A way to the future: reorganizing library work

A way to the future: reorganizing library work

A way to the future: reorganizing library workKeywords: Librarians, Employees, Task, Task specialization, Re-organization, Performance measurement

A cartoon inspired this column. The black-and-white sketch shows the interior of a smallish library complete with card catalog, shelves lined with books and a poster with the words, "Support your local library". The visual center of the cartoon is a female librarian sitting at the reference/service desk with a computer at her right. Immediately behind the computer is a large trash barrel with a desk-sign sticking out of it. On the thrown-away sign is the word, "Librarian". On the desktop in front of the librarian is a new sign. The sign reads "Search engine".

A similar message with a more stentorian tone comes from a 1999 article on "Intelligent agents: what we learned at the library." It reads, "A reasonable information future will include human librarians and software agents. Since a real general artificial intelligence is not yet within reach, a collaborative future makes the most sense" (Nardi and O'Day, 1996).

Easier said than done!

To move professional library staff successfully toward more time spent as "search engineers", "intelligence creators" or "knowledge managers" requires a lot more than an executive memo or a little tinkering with work schedules. Most librarians' work at institutions both large and small is already so scattered in purpose that it often becomes a mind-numbing piece work.

A year 2000 CNN.org cartoon makes the point with a touch of humor. Beside the headline of an article on librarianship called, "Not an endangered career: looking it up", is a color drawing of a bespectacled, desk-tending librarian with eight arms – all in motion. One holds a cell phone, another shuffles papers, a third holds a book open, a fourth and fifth type on a computer keyboard, a sixth writes a note on a pad, a seventh dials a phone number, and the eighth stacks books (CNN.com, 2000). Because of the speed of their motion, the arms and hands are blurred.

Research bolsters this perception. Church (1999) reports the results when he set out to see how librarians' work had to change to make them "knowledge managers". The first part of his article involves analysis of the "proportion of [total work] time spent on [various] activities by special librarians". The results of this analysis are:

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  Assisting end users – 4 percent.

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  Training end users – 5 percent.

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  Document processing – 5 percent.

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  Planning – 7 percent.

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  Professional development – 7 percent.

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  Sourcing – 8 percent.

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  Organization of the library – 8 percent.

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  General administration – 14 percent.

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  Products/services development – 16 percent.

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  Research for end users – 25 percent.

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  Other activities – 1 percent.

With the help of his surveyed librarians, Church suggests how to reorganize the work categories so that librarians can become knowledge managers. Church draws up his task deletions and additions for the reorganization of modern work in a special library (see Table I). Out of the substitution, Church asserts, comes a fair opportunity for librarians to become knowledge managers.

Some readers may decide that Church has not developed the appropriate construct for reorganizing their library work. Church's theme still rings true, however. Professional work in today's increasing digital hybrid library is different from the traditional library where work was focused on books and reactive public service. The challenge for all library directors is to assess current professional work and to devise structural changes that will make optimal use of skilled staff in the delivery of services both old and new.

At my library, we have been reorganizing work to make the transition to the possibilities of digital tools and virtual service. In the remainder of this column, I discuss some of these work shifts. I do not think that this list will work for all libraries. I do hope that it suggests possibilities for work reorganization to other library directors.

Here are some strategies that my administrative staff and I have used to reorganize librarians' work in our hybrid library in order to de-fragmentize it and provide more time for growing and substantially more-important knowledge-management activities.

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  Consolidate staff into larger performance units. Library "departments" and library buildings too often function like little ma-pa shops, each operating like a petty fiefdom. In St Louis, we are breaking up the fiefdoms. We have reorganized our central operating unit into six groups: research, business/science/technology, information services, youth services, media (the old audio-visual) and popular library. The latter two units will become a single unified center for the reader as soon as our central library reconstruction allows it. We applied the same work-unit consolidation to branches, moving to a tiered system in which regional branches care for nearby neighborhood branches. There were other similar changes. The result always is the same, however. We have cut the number of administrative units, the number of "managers", and, as a corollary, the number of administrative reports. The changes enhance opportunities for cross training and make scheduling easier. The savings in meeting and reporting time are already visible, and we will reduce what Church calls "general administration" tasks even more over the next several years. In the process, we free up the time of a dozen librarians to do intellectual, rather than administrative, tasks.

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  Restructure and standardize the reporting process. As another tactic to reduce general administration, we have simplified monthly reports required by our board of directors. We require shorter narratives and ask for performance statistics available in no other way. At the same time, we have strengthened our statistics-gathering process by data mining our OPAC and by using other mechanically generated statistics. We have designated one of our high-level administrators as a "statistics czar". Her job is to stay current on library statistics literature and to work with staff to devise new statistical measures, including surrogates and sampling where no exact counts are available. One initial outcome is a crude "activities index" that we have started to use as a single quantitative measure. Here, we will compare unit activity rather than having everyone report output measures in categories that are not comparable to the work of other units. This statistics exercise is tough, but enlightening.

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  Expand use of the library intranet as a time-saving information source. All of our forms, requests for service (e.g. maintenance and reports on when and how maintenance is accomplished), administrative information, meeting notes, policy manuals, purchasing of supplies, etc., are increasingly on our intranet site. This shift comes with an accompanying planned cancellation of lots of internal paper publications and the accompanying electronic storage of many different forms. The result of the change is reduced time spent in meetings even while improving communication.

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  Establish the library intranet as a common-authoring venue. One portion of our intranet site is an authorship commons that can be used by two or two-dozen staff at the same time, and from different computers in their own offices and at their individual workstations. Meta-tagging of important photograph collections after digitization is one current activity. This tool provides an important community tool with which to carry out the library's most important future-orientated intellectual activity.

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  Reduce time in meetings. A mind-clearing exercise is to look around in a library meeting, mentally calculate the average salary in the room and simply multiply by the number of persons attending and the number of hours the meeting lasts. There is a general library tendency to organize meetings that are too large in order to make sure that everyone is involved or that everyone knows. Big meetings are an expensive substitute for an intranet-based institutional communications structure that works.

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  Use work teams. Many library tasks are neither attractive nor physically or intellectually easy. One such task is weeding. "Team weeding" has become a way of life for us. A weeding team with those who can make the first and the final decision on the spot and note the removal from the catalog saves enormous time over the old weed-a-little-here-and-there philosophy that has been mostly ended. Team weeding is faster and more fun than the old single-weeder method.

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  Be specific about the time to be spent on various tasks. One of the most important outcomes from my institution's last planning process is greater specification for the work expected of individuals and units. We are not regimenting behavior; we are specifying specific outcomes. Our rule for successful work: the greater the specificity in expectations, the greater the success of the individuals and units in achieving the assigned tasks. One simple example is as follows: Certain "staff will offer five hours of outreach programming a month" rather than "staff will do outreach".

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  Move training, especially technology training, to non-MLS staff. More than a year ago, we hired a training director, a professional adult educator, who has helped us organize training. A well-trained library technician now teaches all computer-training classes for the public and many general computer classes for staff. We created other kinds of training and helping jobs to free librarians' time. One such group is homework helpers, who are often college students on their way to degrees. These staff play "the mom role" in motivating kids to do their homework and helping them to get it done. The other group of new workers is technology assistants, high school grads and up, who are computer literate. These relatively inexpensive and mostly part-time staff cruise computer areas, helping those who are stuck, rebooting machines, and reporting to technology maintenance if a computer is beyond their own ability to "quick-fix". These changes reduce librarians' time in general training and open up opportunities for them to undertake intellectual work, and high-level service, including virtual reference.

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  Centralize materials purchasing. We have drastically reduced the time costs of doing book ordering by utilizing institutional profiles and giving more collection-development money to a few people rather than a little to the many. In the collections where we are choosing in this way, usage and turnover rates are higher than in collections where there has been more decentralization.

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  Reconfigure institutional staffing. We have reduced the number of librarians (by attrition) and have used that money to hire a greater number of technicians and clerks. These we have trained as "semi-skilled" staff responsible for carrying out specific clerical and service tasks which librarians often were doing. (One example is scheduling van deliveries to day cares and senior centers.) We want to allocate as many tasks as possible to the support staff and leave "the high hard tasks" to our librarians, most of whom would rather do the intellectual tasks than myriad administrative duties.

If this list of work-reorganization changes seems uneven in conceptualization, execution or impact, it is because this work is ongoing. The mantra is always the same, however. Librarians will not have time to engage in "new work" unless we can find ways to reduce "old work". It is a simple lesson. For all sorts of reasons, many listed here, it also is difficult. The changes require administrative vision and detailed knowledge about how staff currently spend their time. As you think about where you are and where you want to be in your institutional work life, Doug Church's article is a good place to begin.

Glen HoltExecutive Director of the St Louis Public Library, St Louis, Missouri, USA