Administrative

Technical Services Search TSWeb:

TechForce Retreat, 12-8-2005

Attendees: Z. Breeding, S. Davis, M.E. Wilson, R. Winjum

The TechForce held a retreat on Thurs., Dec. 8, 2005, to do some planning about the future of Tech Services and ways to strengthen our connection to the library's strategic initiatives. We want to encourage staff to be more involved in library-wide activities to give TS greater visibility and recognition. That's not an easy thing to do, and it really depends on TS staff ourselves taking the initiative whenever possible. Filling out the Staff Interest Survey is a step in the right direction.

We feel that we've done a lot to improve our workflow in TS, especially using the task forces over the past few years. We will use the task force model again when appropriate, but we didn't identify any specific needs right now. Our statistics show the amount of work we receive is decreasing in many areas, some more dramatically than others. As a result, we suspect that as new initiatives are identified, TS staff will be able to find the time to get involved by adjusting our other work. In the meantime, backlogs and catch-up work in various areas, such as gifts, can fill many, many hours.

We discussed some ideas for reducing time spent on our routine activities, but didn't come up with much. One thing we want to try is to reduce the time spent on annual reviews for those people who are doing a good job and have been for many years. We discussed other tasks that might be eliminated, but rejected every idea for good reasons.

We still recognize and value the importance of ordering, receiving, cataloging, and preparing for the shelves materials that are desired by faculty and students on campus. Keeping up with these tasks is essential.

We will be making some big changes in electronic resource management over the next year. We hope to find an electronic resources librarian soon. In the meantime, we don't really want to specify how to organize around e-resource management, but instead give the electronic resources librarian a chance to have some input and interaction with the many library people who do part of the e-resource management now.

It was suggested that our next TS-wide meeting should be a chance to talk about the Rush In-Process procedure and how it's working. We may try to do that in Jan.

It was productive to take a day to think about our current work and future directions. We see some changes on the horizon, but we don't see the need for drastic change now.