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Every library I have worked at has had an uneasy caste system between the faculty and staff. While I understand this to extent, this delineation is used without rhyme or reason much of the time. The implication is that this means the librarians are treated as “career professionals” and the staff is merely “the help” (more on this in a minute).

I was pleasantly surprised to see the University of Iowa waive the MLS requirement for their current “Director of Information Technology” job posting (MS Word Document).

The University of Iowa Libraries seeks a creative, experienced professional to lead our information technology (IT) operations. Building on the Libraries’ current capabilities, the Director will provide innovative leadership in the use of technology to deliver information resources and services to the Libraries’ user communities. The Director for Library Information Technology reports directly to the University Librarian and is a member of the Libraries’ Executive Council contributing to overall strategic planning, program development and evaluation, and the allocation of resources in support of the Libraries’ mission.

This is a senior administrative position responsible for IT planning, the development of system-wide policies and procedures, and the coordination of information technology activities throughout the library system. The Director will supervise a department of 11 staff responsible for desktop support and technical training, systems administration and security/rights management, and applications development. Collaborative and advocacy activities with other library administrators and staff as well as members of the IT community on campus, the state, nationally and internationally are key responsibilities of this position. This Director serves as the Libraries’ liaison to CNI, EDUCAUSE, and similar organizations.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree

• Minimum of 9 years of library information technology experience in a university environment

• Demonstrated knowledge of current trends and best practices in the application of information technology in research libraries and higher education

• Demonstrated experience promoting and working effectively in a diverse environment

• Evidence of highly effective interpersonal and communication skills.

• Evidence of analytical and creative problem-solving skills

• Library-wide perspective and ability to contribute to planning and system-wide administration of the Libraries

• Record of active participation in national pertinent professional associations

While I meet the “minimum requirements” for this position, I am not fully qualified… somewhere in this job’s requirements (maybe not actually written in it) is a healthy desire to live in or near Iowa City (which I do not possess). Still, this is very, very progressive for school of UIowa’s size. They are indicating that if you have spent 9 years of your life working in libraries and have shown the initiative to participate professionally and whatnot, you’re the sort of person who they want on their team. The idea being that the MLS is not a terribly good indicator of skills and (for this sort of position, anyway) may actually limit the pool of good potential candidates they may get.
When I was hired as “Web and Application Development Coordinator” at Emory, they stripped any “faculty-ness” from the position which, in turn, devalued the authority the position had — at least this seemed true in practice. The position could have been pretty similar to that of Iowa’s (I still would have been miserable at it), but the faculty wasn’t quite able to make the leap to label me a “peer”.

Just like my Emory position, though, Iowa is requiring that the position be a “manager” position to get invited to the “career professional” table. There are a lot of librarians at that table who are not managers.

This gap was made evident eariler this week here at Tech. I frequently hear about things going on in the library secondhand due to the fact that I am not faculty. Lord knows how much I never hear. We have a mailing list (lib-fac) where “career professional” sorts of announcements are made and, on Tuesday, a meeting was held for the faculty only to hear people report back what they had learned at ALA Midwinter.

My beef here is, why the faculty only distinction? If they were talking about tenure review or the sorts of things that couldn’t affect me by nature of my employment status that would be one thing. They are talking about things that I would like to know about, however, and could possibly contribute a voice in the discussion. I am not entirely sure why I should be left out.

It’s possible that I could be included just by asking to be. But why am I (or any other staff that has an interest in the profession, for that matter) being excluded in the first place?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s a little discouraging to work to be treated as a peer and a colleague in a national/international community and not in my own organization.

My intention here is not to single out Georgia Tech; this is prevalent throughout libraries everywhere (at least, from what I’ve seen it has). I’m just calling for the possibility of a third caste: those that are making a career in libraries, but have no desire for faculty status (or management).

Last week I was reading Dorothea Salo’s posting about OCLC’s report on library branding, and it got me to thinking about this a bit.

In particular, I thought about her comment:

I would want to trial-balloon a “Deep Web” play in my next survey, if I were OCLC. I would want to know how many people have heard of the Deep Web, what they think is in it, whether they think information useful to them is in it, whether they would access it through their libraries if they could. This moves away from free-vs.-paid and toward exclusive-vs.-nonexclusive. People like the idea of being privileged. If the library is a place that privileges them, I think they’ll go for it. Special-collections and archives get a boost in this campaign, too; access to rare or unique information is the ultimate in privilege.

I see a tension here. While many push for an “information wants to be free” model, this would, inherently, devalue the role of the organization that makes it free. In fact, to take her quote even farther, this is especially true of special collections and archives.

Allow me to explain.

Users aren’t particularly discriminatory as to where they get their information. Our students or faculty don’t really care if the article or research they are looking at comes to them courtesy of Georgia Tech or if it was found in Citeseer. They are more likely to say they found something in “Google Scholar” vs. the actual institutional repository for the school they are actually getting it from. The more open the information is, the less exclusive our collection becomes and the less leverage and value we hold (at least conforming to our traditional model).

With special collections, this is especially true. Special collections are “special” because they are “unique”. Libraries spend a lot of money curating these collections. Historically, this has enjoyed a fairly good ROI because it distinguishes the library (and therefore, larger institution) as something “special” itself. These materials are exclusive to that particular institution and give value to the collection.

However, there is pressure to digitize and publish these collections. If all of these collections are digitized and published, we have a bunch of silos strewn about the internet requiring the user know about find them to use them. Since it is a lot of work to digitize and mark up these collections, there’s not a terribly good return for the effort.

In an effort to improve findability, the collections need to be aggregated with other similar collections to increase their exposure. However, the result of this is improved awareness and accessibility, but at the same time it dilutes exclusiveness and branding. Whoever provides the aggregation/discovery service gets the benefit of the content, so some of the content providers (inherently) must lose.

So, what does this mean? It should not prevent us from making our collections more open and accessible. That runs counter to our mission. However, we need to start thinking of ways to generate value when our information is free. There are plenty of ways of doing that, such as tailoring services that aggregates the “free” information for our communities, or building systems that can use the information in unique and specialized ways.

There is a large cultural shift that needs to take place to realize this future, however. We still place a lot of emphasis (way too much, really) on the size and uniqueness of our collections. With a world of information available (or a lot of it, at any rate), it’s not so much an issue of how many books you have in your building, but how you are able harness all the good data and present it in useful and meaningful ways. There aren’t easy metrics to this. ARL just can’t count book spines and annual budget. Serious consideration needs to be paid to what and how a library is utilizing the collection outside their walls.