Relationship Building One Step at a Time: Case Studies of Successful Faculty-Librarian Partnerships

Abstract

Building strong relationships between academic librarians and teaching faculty is paramount for promoting services and resources. While librarians face challenges ranging from new technologies to heightened expectations and fiscal difficulties, the key work remains in solid relationship building. Drawing on the experience of a group of subject librarians and teaching faculty at The Ohio State University, this study examines the qualities that help liaison librarians develop relationships with faculty and support ongoing library services. It explores how liaison librarians build opportunities for ongoing relationships and how they assess the successes or failures of those interactions. It chronicles interview findings that detail the importance of such skills as patience, expertise, follow-through, responsiveness, and individuality if librarians are to build solid relationships and fruitful collaborations. Finally, it offers some preliminary observations on the teaching faculty's understanding of the librarians' relationship-building efforts. Relationship Building One Step at a Time 274 academic libraries. 1 They recommended that, to prepare for the future, libraries should hire "for competencies (skills in technology, deep data, deep subject, culture/language, etc.) rather than credentials; for potential (attitudes, aptitudes) rather than years of experience" and should create "career opportunities with new titles and new responsibilities to attract non-MLS professionals." In "Reinventing Our Work: New and Emerging Roles for Academic Librarians," Lori Goetsch re-envisioned librarians' duties into four core responsibilities: (1) basic consulting services, (2) management of the information life cycle, (3) collaborative print and electronic collection building, and (4) information mediation and interpretation. 2 James L. Mullins's article "Are MLS Graduates Being Prepared for the Changing and Emerging Roles That Librarians Must Now Assume Within Research Libraries?" acknowledges the seismic changes the profession has experienced and calls on library schools to better train librarians for this changing environment. 3 With these recommendations in mind, this article explores how these new skills, aptitudes, and responsibilities-coupled with core proficiencies such as expertise, understanding and listening, creativity, and follow-through-can assist liaison librarians in building relationships that flourish with teaching faculty. For the purposes of this article, faculty can be assumed to mean teaching faculty as opposed to librarians, though at Ohio State University librarians have faculty status and many also teach. This article also offers a perspective on how faculty approach relationship building and describes liaison librarians' efforts at intentionally developing these skills. The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus is a world-class public research university and the leading comprehensive teaching and research institution in Ohio. With more than 63,000 students, the Wexner Medical Center, 14 colleges, 80 cent...

Subject Librarianship in Kazakhstan: Exploring Information Literacy Skills, Functions, and Practices

“…A subject librarian can start researching these areas and offer more materials that are not yet available in the library's collection. As Diaz and Mandernach (Diaz, Mandernach, 2017) noted, building a relationship with members of the community starts when a great collaboration opens for new and additional projects. It gets even better when more projects are offered to the subject librarian since they saw your sincere service for them.…”

Beyond Individual Relationships: Programmatic Approaches to Outreach and Engagement at UC Santa Barbara Library

“…Only relatively recently have libraries and the literature attempted to characterise the cognitive and affective ('soft') skills that subject librarians deploy in their roles. In two small-scale studies, strong relationships between subject librarians and faculty were shown to be the result of planning, patience, networking, bilateral communication, trust, shared interests and goals, sincerity, flexibility, responsiveness and reciprocity (Schlak 2016;Díaz & Mandernach 2017). Since 2009, libraries at the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, have taken the lead in creating local standardised responsibilities, competencies and best practices for their subject librarians (Williams 2009;Ohio State University Libraries 2012;Horowitz, Crummett & Gabridge 2016).…”

A cascading approach to training discovery

“…Therefore, it is critical that librarians develop relationships and collaborate with teaching faculty in order to reach students. Librarians have documented numerous successful outreach and partnership efforts with faculty in varied applications, including liaison work (Díaz and Mandernach, 2017), train-the-trainer models (Gilman et al, 2017), and participating in digital research projects (Courtney and Courtney, 2015).…”