Category Archives: Library Profession

An Announcement

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I am happy to announce that I have accepted a position as the Liaison Librarian to the College of Media Arts and Design at W. W. Hagerty Library at Drexel University, beginning on August 22nd. I make this announcement almost 4 years to the day of beginning my position as Head of Media and Computer Services at the University Libraries at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I will miss many things about my experience here in Las Vegas, mostly my great friends and colleagues, but the time has come to return to my hometown for this amazing opportunity. I received my MS from Drexel back in 1999 and am very excited to be going back professionally. So much has changed at Drexel and at Hagerty Library since my days there and I look forward to working somewhere new, yet familiar. Being a city boy and born and raised Philadelphian, I am thrilled to be working at an urban university.
 
I felt a natural affinity with the staff during my interview and am excited to be working with my new colleagues. I appreciate Drexel University Libraries’ forward thinking approach, focusing on the educational role of librarians and the notion of the library as a place of intentional learning. They seem to be an agile organization willing to try new things, as exemplified by their new Library Learning Terrace which is gaining national attention and pushing the conversation about the future of libraries.
 
Working with the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design will give me the opportunity to work with creative and artistic people on a daily basis. As many people know, I have great enthusiasm for “non-print” aspects of librarianship and am excited to work with a program that offers degrees in areas such as Animation & Visual Effects, Architecture, Dance, Film & Video, Interior Design and Photography, among others. Some of these disciplines will be very new to me and I look forward to the challenge of learning from my soon to be colleagues.
 
Here’s a look at some of the exciting things that go on in the college:

And more about the college from the Dean’s message:

At Drexel’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, we go about teaching design, media and the performing arts in a different way. Our sixteen undergraduate and five graduate degree programs empower students with the knowledge, skills and confidence to succeed in highly competitive creative fields. Our programs are predominately studio based. That means small classes and hands-on learning. We start with a very special faculty… teachers who have worked at the top of their fields… winning Emmy Awards… designing for top fashion houses… creating art that’s exhibited in the world’s great museums… and as leaders of major cultural organizations and media companies. They bring real life know-how and industry contacts to the classroom but, most importantly, they bring a passion for teaching.

What Is Mid-Tenure Anyway

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In my various social circles, I’ve been talking about my upcoming “mid-tenure.” I’m sure my friends in academic institutions know what I am talking about, but I also have friends who are not in academic libraries, and I even have friends who are not (gasp!) librarians at all who probably have little to no idea what I’m babbling on about. So, I want to give a brief overview of what it is and what the process has been like in my place of work.

In the most general sense, tenure invovles successfully completing some kind of probationary period in order to make one’s job more or less permanent. Most employment situations have this even if they don’t call it such.

In many academic work places, usually just for faculty, this “probationary period” is much longer, usually in the neighborhood of 5 to 7 years. The point of this long period of time is to give the faculty member time to prove his or her worth and a scholar, teacher and/or researcher. I put “probationary period” in quotes because even though the position is not permanent, it usually is a contract position. Most often, a person in this position is on a yearly contract that more or less automatically gets renewed unless there are extenuating circumstances.

When faculty members are “up for tenure,” they need to provide evidence of their achievements. A board of tenured faculty members evaluates the work and decides whether or not they have achieved enough to be granted tenure and be given permanent employment.

Many places have a mid-tenure review, which is what I’m heading into and have been talking about. At my library, mid-tenure candidates go through the motions of applying for tenure in order to get feedback from tenured librarians regarding our progress toward tenure. The process for mid-tenure stays within the library. When I am up for tenure, my work gets evaluated at the campus level.

Whether or not librarians should be considered faculty and whether or not they should be held to the same standards as teaching and research faculty is a Ginormous Can of Worms which I am not going to get into here.

Getting one’s work scrutinized is stressful, but the mid-tenure process is meant to be helpful. What candidates gets from the process is constructive feedback on how well their work is progressing and on what they may need to do in the next couple of years to make getting tenure much more likely.

At my library, the process involves a few things, which, I would assume are fairly similar to those at other institutions.

  • As a state funded university, there is a form to fill out in which we provide an overview of our education and work.
  • There is the infamous “packet,” which for us takes the form of a binder. Into this binder, we put any evidence of our accomplishments, including our CVs, annual reviews, annual reports, publications, presentations, the state form and anything else we can think of to help us make our case.
  • Our direct supervisors and our tenure committee provide feedback on our binders and we have some time to make revisions.
  • The bindesr then go to the administrative office in the library where other librarians can go and review them.
  • There is a library faculty meeting where all the candidates field questions about their work so far and plans for improvement.
  • Finally, we get feedback from the library Dean and our direct supervisors.

Mid-Tenure Binder

We get evaluated on three general categories:

  • Job performance: how well we execute our daily job duties.
  • Scholarship: what we’ve published and/or presented. What also gets considered is the quality of the publication or the importance or prestige of the conference where we presented.
  • Service: what we have done to provide additional service to the library, university, and professional organizations.

Although I have been working in academic libraries for 17 years (yikes!) and have been a professional librarian for 10, I have only been a tenure-track librarian since taking this job in 2007. The tenure process is still somewhat new to me. I would be interested to hear what the process is like at other libraries.

2nd Annual Library Day in the Life Project

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A year ago, Bobbi Newman over at Librarian By Day, proposed a project asking librarians to chart what we do at work for one day. The results, which you can find at this wiki, were enlightening, mainly because no one seems to have a typical day. July 27, 2009 marks the 2nd Annual Library Day in the Life Project and you can get the lowdown here.

It’s an interesting time for me to take part in this project. I just past my 2 year anniversary at UNLV and I am currently working on my mid-tenure packet, so what I do all day is much on my mind. I had never had a tenure track position before, and I think the prospect of tenure persuaded me to become over-committed to work above and beyond my actual job. At my 2 year mark, I was feeling stretched too thin and decided as I rotated off some committees to limit myself as far as joining any others. I have my committee work under my belt for my mid-tenure packet and intend to focus more on the day job, so to speak. The Day in the Life Project comes at a time of transition for me.

  • Checked email and updated to do list.
  • Took a look at a demo for Swank Digital Campus and contacted rep with a bunch of questions.
  • Set-up a meeting with the Systems Manager for the afternoon and created a list of topics to discuss.
  • Nominated Poisoned Waters for the ALA Video Round Table Notable Videos for Adults. Typed up some notes I made about it.
  • In looking up the links for the Round Table, I discovered that the video presented at the VRT program celebrating the 10th anniversary of Notable Videos is available on YouTube and I wrote a post.
  • Wrote post for our departmental blog promoting some new additions to the collection.
  • Took a look at a trial for American History in Video.
  • Met with Systems Manager and discussed progress on the fall image, getting IP addresses for new copiers, finding time to set-up and test a software trial, and providing access to streaming media content.
  • Worked on mid-tenure packet.
  • Worked on semi-annual report.
  • Updated stats for Media and Computer Services web site and other web services. In updating stats, noticed something amiss with a couple of the media pages, so fixed the problems.
  • Set-up meeting with Web Technical Support Manager for Thursday to discuss LabStats implementation for the public.
  • Google Reader
  • Back to the mid-tenure packet.

Of course, there were a lot of other little routine things during the day too, but these are the items of note. It was a rather calm day, which I haven’t had a lot of recently. Last week was crazy because I was catching up from being out for ALA.