingly, liaisons need to be flexible. Their job description may change from year to year based on identified or anticipated needs. Because of this, they also need to be lifelong learners. As library liaisons, we need to be always ready to learn a new skill or tool which leads us to the next topic of interest from our data. The tools that we're really seeing a lot of library liaisons engaged with. So really going along with the idea of library liaisons needing to be lifelong learners, I was particularly interested in this variety of tools that library liaisons are relying on in order to do their work. This topic actually ties in really well with professional development and continued education which we're going to talk about in the second part of this webinar. But when we asked our respondents to identify the types of tools or technologies that liaisons were using, my mind was a little bit blown by the diversity of tools that library liaisons are expected to have some familiarity with or really have some level of sophistication with. A number of the things that were mentioned in the narrative responses when we asked about tools that liaisons were using were open access harvester tools, anything from the spring share suite of Lib tool products to like Lib guides, Lib analytics, all of those things. DMP tool which relates directly back to data management being an important piece of what a lot of library liaisons are doing. ORCID which again relates back to the scholarly communication realm, thinking about scholarly impact and all of that. GOBE for those who are still involved in any sort of level of collection management. And then a number of libraries mentioned just mobile technologies in general that library liaisons were really expected to have some level of sophistication with technology in order to really be able to support the faculty and students that they work with. All right, so at this point I'm actually going to hand it back over to Lauren to talk a little bit about what we're seeing or what we saw in this evolution of position descriptions for liaisons. All right, so with that we have another chart showing some of the changes over time. And we also included several example documents in the set kit of specific position descriptions if you're interested in looking at them. But we wanted to highlight a few trends here. In 2015, 72% of responding libraries have written descriptions of ways along services and practices. And 56% of reporting libraries have written policies or guidelines governing functions, activities, or responsibilities. Of course there are significant variations among position descriptions, but the top areas of work that were included again and again each year are listed on this slide. You can see that some concrete skills like budgeting were included in the 1992 and 2007 survey responses, but this year they've been replaced. You can also see that categories have expanded to take on new duties, for example, collections of grants to include scholarly communication, communication keeps growing each year with 2007 including education marketing and 2015 added embeddedness. One major clear trend is the shift towards marketing and partnering in general. So this gives a little bit of a framework for the types of things that show up in job descriptions, especially over time. And our next slide will look at where these positions reside in an organization. Generally speaking, across all aspect kits, a liaison program is determined by the administration and the librarians' perceived needs of their departments. Liaisons are assigned subject areas based on their expertise, and liaisons have been distributed to some extent throughout their libraries in each of these surveys. The organizational changes are more nuanced than these broad trends. For example, there are new types of positions, for example, data management, that lead to different liaison structures. Because certain disciplines might be more interested in data, it might mean those positions tend to liaise with those programs more often. Where positions report are based on a function that isn't necessarily tied to their liaison duties. For example, you might have someone that has scholarly communication that has, say, a math background, so even though they're not in a traditional part of the library or liaisons where they might still be doing that work from another place in the organization. And we also see more library professionals with PhDs but without the MLS that might be liaisons as well. So given this sort of general thing that has held true, which is in the slide, and these sort of nuanced changes, we don't see a significant change in where they are situated, but we do note that there are some evolutions taking place at this moment. So at this point in the presentation, we're going to stop for a minute and let you all participate in the conversation. Again, we just covered some of the more interesting to us findings about who library liaisons are and how they do their job. And now we're interested in what sorts of questions or comments you might have about this. Feel free to refer to anything in the report that we may not have mentioned yet, but there is a lot of data in there. We have one question coming in from Rebecca. What if we shift from subject expertise towards needs expertise for liaison models, for example, scholarly communication and instructional design, et cetera? Okay. That is actually a great question because it completely anticipates what we're going to be talking about next. Since it was asked, I'm going to jump forward a couple of slides. Aha! Expertise. This was actually one of the areas that we identified as a major shift in the way we think about liaison work. And I'm going to pull up my notes for that so I make sure not to forget anything while I'm talking about this here. So in the 1992 survey, the idea of subject expertise came up, but it came up in the area that it was identified as a challenge. That was one of the biggest challenges for library liaison programs, that library liaisons either needed to get more subject expertise or that they didn't quite have the subject expertise that they needed in order to be effective liaisons. And of course, we just talked about how most libraries close to 100% use some sort of background or subject expertise to assign liaisons to departments. But what the data from the 2007 and 2015 reports really show is that there is now this tension between subject expertise and what we were sort of calling functional expertise. But needs-based expertise could certainly be another term that would describe that as well. So if we look back at some of the emerging duties of liaisons, we see a number of new areas of expertise included, like technology, pedagogy, open access, intellectual property, e-research, data management, scholarly communication, instructional design. And one of the things that's interesting about this is that it probably is untenable for a single liaison to be able to meet all of the needs of one department. And we do see a lot of libraries that are assigning liaison roles in these functional areas. So I don't know if that was a full answer to that question, but I think it's a great question because that from the data and from the conversations we've had, that absolutely seems to be the direction that a lot of programs are moving in to not only think about subject expertise, but also think about functional expertise and have different people working on each of these and then having them work together as a team in order to solve complex problems, which we'll dive into a little bit more here in a minute. But I'll back up now and go back to the previous slide because I think we have a couple more questions. We have a quick question from Lori. Did you ask the same questions as the two previous surveys? That is another great question. So we did ask some of the same questions because we wanted to be able to track that data. And in the summary of the piece that is freely available, if anyone wants to go and read it, where we were able to offer data from 92, 2007, and 2015, we generally were using those descriptions from the questions that we were able to use from each of those two reports. But we also asked some additional questions. And each of the reports have some unique questions and then some that we see consistent through the report. So I hope that kind of answered the question. Lauren, would you add anything else in there? No, I think that's it. Excellent. Let's take just one more question now and we'll come back to some of these later. But Janet wondered why the budgetary responsibilities have been replaced over the years. Yeah, I mean I can speak to that. We didn't ask concrete questions around that because we didn't know that that was going to be a difference. But I can say that by looking at how collections have shifted downwards in the list, a lot of the budgeting was tied to collection development. So my assumption is that it is based on that, but I think that's certainly something that would be an interesting thing to look at in a future study. Let's go back to the presentation and we'll come back to our questions in a few minutes. Excellent. All right. Great discussion so far. So thank you all so much for your thoughtful comments and questions. It really does feel like the topic of library liaisons is a really relevant one right now, since it does seem to be going through so many major changes. And that's really what we're going to focus on for this next section of the webcast. Some of the major changes that we noticed and where the data seems to suggest that library liaisons are headed in the future. So we're going to touch on a couple of specific topics here. But again, start thinking about questions or comments that you may want to bring up since we will have a bit more time for questions and discussion at the end. For now though, let's start talking about some of the major areas of change that we identified through this report. And those specific themes are going to be how we think about expertise in relation to the liaison role. So I might not talk too much else about that. The new types of liaison relationships that we're seeing across institutions. Team-based working models. Professional development in continued education. And then finally a really big topic, assessment and evaluation. So let's go ahead and jump into some of that. This was one of the findings that was most interesting to me, because as I've already confessed at the very beginning, a lot of our interest in this topic was just we had been gathering a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of libraries were going through changes. But I was not aware of how widespread this change was going to be. Ninety-one percent of libraries are either recently incorporated changes or are planning too soon into their liaison model. That's huge. Ninety-one percent. That's a lot. That's more than I thought. But what was more interesting to us even than that, perhaps, were some of the drivers behind this change. Why all of a sudden are we all changing? And these are some of the responses that we got as the drivers of changes when we were asking why we were making these changes. The changing landscape of scholarly communication. The way that scholars work, publish, access information, consume information, and create more. These are all changing the way that we need to work. And a number of the quotes that we've already read back that up. New needs and strategic directions within either the library or the university are often shaping and shifting why we're seeing some of the changes in these roles. And then new leadership within the library or within the university, not surprisingly, also drive some of the change that does seem to be increasingly widespread. We've already talked about expertise a bit, but I think one of the most important things to pull out of this discussion about expertise is that, again, it really is increasingly unlikely that a single person will be able to meet the needs of one department. And we're going to talk about that in a bit in how a lot of libraries are helping leads on to be able to meet these complex needs that they're seeing from their users. But this trend in expertise and in thinking about what sorts of services we offer and what sorts of areas we're growing in as individuals in those libraries also speaks to the new types of leads on relationships that we're seeing, which Lauren's going to talk a little bit about. So one form of new liaison shifts that we saw was liaisons being established to work with non-academic departments at their institutions. We wanted to explore this in part because this is a development of Virginia Tech while we were based working there. Previous surveys did not target this type of liaison shift, so this was a new section in our survey. The comments and surveys did indicate that there was some shift towards this type of work. You can see on this slide that nearly 50% of responding libraries said that they have liaisons working with administrative support departments. So at this point, you might be wondering what those units are. The answers were so diverse and so institutionally specific. I mean, we all use special acronyms or campus vernacular for teaching and learning centers and things like that, right? The best way I could quickly convey the liaison relationships was with attack clouds. So you can see that student services, undergraduates, international learning, writing, these are all common areas that people ascribe to liaison shifts. But you can also see that there are some institution-specific categories in there as well, especially the smaller terms that just show up once or twice. Other interesting trends in this area are things that people wanted to make sure that we understood are that some libraries link librarians with non-academic units, but the libraries choose to use a different term than liaison. They see it as a slightly different thing or they want to differentiate it somehow. Some libraries position liaisons with departments based on their job duties. So if a, for example, a digital humanities librarian might be doing work with that department, but it might not actually be like humanities liaising. So they might position it based on job duties but not call it a liaison shift. And some libraries clarify that they collaborate across campus about any particular designation. They just see that as part of their mission. So not everyone is using this term, though there is a clear trend towards librarians working across campus to further the institution's positions and goals. So really it's the way that libraries frame that works. It varies a fair amount, but we are seeing a lot of libraries use the term liaison for these types of engagements. So considering traditional liaison shifts and these new partnerships, let's take a little, let's take a moment to look at how liaisons do their work. Rebecca? Excellent. So as we just promised, we're going to talk a little bit about how new liaison roles, duties, and areas of expertise inform new ways that liaisons are working and working together. And we want to be clear that team-based work and collaboration is not something new. Liaisons have always worked together and have always been collaborative. But what we're seeing is collaboration in sort of a different form or in a different structure. Since again, it is pretty unlikely that one person will be able to meet all of the needs of the department or the departments with which they work, we're really seeing more libraries moving toward a team-based approach for working with these different departments. In our report, some of the representative documents that we included, such as the 2014 University of Kansas document, really describe how librarians with different areas of subject and functional or needs based, as we mentioned earlier. Expertise comes together to work within complex situations. And a number of the representative documents and the responded narrative comments in the survey responses really included the word complex a lot. We saw that word come up over and over again. And it really seems like liaisons are starting to work more in this team-based model because it seems like the best way to deal with users increasingly complex needs. So you might have someone on a team that has that subject expertise. You might have someone else on a team that's an instructional designer or has some instructional design expertise. You might have someone else on the team that's a web applications developer. So all three of these people together might be working with a faculty member to develop information literacy modules that will fit directly into the curricula that the faculty member is working with. That's an example of a project team that I worked on when I was at Virginia Tech. And it was actually a really sort of interesting and cool experience because I'm not a web applications developer. I am an instructional designer but I was sort of filling in the role of subject expertise. And it was hard for my brain to be in two places at once. So it was really helpful to have different people with different areas of expertise working together to solve these complex problems. And sort of related to that is this idea of how liaisons are continuing to grow and learn in order to fill some of these roles. So this complexity means a real need for flexibility. And as Rebecca mentioned earlier it also means that there's a sense of growth and change that always comes with it. So this really leads to a necessity for liaisons to have a healthy appetite for professional development and continuing education opportunities. Most reporting libraries offer and have historically offered training for those who are new to leave on duties. The 1992 survey specifically calls out meetings and informal networking. And these opportunities have grown throughout the survey to the most recent one or responses built on these past examples but also highlighted other developments like learning communities. These networking opportunities allow liaisons to learn about what it is to be a liaison in their own institution's context and ask questions at their specific point of need. In addition to these learning opportunities, there's also a need for training as new tools and practices emerge. The 2015 survey included a question specifically target the professional development and continuing educational opportunities that libraries offer their liaisons. You can see here that most responding libraries offer funding for conferences, internal across training programs, and resources for external workshops. But you'll also note that 22% responded with other opportunities. These included support such as research days, access to lynda.com, other coursework, and supports for gaining certificates. Thank you. Okay, so we promised we'd end with a big one. And this idea of assessment and evaluation is something that we saw pop up in a lot of the literature that we referred to in the selected bibliography that's part of our report. And this is obviously an area where we're going to be seeing a lot more growth and a lot more movement, we hope, over the next couple of years. So now that we're sort of in the early stages of thinking about how to define liaison and liaison program success and how to assess, evaluate, measure, and provide evidence of a program's impact, we just wanted to share a little bit of some of the interesting data about that. What's interesting to me is that from 2007 to 2015, we haven't really seen a change in how many people or how many libraries are thinking about conducting a formal evaluation of liaison services. In 2007 it was 49% and in 2015 it's 49%. But one of the questions that we asked in the report was what source of indicators people were looking for to let them know that their programs were successful. And it's these indicators that could potentially turn into outcomes that could drive some outcome-based assessment or evaluation. We're even thinking about evidence that we sort of move into this next phase of liaison. You can see in this purple box here some of the indicators that people mentioned. New partnerships, increased numbers of consultations and classes, feedback from our user groups, recognition from various groups, and then information from liaisons themselves, whether or not liaisons were staying and how liaisons really felt like they were doing, whether or not they were being successful. So I feel like we could probably spend an entire another hour talking about assessment and evaluation but from what we really see in the data and from what we saw on the survey, this is going to be the area that most of the conversation is going to be happening and moving forward. Because when you think about it, it's really going to inform all of the other pieces of liaison program as well. Because it's going to make us sort of step back and think about what our outcomes really are when we think about the liaison program. And once we identify and define some of those, then gathering the evidence to be able to tell whether or not we're being successful seems like it should be the next step. Alright, so last slide, we're wrapping up here. We definitely hope that this won't be the last back hit on library liaisons and I would say that Lauren and I are going to revisit this ten years down the road but one of the things that struck us was that it's been really valuable to have three different sets of authors with really different perspectives weighing in on this topic. Since the 1992 survey ended with a call to action for liaisons to expand roles and partner in new ways, we felt like we also should include a call to action to wrap up our report. And for us, that was easy since we both believe that liaisons sit at critical points within institutional communities. The 1992-2007 and 2015 reports all talk about service and the way that library liaisons serve their communities. However, it's clear from these responses that we saw in the survey and what we've observed in our own communities that liaisons are increasingly serving through leadership roles. In many institutions, librarians are leading conversations, chairing communities and driving policies related to scholarly publishing, data management, pedagogy and other areas. We absolutely believe that this trend will continue and we look forward to continuing this conversation. Indeed, this conversation is already continuing and branching out in a lot of different ways. At this point, I want to give a quick shout out to my Penn State colleague Ann Langley and her collaborator from Princeton, Neil Miro. Ann and Neil are creating an open data set about library liaisons and they've actually already started collecting data from liaisons back in early November. So if you've got an email from them, be sure to fill out their survey. I believe it's open through the end of the year, but Neil is actually with us today so he can jump in and confirm that or correct me if I'm wrong. But this sort of open data set is a great complement to what we've collected in our spec kit since this data will actually be coming directly from liaisons. I can imagine a lot of applications for the data that they're gathering so my call to you if you're interested is to continue participating in these conversations. Think about how you can participate and what you might have to contribute to the conversation. And with that, it's the perfect segue for possibly more questions, but I think we might be at time. Leigh Ann? We are at time, but we're going to take a few more minutes for questions. And quickly, Perry wonders how do people balance their liaison responsibilities with other committee work and professional development? I feel like the only answer to that is very carefully. That's a really difficult one. And really we saw from a lot of the responses in the survey that liaisons are struggling to balance all of the professional responsibilities that are on their plate. And this is one of those areas that I think Lauren and I would both agree that some of the data we got from the survey brought up more questions than it did answers. So I almost wish that knowing what we know now we could go back and do a whole another survey where we tweak some of the vocabulary a little bit and we get a little more specific about what we're looking for. And that would have been a great thing to ask about just the balancing in general. Lauren, do you want to talk a little bit about that as well? Yeah, the only thing I would really add to that is that I think part of this rethinking the model and how we position liaisons in terms of expertise, functional expertise versus subject expertise is in part libraries trying to deal with that issue. I've been in a library in the past in which everyone was trying to do a little bit of scholarly communication and then we had a scholarly communication librarian and that sort of eased up a lot of time and created fewer task forces or committees to be part of a lot of people but that person could partner with us and help faculty. So I think part of what we're seeing with these major changes are libraries trying to come off with structural ways to help people given how much everyone's being asked to do. Stephen thought that the list of skills would include subject expertise. Is that just a given these days? Oh, that's a good, like the core duties list or the, let me flip real quickly to the skills and outlooks list, I bet. So some of this were questions that we copied over from 1992 and 2007. Some of these skills pieces I think were the ones that we tried to keep consistent. In one of the other questions that we asked about how liaisons were assigned departments sort of got at that subject expertise piece. And again, 97% of libraries use subject expertise as the main reason for assigning a particular individual to a particular department. So that's definitely a component of it. And looking back in 1992, subject expertise was the number one characteristic or skill that was important for a library liaison. So I think maybe the way we framed it here sort of is focusing a little bit more on some of the softer skills or some of the other skills that library liaison sort of need to focus on or build into their portfolio in order to really be effective. And let's see. I also see in the questions asking a little bit about instructional design and technology skills as well. This is another area where I think the language that we used when we were asking the question could have been drawn out a little bit more because we asked about some of the skills and outlooks and people responded with things about like user-centered focus, teaching skills. And I think technology and instructional design is sort of wrapped up in that. But again, when Lauren and I looked at the data and walked away from it, we kind of thought, well, we have a lot more questions now that we didn't start out with. What are people meaning when they say teaching skills? Do they mean specifically instructional design or do they mean public speaking? There's a lot that could be sort of teased out, some really specific things that could be teased out. And as Lauren stated, would be great for someone else to do some future research on. We have time for just one more question. I'm sorry we're not going to get to everyone in our queue here. But Janet asked, did you do any breakdown by disciplines? There may be differences in responsibilities in different subject areas. I'll jump in and start to answer that one. Lauren can join me. When we first started creating the survey, we actually met with like the survey creative expert team at Virginia Tech. And we spent a morning looking at how we might want to break down responses. And subject expertise or the subject areas or the disciplinary areas was one of the things that we looked at. And we decided to sort of back it up and look at more of a big picture view because we felt like that was getting a little more down in the weeds. But again, now that we've seen the big picture, I think that those are exactly the types of specifics that future research could really tease out. Lauren, do you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I would only add that we were thinking about the survey as more of a look at the program of ways like when you think administratively about how you structure it. So that's part of why we made the decision to not do the subject breakdown. But yeah, I mean as we keep saying in these questions, really this just created more opportunities for interesting studies. And I hope to see research in these areas and maybe even contribute some in the future. Absolutely. And I'm going to jump in real quickly too because Neil, I see put in a comment. The liaison survey that I mentioned earlier is actually closing on December 11th and he's going to be sending out final reminders tomorrow at 10 a.m. So if you got one of those emails, you get another one. Be sure to respond to that because those sorts of data sets and that sort of research is going to be what really moves forward a lot of the way we're thinking about and a lot of the way we're shifting ideas about library liaisons which plays right into that opportunities for future research that we keep in mind. And with that, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today to discuss the results of the Evolution of Library Liaisons Spec Survey and a reminder that you will receive the slides and a link to the recordings in the next week. Thanks for staying with us a little past our time today, but that concludes our presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the webinar for today. We thank you for your participation. Next that you please disconnect your line.