Academic Library Management

Case Studies

Tammy Nickelson Dearie, Michael Meth, Elaine L. Westbrooks, Tammy Nickelson Dearie, Michael Meth, Elaine L. Westbrooks

• Publisher: ALA Neal-Schuman
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780838915592
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838915899
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

1

Effective Shared Governance in Academic Libraries

CHARLES LYONS, H. AUSTIN BOOTH, and SCOTT HOLLANDER

The University at Buffalo (UB) is a public research university located in Western New York on the Canadian border. Founded in 1846 by Millard Fillmore as a private college, UB was incorporated into the State University of New York (SUNY) system in 1962 and has since grown to include three separate campuses and an enrollment of over twenty-nine thousand students. UB is now the largest campus in the SUNY system and serves as its flagship. A member of the Association of American Universities, UB is a research-intensive, comprehensive, doctoral-granting university that offers more than three hundred undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs.

The UB Libraries strive to comprise a premier academic research library that provides resources, expertise, services, and spaces that support the mission and vision of the university.

A member of the Association of Research Libraries, the UB Libraries provide access to a collection of 3.8 million print volumes, over ten thousand electronic journals, and three hundred research databases. The UB Libraries comprise a network of nine separate libraries staffed by approximately 130 personnel (both faculty and professional). The annual operating budget of the UB Libraries is nearing $20 million with an acquisitions budget close to $10 million.

In response to the changing landscape of research libraries, the UB Libraries underwent a significant reorganization in February 2015. A primary goal of the reorganization was to create an organizational structure that promotes and supports innovation, collaboration, and communication. Although the reorganization of the UB Libraries was successful in creating the foundation for a more agile and dynamic organization, it also spurred much debate about the internal processes and procedures followed when creating and implementing organizational changes. One area in particular emerged as a primary concern: shared governance. Like many institutions of higher learning, UB and the UB Libraries have long demonstrated a commitment to shared governance, an approach to decision making that strives to balance input from throughout the organization. That balance, always a delicate one, is especially tested during times of significant change or when roles of the various parties involved are not clearly defined. Because of the reorganization, issues around communication and decision making in the UB Libraries were thrown into sharp relief, causing us to reflect on how to create effective shared governance practices.

DEFINING SHARED GOVERNANCE

Defining the term shared governance is challenging: it is a term that means different things to different people, and there does not seem to be a generally accepted definition. Complicating matters, the concept of effective shared governance in higher education is the subject of much debate and has been evolving over time. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dr. Gary Olson, then provost at Idaho State University, noted that shared governance “has come to connote two complementary and sometimes overlapping concepts: giving various groups of people a share in key decision-making processes, often through elected representation; and allowing certain groups to exercise primary responsibility for specific areas of decision making.”1

Concepts that are related to, and often inherent in, shared governance include participatory leadership, consensus-based decision making, collegiality, and inclusiveness. These concepts are often discussed in terms of giving participants a “voice” or a “seat at the table” when important decisions about the operations and future directions of an organization are being made. In higher education, shared governance is often characterized as being under threat by several factors, including the corporatization of colleges and universities, the influence of political concerns over academic ones, and the rapid adoption of online teaching technologies.

One of the key challenges in effective shared governance has to do with balance: finding the appropriate level of involvement, influence, and input from the various parties that share in decision-making processes. Too much involvement from too many people can lead to “death by committee,” slowing down the process of decision making and frustrating all involved. This excess involvement is especially important because today’s academic libraries are experiencing a period of great disruption, and the ability to respond nimbly to continual change is paramount. Too much involvement can also lead to “groupthink” in which group pressures lead to forced conformity and a lack of creativity or critical thinking. On the other hand, a lack of participation can lead to more authoritarian or top-down approaches to decision making that can leave people feeling disempowered and unengaged.

SHARED GOVERNANCE IN THE UB LIBRARIES

Broadly speaking, the primary groups of people involved in shared governance and decision making in the UB Libraries can be broken down into three categories: administration, faculty, and staff (both professional and classified). The UB Libraries’ administration, represented by a large Directors Council before the reorganization, is now primarily composed of five associate university librarians (AULs) and the vice provost for University Libraries (VPUL) to whom they each report. There are over forty-five faculty librarians in the UB Libraries, and they are represented by the five elected members of the Faculty Executive Committee (FEC) who serve alternating two-year terms, with two members elected in one year and three the next. There are over eighty staff members in the UB Libraries, and they are similarly represented by the five elected members of the Professional Executive Committee (PEC) who also serve alternating two-year terms. Librarians participate in university-wide governance through such structures as the Faculty Senate, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, the Faculty Senate Library Committee, the Professional Senate, and other ad hoc and standing campus-wide committees.

Shared governance encourages involvement in decision making from all staff throughout an organization, but the focus in higher education tends to be on the relationship between faculty and administrative leadership. At many colleges and universities, it is often a fraught relationship, one that is characterized by suspicion and susceptible to mistrust. Many, though certainly not all, of the debates about shared governance issues in the UB Libraries were between administrators and faculty members (as opposed to staff members). In order to fully understand shared governance in the UB Libraries, it is important to note the significance for UB librarians of having faculty status.

In the 1960s and 1970s, SUNY librarians vigorously advocated for attaining and then retaining faculty status. During this period, movement activists described feeling like second-class citizens on their campuses and being dissatisfied because classroom faculty “saw us as technicians rather than scholarly people.”2 SUNY librarians in the faculty status battle were motivated by a variety of factors, including salary parity with professorial faculty, eligibility for tenure and sabbaticals, equivalent academic ranks to professorial faculty, voting privileges as faculty, and academic-year appointments. After much lobbying, SUNY librarians were granted academic rank, including faculty status, in 1968.

In the literature of the era, SUNY librarians stated that they hoped to obtain the “dignity and respect” associated with being considered faculty members of their academic communities. This effort included an enormous desire for more “participatory management” at the SUNY central administration level and at local campuses. SUNY librarians expressed dissatisfaction over not having meaningful input in policy making in their libraries. In essence, participation in shared governance was a major reason why SUNY librarians fought so hard for faculty status: they fully expected that after they were made faculty, decisions would be made on a more collegial and shared basis, and these expectations are still very much a part of how the UB Libraries operate today.

REORGANIZATION IN THE UB LIBRARIES

The reorganization of the UB Libraries was designed to take advantage of the opportunities created by transformations in the research library landscape in general and more specifically by changes on our own campus.

Drivers of the Reorganization

The drivers for transforming the UB Libraries’ organizational structure included developing a culture that supported innovation and creating teams and workflows that encouraged collaboration and communication across previously isolated faculty and staff. In addition, we wished to create professional development opportunities for faculty and staff and develop more effective succession planning strategies in the face of anticipated retirements of key personnel. The UB Libraries also wanted to align our organizational structure with university-wide priorities identified in the university’s ambitious strategic plan called “UB2020” as well as with the UB Libraries’ own Balanced Scorecard strategic map.

In 2013, under the president’s direction, UB2020 was moving into a new implementation phase focused on the following four areas: teaching the curriculum (specifically, a new general education curriculum), research, innovation, and infrastructure (specifically, our “Heart of the Campus” initiative that aims to create new learning landscapes throughout the campus, not just in lecture halls and laboratories). The new organizational structure of the UB Libraries was designed to reflect and respond to this four-pronged, campus-wide focus.

In addition, a survey of UB Libraries’ faculty and staff and intensive follow-up focus groups, facilitated by an outside consultant, were conducted in 2013. The results of the survey, which had a very high response rate, as well as feedback from the focus groups identified five key issues we hoped to address through our reorganization:

• ▪ A clearer sense of unit missions
• ▪ More efficient decision-making structures
• ▪ Improved communication
• ▪ More collaboration across units
• ▪ Greater support for innovation

Not only did the reorganization itself promise to deliver these goals, but the job descriptions for newly created positions deliberately incorporated these goals as job responsibilities. All unit heads, for example, were charged with “creating a culture of innovation, collaboration, communication, engagement, and accountability.”

In addition to surveys and focus groups, further discussion, consultation, and information sharing about the reorganization occurred throughout 2014, including library-wide Town Forums, a presentation to the university-wide Faculty Senate Library and Information Technology (IT) Committee, numerous Library Directors’ Council meetings, and various e-mail communications. The VPUL also discussed the reorganization with other administrators, including the UB provost to whom she reports.

The New Organizational Structure

The reorganization of the UB Libraries was implemented in early 2015 and resulted in an organizational structure composed of five units, four of them new: Discovery and Delivery; Research, Education, and Outreach; Technology; Administration; and Law. The Law Library remained a distinct, semiautonomous unit, with the director of the Law Library continuing to report to both the VPUL and the dean of the Law School. Each new unit is headed by an AUL who reports directly to the VPUL. The AUL structure replaced a more cumbersome one composed of functional directors, functional coordinators, building-specific directors, and subject-specific directors, many of whose duties overlapped. Descriptions of the four new units follow.

The Discovery and Delivery (D&D) unit combined numerous previously isolated and organizationally separate operations: interlibrary loan, collection development, access services, technical services, and acquisitions. This unified unit focuses on delivering library materials to users at the point of need in a holistic, strategic fashion. D&D teams are arranged to more efficiently manage the workflows related to the provision of library materials: from selection and acquisition to description and discovery and, finally, to the delivery of print and online materials to our patrons.

The changing nature of academic publishing caused a rethinking of our organizational structure related to scholarly communications. The increase in open-access journals, open educational resources, and mandates to open federally funded research as well as increased interest in open data prompted the bringing together of our scholarly communication specialists with the subject liaisons who interacted with our scholars (the teaching faculty of the university) into a single unit called Research, Education, and Outreach (REO). This unit also focuses on the changing nature of the library subject liaison, especially in light of the fact that interdisciplinary research had become a priority on campus.

Instead of library IT support spread out organizationally across several different areas, the Technology unit became a single entity providing centralized technological support services for web development, digitization projects, desktop computing, and networked information delivery to all library faculty and staff. This coordinated approach eliminated duplicative services allowing library faculty and staff to focus on mission critical tasks leading to better knowledge-sharing and cooperation among departments. Finally, the Administration unit brought our human resources, finance, and facilities teams together. User demand, especially from students but also from faculty and community users, for repurposing of library space for increased high-tech collaborative study and work spaces motivated us to bring all facilities operations into a single unit so that we could fashion a master plan that prioritized and coordinated library space projects under a single vision.

GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES

As the reorganization plan took shape and especially following implementation, three key challenges emerged that caused us to reflect on the nature of truly effective shared governance. First, at a very basic level, we found ourselves reviewing and clarifying the very processes and procedures (including approvals and reviews) that needed to be followed when reorganizing in order to comply with both the bylaws and spirit of shared governance. We also engaged in deep discussions about how decisions are made regarding recruitment for the new roles created by the reorganization and about hiring in general. Finally, because effective shared governance depends on participation in decision making, we focused on ways we could create the sort of inclusive culture that encourages and facilitates broader and more meaningful participation from people throughout the organization.

Who Approves a Reorganization?

Within the larger UB organizational structure, the status of the UB Libraries as an academic unit or an administrative one is complicated by the fact that although many of our librarians have faculty status, we are not a unit that awards degrees or produces credit hours. Throughout our history, the UB Libraries have reported to the academic leadership of the university (i.e., the provost, as is currently the case) and to administrative leadership (for example, for many years we reported to the chief information officer). Within SUNY there is little consistency regarding where the library falls in the organization charts of the other sixty-three colleges and universities in the system. These facts lead to confusion about whether the UB Libraries are a support unit more akin to the Computing Center or the Teaching and Learning Center, for example, or an academic one more similar to the School of Management or the College of Arts and Sciences.

It was in this context that basic questions began to emerge concerning the proper processes and procedures that should be followed when creating and implementing a reorganization: what the process was and, in fact, whether a process even existed. These questions came to the fore during a question-and-answer session with the provost at a university-wide Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC) meeting in October 2015. In particular, the provost was asked to provide clarity about the status of the UB Libraries as an academic or administrative unit and whether the “bylaws and spirit of shared governance” had been followed when the UB Libraries’ reorganization was adopted. In particular, one faculty member asked if the UB Libraries reorganization should have been reviewed more closely and voted on by the Faculty Senate.

After some deliberation, the provost confirmed that the UB Libraries were indeed an administrative unit, albeit a unique one. He also confirmed that the reorganization did not need to be reviewed or voted on by the Faculty Senate and that proper procedures had been followed. In an effort to communicate more clearly about what was going on with the reorganization and allay concerns, the VPUL and the chair of FEC were invited to attend a meeting of FSEC in November 2015 at which they provided an overview of the reorganization from both the faculty and the administrative perspectives. The presentations included a time line of the processes and procedures that were followed, the rationale for the new structure, and an outline of future directions for the UB Libraries.

Although the nuances of administrative and academic units may seem trivial, the debate hit on some of the same issues that were at the heart of SUNY librarians’ fight for faculty status in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some faculty took away from the provost’s remarks the idea that librarians are indeed faculty, although we lack some of the same rights. An eerily similar echo occurred when one faculty member from an academic unit said at the meeting that the university was running the risk of treating faculty librarians as “second-class citizens”—the same term that was used in the 1970s.

Recruitment Policies

In March 2015, the announcement of the new AULs served as the official launch of the reorganization. The searches for the four new AULs were internal, and formal, daylong interviews (including presentations to the entire library and interviews with the search committee, the VPUL, and other key individuals) were conducted during the second half of 2014 and into the beginning of 2015. Many faculty and staff, both within and outside the library, participated in the recruitment process by se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 | Effective Shared Governance in Academic Libraries
• 2 | LibrariesForward
• 3 | One University’s Approach to Academic Library Funding
• 4 | A Shared Collection and the Advancement of a Collaborative Future
• 5 | Form Follows Function
• 6 | Using a Project Management Methodology to Reorganize Technical Services
• 7 | Triage Succession Planning
• 8 | The Archivist Apprenticeship
• 9 | One Incident of Violence, or, It Will Never Be the Same
• 10 | A Phased Approach to Creating Updated User Spaces
• 11 | Collaborative Digital Planning for Archives and Special Collections
• 12 | Collaborating for Success
• 13 | Engaging Internal and External Stakeholders in a Comprehensive University Archives Program
• 14 | The Closing of a Library
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX