44 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
18. Please indicate whether your library has hired new staff or reallocated library staff or is planning
to do so to provide scholarly output assessment activities. Please make one selection per row. N=64
Options Library has done Library plans to Library has no plans to N
Hire new staff 6 10 43 59
Reallocate staff 14 6 41 61
19. Please enter any additional comments you have on scholarly output assessment staffing. N=37
Above the FTE doesn’t mean they spend all of their time working on scholarly output, but that they are full time
individuals at the library.
All liaison librarians play an assessment role. It’s difficult to gauge the amount, so we added their effort up to 1 FTE.
All subject liaisons are expected to have some knowledge of scholarly output assessment and be able to speak to
their faculty about how to use them. Scholarly Communications Librarian is working to put together base-level service
expectations and training to assist subject liaisons.
All subject librarians are expected to be knowledgeable and be able to advise and assist researchers and answer
questions related to scholarly output activities. Only a handful are comfortable teaching workshops/classes on the tools
and topics. (All 14 librarians with subject responsibilities are FT).
As mentioned earlier, those librarians who have expertise have mostly taught themselves. Most colleagues know who
they are and can go to them for assistance if needed. We have no “dedicated” staff who are charged with having
this expertise.
Expertise is very distributed across the library system and is part of the expectation for library faculty liaisons and
library leadership.
Here, this is considered part of the skill set for liaison librarians. It’s something done in response to a question, or
brought up in a classroom session discussion.
In addition to leveraging the liaison model for liaison librarians to assist faculty in scholarly output assessment and
existing Exhibits Coordinator and Digital Scholarship Librarian positions for their collaborations with liaisons, the
Libraries also hired a Scholarly Communications Librarian and is in the process of hiring a Data Librarian who will also
collaborate with liaisons to provide services across all areas on campus.
In our answer above to which we answered (17,15) we are referring to the number of subject & liaison librarians on our
staff. All of these librarians spend only a small portion of their time on such activities.
In our institution, the responsibilities for this area are very diffuse, each subject specialist is the initial point of contact
because they know the scholarship culture of their departments. They consult with a few people on staff that have
developed special expertise in metrics based on previous experience and their normal ongoing research interests. At
this point, no one is specifically assigned as a general point person, though as chair of the scholarly communications
committee, I function informally in that role, though it is not a specific dedicated job responsibility. Hence the questions
you ask above are difficult to answer. I suspect we will move toward dedicating more staff time to this area, but it may
be a while before we formally create specific staff positions to address this area. This is complicated by the fact that
other institutional support and assessment offices like Institutional Analysis and Sponsored Programs see this as their
function and tend to act independently of the library.