April 6, 2007
New Models for Liaison Librarians - Part One
Who is the liaison librarian to the Office of Greek Affairs?
Most of us know what a liaison librarian is - a librarian, often a subject specialist, with formal responsibility for facilitating communication between the library and a given academic department or departments, and for providing a full spectrum of library services to the faculty, staff, and students in the liaison department(s) (more on that "full spectrum" in Part Two). Don't believe me? See the Online Dictionary of Library & Information Science:
http://lu.com/odlis/odlis_l.cfm
Today, we are in the early days of a new model for liaison librarians and liaison programs - one defined not only by service to academic departments and programs, but inclusive of co-curricular and extra-curricular programs. Why? Because co-curricular and extra-curricular programs have been focusing for the past 15 years on refining and highlighting the contribution that they make to the academic experience. And, if these are educational programs, it follows that they can benefit from working with the library. Not just once, and not just by chance, but in the same substantive, sustained, and ongoing way in which we work with academic departments.
Of course, few of these programs have "book budgets" or collections needs (although some do); thus, the focus of the liaison relationship is primarily on service, especially information and instructional services. What is the "subject specialty" of these new library liaisons? It depends on the liaison program, of course, but often the subject exertise lies in the librarian's knowledge of the educational content of the co-curricular program and of the research underpinning its work.
The liaison librarian at the University of Massachussetts assigned to Residence Hall Education programs, for example (http://www.library.umass.edu/reference/liaisons.html#centers), should be familiar with the student affairs research underpinning residence hall education programs [e.g., Realizing the Educational Potential of Residence Halls, 1994 (currently circulating)].
UMASS demonstrates one model for expanding our vision of the liaison librarian's work, i.e., assignment of liaison responsibilities for student affairs programs that complement a traditional set of academic liaison assignments. This was also the approach we took at Kansas (http://www.lib.ku.edu/instruction/partners/). Want to see how this could look at UIUC? I'd recommend Yoo-Seong Song's forthcoming article in Research Strategies (already available "in press" from ScienceDirect) on how his liaison work with the Business Career Services Office complements his traditional liaison work as a faculty member in BEL.
Another approach is to create new positions that focus on this new facet of liaison work. Oregon State has moved in this direction with the creation of an "Undergraduate Services Librarian" charged with the development of programmatic relations with student affairs programs. We are in the mix here, too, with the creation of the position of Outreach Librarian for Multicultural Services.
The role and scope of the liaison librarian's work is changing, both in the range of professional responsibilities and in terms of the programs with which we must commit to build programmatic and sustainable relationships if we are to serve the full range of educational programs on our campus. Yoo-Seong and Emily (and, yes, there are others, but this post is already too long) provide examples of significant progress we've made down this road already at the University of Illinois. We have a long way that we can still go, if we choose to do so.
There are several liaison relationships already existing between librarians and co-curricular and extra-curricular programs at UIUC - some more formal than others. The Office of Services is engaged in an exploration of these relationships and looks forward to documenting them, to supporting the work of these liaison librarians, and, as at UMASS, Kansas, Oregon State, Washington State, and other institutions, to representing this valuable, professional work to our colleagues and our campus as another facet of the service we provide to the students of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Posted by swalter at April 6, 2007 5:58 PM
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