About a year and a half ago, the Libraries went through a rigorous strategic planning process involving the entire staff as well as our user community. We understood the need to build on our strengths and traditions in developing and managing print information collections and serving the needs of library users in our libraries. At the same time, we saw a future for the Libraries that would require a strong commitment to creating a digital information collection and delivering it to our users wherever and whenever they needed it. We also saw a developing role for libraries of all kinds to give users the tools they would need to find information in the digital world and to use it effectively for teaching, learning, and research. We saw an important niche for libraries to foster good citizenship in digital societies. We found our vision of the future exciting and energizing.
With our new strategic vision and plan in hand, we realized that we needed to look at how the Libraries were structured and organized to be able to move agilely and competently into the future. Our organization, administratively, with minor modifications, emerged in the 1980s, at a time when networked information and remote access to full-text information and the World Wide Web were only in their most embryonic stages. We were focused on the user on the campus and in our libraries. Our organization reflected what we did rather than who we served and what we hoped would be the outcomes of our work. Could this organization as it stood support our new directions? We did not believe it could. We believed that it needed to be completely rethought and restructured to be able to move in new directions with the energy and focus required.
We began our restructuring effort with a fairly simple goal, to make our organizational structure as much as possible reflect our strategic plan. The plan enumerated six primary programmatic goals. The organization, therefore, began with the identification of six program areas:
Information Resources, focused on the development and integration of traditional print-based information (i.e. books and journals) and digital information (i.e. e-books, e-journals, electronic databases, web-based information, multi-media information, and emerging new information media);
Information Services, focused on providing both traditional one-on-one user assistance, and on integrating library services and support to all UTA community members, with renewed efforts to deliver that assistance to users wherever they are and whenever they need it;
Information Access, focused on both traditional means of cataloging printed materials and applying the new tools of organizing digital information so that users have the best and most effective ways of finding all the information, regardless of its format, to solve information problems;
Information Literacy, building on our traditional methods of classroom based instruction, with the aim of building a strong foundation of information competencies on which these traditional instructional sessions can depend, and on integrating 21st century literacy into the curriculum as much as possible;
Information Technology, recognizing the critical role that the technological infrastructure plays in all that we do and the importance of keeping the technologies we use in line with the products and services we provide;
Distributed Access, whose role is wholly related to the creation and maintenance of digital information products and services that can be “distributed” to our users on “wherever, whenever” basis and to the support of students and faculty in the creation of digital information resources that can enhance learning throughout the campus.
Since we wanted our new organization to be team-based and highly collaborative, we shied away from using terms such as “department” to describe our emerging organization units, preferring “program areas” as maintaining the relationship to outcomes and users and the strategic plan’s programmatic themes. We also felt that terms like “departments” would lure us back into functioning in a bureaucratic and traditional pattern.
As we worked through our restructuring efforts, we realized that we needed to add two other program areas, neither of which were featured at the program level in the strategic plan, but both of which would continue to be important elements of our work. The first of these was Information Access, providing the means to deliver “packaged” information to users in the form of books, articles, course reserve materials, etc., using both standard across-the-desk and digitally enhanced delivery mechanisms. The second was Special Collections, a service that spans all the programmatic areas of the strategic plan, and which also has a unique and significant role to play in the digital library vision through the digitization and delivery of those special research resources that will be a part of the information-rich 21st century society.
We identified leaders for each of the program areas and engaged them in the process of developing the organizational schemes of their newly assigned program areas. The staff as a whole were invited to participate in these processes through a series of meetings where plans were shared and discussed. A difficult process of staffing the new organization gave many staff members the opportunity to choose new positions, and several chose positions quite different from those they had occupied. A commitment to increased training and development opportunities was offered to all staff, since almost every professional position was affected as well as many classified staff positions.
While we are still staffing the new organization, a number of new beginnings are already underway:
A $413,000 grant that has been received will create and equip a digital media classroom to support students and faculty in using technology in teaching and learning; create and equip a hands-on, electronic classroom to enable interactive instruction in the use of information resources; and upgrade an existing classroom with state-of-the-art instructional technology;
The development of a portal-like access to the Libraries website will enable users to create a personalized site with the resources and services they find the most useful and with access to their own personal information (e.g. what books they currently have checked out, what is the status of their interlibrary loan requests);
Electronic journal subscriptions have now far outstripped subscriptions to print journals, with access to the digital content of over 20,000 journals available through the Libraries’ website;
Electronic course reserves, hampered to some degree by restrictive copyright regulations, provide access to required and suggested course related materials from users’ homes, computer labs, dorm rooms, etc. (Early data suggests that students use these materials four or five times as much as they do traditional reserve materials.);
Metadata standards have been adopted and applied to provide access to digital information as a standard part of the workflow, and staff build and maintain databases to manage access to web-based resources;
Librarians, freed from reference desk coverage and the detailed aspects of collection development, are engaging academic programs in new ways, and with the specific research and learning needs and problems of faculty and students.
Our vision places the Libraries at the center of academic life. We believe our new organization is poised to make that a reality, and will allow us to build better, more effective collections of digital and traditional information, more targeted to the needs of our users. Our digital library services will bring easier and better access to users in an increasingly complicated information world. Our information literacy program, teamed with the traditional instructional program offered by our subject librarians, will enable every student to leave UTA with an educational experience that will equip them to be leading citizens of the 21st century, digital society.
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