Beyond Our Walls:

Anything can happen in the Zone: Library and Departmental Change Driven by Migration to a Cloud-based Library Management System

“…Additionally, according to the American Association of University Professors 6 and others, 7 8 higher education has come to resemble the business world too much, galvanizing librarians already not inclined to looking outside their profession for ideas to become even less so. And yet, Hirshon's article 25 years ago was advocating abandoning "the conventional library organization chart, which neatly divides public and technical services" 9 as well as addressing the broader set of skills needed by those in public positions as they need to interact with systems more often, and conversely, those in the technical positions as they come into contact with the public more often. 10 Indeed, as Gertrude Koh argued quite presciently in 2000, a more apt description of the work that is done traditionally in technical services departments might be "knowledge access management" 11 a phrase which embraces the fact that while the skills required are similar, there is a "clear ideological transformation … from collections held in a library to access plus" (166).…”

“…23 All of this sounds quite appealing, and in line with Hirshon's description of the vision and focus that should be reflected in a library's organizational structure. 24 Getting to that point is easier outlined than done, however.…”

“…Aside from the work around pulling and refining data, there were many steps of the actual migration project provided by OCLC which helped us as a library think differently about what Technical Services does for the library, and by extension, what the outdated processes, workflows, rules, and organizational methods we'd applied to our collections were actually meaning for our patrons. Truthfully, whether Technical Services librarians and staff see their work as central to the operation of a library (the Ptolemaic model, again), or are simply in reaction to outside forces (following the Copernican model), 36 everything done by those in the department was undertaken to improve access. However, as the patterns and modes of access changed, the collections remained governed by the same rules and procedures which were now outdated.…”