Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 02:27:18 -0500 (EST)
From: Birdie MacLennan <BMACLENN@uvmvm.uvm.edu>
Subject: Re: Staff in general & changing roles in serials work

Hi Kay,  Thanks for your messages and clarification.  I'm sorry i didn't
take more time to elaborate in my intial message, but I see others and
you yourself followed up nicely with additional thoughts and clarification.
(I was mostly hoping to elicit more dialogue on this important issue.)
I think the phenomena you describe is happening in a lot of places
and I didn't mean to diminish that. (I just didn't want to see support
staff take the bad rap -- "inexperienced" staff, as Naomi suggested does seem
a more appropriate term).  I agree the people needing the real education
in the human equation of dealing with serials and database integrity
are, in fact, a lot of library administrators ... however, I also see,
from our local perspective, that they are under great guns to downsize
and squeeze more out of staff at the same time that demands for services
are increasing.  I'm not sure many of us will continue to be able to have
the luxury or safe niche of our specialties or various areas of expertise
in working with "other" formats, such as serials.  Sometimes I wonder
if others have this sense too ... at various times there has been
discussion regarding the future of serials librarianship on SERIALST.
I'm not sure there have been any hard and fast answers.  Downsizing
the human equation in most areas of business does seem to be a pervasive
trend nowadays -- alas, libraries are not immune.

Here at UVM we've watched our tech services areas shrink over the years
through reorganizational downsizing, streamlining ... we've lost staff by
attrition and they've not been replaced.  We have, in fact, asked staff who
once had special areas of expertise in monographs and serials to cross-train
and learn other formats, including media, sound recordings, and computer
files.  In some instances, professionals do the training; in other
instances, staff work amongst themselves or in teams to solve problems
and work out the intricasies of a given situation.  More and more
often it seems we have fewer and fewer staff who can "do it all" in
a given area; so we draw from other areas and shift priorities according
to where the biggest need or backlog is at any given point.  Some days, we
have work "parties" to tackle a particularly accumulated backlog ... and
staff have been seen recruiting administrators to help sort fiche (as
they walk innocently by on the way to rinse out a coffee cup -- every
work area should be set up near a shared sink!)

It isn't easy ... more often than not it's painful to try to find new ways
of doing things and to train staff for procedures that might need changing
or readjusting in a few short months.  On some days all hope of long-
term planning and goal-setting seems to get thrown to the wind and
it becomes a sense of management-by-wherever-the-shelves-are-most-
full, which is probably akin to management-by-the-latest-challenge (or
crisis ?) on any given day.  Nonetheless, we are doing our best to
cope and it does help to have dedicated and highly-trained staff
(albeit fewer in numbers) to ride the wave of each transition.

In addition to making administrators aware of the importance and
intricasies of our work, it also seems to me that until public services
staff and patrons themselves (eg, faculty & researchers) notice and/or are
made aware of the issues and effects of cutting corners on serials and/or
database maintenance and begin to complain, that the pendulum won't shift
back toward our areas.  Tech services and serials staff may be bound to
diversify ... for the sake of their jobs and for the sake of the library.
It becomes a balancing act.  The question that we seem to be coping with
here is:  How much can one balance and diversify one's workload before
becoming stretched too thin?  And then what? ...

    Birdie MacLennan
    Serials Coordinator          bmaclenn@uvmvm.uvm.edu
    University of Vermont        bmaclenn@moose.uvm.edu