98 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
The more popular liaison services become the harder it is to meet all of the needs/collaborate with everyone who is
interested. Victims of our own success. Finding ways to make liaison services relevant and appealing to those units that
have not yet taken advantage of these services.
Time. Lack of people. Lack of ability/money to provide what faculty need/want.
Time intensive. Difficult to scale—some departments are big, meaning that some liaisons have a lot of departments.
Difficult to evaluate—hard to determine what success looks like for different departments.
Uneven level of support provided. May have expertise in one area and less in another (i.e., instruction vs.
collection management).
Workload &staffing levels with new programs and no increase in library resources. Receptivity of some departments
to liaison involvement. Keeping up-to-date on emerging areas such as scholarly communication, research support,
bibliometrics, etc.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
44. Please enter any additional information regarding liaison services at your library that may assist the
authors in accurately analyzing the results of this survey. N=18
Coming out of a reorganization. New liaison program is just starting this fall. Focused on engagement, communication,
outreach. Liaisons not expected to meet all departmental needs themselves but to leverage the diverse strengths of the
newly formed library teams.
In addition to liaisons we do have a Director of Communications and Outreach who responds to all emails coming in to
the general library email address of the webpage. She also handles general library messaging, media relations, social
media activity, and marketing campaigns. She supervises a student liaison, who is a student working 1/2 time who is
generally tasked with collecting feedback and representing student perspectives in library decision making. Ideally, we’d
like to have one for undergraduate students and one for graduate students. At present we only have one position.
In the University Libraries we feel our liaisons are more important than ever in the work we are doing to support campus
priorities and strategic directions. The liaison’s deep subject knowledge and strong relationships with faculty are leading
to interesting projects and opportunities for collaboration between the faculty and the library.
In the last 5–10 years, librarians have made deliberate efforts to move away from a “bibliographer” model (which
tended to emphasize selection of materials for the collection) and toward offering expertise-based support to help
students and researchers find, interact with, transform, and use materials in our collections. This now includes areas
such as managing and manipulating data and digital texts, and advice on issues in scholarly publishing and copyright.
Liaisons in our library offer different levels of services beyond the core responsibilities, based on their skills, experience,
and comfort level. Members of all academic departments have access to the full menu of services, such as instruction
and research consultations, but in some cases they are provided by a reference &instruction librarian instead of the
specific departmental liaison.
Librarians with data management/e-science, data sets/data librarian, GIS/remote sensing, IP/scholarly communication,
and repository expertise are not within the subject librarian org structure. However, we work closely with offices.
Subject librarians serve on committees for each of these areas, and we refer people as needed.
One challenge in the coming year will be to review the liaisons’ roles in collection development, and to encourage
more outward-facing engagement with our community. We will be exploring ways to do this in the coming year. Also,
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