14 · Survey Results: Executive Summary
advantage of liaison services. Several remarked that,
while most of the departments that are offered liaison
services use them in some way, the extent of partici-
pation varies among departments. Nearly all survey
respondents (96%) are actively seeking ways to in-
crease participation from departments, and the rest
are planning to soon. Again, nearly all of the respond-
ing libraries encourage liaisons to attend departmental
meetings (98%) and actively market liaison services
(97%). Other methods that ARL libraries are using to
actively increase participation from departments in-
clude attending orientations and other campus events,
co-authoring papers and presentations, collaborative
teaching opportunities, social media, inviting depart-
ments to library events, and embedding librarians in
various department-related opportunities.
A recognized method of increasing departmental
participation is ensuring that libraries fully under-
stand the needs of the communities that they serve.
All of the responding libraries use communication,
such as conversation, email, or other methods, with
faculty, students, and researchers to attempt to assess
needs and understand departmental priorities. Forty-
nine libraries (75%) also use documentation from de-
partments, such as strategic plans and promotion and
tenure guidelines for this purpose, and 47 (72%) have
surveyed faculty, students, and researchers to gain in-
sight into their work. Examples of other methods that
library liaisons are using to better understand depart-
mental needs include: bibliometric analysis of faculty
publications, university-level strategic plans, curricu-
lum review, town halls, focus groups, LibQUAL+®,
and collaborative research. Survey responses indicate
that many libraries are using a diverse portfolio of
methods to investigate community needs, which en-
ables them to be both reactive and proactive when
identifying new areas of support for library liaisons.
Liaison Core Duties and Services
The definition and core duties of a library liaison have
changed fairly dramatically over the past two decades.
The 2007 SPEC Kit on liaison services reviewed the
1992 and 2001 RUSA guidelines for liaisons, noting
that in 1992, the RUSA guidelines mainly focused on
the liaison’s responsibility to gather information for
collection development.5 The 2001 RUSA guidelines
expanded to include five components: three still cen-
tering around collection development and two deal-
ing with public relations and communication with
the surrounding community. RUSA’s guidelines were
updated again in 2010 and include a wide variety of
activities related to liaison work in academic libraries,
including developing collections, identifying users,
and activities such as participating in campus organi-
zations and encouraging wide library use.6
In this survey, nearly all the responding libraries
identified the following as core liaison duties: provid-
ing one-on-one research consultations (99%), man-
aging library collections in disciplinary areas (97%),
outreach and communication (97%), and teaching
one-shot information literacy sessions (96%). The ma-
jority of respondents indicated an additional suite of
liaison core duties, including providing consulting on
scholarly communication issues (82%), reporting news
from disciplinary departments back to the library
(79%), embedding in discipline-based courses (76%),
providing data management support and consulting
(63%), and regularly staffing the reference desk (61%).
Nearly half of the respondents (46%) listed additional
core duties taken on by their liaisons. Listed multiple
times were citation analysis and impact metrics, using
and teaching new technology tools, digital scholar-
ship support, and literature review help.
The full menu of services offered by liaisons at
ARL libraries covers a wide breadth of support areas.
In 2007, primary areas of liaison services included
departmental outreach, communication of depart-
mental needs back to the library, reference, collection
development, library instruction, and scholarly com-
munication education. Each of these areas remains at
the top of the current menu of liaison services (90% of
all respondents named all of these services). However,
the majority of respondents also named at least eight
additional services that are now on the liaison menu:
assistance with scholarly impact and metrics (88%),
promotion of institutional repository (83%), consulta-
tion on open access issues (82%), creating web-based
learning objects (80%), e-research support (80%), data
management support (79%), consultation on intellec-
tual property issues (71%), and new literacies educa-
tion (58%). Examples of other services are data visu-
alization support, GIS support, help with systematic
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