The “Double Dean”: Embracing the Unexpected Opportunities of a Non-librarian Interim Dean

Serving as an interim administrator is never an easy thing to do. Walking into an interim administrator position when it is not in your area of expertise… well, that is just crazy. Or is it? A University of Arkansas practice is to fill vacant dean positions with an interim leader who is a current sitting dean from another college. When our former dean announced his departure, the university appointed the dean of the Honors College to serve as interim dean of libraries. For the senior library leadership group, all relatively new associate deans from other academic organizations, this practice at first seemed a bit bizarre. Many libraries struggle with maintaining organizational momentum on key initiatives in the vacuum of interim leadership. How would this work with someone whose field of expertise was so unrelated? As we quickly learned, having an experienced administrator with already established campus relationships to advise us became an immediate asset for the libraries. A neutral advocate at the table for campus decisions meant more exposure for the libraries, more access to decision-makers, and greater opportunities to build and advance our core programs and services across campus with key stakeholders. This relationship is also not one-sided, as our new double dean was very candid about what she saw as an investment in a long-term relationship between her home college and the libraries. This chapter will explore, from the perspectives of two associate deans and the interim dean, what those advantages were and why this arrangement served academic libraries well

Canceling the Big Deal: Three R1 Libraries Compare Data, Communication, and Strategies

Canceling the Big Deal is becoming more common, but there are still many unanswered questions about the impact of this change and the fundamental shift in the library collections model that it represents. Institutions like Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the University of Oregon were some of the first institutions to have written about their own experience with canceling the Big Deal several years ago, but are those experiences the norm in terms of changes in budgets, collection development, and interlibrary loan activity? Within the context of the University of California system’s move to cancel a system-wide contract with Elsevier, how are libraries managing the communication about Big Deals both internally with library personnel as well as externally with campus stakeholders? Three R1 libraries (University of Maryland, University of Oklahoma, and Kansas State University) will compare their data, discuss both internal and external communication strategies, and examine the impact these decisions have had on their collections in terms of interlibrary loan and collection development strategies. The results of a brief survey measuring the status of the audience members with respect to Big Deals, communication efforts with campus stakeholders, and impacts on collections will also be discussed

Ebook Collection Development in Academic Libraries: Examining Preference, Management, and Purchasing Patterns.

The practice of acquiring ebooks and managing them within the collection is complex. Through survey results and a review of the literature, this report attempts to measure the significance of the ebook format within the collection, the procedures and preferences academic libraries have for acquiring ebooks, and the perceptions librarians have of the acquisition and management workflows. This survey and white paper aim to provide empirical context around the factors that are having the most influence on the way academic libraries acquire and integrate ebooks into their collections.Overdriv

Reengineering the Library: Advances in Electronic Resources Management

Libraries have long been proponents of automation, but one area that remains a challenge is support for electronic resource management. With each step in the long history of library automation, expectations are that the next generation of technology will allow libraries to do work that has always been done, only faster. This chapter discusses how this expectation may in fact have been the reason behind the unrealized potential of electronic resource management system (ERMS), and may further challenge the success of libraries in moving to new library services platforms (LSPs). As libraries contemplate this next migration, library professionals must reflect on how new technologies, particularly in the area of cloud hosted services, may provide an opportunity to redefine the library’s purpose and mission in a truly new way. Taking that opportunity will mean reclaiming the library’s relevance with respect to its parent organization, rethinking and rebranding the services provided to library users, and most importantly ensuring that the services libraries provide to their communities are understood to be something needed and valued by that community