Hi all,
For today, let’s spend our time on:
- Changes to TSI focus – Below is a message that Jim LeBlanc sent to one of the other TSI working groups to explain changes in the focus of TSI. The specifics relating to their team can be ignored, but the points listed and general gist of the message apply to TSI as a whole. We should discuss how this might affect our work short and long term.
- For discussion on Monday
- NERL resources/licenses, is there a role for the e-journal preservation person or project ?
- Contacts in CE (all or NERL, or none?) - in all cases we need labeling to make relationships clear.
- For discussion on Monday
- RM Implementation Updates
- Other topics
Talk to you later.
Jesse
As you know, we’ve been struggling with the idea of technical services “integration” for several months now, ever since we confirmed that neither Columbia nor Cornell staff may in any way, at any level, supervise staff at the partner library. We have even struggled to get a clear picture of what exactly we mean by “supervision.” In short, the project as originally conceived now seems impossible.
For this reason, the JSMIN group, along with Xin and Bob, have proposed changes to the TSI vision. I’m writing as your liaison from JSMIN to the TSI Monograph Receiving Working Group to alert you to these changes. They still require approval from the 2CUL Steering Committee – in particular from Anne Kenney and Jim Neal – since there’s a significant amount of Mellon money involved in supporting the project. Nonetheless, we feel we absolutely must move forward towards a different horizon, if we don’t want to squander the excellent work we’ve all done so far in preparing the ground for useful collaboration between our two outstanding technical services divisions.
Here’s what we’ve proposed. Please bear in mind that this plan is still tentative, but do feel free to share it discreetly with others (like Pedro Arroyo) whom you’ve been working with. There will be a public announcement after the plan clears 2CUL Steering, but (as we’ve learned from recent experience), that could take a while.
- Cease work on integrating nearly 150 library staff without the possibility of a single reporting hierarchy at any level.
- Change the nature of TSI from 2CUL Technical Services Integration to the 2CUL Technical Services Initiative to allow TSI planners to focus on areas of more promising collaborative projects and alliances.
- Evaluate goals for individual collaborative efforts on the basis of four driving factors: quality, productivity, improvement, and innovation. Discourage collaborative ideas whose goals do not meet one or more of these criteria, but are initiated merely for the sake of the collaboration.
- Test and assess collaborative efforts based on the criteria defined above and for their strategic value in addressing the priorities of the individual institutions.
- Continue the middle-out approach to TSI planning to leverage the experience and expertise of staff at all levels, as well as engaging and building support among key mid-level staff who will ultimately need to carry the initiative(s) forward.
- Continue to build on the excellent contributions of the TSI Working Groups in Phase 1 (information-gathering) by examining more deeply the differences in 2CUL institutional culture, practices, and the reasons for them.
- Pursue additional research into the broader landscape of collaboration among libraries in order to better situate the 2CUL TSI experience within this trend and to share what we are learning with other ARL libraries.
- Reconsider the need to implement Alma at this time. Without a mandate to integrate, the primary impetus (from a technical services point-of-view) to adopt such an immature system is no longer relevant, and the impact of a premature Alma implementation on TSI is likely to be more disruptive than useful.
- Rekindle the positive energy of TSI by focusing on those ideas, however small, that are clearly beneficial to both institutions rather than on the grand idea of integrating two major, but non-neighboring, library operations. In other words, build and maintain the Technical Services Initiative from the ground up, while leading from the middle-out.
We will be talking about this change of direction more fully at the next Working Group Leads meeting on July 15th. In the meantime, please let me know if you have any questions about all this, or feel free to talk to your supervisors (who were both part of the conversation within JSMIN). I’m going to away from the office June 12-30, but will be reading and responding to email intermittently during that time.