 Judy Ruttenberg, the floor is yours. Thank you and welcome to the ARL webcast on Transforming Liaison Roles in Research Libraries, based on a recently released report in the New Roles for New Times publication series. My name is Judy Ruttenberg and I serve as program director for the Transforming Research Libraries Strategic Initiative at ARL, which sponsors the report. New Roles for New Times identifies and delineates emerging roles, highlighting early experiences among ARL's member libraries and developing new roles and in the deployment of new services. Touring the websites of ARL libraries, I found that liaisons are described with fascinating variety, some as partners or consultants broadly integrated into research teaching and learning activities, and others specifically focused and skilled in areas such as knowledge management or mobile technologies. This is clearly an area in the library undergoing transformation and a reflection of new kinds of research and new pedagogies within our institutions. We are very pleased to have with us today the authors of Transforming Liaison Roles, Karen Williams, dean of libraries at the University of Arizona, and Janice Jagaszewski, director of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Minnesota, as well as three expert reactors from the ARL community, Barbara Dewey, dean of libraries and scholarly communication at Penn State University, Catherine Sainer, associate dean for research and learning services at the University of Utah, and Greg Grashke, associate director for collections and scholarly communication administration at North Carolina State University. Karen and Janice will start us off by highlighting the findings from their reports, and our panel will each have a few minutes to respond. Please type any questions you have in the chat box, and I will monitor them to pose to our presenters. After the webcast, a recording will be posted on ARL's YouTube channel. If you are following us on Twitter, we are using the hashtag liaison roles. It is my great pleasure to turn the mic over to Karen and Janice. Thanks, Judy. This is Karen Williams, and I am going to go first. And I do want to offer one small correction to some of the publicity that I saw about this webcast on the front end. Something I read said that we did extensive interviews with institutions for this report. And I guess that's true if you think of five institutions as being extensive. This was not intended to be a really in-depth research report. The new roles series is about what's new and what's emerging. And so we did actually do structured interviews with five institutions. These were phone interviews, and they were each about an hour long or maybe a little bit longer. And then we added our knowledge of what we were doing at the University of Minnesota where I was at the time, and then drew on actually extensive conversations with colleagues. You can say that with truth, but what I can tell you is that academic librarians everywhere are grappling with these questions around new roles. I am convinced of that. And I want to take a second to say many, many thanks to the institutions who participated in the structured interviews with us. And you see them here on the screen, Duke, Guelph, MIT, North Carolina State, and Purdue. We came up with what we thought of as six trends, and there conceivably could be more trends in this, but we were trying to group things that seemed like as we go forward. So first of all, we take a look at, oops, I'm sorry, and I have actually just advanced too many slides. I'm going to try to go back one. The work of what we've traditionally been called public services librarians or reference librarians or bibliographers has been shifting for quite some time. But suddenly, like much else on higher ed, it feels like we're now moving in the fast lane. And there are days when I feel like I'm on the autobahn and I can't ever slow down. Technology has certainly played a significant role in this, changing the ways in which scholars create and disseminate their work and the ways in which they teach. Content is everywhere, and neither scholars nor students think of libraries as the be-all and end-all of the information universe. Janice and I started actually working on this a couple of years ago, and since that time, much has been written about libraries moving away from a collection-centered model to an engagement-centered model with increased emphasis on services. And in order to thrive in this new era, and I mean not just survive but actually thrive, we've all begun thinking about how we redefine our roles and what our universe is going to look like going forward. So the first of these trends that we came up with, I'm going to quote Cara Watley from NYU who made this statement when she and I ran a panel together a few years ago that we're moving away from the tripartite definition of liaison work as collection development, reference assistance, and library instruction. As we go forward, our work is increasingly less about what we as librarians do and more about what our users do. And ultimately, our goal is to make them more effective and efficient and to enhance their work from start to finish. And in order to do this, we're trying to find ways to free up liaison time to focus on new and emerging needs. So let me be very clear about one thing, because I think when we talk about collections, people sometimes think what we're saying is that collections are not important going forward, and that's not at all what we're saying. Content is still vitally important to research, teaching, and learning. But what's become different is that our scholars no longer think of themselves as being largely restricted to the content owned or licensed by their home libraries. So at Minnesota, for example, in a recent reorganization, the newly created division there is called content and collections. And here at Arizona, the collections budget has been known as the information access budget for well more than a decade. And I think these changes represent a refocusing within our organizations or a recognition of our new context going forward. So under new approaches to collection development, I'm not going to say too much. Many of us are using approval plans much more than we used to, and we are experimenting with demand-driven acquisition or patron-driven acquisition, whatever you call it at your place. And increasingly, we're taking a look at the idea of collective collections. And I'm not going to say much more about that, because I think Barbara is going to talk about that point. The service points, our clientele really should not need to understand how we're organized in order to access our services. And many of us for years have run parallel service points, one being a circulation desk, for example, and one being a reference desk, sometimes within sight of each other, but offering very different services. And students are often confused about where to go when they need help from us. So one result that we're seeing is merging of circulation and reference desks and sometimes even other service points in order to provide better service to our students and faculty. And another one is partnerships with other campus units that bring together a collection of services that students might expect to use in tandem. And I say students because I think for most of us it's true that the students are making much greater use of our physical spaces these days than what the faculty are, although some of us are bringing those services together in the virtual world as well. We're also recognizing that highly trained staff rather than librarians at service points can generally deal with something like 90% of the traffic that comes in that way. And so we supplement that with a robust referral system. We've made greater investment in online resources, things such as live guides and screencasts, and this is in response to our ability to anticipate recurrent needs and create things that will deal with them on the front end. And then last but not least, we've got liaisons available to provide the more advanced one-on-one in-depth consultations when we need them. We're addressing the scalability of instruction and recognizing that our modus operandi of invited guest lecturers really is not going to extend our reach across the curriculum, and we need to do that. If our goal is to graduate more students who are equipped for the workplace or for grad school, we've got to find new ways of integrating into the curriculum better. And then last but not least, we're seeing a trend where librarians are moving away from traditional supervisor kinds of roles, such as supervising one or two staff or running branch libraries. It's less about gaining traditional management experience and more about building relationships and to lead laterally or learning to lead from within. And this means that even those of us who don't have positional leadership are serving in leadership roles on our campuses. The second trend is this idea of a hybrid model between liaisons and functional specialists. And this is a recognition that we were increasingly asking liaisons to master an ever-extending skill set and knowledge base, sometimes beyond the point at which individuals could feel like they possessed any sort of level of expertise to be able to help people. And so one of the models we're seeing emerging is that we're supporting these liaisons with functional specialists. So the liaisons still support certain departments or colleges, and they might learn things up to a certain level, like they'll learn the basics about copyright, for example, but when they have more in-depth needs, they consult with one of these functional specialists. Some places like Guelph and like Arizona have moved away from the liaison model and are pretty much functioning in a specialist-only model. And in those two instances, that was brought about largely by budget cuts and a reduction in staff, but some people are experimenting with this in other ways as well. And then moving on to trend three, the point that I want to make with this one before I turn this over to Janice is the fact that we truly are defining, occupying, and redefining new roles sometimes simultaneously. And I think that we need to understand that the needs of students and researchers are changing quickly, and we need to be flexible and able to respond to that. And so I really encourage us not to get hung up on trying to fully define these new roles before we move into them. To highlight things, we have to be willing to do some rapid prototyping with the understanding that some of the roles may not pan out as we think they will, and then we walk away from them if they don't evolve like we thought. The majority of these services, for example, we're redefining research services, and the majority of these I think will be conducted in partnership with other campus units or even at other consortional, regional, national, international levels. The liaisons bring expertise to the table, and our campuses bring expertise as well, and we pull this together to create virtual organizations or highly coordinated partnerships on our campuses. But I will note the last thing here, that librarians often bring something else which is very important. We have a very broad campus view, and we frequently serve as a conduit between scholars, IT staff, and other campus professionals. I was recently at an ARL gathering, and I heard James Hilton from Michigan describe us as Switzerland. We've heard that before. He introduced this concept by noting that librarians often represent engaged neutrality on our campuses, and I think that's kind of a lovely way to think of ourselves as being neutral partners, perceived as non-threatening by many, but very actively engaged in what's going on on our campuses. So that was my short summary up through trend three, and now I'm going to turn this over to Dennis. Thank you, Karen. So our fourth trend that we've observed as we talk with our colleagues is that no liaison is an island, and what we meant by this is that really libraries must support and reinforce our liaison roles with many other things, and that includes renovated and repurposed spaces. As we were talking to people, certainly libraries have had learning comments for quite some time, but we also had conversations around research comments, supporting the idea of liaisons being very much involved in the research process. We also had conversations around the idea of an informatics comment. Certainly, as Karen has just been discussing, we have colleagues with specialized expertise who support our liaisons, and that may be other types of librarians, it may be IT staff, a wide range of people, metadata strategists, a variety of people that we work with, the liaisons work with. Certainly, there needs to be a strong institutional capacity for technological support that technology is really changing everything that we're doing from e-learning to supporting e-science. Some other examples in the conversations we had were at NCSU, they have a brand new library, and they have data visualization facilities. They have a game lab for computer science, design and humanities, some very interesting things that are being done elsewhere. And trend five, as Karen was just mentioning, collaboration is key. As these new models are emerging, we are not doing anything on our own, and certainly, we're looking for partnerships at every level, so that happens within the library, between library staff, again, no liaison is an island, among library divisions, across campus units, and of course, among institutions. So many of our initiatives require incredible resources. I think when we talk about collaboration, what we heard was that it was very important to have clear roles and responsibilities. I know here at University of Minnesota, we've been talking about areas in which the libraries have primacy. Where do we have primacy? Certainly around content and digital content and how that is integrated into e-learning, how it supports research. Also, we're recognized for our copyright role here on campus. And as we had conversations with our peers, those areas emerged as well. Then we talked about areas in which we might have partnerships, and again, defining roles. And then we're areas where we may not have a stronger role as we originally thought we might have. So it's been interesting to observe the conversations around e-science. And one of the people we talked with in our interview said, a library-centric approach to e-science is doomed to fail. That we really need to recognize and carve out what's our area within the libraries? What's the IT area? What's the role for the university's office of research and any other units? And we all have to be working toward mutual goals. Certainly, we need to know what our colleagues and other units are doing so that we can implement a strong referral system in this collaborative environment. And as I already mentioned, increasingly interdependent with other units on campus. And our, whoops, I skipped, I skipped somehow way too far. Sorry about that. I don't know what just happened. And six, that is our final trend, that really we need to create, and libraries need to create and sustain a flexible workforce. And among all of the people that we interviewed, the same ideas came up, that we need a combination of expertise, that may be subject expertise, that may be technological expertise, but we also need to combine that with soft skills. And so there was quite a discussion around the capacity to cultivate trusted relationships. We need liaisons who can engage and thrive in the messy and ambiguous. Karen said we're defining our roles and redefining them as people, as people are actually trying to carry them out. We need liaisons who possess systems thinking, who can really see the big picture and see where all the parts fit together and how they need to work and collaborate with others. We cannot, we talk about research and learning as if they're two different things, but there are so many connections, and they feed into one another, that we need liaisons who see those connections. And of course, they need to be politically savvy. They need to be able to solve problems, resolve conflicts, and have strong leadership skills. It was very interesting to talk to those that we were interviewed around different programs that they've developed to try things out and to give new people opportunities to develop expertise. So at NCSU they have a library fellows program, which is a two-year appointment to develop expertise. And they have four to six fellows at a time. And Purdue had something similar with a two-year visiting assistant professor program. So they're trying short-term hires to test new services and try new projects. Certainly professional development is something that ARL libraries are investing in and helping our staff develop new skills. So in summary, really the emphasis is on campus engagement. That liaisons need to be outwardly focused. They're playing two new roles. One is advocate. They're really our sales force. They're going out and talking about library services, helping our students and our faculty see the library in new ways and understand what it is we have to offer and how we can be partners. And they're also consultants. They're going out and identifying those opportunities and needs and identifying potential ways to solve people's problems. And often then they team up with a specialist to find those solutions. I just wanted to highlight, we have a video associated with this report and it features Jonathan Coffle, who is a liaison here at the University of Minnesota in the Health Sciences Libraries. And I encourage people to watch this video. Jonathan is just an exceptional liaison and engages with his user community in the medical school here in just terrific ways. He's involved in morning report and rounds, helping people find the evidence that they need at the moment they need it. He's also involved in some very interesting projects. One is an interdisciplinary project that involves enhancing radiology reports with key articles and information. That physicians may need at the time that they're reviewing those reports. So anyway, I encourage that. And it's available on YouTube and there is the URL. So thank you very much. Thank you, Janice and Karen, Barbara Dewey. Then Mike is yours. Thank you very much. I'm trying to figure out how to get to my slide. Please bear with me. Okay, there we go. Well, I'm pleased to be here. Hello, everyone, wherever you are. New roles for new times really has broken new ground for broadening the discussion around liaison roles. And I applaud Janice and Karen for weaving in partnerships, collaborations, and multi-institutional approaches. 21st century research libraries need the knowledge and skill sets for many different kinds of professionals in order to provide the array of services essential for student and faculty success. And I would like to add a couple of areas to the discussion. And this is kind of illustrated in my version of the reports titled, New Roles for New Times in a New World. That's three news in one title. So I really believe we need new roles for what I call filling holes. And what does this mean? In part, we must broaden our concept and definition of collections and services for a more comprehensive and diverse knowledge base. A recent presentation at Penn State by Chris Borg from Stanford University confirmed my view that research libraries, even the largest, are shockingly lacking in depth while asserting to represent the world's knowledge. This is because of the way we choose and build our collections. Karen alluded to this. Books and journals from many parts of the world are not collected, are not part of the ILL world, are not digitized, and are not embedded or are part of the quote-unquote Western scholarly record. And that's just published books and journals. Likewise, scholarship coming from diverse voices is not always collected and therefore is slow to become part of the canon and available to researchers. Societal issues related to power, discrimination, and disenfranchisement stem in part from the distortion in the historical record upon which knowledge is created. I believe librarians are starting to address the lack of quote-unquote collecting or servicing in some way artifacts, oral histories, objects, or anything else containing knowledge. For example, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party was conceived as a way to expose famous women throughout history using techniques that were traditionally not considered true art and certainly not knowledge, such as ceramics, painting, and needlework. This alternative way of knowing about women's culture through the ages also needs to be preserved and curated. Judy Chicago found a way, a schema, and a mapping strategy with The Dinner Party to present knowledge and ethos in a new way. Many cultures from countries throughout the world use artifacts and other means to preserve and pass along important content about their history. Do our librarians individually or in partnership have the knowledge and skills to broaden the interpretation of the world's knowledge? The new world requires us to fill in the holes created by a bias western-based research library through innovative services, partnerships, content, and approaches. And the other area that I just wanted to mention, and it was alluded to in the paper and in the previous presentation, librarians must also take on new roles to support the realities of higher education administration. Our colleagues in administration must lead incredibly complex organizations, and I don't believe research libraries support their information needs as much as we could. Our liaison librarian structure is typically aimed towards the academic discipline or possibly the academic support unit or research center. We don't consider the hands that literally feed us and make critical decisions for the university as well as the library. Examples of information-intensive areas include accountability, accreditation, marketing, recruiting, space planning, advocacy, and legislative relations. Librarians or the appropriate library staff need to place a razor-sharp focus on this group of seriously important individuals and units, and I've listed a few on this slide, but it's not comprehensive. Other key people include the general counsel, the human resources director, the risk management director, and the campus chief of police. And the list goes on and on, but I truly believe that if we provide direct support to these folks, we can improve their performance, the university's performance, and also benefit the library because they will know us and know more about us. So I urge everyone to go to them, set up relationships, and provide support. And so in summary, I see four traits needed for new roles for new times in a new world. Now and in the future, and these include proactive, creative, self-directed, and willing to partner. And as Janice and Karen correctly point out, leadership needs to happen at every level and is essential to the successful embrace of our new roles. So I'm going to end here just for fun. I want to show you three slides from my Penn State colleagues in the Smeel College of Business. They support the Smeel College of Business and also the Honors College. And this one I thought was really neat, librarians on location, the librarians are going over to the Honors College and they're available for consultation and they do a lot of other things while they're over there. Now in the Smeel College of Business, they decided not to use the word librarian because it didn't really resonate with the business students. So here we're talking to a research consultant and this is a very large business school. It's probably one of the largest in the country so they are very, very busy working with faculty and students over there. And then the last example is also the Smeel College of Business. These are just different ways we can present ourselves to make people excited and common and work with us and we can assist them. And so I'm very happy to provide a couple of more in-depth comments on the paper and on this whole area. And thank you very much. Thank you. We will now hear from Catherine Sainer. Hi, I'm getting my slide up. There we go. Thank you Judy. So this report really is a very excellent description of where libraries are going and where they really should be going. And from my part of this reaction I pulled three quotes from the report that struck me as speaking to my experience and I wanted to speak to specifically today. And here's the first one. Engagement requires an outward focus. And in order for us to really understand how our faculty and students work we must talk to them. We must watch how they use our buildings. We must be interested in what they are doing and how they are doing it. And once we understand how they work and what they need, we can begin to create services that meet those needs. Rather than designing buildings for the needs of librarians. Here's the second quote. And in bringing this particular quote to life at the University of Utah we began with paying attention to the stated goals of the university. And a few years ago the president at the U declared innovation and commercialization as major focus for the university. And within a short time a whole number of new courses, programs and contests began to emerge as innovation scholars and improving the patient experience and bunch to bedside. And these courses required students to find information about market shares, marketing patents, medicine, biology, chemistry and engineering to name just a few. And one person was really, one liaison couldn't cover all of that. And so as a result we created this innovation team. And this team was made up of librarians from the main campus library, the National Sciences Library. And we meet with each student group as they get started. We communicate with them throughout their project. And we provide these, we can help brochures and flash drives so that the students can find who and what they need when they need it. And this is a pretty good example of a concierge type service and our attempts to sell and market these services. And I agree with Janice that this is a very good example of a concierge type service that's available in sales. And our ability to sell and market the services we have to offer is really imperative to their use. Which leads me to the next quote. And this one I broke into two. And so let's talk about this first section. Administrators are wise to understand and respond to the natural range of emotions that accompany significant change. And the new directions offered by this report hinge on the desire and the capability of administrators to lead librarians and staff to this outward focus. In order to bring about this type of outwardly focused action, we need to reskill the administration and leadership of our libraries. Those of us who are responsible for reorganizations creating significant change. Asking librarians and staff to go outside of their comfort zone. Asking people to start doing things they don't want to do. Things that their careers were originally built on. And we need to be skilled in having those difficult conversations so that we can bring about an outward focus and hold people accountable. The art of an effective difficult conversation and holding people accountable needs to be taught over and over again to those of us in charge. And without holding people accountable, change really doesn't happen for those who are unmotivated to make the change. For those who are willing to make the changes, include at the very least a sense of loss and potentially a sense of not knowing how to go about the new role. And I'm really lucky here at the University of Utah to have as part of our administrative group a person who is responsible for assisting with an organizational change, training and facilitation. And I often work with her to introduce change, set up trainings and facilitate group responses to change. And often there are human resources people on campus and sometimes in our libraries to provide those kinds of services to us. But asking for change isn't enough. And here's the second part of this. Administrators are wise to foster the right structures and support and develop liaison skills to affect partnership with faculty across the institution. And in every supervisory position I've held, I've needed to make outreach and connection with faculty a requirement for library positions with actual numbers as targets for each semester, along with cheat sheets for discussion topics, to take to forge a relationship, examples of emails requesting meetings. And that's, in terms of support, that's at least one example of providing that kind of support for folks. And we need to remain sensitive to people's reactions and firm about the direction we are going. So I might suggest that the next new roles for new times be directed to retooling our leadership and administration and libraries. And in conclusion, I'll have this one more slide here, and in conclusion, I think the report in front of us is really an excellent guide to the way liaison roles will evolve if librarians are outwardly focused. If they're connecting with university faculty and students, meeting them where they are and paying attention to how they do their work. I want to thank the writers of this report and congratulate them on a document that we will be discussing and using at the University of Utah for some time. Thank you, Catherine. I'm pulling up your slide, and the mic is yours. Okay, great. Thanks, everybody, and those are great reactions. Yeah, the report, I think, sets an excellent stage for a lot of the conversations that we all want to have and a lot of the work that we all want to do. I kind of like Catherine's suggestion about the next new roles for new times about retraining administrations. That would probably be helpful for many of us in terms of approaching some of these changes. I know that seizing our role, and that's actually a phrase I stole from my boss or borrowed from my boss with her permission, but in terms of intentionally sort of being proactive about this, right? We have to react a lot to the campus community and their needs, but we can be really proactive, I think, in terms of taking on these new roles. And seizing is a much better term than reacting or responding. We do that, that's the nature of our work, but I think being proactive and being somewhat dynamic about carving out value-added roles for libraries is the way we want to think about this and approach this. The strategic context is, I think, pretty obvious to us all. The report had a welcome emphasis on working across the life cycle of scholars and faculty, and a lot of people have been talking about this. Minnesota's been talking about being in the flow, for a long time, and other libraries have been approaching this. And in many ways, libraries have been experimenting in working across the life cycle with specialists for a lot of years, right? Geographic information systems specialists, a lot of us have copyright experts, either brought in or trained. We have emerging research data programs, right? So picking up on a specialist and having them work at different points in the life cycle of scholarship and specialty is not anything new. Instructional technology is another example, but a sort of coordinated, holistic, organizational approach to having liaisons and subject specialists do this is a relatively new point of emphasis. It's a big shift, and in many ways, I think that's much more difficult. Hiring a specialist and incubating a new service area or a new program at a different point is a challenge, and it definitely takes strategic risk, but you're talking about one, maybe two experts and one or maybe two points in the research continuum. And now we're trying to move to large, very important parts of our organization. We're trying to move them to work across the spectrum of faculty members' work and adapt that work, which Catherine and the others have hinted at. I talked about a lot. And that's a large organizational shift. It's not easy to pull off. There's going to be friction at many points. You've got administrators that need to adapt skills. You've got subject specialists and liaisons that need new skills. You've got department heads that need to embrace some of this. So that's quite a challenge. I like the emphasis in the report on the hybrid model between liaisons and functional specialists because I think that's realistically what needs to happen. We'll likely end up looking to some functional specialists or librarians with the skills to be functional specialists and thinking about them as liaisons. So I think part of this process is not just thinking about looking at our liaisons and looking at them working in new models and increasing their skill set, but also looking at new sources for liaisons, new ways of recruiting and identifying subject specialists who can bring different skill sets and different approaches that can enrich everybody's work as liaisons. I also obviously like the emphasis on soft skills and political savvy because that's a critical set that we often, I think, underestimate. And hopefully liaisons have this, right? It takes political skills and savvy to navigate journal collections and what you can have and what you can't. Navigate service issues, all those kind of things. But I think we're going to need an extensive set of those types of soft skills to bring to bear in pursuing new partnerships and working with faculty. We're navigating new waters. We've got partnerships at levels that we've never approached. We've got a depth of partnership. We've got new types of partnership. We've got to make selections and choices about where in the scholarly faculty research life cycle to emphasize our efforts, how to drop or de-emphasize some areas that may have some value, right, to faculty, but we see greater value in other areas. So those are challenging choices that we have to make. In some ways, I mean, we've been making similar choices about collections for a long time, but I think in a lot of ways these kind of choices and selections are a little more transparent to faculty. They're inherently more external, and they're just a challenge to work across. Okay, so I think fundamentally when I think about this, for me, again, it's making it happen. In any ways, we know a lot of the steps we might like to take. We know some of the strategic areas that we want to experiment in and test. The hard part is how to get there. How do we really change ourselves in our organizations? And Katherine and I were in a fellowship program together, and she was much better then at addressing these sort of big organizational, sort of somewhat emotional and thoughtful issues, and I think she's done a great job here better than I would in describing the types of investments organizations need to make in order for us to adapt. So I'm just going to add some additional thoughts to what she offered. Hiring, right, that's an obvious point of emphasis. We often, when we talk about this, we talk about retraining existing staff, but I think it's always underappreciated value of hiring and changing the skill sets that we seek in hiring liaison librarians. I think we'll want to look for more technically oriented candidates, look for the kind of technical candidates we're currently putting into Learning Commons, digital collections, sort of new user experience departments, and think about them as potentially liaison. I mean, they're also going to need the soft skills, so that's a challenge having technically oriented librarians with the soft skills and the political savvy, but I think we'll need to head in that direction in terms of some of our hiring. Training obviously has to include a breadth of opportunities, and the training has to have some teeth to it as well. Accountability is a word Catherine used, and that's a good one. We have to have internal training with some of our specialists, some of our technical specialists, data specialists, people like that, who are willing to engage librarians and can help sort of bring liaison librarians along and give them options for training and experimentation. Finding exemplars within the organization that have either made the shift to working across the life cycle in more embedded and more external ways and are embracing that shift and use them as models to try ideas is a great approach. Identifying campus opportunities for engagement and training, for example, at State, we have a new geographic information systems lab in our College of Natural Sciences, and we're going to take all our liaisons over there, not just the ones who work particularly with that college, to look at the kind of visualization work that faculty are now doing in some of those areas, and those faculty are willing to offer some training back to us. We have faculty experts on campus in areas like research data and visualization who can do some training and engagement with our liaisons that'll benefit us. Bringing in outside speakers is another idea to get ideas to foster discussion. This is the third point of this whole webcast. And then I think also just as important is mixing in some formal training opportunities, whether it's digital humanities courses, research data management, short courses. We have some subject specialists who are taking courses in statistics and visualization and offering those kind of formal training opportunities, and maybe even perhaps looking at some requirements for training are going to be important. And rewarding those that embrace these opportunities and holding people accountable who are unwilling to do is going to be important. That's important to making it stick, right? You have to have mechanisms to push forward those who are making the effort to change. And you have to offer, again, offer people the opportunities and the right kind of opportunities and a clear vision of where we want, where we all want to go. But making it stick, I think, is going to be an important piece in holding people accountable. And it's not easy for librarians, right? We're service-oriented. Not necessarily, although, you know, we've all encountered people who can be plenty computational as librarians, but inherently as a profession we're service-oriented and we need to find that balance of accountability that we can all hold ourselves to. Another sort of emphasis for me is finding models with no locked-in paradigms, right? Not being locked into sort of traditional paradigms. And using creativity, that's a word we've heard a few times, which I think is underutilized in libraries. Experimentation to accelerate sort of with agility the work of liaisons and our collective flexibility and ability to work with faculty across the lifecycle. So basically being open to experimentation and creative ideas is going to be important. Focusing on one area is another model that I think is potentially valuable, sort of take the Toyota model, right? You've got large, complex issues in large, complex bureaucratic organizations. So one approach you can take is break it down into a smaller issue. Take a single opportunity like visualization or research data or whatever makes sense, the most sense in your institutional context. Focus on that one area, have some of success, find some examples, test, experiment, and then expand out into other areas so you're not trying to bite it all off at once. And then test in one area. We've done this here at State with research data. We've done quite a bit of work in that area in testing. It can give you clarity and road maps for how to do this in other areas. Obviously, partnership is an issue that I was going to talk about, but that's been sort of well discussed, the importance of that. I think we all realize that the hard part is which partnerships who make them, right? What are liaisons empowered to do in terms of creating partnerships? What are administrators wanting to do in terms of making partnerships to try to find some clarity in the types of partnerships and the depth of partnerships? Partnerships are also critical to doing this at scale, right? That's one of the issues that I think we underestimate a little bit is working with faculty in this mode, right? Can be difficult to scale, depending on what type of area you're talking about. So if you can get into partnerships with people like research offices, information technology offices, that can be beneficial and transformative as well as helping to scale. And then fundamentally, at the end of the day, we have to add value for researchers, right? It doesn't matter if we have office hours in their space if we're not offering anything that they value, right? It doesn't matter if we're trying to work across the life cycle of their scholarship in an area that we think they should want us. If it's not adding value, if it's not doing things that are important for scholars, making them more efficient, increasing their impact, conducting better research, or helping them get more funding. If we don't do that, it's not going to stick. If we do, then we're going to be successful and these things are going to stick. So it looks like we have time for questions. Judy, I'll turn it back over to you. Thank you, Greg. And thank you to all of our presenters for a fascinating discussion. We do have some questions queued up from the audience. And I'm going to start with our authors, with Karen and Janice. And the question is, how can you set clear roles and responsibilities if the roles are going to be evolving? Karen, I'll take a quick stab at this one and then Janice can jump in for you. Sure. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why we are paying, I think, increasing attention to the importance of soft skills. And one of the things that maybe didn't get mentioned directly here, but we talk about all the time today is a certain amount of comfort with ambiguity. It is true that we want people to understand, at any moment in time, have a clear understanding of where we're headed now and what we're trying to do in order to get there, but also to make sure that people know going into it that this could change. And so that's where that comfort with ambiguity comes in and an ability to be flexible and an ability to assess what it is we're doing. And if we're discovering, as Greg just said, that it's not what people want, then we have to be able to respond to that. And Janice, do you mind? And I think, I'll speak from some of my experiences here at Minnesota. We do try to be very clear with the roles, even though they do change. And so as we hire new individuals, they may have an initial assignment, but it's clear that as Karen just mentioned, as we assess needs and we identify that something is no longer where we need to put our resources and we need to change direction that we redefine those roles. And so we're pretty careful here in defining our position description. So I'll give you an example. Several, well, no. Gosh, now it's about six years ago. I hired a liaison for physics, astronomy, and geology. And some of you may know of her. She's Lisa Johnston. And sorry, Lisa, if you're out there, and I'm mentioning you. And she was very successful in that role, but she had an increasing interest in data management. And she saw opportunities out on campus and she began establishing those sorts of, having those conversations and establishing some partnerships and working at a higher level across campus with units. And I sat down, we sat down together and I said, it sounds to me like this role needs to change. And so at that time, I was working very closely with Karen and we sat down and we really kind of redefined that role in new ways. We defined it very broadly in terms of research services and she was no longer just working for the physical sciences and engineering, which was my department at that time, but defined it so that she could work across the library system and across the campus supporting all of us. And then now, more recently, we're finding that that role has gotten to be so large. How do you define research services? It's so big. It's so all-encompassing that now we're having conversations about narrowing it back down toward her data management, data curation role that she has really been focused on. So it's been very interesting to watch how the needs have changed, how the individual brought a skill set that we could really work with and she could just really take off and do some new and amazing things. And so yes, those roles are changing. We try to, as much as possible, sit down, have those conversations and be very clear about how they're changing, talk across our library system, talk with colleagues. What does it mean then when all of a sudden a person's being redirected? There is work still to be done. How do we manage that? How do we look at our issues of capacity? So that is one example of the way we've been managing it here at Minnesota. Thank you. We have a couple of questions here that ask about, several of you mentioned, accountability and rewards. And so we have a couple of questions, specific questions asking for suggestions for how to hold liaison accountable for following through on new projects, roles and initiatives, and about rewards for librarians who are doing so. And I would open this to any of our presenters. Greg, did you want to say some things there? Sure. Partially it depends quite a bit on what kind of system you're in. So not to be overly dramatic or blunt, but if you're in something like a contract system, you can not renew people's contracts who are unwilling to adapt or who can't or decide they don't want to. I mean that's one area. Another area obviously is pay, although lots of studies will tell you pay is very important, but it sort of ends up somewhere between third and fifth on the sort of motivational elements for people. I mean I think some other opportunities that are like leadership advancement opportunities are important. In a fully tenured environment, that can be a more difficult sort of piece in terms of how you hold people accountable. You have less direct sort of characteristic motivators like salary and contract renewals and things like that, but I mean I think those things come into play. I mean the other thing I think is just in terms of the feedback that your managers you've been clear about what's expected of people and you've been clear with your managers about how you want liaisons to work and grow and you're clearly seeing people who aren't doing that, then the managers need to sort of hold them accountable. I mean there's some other smaller things like conference funding and support for ideas and projects and things that people want to do. Those are all sort of inherent reward mechanisms that you can invest in people who are... Go ahead and just add in a little bit more. I think Greg hit it right on the head there. I think holding people accountable is tricky and it does really depend upon the context in which you... So getting clear and connected with your human resources people is really important so that you're clear about what the rules are for being able to hold people accountable. What are the disciplinary actions that you take and what do those look like? That's kind of the stick end of things but in terms of the carrot end of things there's... And depending on what your library does to acknowledge the good work of the library instigating places where we can celebrate when good things happen and when we are successful. And those moments are pretty motivating for folks along with individualized, personalized thank yous. I know that sounds small but I know it's very appreciated when I take the time to really go out of my way to thank someone for the work that they've done. So that can't really be underestimated and so saying thank you is an important tool that we can use. I think that's all I have to say at this point. I'll continue to think about the question if I have something more to add I'll pop in later. This is Barbara, I think the leadership providing opportunities for leadership is a great motivator for some people because they're really seeking that and to really flesh out this notion of leadership at all levels and in this discussion today we've seen a lot of examples where people can go out onto the campus and explore different areas of need and come back with proposals and that kind of thing. So I would really encourage people to do that. This is Greg again. I forgot one thing I would mention is like seed funding trying to keep some amount as an administrator trying to keep some amount of sort of experimental seed funding for new areas available and for people who really show promise being willing to invest some of that seed money in projects I think is really critical. And this is Karen at one really quick thing. I want to really emphasize how much recognition it is usually valued by all of us frankly. And in addition to doing internal recognition within the libraries many of us are in positions where we can do that out on our campus or do that at a national level. So when I was in AUL and now that I'm in this new role at Arizona I take every opportunity I can to make sure that people get credit in a broader way for the creative work that they're doing. I have a question here for Barbara Dewey. And it is, would you please give some examples of successful liaisons to Board of Trustees, University Administrators and how these have benefited the library? One example that I would give from my previous location at Tennessee when I came there it was clear that we needed to migrate to a new library system. And so I become acquainted with a person that was in the budget office for the university and at that time she wasn't as high up as she became. But I decided to ask her to come to the demos that we were having at the library which she'd be interested. And so we involved her in that and so when it came time to seek funding for that project she was completely on board and then later she became Vice President for Budget and Finance and really helped us out. But she liked being invited to participate so it's not just going to their offices and getting to know them and finding out what they need but it's also inviting them at strategic moments to learn about different kinds of things. Another would be with deans of academic colleges. We've had some liaisons, particularly deans of nursing. They seem to be, not only do they have to do all the administrative work but they write grants and they do a lot of presentation and publication and I know of a couple of examples too where librarians have said I'm your liaison to a dean and let me know how we can help and so there's a lot of, there's a lot of benefit there and a specific one is the dean just a couple of days ago told me that she was going to reserve some space in the new building that is just in the planning stages for research consultation of all kinds that we can provide. So that's another example. Great. We've got a question here that I know we've got a lot of people out in the audience watching in groups and we have a question here about what is the suggestion for having conversations about changing roles? Do individual liaisons initiate these conversations or ideas or should this come from managers or administrators? Maybe we'll just let everyone say a word about that. Karen and Janice would you like to start? Sure, as I was mentioning with my example I think it was sort of certainly I was this person's direct supervisor and so we met on a regular basis and I think it was the individual who took the initiative to identify these opportunities and to start thinking about perhaps making that a larger part of her role and then I think it's also as a supervisor recognizing what this person brings to the institution and letting go perhaps and encouraging this kind of development and saying this person will better serve the libraries, the campus. I cannot just hold them here in my unit and I need to encourage them to participate at a broader level. So I think it can come from anywhere really and it is really a conversation and it evolves over time and as we're noting these roles just continue to change. I would pretty much second that. I think this is one of those really clear examples of where it's not an either or situation it's much more about both and and it should be coming from all directions. We want to be as open as possible as soon as possible as much as possible but I will also note that I love it when colleagues initiate these kinds of conversations and I look at that. We talk about acts of leadership in this organization and one colleague taking the time to say to a bunch of others, let's get together and bring our lunches and talk about this. That very organic approach when Greg was talking about how do we make it stick and how do people come to own it I think that's a pretty key part of it in addition to having the formal leadership talk about these things as well. Well it looks to me like we are at the end of our hour. We have more questions and I think we could engage this panel for much longer but we're going to have to wrap this up and conclude today's. Thank you so much to our authors and reactors and thank you all for joining us. Have a nice afternoon.