At Notre Dame, I’m on a social sciences team that’s investigating best practices for training and evaluating people who will be doing social sciences collection development and liaisonship. If you know anything about previous work that’s been done in this area (or if you’re willing to share your documents!), definitely let me know.

Since I’m new (my two-year anniversary as a librarian was in January!), a lot of the issues I grappled with are still fresh in my mind. The team has asked me to make a list of things that were helpful, things I wish I’d known, etc. So I thought — why not make it a blog post? So here you go. This is what I wish I’d been told about liaisonship and collection development when I started.

All the stuff bibliographers/liaisons actually do

Librarians assigned a subject responsibility do many things. Here’s a list of some things I can think of, by no means exhaustive.

• Create subject guides and course pages
• Subject-based library instruction
• Research consultations one-on-one with students and faculty
• Purchase materials — books, databases, serials
• Make decisions about preservation and reformatting
• Outreach to faculty and students in their subject areas
• Sign off on approval books/work to create approval plans
• Review gift books
• Handle endowments and write endowment letters to donors

Available tools and technology

I still don’t fully have a grasp on all the tools and technology used to make collection development purchases and decisions. I can think of at least five different ways to purchase something at Notre Dame, and more ways than that to see what we hold, how many times books have circulated, and how to get items we own listed in our catalog or on our website. Information about these different things are in disparate places and knowledge of them came to me piecemeal. There should be a centralized “getting started” page or tutorial that tells new collectors about the following:

• The Aleph back-end system for the catalog (how and where to download the software, how to get permissions, how to use it to investigate monograph records). Not everyone may want this, but I found it very helpful and I’m kind of a geek. More information is better, as far as I’m concerned.
• The Datamart: https://datamart.library.nd.edu/ and how to use it to pull statistics, view funds, and interpret what all of the data means. A discussion of what it’s best suited for and what it’s NOT suited for.
• The Checklist for Electronic Products form (this is how we initiate the purchase for an electronic product), how it’s similar and different from the DDW form (the database-driven website — to get it listed in our beautiful database catalog), why you’d use one over the other for a free resource, who’s in charge of each of these things, who’s responsible for assigning subjects to the new resources, and how to get subjects changed or added most efficiently. I think there’s a lot of confusion over both of these tools.
• The GOBI system (formerly Blackwell’s Collection Manager) for viewing approval plan books, initiating purchases, getting results emailed to you based on your subject areas. Just as an aside, I was really excited about the slickness of the Blackwell 7 system and I liked using it, browsing for books, looking at the forms, initiating purchases. I don’t like GOBI at all. I’ll use it when I have to because it’s my job, but I’m not excited about it, and I won’t spend extra time there.
• The reformatting/missing books database. Preservation sends out a message every now and then, but I often forget it exists unless they’re reminding me.

Endowment policies and politics

This may not be an issue for every selector or every university, but I think it’s really helpful to understand where money comes from and what it’s to be spent on. I handle the economics endowments at Notre Dame. Understanding what collection endowments are and how they work would help me do my job. I know that I can find information on the donors of my endowments if I look for it, but only because I’d come across it somewhere before, not because anyone explicitly directed me to it. Maybe the approach to handling endowed funds isn’t very strict here, but we’ve definitely got a responsibility to spend these funds mindfully, and I’d like to better learn how to make good judgments in this area.

Additionally, I’d like to be better at writing endowment letters to the donors. I can be as sincere as can be, but how do you really genuinely thank somebody for donating thousands of dollars to your library? How do you assure them you’re aware of the meaning of an endowed fund and that you steward the collection wisely? Notre Dame is very good at being both genuine and elegant in its outward presentation, and I think interactions with donors and alumni should reflect those qualities as well.

The purchasing processes

How are serials different from monographs with regard to purchasing them for the library? How are print and electronic resources different? What’s the process a database or electronic product has to go through to get licensed? What are some best practices? Can I just find a book on Amazon and tell the monograph acquisitions people that I want it bought & processed?

What makes everyone’s lives easier on the other end? I’ve never had a problem getting anything done, but I suspect it’s because the acquisitions people are so flexible. If I’m just starting out, I’d prefer to mold my practices to their standards and save someone a headache.

Decision making

What tools or strategies are best for making decisions about collection development?

Gift books: I was surprised to hear that gift books shouldn’t leave the gift books room. It would’ve been much more comfortable for me to cart a load of books down to my office and make informed decisions about their usefulness to our collection by looking them up for myself. I could still do that on a mobile device, but at a considerable loss of time and comfort. I feel like I’m discouraged from doing real research on what should be added to the collection from the gifts pile. How do other people make good decisions with this restraint?

Lost/damaged books: We have a database that lists all of these by subject area. How often am I expected to look at it? How often do other people look at their subjects? How do I make an informed decision about what to ditch or get replaced or fixed? Do I check circulation rates, maybe? Find out how many copies we have and if any of them are just newer or older editions of the same missing/damaged work? What’s the easiest way to do that? I’ve had trouble in the past getting my hands on the actual book to look at it and see if it’s something we need to replace (and if the book is missing — that’s impossible, obviously). Maybe there can be a checklist of basic guidelines for figuring out whether something is worth replacing or fixing.

New purchases: Obviously, if a faculty member requests a book in my area and I have funds, I purchase it. How often should I “push” potential purchases to faculty in my departments? I’ve sent econ faculty lists of monographs from our acquisitions slips, but no one has ever had any input. Granted, that could be because they’re books. Grad students know to come to me when they want data purchased, and as far as I can tell, it’s only data and statistics that anyone needs. How do you make decisions about monograph collection development when your fields don’t use books? How do you find out about new resources in your fields?

Interlibrary loans: Is it helpful to look at the ILL history for a department? How often should I do it? Does this largely depend on the discipline?

Budgeting & managing funds

How does the budget allocation process work for each fund? When am I expected to have these funds spent down? It seems I never know until I get an email that says “You need to spend the funds remaining on this account.” Is there a calendar somewhere or some guidelines to help me establish a system to manage my funds through the fiscal year?

Connecting and communicating

What are the best ways to connect with faculty in your assigned departments? A colleague mentioned getting to know the administrative assistants and having them send out information to the faculty and students via a listserv. I wish I’d thought of that! I didn’t even realize that was a possibility.

Another colleague said that he regularly sends his own monthly newsletter to his faculty, informing them of recent purchases and any library news that’s going on. I think that’s fascinating and proactive, but I think it really depends on the department you’re a liaison to. Which brings me to my next questions.

How do you avoid being annoying or overcommunicating? And how much communication is enough? For the past two years I’ve sent welcome emails to new faculty in economics telling them about library resources and services. In that email, I offer to meet to discuss doing workshops or instruction for classes, and I inquire about their areas of research and urge them to let me know if they notice any gaps in the library collection with regard to those areas.

I’ve never received a single response, not even an acknowledgment of receipt or a hello. I don’t know if I’m just doing it wrong, if new faculty are overwhelmed already, if they think my contact isn’t very helpful at all, or if they think it’s helpful but prefer not to reply or take advantage of any of our services. I have no way to gauge what communication is effective when I get no feedback from my faculty, so nonresponse leads me to believe that none of it is effective and they’d rather not hear from me directly, so my liaison/collection efforts would be better spent doing other things. This may or may not be true — there’s no way for me to assess this when nobody’s talking to me.

Some guidelines about best practices for communicating with faculty would be great. If I know I’m “expected” by the library administration to send a welcome letter to new faculty every year, I could do it without feeling like I’m overstepping some bounds or wasting my time. The same would be true of sending monthly newsletters, occasionally inviting requests for purchase, or plugging library workshops and instruction every now and then. I’m sure librarians who have been at this longer definitely get a feel for what works or doesn’t work, and a lot of liaisons here have very robust relationships with their departments, but it’s choppy water to navigate for a new librarian, and some more expectations might be welcomed.