 Staffing Priorities for Workforce Transformation Remarks by John Cawthorne, Vivian Lewis, Shimo Wang, and Tito Sierra at the 2012 ARL Fall Forum. Convened by Ann Kenney. So welcome back. I'm Ann Kenney, the Carly Crock University Librarian at Cornell. And it's my pleasure to introduce two sessions that are coming up. Each of these sessions will be about a half hour. I know they've timed their presentations to allow for questions and comments as well. Creating a vital workforce for the 21st century research library challenges us to think about the future in different ways and to create new pathways. How we define this future and develop strategies for building a workforce that is prepared to support the needs of 21st century students and researchers is vital. We'll be hearing two research projects that will highlight data about future service trends and staffing priorities. The first session is 21st century research library's workforce transformation case studies, which will feature three people, many of whom you've already met. John Cawthorne, Vivian Lewis, and Shimo Wang engaged us last year in using the ARL 2030 scenarios as part of their research library leaders fellow program. Their presentation will summarize their findings from discussions and focus groups about the workforce transformation through the lens of the 2030 scenarios. Their bios are in the program materials, so I'll forgo those. But I do want to point out that each one of them came up to me independently and said, you do not have to spend much time introducing us. I said I have done one or two of these. So these research library's leaders fellows are not only really wonderful, they're a little feisty. So John Cawthorne, Associate University Librarian, Organizational Development and Assessment at Boston College, Vivian Lewis, Interim University Librarian McMaster, and Shimo Wang, Dean and University Librarian at the University of Cincinnati. Good afternoon, thank you, and we just didn't want it to go too long. So I want to thank you for the introductions and very short. So our presentation is organized in three parts. I'm going to first talk a little bit about the background and overview for our project. Second, Vivian is going to share some key findings from our conversations and research held over the 18-month RLLF program. And third, our colleague and new dean, University Librarian Shimo, is going to discuss new skills and competencies for our future workforce in research libraries. Now we're only going to take about 20 minutes, and that'll be some time for questions and reactions, but before I get started any further, I want to thank several people for us being up here. There are a lot of people behind us, of course, and the ARL staff, Sue and Judy, have been really wonderful. And Carton Rogers has been great and encouraging as the chair of the Transforming Research Libraries Steering Committee. He could have said, no, this is a terrible idea, but he didn't, and we appreciate that. Deeta and Duane have been wonderful in their stewardship of all of our projects. And Charles Lowry will want to give him a very special thank you because he facilitated some conversations with senior fellows in August. And we're also very grateful to many of our RLLF colleagues who helped us facilitate some of these conversations in May with the ARL Library Directors. And I must not go any further without saying how much of a pleasure it is to work with Vivian and Shimo. They are very smart, and it's just my pleasure, really. So here, let's start with the first slide. So for us, this project started when we met in Atlanta during a training session on how to facilitate discussions using the ARL scenarios. And since I only have 20 minutes, I'm not really going to go into each one of these four scenarios in any great detail. I assume you read them. You might have read them a long time ago, but you read them. But I can tell you this and set the stage. They're basically four fictional stories, and they're intentionally focused on what the research enterprise might look like in the year 2030. And they're created by 30 leaders from ARL institutions, plus provocateurs and ARL staff. Each story features fictional researcher Hannah Chen. And of course, what makes these scenarios so provocative and challenging, I think, is that the library's not written in them. And if you read them, you know that they really force us to kind of think outside of our comfort zone. And so what Vivian and Shimo and I recognize right away is that their value lies not in predicting the future, but rather in helping us frame conversations everyone in our organization can recognize, understand, and begin to test different futures. And it's with this so much uncertainty in our environment. And I mean uncertainty by the related to funding and scholarly communication and placing our services that we also appreciate, and we did it almost simultaneously when we read them, that if used correctly, these powerful stories will help leaders articulate how decisions we make today might play out in the future. So because the library was not written into the scenarios, we felt there was a great opportunity to first imagine what the research library might look like. We use these scenarios as planning discussion tools with current and future research leaders as the basis for the research. We also thought when leaders talk about workforce transformation, particularly with our current organizations, they must ground these conversations enough to help staff and librarians at all levels understand the implications, possibilities, and I think real opportunities we have in future directions. Finally, we wanted to make recommendations for ARL libraries and how best to use these scenarios and place our findings in the research. And before I get off the stage, I'll have some questions that might help you help us think about where to place this. So this is what we did. We facilitated some conversations. We had groups of people. We separated them up into four groups and gave them each a scenario. We started with the RLLF Fellows in University of British Columbia in October 2011. We cleaned that up a little bit for ARL library directors in May of 2012. And as I said before, Charles Lowry did a great job facilitating the Senior Fellows cohort that met in August of 2012. And we asked the participants four basic questions. So we asked four basic questions. As a researcher, what our hands information research needs. And since the library is not present in the scenarios, we asked participants to tell us what the library looks like, its functions, its opportunities. We also had participants imagine what skills and competencies will be needed in this future library. And finally, we asked participants to tell us what decisions we can make today, we can make today that will help move us towards that future, whichever future they were given. And so as I bring up Vivian, there are several questions I want you to think about because we're committed to kind of placing this research where it needs to be. We're going to write for ARL publications, certainly, but we'd love to hear your thoughts about other outlets for this research. And you might also help us think about other groups that we might add to the conversation, like HR professionals, faculty, provost, I'm not going to tell you who else, but you can come up with some names. So with all that background, I think you'll be able to follow the real star of our presentation, Vivian Lewis. Good afternoon, everyone. May I just ask, how many people in the room have actually read the ARL scenarios? I am so happy to hear that. That's wonderful. Before I get started, I just wanted to say what a great honor it is to be part of this very important conversation within ARL libraries. And as well, it's been a tremendous amount of fun, and I'm really happy. When we met with the ARL directors back in the spring, one of our great concerns was, how embarrassing will this be if no one actually comes to hear our preliminary results? And I'm so happy to say that the ARL directors came in great numbers, and it gave us a huge amount of information to play with. And so that's been very reassuring. I'm going to go through these slides quite quickly. I can assure you that the information will all be loaded on the ARL website, so you don't need to write madly. As John has mentioned, the stories of Hannah Cheng in the year 2030 do not explicitly mention the libraries. And this actually was a source of great concern and in some ways discomfort with some of the participants in our conversations. And in some ways, it's actually hard to imagine what Hannah could possibly want from the research library 20 years or so down the road. It's really hard, and in some cases some of the participants found the experience somewhat grim. And in observing it and reflecting on our discussions with various participants, we noted something somewhat unusual. We noted that when we discussed these scenarios with the ARL directors, they tended not to be as alarmed as some of our other participants. And it was almost as if they were so used in their careers to looking over the brink that it wasn't quite as frightening. I leave that with you for consideration over a coffee or a long glass of wine tonight. And if anyone has any suggestions for why I'd like to hear. The other thing we noticed was that all of our participants were very clear in how important they found this conversation. The discussions were lively and sometimes they were quite emotional. And there was a clear sense that participants wanted others in their organization to walk down the hallways with Hannah as well and to experience some of the things that we were sharing with them. There was also a sense that some of our senior university administrators were really not thinking to the year 2030 and possibly they should be brought into this conversation as well. There was also a feeling that when you look forward no matter what you saw, you saw fewer people. And all of the groups sensed that the traditional face-to-face type, a transactional work that's happening in ARL libraries today is probably going to happen at a lesser degree as we look forward. In many cases it was hard to picture Hannah ever entering a library or ever consulting a service desk in the way that we think of as most common today. And as well, the whole issue of the composition of the workforce was something that was of great interest and we tease this out a little bit further in our findings. Most participants saw that the proportion of lower-skilled staff within our libraries, the ones that are traditionally delivering face-to-face transactions like circulation, that there would be fewer of those kind of staff in the future. It's hard, for example, to see Hannah Chen signing out a book. That was quite clear. And the other thing that we really noticed with all of our groups was the concept that collaboration was no longer an optional activity. And we really heard some very powerful statements around collaboration. In at least three of the four stories there are very few universities actually left. And those that remain are grappling with terrible funding issues. And in many of the scenarios Hannah is partnering with colleagues in other parts of the world just to keep going as a researcher. One ARL director said it fast. She noted that the concept of a single institution is gone especially in STEM disciplines. It was collaborate or perish. One of the other themes we heard a lot about was data curation. And this really reflects a lot of the conversation that's gone on during the last couple of days at the ARL director's meeting. We heard time and time again how this really was our future. And we talked about the key roles of preserving and curating data of advocating for open access. And we really heard this issue that there was going to be a real change in what we considered our primary focus. The sense that we were in the year 2030 no longer going to be focusing on the delivery of the book or the peer reviewed article. That wasn't our future. Our future from the scenarios appeared to be in data curation and data management. And we heard many, many reflections on what this all means as a librarian. And I must admit we heard a lot of emotions and a lot of opinions on this subject. We did hear a few voices suggesting that the future of the MLS was unsubstantiated. And that we'd be better to hire deep subject experts and walk away from the librarian as the future of our organizations. But the far louder voices called for the continued concerns of the librarian in our organizations. All that with a significant retooling. We heard some very interesting discussion which I'd love to walk out with you about the future of teaching and learning. This was something that I think in some of my conversations have been a point of real concern and interest for colleagues. There was some sense with some of our discussions that the current focus being placed on teaching, learning and research as our true focus today in 2012 isn't necessarily the focus going forward in the year 2030. And that as our universities actually walk away from some of the focus on education and they start handing off that to commercial ventures which is what you see in a lot of the scenarios that the implication for libraries is that we walk away from teaching and learning as well. Something to consider and I'd like to hear your comments on that. We heard a lot about skills and competencies in the future workforce. We heard a lot about agility, flexibility that we need staff who can adapt to new realities and can accept change and transform themselves rather than waiting for us to transform them. We heard the importance of subject expertise and far less room for generalists. We heard the critical importance of IT skills, of data curation skills, of intellectual property and rights management. One that was of great interest to us was cultural and linguistic diversity and this reflects very well on some of our comments in the last session. The global followers scenario has Hannah Chen working as a professor in a Chinese university located somewhere within the United States. But all the scenarios display some aspects of global positioning and global collaboration as a strategy to retain pertinence. Again, I'd like to hear your comments on that one. We blended several characteristics into a broad category we call entrepreneurism. Informal conversations with librarian peers suggest that some of these competencies are considered a bit controversial. These aren't the characteristics that many of our librarians came into the profession with and some of our colleagues may even find some of them unappealing. We grouped the last few in terms of literacies. We talk a lot about geospatial literacy and in terms of data visualization as important literacies as we see in going forward. And finally the last category is around interpersonal skills, but at a very deep level that takes us towards the ability to form deep collaborations with our faculty. At this point I'm going to turn it over to Shimo who is going to talk to us a little bit about preparation. My part of the summary will be focused on that last question about what we can do now to prepare the future. You can hear from my presentation many of the since I'm aware many of the AR institutions already practice, but we hope those are reflect much more larger trends for what we're doing now to prepare for the future. We heard that prepare the future we should focus on three R's. They are recruiting, retraining and retuning or restructure. Under recruiting we heard we should hire for the competencies rather than for credentials. The competencies we should focus on those new emerging skill sets technology skill sets data, deep data deep subject domain skills cultural and language skill sets etc. We also heard we should hire for potential potential for the aptitude of learning and aptitude to facing the future challenge rather than the years of experience let's face it in some new areas like research data management there's not much about the years of experience you can hire so that potential is extremely important. We heard we want to create in our organization a career opportunities to hire the people with the new title and the new responsibilities especially aiming on attract those non library information science degree graduates to our professions. We also heard we need to pay people more. The salary was on the table over the previous presentation the compensation is really important to compensate people for the responsibilities not exactly about their educational credential but rather what is the market going to pay them. I always said if this guy walk out across the street even the nonprofit organization how much it's going to get paid. That's what we heard. We heard the directors for those of you who are dean, university library directors you should see yourself have the larger role to play for yourself in the hands-on recruiting for new people. At Emory Rick Luce and I practice none of the professional position will get hard unless either of us have the time to interview this person. At my new institution Cincinnati I made the staff aware no matter where I am how busy I am whether in China or Europe even it's the Skype meeting I have to see any single professional position get into the organization. Returning and retuning we heard we should streamline current workflow, unlimited routine works whenever it's possible and free up the existing capacity and repurpose them. Let's face it there's only two way in today's economic situation you can create the capacity hiring new and repurpose existing. We heard we need to get our librarians out of the library and say and be seen by especially our research faculty team. We heard we should offer rich training and development opportunities as broad as possible for our professional team and we also should selectively cultivate our stars with the very limited investment such as the training, traveling and all of those strategic investment. We should embed our librarians in the research team that mentioned before and we should cultivate the data management digital scholarship skills now. Returning we heard the direct says we should seek out the real and meaningful collaboration project with other institutions not only libraries testing Russian nails piloting the radical concept is good but just do it don't sit over there with the six months of the research a lot of six months of pros and cons analyze I think we just do it. Create the culture of the collaboration between the MIRS graduates and the non MIRS professionals come up to our institution that appears to be extremely important for the future of our organizational culture. Directors and other senior managers be ready to disrupt your organization at least in small ways to affect the change. In general we should collectively selectively forget the past streamline the present and work to the future with that my last slide and I like to on the behalf of our three of our researchers post some of questions hope to stimulate some of the conversation after. Our deal term outcome for this project is today this presentation plus we're being invited to write the essays for the publication for the ARL research library issues and for the long term outcomes we have a question mark we'd like to hear your advice most important we have some questions to ask you what alternative channels of communication should we pursue? Are there other people or groups we should bring into this conversation you heard we engage the directors my fellow groups as well as the UCL fellows training the last question is what is the best way to use fundings to affect current projects in the ARL libraries I think that's the most important question to summarize my presentation thank you I want to thank our colleagues for their provocative presentation we have time for one or two questions now we'll come back at the end of TTO's presentation and open for more general discussion but are there any specific questions right now that anyone wants to ask yes Sarah you are somewhat controversial finding that at least some directors see the trend being away from our profession anyway focusing services on student instruction do you think that that implies a trend of bifurcation in universities where we will see a different kind of workforce developing at universities that are largely research focused versus universities that are focused more on large groups of undergraduate teaching that's the implication of that finding and I just wondered if any of the focus groups walked through that line of thought I know the question was opposed to me but I wanted to say something about that finding if Sarah or you agree because I think that finding is a little bit an artifact of the way the scenarios were intentionally written because having participated in the development of the scenarios I know that we felt that the teaching and learning issues were well of course since MOOCs and this morning's discussion they are probably not better understood but that they were handled in other places at ACRL there's a lot of work in this arena there's a lot of other conversation and that only in ARL do we focus on the future of research and research support in this way and so the scenarios were explicitly written to focus on that and yes I think they create some important thinking about where research universities are going but in reality of course there's a lot of discussion about the undergraduate education and the discussion about MOOCs this morning shows that people are pretty while teaching and learning is changing it's still pretty intense so I wouldn't want a finding to be something that was really unintentional it was an artifact kind of of the way the scenarios were intentionally written okay panelists let's address these two the setup was actually beautiful because you covered both of the pieces that I wanted to suggest the ARL scenarios are themselves an artifact they are fictions they are fictions that are created with purpose and their beautiful self-contained stories of possible realities the piece about scenarios is none of them will be true aspects of all of them could become true and they're really just points of discussion and what we did in our focus groups was just present those scenarios and have people imagine and they imagine that if any of those scenarios were true this is the point at which we would reach and then they would reflect backwards and say does that seem real to me does that resonate and I must say that this teaching has been one of the big discussion points when people discuss our findings and some people have said it's true I see it happening today on my campus I see my campus stepping away from teaching and learning and focusing on coddling the research stars because that's where the future is and that's where the money is and so it seemed very true and other people have said no it's not true on my campus I don't see this happening for 20, 30 years it's really just an opportunity for you to reflect and Carol's nodding affirmatively so I think I've answered it correctly so I'm going to stop talking right now okay so anything John you want to add okay well let's move on because I think the next part of this will actually complement some of this future thinking with the realities of what we've seen in the last year so I'm really pleased to introduce you to Tito Sierra associate director for technology at MIT and he will be presenting on staffing for the future ARL university library hiring in 2011 he recently completed the library career and development program and his research has investigated how research libraries are staffing for the future by examining their planned investment in new professional positions so Tito okay I have 20 minutes to cover a year and a half long study so I'm going to jump into it basically the study that I'm going to present the findings on in this presentation tackled two big research questions one is the question which is a theme of this forum which is how are research libraries staffing for the future it's kind of a big question and the other research question that I was trying to tackle with my study was what are the new emerging jobs in the research library profession what are the new positions that are being created within our organizations so the data source for my study was vacancy announcements specifically from ARL university libraries so I basically took the 113 ARL university libraries and looked at a time period which was the 2001 calendar year to get a full year of hiring so basically the study is a year in the life of ARL university library hiring the specific methodology again focus on 2001 so I cannot report on any sort of trends that come out of here this is really a snapshot of a single year and the focus in terms of the positions that I was looking at were full-time professional positions so that necessarily excludes contract positions term positions support staff, civil servants, students etc I also excluded medical and law libraries as part of this analysis so the method that I used to collect the data was to actually manually harvest from university websites and library websites the job descriptions that you all post for positions in your organizations and I basically did this quarterly so at the end of March I went through all 113 pull down the jobs from your site and I did that again in June September and then December and this is the summary of the data that was collected so it doesn't have the ground truth in terms of all the positions that you all posted but it has a pretty good sampling and you can see through Q1 through Q4 there was a fair amount of job postings that were advertised during this period and evidence of there not really being a seasonal kind of pattern to how ARL hires happen in terms of the percentage of libraries that had jobs in my data sample it fluctuated between 55 and 65 percent if you look at the year as a whole I found and de-duping the positions that straddled multiple quarters because some of you have trouble filling your positions I found 444 unique job descriptions so a lot of what I'm going to report on are those is that particular sample and so 82.3 a little bit over 80 percent of the ARLs that I studied had at least one job in the sample I should note anecdotally or the data suggests that the 20 there were 20 that had no jobs in my sample were all were all public universities so the I also collected some supplemental data and some of you may have received an email in the last month asking you to help fill out some additional information about the jobs that I found on your site is there anybody in here that actually filled out my questionnaire okay thank you I'm very happy to report that I got a data for 96.6 percent of the jobs so the 444 I got a follow-up data on 429 of those and so the rest of the presentation will summarize the findings from those 429 so thank you very much for participating in this the specific follow-on questionnaire for those who didn't actually do it was a single question to ask the library administrators to assign a category to each job that I found on their website and specifically there was a basically a set of categories that describe the level of newness of that position to the organization so at one end of the spectrum you can have jobs that are a refill for the organization and on the opposite end of the spectrum there's a completely new position so now I'll summarize the analysis so I'm going to present the analysis according to two dimensions one is the type of job responsibility so here I'm talking about one could call it a level for example senior leadership versus a department head level position and then the differentiation between functional specialist and subject specialist subject specialist being positions of services for a specific designated subject area and these category assigns were assigned by myself the other dimension is the thing that I just mentioned in terms of the follow-up questionnaire was determining the level of newness the job role newness to the organization and there I had three main categories which is the role was an existing role so the position was refilling a role that previously existed or the position description is similar to a previously existing role but had been significantly redefined so the specific terminology in the questionnaire I used was the position is similar to a previously vacated position but the position description has been significantly redefined and finally the new role so this is a position that's new to the organization and I also had another category in case my particular categories weren't perfect so here's the meat of the data here so as you can see on the bottom right the total number of jobs that were classified was 429 and then you see the distribution across the two dimensions so on the columns you see the level of newness the existing roles being the first column and then new being the third column and then you can also see it based on the type of job responsibility so I'll point out a couple of interesting things first is you can see the distribution here in terms of existing redefined and new actually if you add up the redefined and new it's actually over 50% of existing so in terms of the ARL hiring we're not just mostly refilling existing positions there are opportunities are being taken to redefine positions and also create new ones in fact I thought the number of newly created positions was actually quite high the other thing you'll see is when you look at it framed against the particular level of job responsibility you also see some interesting patterns in terms of the new subject specialists nine positions of the 429 were subject specialist positions that were new to the organization when you look at functional specialists it's 87 so the distribution of the newly created positions is disproportionately centered towards functional specialist positions as opposed to subject specialist positions so this is the same data this is the 429 jobs except represented visually and this is using 100% scale so you can see the relative differences across the different categories so again if you look here you'll see that the blue are those are existing roles so those are mostly refills of vacated positions the red are redefined roles and then the green are the newly created roles so these are roles that don't exist in the organization and the functional specialists have the greatest in terms of the share functional specialists have a greater share of new positions than any other category whereas they're much rarer among the subject specialists for example the other thing that I did to try to make some sense of the data set was to actually try to visualize the job titles to give you a sense of what these positions are and I should mention that outside of the room is a handout is a two page handout which I encourage you to pick up which summarizes the data includes these word clouds and the data tables if you're interested in looking at more of the details so this is existing roles I took the job titles put them in a word cloud extract removed commonly occurring words and you can see the sort of keywords one would expect to see in a research library research collection sciences business coming up as the dominant keywords now if we compare that to redefined roles I took the set of redefined roles did the same thing you see the prominence of the word digital start to show up you also see cataloging actually emerges as a keyword that becomes more common in these redefined roles as well technology the word curator also appearing in the redefined roles and finally this is the the tagpot for the new roles so you can see the word digital is extremely prominent in the size is the indication of the frequency of the word but you also see other keywords emerge here like data and technology management so I encourage you to look at the handout so you can compare and contrast these in more detail so to summarize the findings from this research study over 80% of the ARL's had at least one job in the data sample so one of the things that was a concern at the very start of this project when I was thinking about doing it I got some feedback that suggested this might not be a good research study because I might not find any jobs so this was in 2010 this is at the economic crisis and so I was going to do this research study for 2011 and things were looking kind of gloomy at that point but there is still hiring or there was hiring that happened in 2011 I think it's quite interesting to see that over half of the jobs that were in this data sample were either newly created positions or significantly redefined roles I think that's actually promising it's suggesting that we're making an effort to really rethink the positions in our profession two-thirds of the functional specialist positions were created or redefined roles the handout that I have outside actually shows nearly all of the new functional specialist job titles so you can actually go through that list and look at what these jobs are and you'll know it's in alphabetical order because I'm a librarian and you'll see that when you get to these you'll see digital, digital, digital, digital just repeats so I encourage you to take a look at those less than a third were refills of existing positions there seems to be some differences in terms of how functional specialists and functional specialists are distributed in terms of level of newness although of the entire set and I'll go back to the to this visualization you'll actually see that they have the greatest share of within their particular category of redefined roles so there's not a lot of new positions being created in that area but there are a lot of redefined positions and about half of the newly functional specialist positions which is the largest category of new positions have a strong digital or technology focus and you can look through those job titles and it becomes pretty apparent and that's intuitive one would expect that that's actually happening however research libraries continue to create plenty of new positions in what might call traditional libraries such as special collections administration and public services so even in the category of newly created positions there are a lot of special collections jobs, administration jobs and other jobs that are being created it's not just digital it's not just data curation it's not just data management eScience so on and so forth so that's the end of my talk and I want to point out the fact that the data set which is the 605 job descriptions that I found as part of the study is available for downloading at that link so if you want to run some do some research on those job descriptions you're welcome to do that the data is there, have at it and I thank you for your time thank you so a couple of things before I open it up for questions and observations comments is that I think Tito's kind of perspectives here and as we look at new positions being defined I think it's interesting to look at that emphasis on digital, the emphasis on data curation that sort of thing and Tito was kind enough to provide me with a copy of his survey so I put it in and I looked at what were the job qualifications that I was seeing I used digital data and e-science as just the terms under only the qualifications not the titles of the positions and of the positions with those I think it was 68 in number, 55% of them mentioned the MLS or the MLIS as something that might be desirable or required only three of them had positions posted listing digital curation skill sets as critical in the qualifications and as we look at our e-science work moving into e-research the differences between the requirements associated with e-science which were much more focused on technical knowledge and the archiving of digital data and repositories and ontologies versus what the digital humanities folks were being requested to have which was research methods and processes and trends and scholarly communication and digitization you know we need to continue to respect the differences in those disciplines but also start to understand where is some of that common knowledge that we're going to need to build across all of it I think it also raises questions what are the appropriate levels of skills that we need to bring in and a lack of definition around what exactly we're looking for I also asked Tito about how many positions was the median per institution last year that had been posted and I believe you said there was 1.9 it's actually so the most common number of job postings within the 90 that actually had at least one job was one job followed by two there were a small number I think it was about 10 that had more than 10 so it tends to follow I think the highest the era that had the most job postings I'm not going to mention who it is but I think it was about maybe 16, 15 or 16 but most were one or two jobs and there were 20 that had none in the sample and it's possible that I missed it or when I went to the quarterly sampling I didn't capture it but it so happens that all of those were public universities and when we were talking earlier you pointed out that doing the correlation against the investment index would also provide additional information around that because if we're counting on a future in which we need all these new skills it's going to take us a while in terms of employing new folks so I think a lot of our work really needs to focus on the necessary change that has to occur through redeploying our current staff and I think there are some issues there overcoming staff resistance to the change I would put as way high on the list I don't know if many of you took a look at the significant skill gaps in supporting evolving researchers information needs that came out of the research libraries UK they identified a range of skill sets that the subject specialist self identified as lacking and there were such things as the ability to advise on preserving research outputs data management complying with mandates of funders you know all the usual good things that we would expect to see them wanting to have what was more interesting about it was they were asked is this essential now versus two to five years from now the highest one which got essential now was knowledge on data management and curation 10% said it was essential now to have and 48% said it was essential in two to five years I think there's a little bit of man I don't want this to be on my watch but it will be on our watch we've got to deal with with it and a really key issue is what are we going to give up I don't know about staff at your institution but I think it is pretty true that it's easy to think of new things we need to do and much harder to think of the things we can shed which we have prided ourselves on for the longest time and so that staff actually end up being over stressed because they would rather do more new things than give up doing some of the old things it's a really difficult thing to do so we're obviously not only going to have to retool but we're also going to have to provide the incentives and the carrots and the sticks in terms of those kinds of change and I think the issues around those rewards and those flexibilities in time and place that the first group talked about the sort of virtual folks I think is going to be important but we also need to look at how we change our organizational structures to reflect that we're either going to be banged or we're going to figure it out ourselves if any of you who joined Cornell and having Bane come and tell you about your spans and layers don't go there I had someone remarked the other day that where we see org charts they see red tape and so we spend a lot of time in sort of developing these elegant kinds of charts and then finally I think new measures new expectations for successful performance and at yesterday's TRL meeting there was a really robust discussion about what is the new librarian what is the new information professional do we redefine what a librarian is do we follow everybody into that bucket or do we start to define additional buckets for professionals who work in these challenging new ways so with that I would like to open the floor for questions, observations Nancy Elkington, OCLC Research Tito I'm curious in your follow up questions back to the ARL directors or their delegates did you get a sense of fill rates for these positions I didn't no I wanted to get the response rate as high as possible so I wanted to ask a single question for each job and my focus in this particular study was I try to identify what are the new positions being created in the profession so I didn't use that opportunity to ask about refill rates although I did get somebody to comment on the fact that some of the positions they had posted weren't filled because they had gone through a reorganization and had then reshifted those positions into new positions so this is kind of a fluid environment that we're in I did see several of the positions span multiple quarters that was not uncommon Hello Susan Flis from Harvard College I have a question for all of you building on your questions before Carolyn and Sarah so Tito in the descriptions of the the word descriptions of the jobs in the existing jobs I was looking for teaching and learning and I saw the word instruction and then in the the wording for the new jobs I saw learning and that's a shift from how we thought of those jobs say 15 years ago to now and I'm wondering if while we talk about whether teaching and learning will be important if it's become so part of what many of the librarian positions do now public services, research services curators, special collections librarians that it's not having that prominence in the titles or in actually how the jobs are being written up I mean we may have we used to have coordinators of education has that gone away because we have so many people that we now expect to do that teaching and outreach and that would be a question for all of you to answer thank you I would observe that I think some of the language that's used to describe certain functions has evolved over time so in positions for example the prominence of the word metadata in what are based on the review of the description or cataloging positions is interesting so sometimes we're calling things in different words for very similar roles in terms of I wouldn't from the tag clouds infer any sort of less importance to certain kinds of functions like reference or instruction this was a snapshot of a single year so I can't provide any sort of trend analysis although that would be interesting to do but you can certainly go through the job database and look at jobs and do keyword searches for instruction and reference to see how those positions are described it's not a huge sample so it's actually fairly manageable to go through the tag clouds I wouldn't read too much into it the point of it was to give you a gist of what's emerging within those clusters of categories of existing positions versus new positions I could just add that I think many of us could attest to the fact that when you're thinking about a new position and an inordinate amount of time talking about what you'll call that person and people are nodding sometimes it's more than you spend talking about what that individual will do and the name becomes a trigger or a flag to the world and sometimes we hesitate to give a new position an old sounding name and so some of us may be shying away from using a very traditional job title like instruction even though it remains a core role within an individual's set of duties for that reason it changes things up a bit it would be interesting to study or to look at why one would use instruction versus teaching or learning something going forward if you continue thank you Linda Plunkett from Boston University we often teach our graduate students the power of qualitative and quantitative research and I think this panel is exemplary in that it's just so powerful it's a huge takeaway for us, thank you we were going to start our presentation by saying that there would be no numbers involved my mantra was look what's the look at the money look at where the money is being spent follow the money, follow the money that was my mantra to try to understand where the investment in the future was going was to look at where organizations were actually committing positions for full time permanent positions because that is a really large long-term organizational commitment to hire a permanent professional staff person so as follow the money was my mantra Carol this isn't exactly a question it's probably too hard to go back to the slide but the first team kind of ended with Shimo having a slide about questions for us and wanting about ways forward and of course I've managed not to keep those in my head and I wonder not to see if people have other stuff they want to talk about that's fine but when I saw not lines at the microphone I wondered if you guys wanted to stimulate some of those questions that you had and when that would be great if people were willing to have that conversation with us our group is very interested in delivering something to the research library community that is helpful and we want to find a way of packaging our very humble research results into something that can be of assistance in the local library but we're not sure where to take it from here I can say that I've done a similar type of experience with my own staff back at McMaster and the staff involved my secretary and people librarians and professional managers a small group but we went through the scenarios and they arrived at actually some of the same results that the ARL directors did and they were very happy to hear that afterwards but it's a question of how do you how do you package that kind of information and make it helpful so if anyone in the audience has a suggestion to us for how we can share our results we would be most happy to receive them either now or later Gary? Gary Strong from the UCLA library and I won't answer that last question you just posed. I have an observation to make and that is that a statement was made during one of our meetings somewhere during this conference that if you look at the longevity of ARL directors that there's this large new cohort that have come on the deck in the last five years and I would suggest that one thing that might be useful is to separate those folks out into a room by themselves away from the rest of us and ask them where they would like to take research libraries with their leadership over the next five years and I would suspect that some of what you would find and dump all this on their heads and I would suspect that you would find some incredibly interesting information out of that exercise. Yeah, great. So I was interested in your point about, oh I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I'm Lorraine Herrick from the University of Kansas and I was interested in TETAS analysis perhaps you haven't done this but you mentioned long time permanent investments of these new positions. Was it clear to you in those advertisements whether they were faculty positions, librarians as faculty positions or did you notice any sway away from that perhaps I'm not sure if you analyzed that but I'd be interesting to. I didn't analyze that but there's actually a lot of additional analysis that could be done on that data set by looking at things like whether or not an MLS is required whether or not it's tenure track any number of analyses that could be done on that data set my focus was really looking at the new professions the new positions that are being created but I welcome other folks to go through that data set and extract that. I have the full descriptions so they can be mined for that sort of information. So I was thinking about the the recommendations that you all came out with their findings that there will be more deep subject expertise in the future and fewer generalists yet Tito when you were looking at the new positions they weren't so much in the subject expertise area but rather in the functional either of you care to comment any of you care to comment on that. I think we might have been speaking in shorthand to be honest I think the key finding was away from the general and towards deeper knowledge not necessarily the subject it could be a functional expertise. Yeah and my analysis in differentiating functional specialist and subject specialist was really subject specialist would be a position that specifically required an advanced degree in a particular subject or had a specific subject named in the title but if you look at the list of functional specialist positions that are newly created positions they're highly specialized positions so in a sense I don't think there's a conflict there there's just a debate on whether or not there's hiring for a specific subject discipline. I can certainly Rick. Rick Lewis University of Oklahoma none of you touch directly or even really indirectly on the question of organizational culture. So if you take any of these individuals newly defined and described and whatever and in ones and twos and threes and literally plunk them down into existing organizational culture it's unlikely in my view it's unlikely they'll thrive so just wonder if the panel might comment how you thought about that. Cultures jump strategy every day of the week I think that's what they say it's a good point in our conversations with the RLLF fellows and with the directors and with the UCLA senior fellows the concept of culture did not actually emerge possibly because the concept of culture didn't show itself in the ARL scenario set and so it didn't jump off the page to them and we probably didn't have enough time to dig really deeply into the implications of actually rendering all of these brilliant ideas because it's not until you get to the rendering of the ideas that you hit culture and that's the obstacle for success. Rick my comments is I would hope there will be the tipping point if we very aggressively rigorously practice recruiting new and repurpose existing than the culture we're starting shifting the more new position new title new responsibility, new credential new kinds of the person and professionalism in brought into our organization I would hope someday at a tipping point we'll be rich and culture we're starting to shift I think this is fundamentally important to cultivate a new culture for the organization for the future. The only thing I would add as an afterthought the piecework culture did come up was around collaboration within the workforce and the desperate need for directors as we add new kinds of people into our workforce to create an environment within which these new professionals can succeed so the culture of collaboration and mutual respect and civility in the workplace was I think the piece that touched maybe the closest on culture in the conversations that we had. Yes Reina Bulby I'm a library consultant I wanted to say that I thought you absolutely touched on culture Vivian you made the point that from the group the quote was we need staff to transform themselves rather than waiting for us to transform them and I think that's a significant culture change in our organization if we can achieve that we can do as much with the retooling side that 50% of the side that we're doing through retooling as through new hiring so there's a culture issue too. Thanks Reina I'm Ed Van Gemmerk from Wisconsin, thank you for your work and your comments I have two observations if I could one is around the pace of turnover of positions my sense is that and I don't know if this is a regional thing or unique or whatnot but my sense is that in the areas of technology particularly we're seeing much more rapid turnover of technology in plain English, not being able to keep up with the rates of pay from private industry and in the areas the more traditional areas of librarianship very little of any turnover so kind of a problem in terms of the repurposing point that you're making so that's thought number one and the second observation is that and I saw a little bit of pushback I guess on one point in the larger research R1 institutions in some cases being a generalist can be viewed as being a specialist if that makes any sense to you it's often times the entry into our institutions and there are positions and in fact libraries where being a generalist is viewed especially at the church teaching and learning level as being a specialty thank you my reaction to the turnover is I think that to keep the organization are very aiming on the future maintain certain percentage of the turnover is not the best it give you the opportunity to address that recruiting and repurposing returning issues I would just add one thing which is in my particular research study because I focused on continuing appointment positions that necessarily excluded a whole raft of technology positions that were two-year or three-year contract positions that were fairly common so the numbers that I presented in terms of new positions functional specialist positions that are technology or digital oriented is probably lower than the reality if you were to include term positions did you want to say I just want to go back to Rick's point about culture it's a really good question and one of the things that's really powerful about these scenarios is they allow for these new ideas to come into conversation with your staff and that's really where I think if we have more structure around these kind of conversations it's going to allow for that culture to change that's a good question and we have time for you too Great, thank you Kathleen DeLong Universe Developer Libraries just a comment on that other professionals classification that we've talked a lot about this afternoon whenever there's a discussion of that I'm always a little bit bemused just because in my case I also have a Master's in Public Management which I took after my MLIS degree and so sometimes when there's this discussion of other professionals I want to show I'm feral too because if we're talking about other professionals and valuing them for the perspectives that they bring to an organization I think that there's a lot to be said for the MLIS holders who went out and took that initiative to become an other as well and yet it doesn't ever seem to be part of the discussion I think it's a very important part of the discussion but it's interesting because once you have an MLIS it's like you cross the Rubicon and that's your defining identity Pam I just wanted to say a quick word about culture because one of the things that I've noticed is it doesn't have to be one big monolithic thing that we do I think that we can do small things I notice myself a major culture change in my own organization that occurred when we had a wiki that staff used it's called Agora and they started to use it for everything they started to use it as a sort of internal Facebook they're using it as a way to set up services, they're teaching each other and they're learning from each other on it they're even interacting with their clients on it in some cases and actually it's not something that we did in fact we almost had to get out of the way I don't take any responsibility other than authorizing to pay for it for this sort of change and I had no idea at the time that it was going to be such a deep cultural change in the organization because they don't have to go to somebody and get something put on the web and translated and they don't have to go through all the formal procedures it's out in 3 minutes and away it goes so I think there's lots of more things that we can probably do including getting out of the way occasionally to support staff to have that sense of empowerment and professionalism that is not dependent on anyone else and that allows them to actually speak directly to each other I want to thank John and Vivian and Shimo and Tito for what I think is really just some food for thought and I think we'll have more interesting analysis around what our future staffing patterns look like, how we recruit, retain reward those who are coming into our professions and those who are here and get a new renaissance around what it is to be a library professional so we've come to the close of the session at 15 minutes in the state room there will be a reception so you have 15 minutes to check email but before you do so, please join me in thanking our panelists Thank you for listening Music was provided by Josh Woodward For more talks from this meeting please visit