Organization Monkey

I was delighted to find out that I have been named one of the 2013 cohort of LMU’s Senior Vice President Fellows Program. It’s designed to let us “explore how leaders in colleges and universities exercise constructive influence to help institutions achieve their mission and goals.” I’m in a group of five fellows, and paired with our Senior VP mentors, we total ten. We’ll be meeting and traveling together throughout the year, reading quite a bit. There are a couple of mini-retreats each month, with themes like “inclusive colleges and universities,” “leadership epistemology.” I’m honored to be part of this group and will enjoy working with my mentor, the university’s CFO. I’ll be doing this in addition to my regular duties at the library. Time management, FTW!

At my eye exam yesterday I mentioned that I’ve started to hold my phone at a little bit of a distance now when I text, so I was instructed to get a pair of glasses to use when I read (“cheaters”). That should really come in handy with all the reading I’m about to embark on with this fellowship program. Our first mini-retreat is at the end of January; required reading is four articles and two book chapters.

Four months ago I shared an abbreviated Gantt chart I made for myself at work, to keep my too-many tasks from getting out of control this year. Sure, I could have decided to try to do less, which would negate the need for such a thing, but apparently “doing less” is not in my nature.

I thought I’d show you what my chart looks like today. A few more tasks made it on to the list, start/end dates have been adjusted, and I’m way behind on my quality control project.

I’m really liking sharing the chart with people when they ask me to join a committee or work on a project. It’s an easy visual way to communicate when my free-er times of the year are, and when I’m totally jammed up with existing projects. If the first four months of using this kind of project-tracker are any indication, I’ll be using this kind of thing again next year.

The library renews its subscriptions to print journals in the summer, so that by the fall our subscription vendor can place the renewals with the hundreds of publishers or suppliers we get the journals from. Using this time line of reviewing our titles in the early summer, updating our vendor database with our renewal decisions in late summer, and the vendor placing the renewals in the fall is all designed to make our renewal for the next calendar year seamless. The idea is that we don’t want to miss a single issue of a journal, and generally if we use this workflow we don’t miss any.

At the beginning of the new calendar year when our check-in staff person receives an issue of a journal to which we’ve canceled a subscription, she’ll toss it in a box under her desk. By the end of February the box is usually full. This means that the publisher or supplier didn’t get the message until it was too late that we intended to cancel, and they’ll send us one or two more issues of a journal before their own databases are updated with the cancellation.

Occasionally we’ll continue to get issues past those one or two hangers-on, and that usually signifies a problem, often that we told the vendor not to renew but the publisher didn’t get the message; they think we still have an active subscription. When this happens we send the issues back in order not to be invoiced for a title we didn’t want to receive. By March this kind of thing is normally all figured out. Except this year. Here’s a pile that we’re still getting. To be investigated!

inspired by the conversation on friendfeed about the nearly impossible qualities a library is looking for in a new hire: http://friendfeed.com/lsw/8c3f8c41/my-kingdom-for-e-resources-librarian

in the last 3 years of my work experience i’ve brought an e-resources management system to fruition, started a perpetual access inventory project, am in the middle of a thorough review of license agreements, tried a new usage statistics reporting system, and organized our order records for maximum ease for other kinds of reporting. dude, i’m tired. i’m also wondering what happens next. we’re *so close* to having a functional, easy workflow with quality people appropriately trained to do the heavy load of work required for the management of e-resources. what happens then? what will we be prompted to think about when the big technical problems have been resolved? how have you addressed this at your own institution? have you been able to think about this at all?

the e-resources world is a fragile ecosystem because we rely so heavily on a variety of data sources (e-journal and e-book MARC records likely come from different suppliers, holdings information from possibly another supplier) and services (openURL, statistics reporting), and having those merge seamlessly with our e-resources management system relies on quality metadata. if any of those things goes wrong, if one piece doesn’t connect properly, our ecosystem is quickly thrown into disarray. when the processes are working well, which is happening more often than not as vendors and suppliers are getting used to providing data in standardized ways, i feel pretty optimistic about where e-resources technical requirements are headed. are you too? can you see beyond the realm of our current technical successes and limitations to think about what happens next?

When a major content provider goes down, social networks light up with alerts from people noticing the problem, cries of alarm from students trying to finish last-minute projects, and reports from librarians of calls with database sales representatives with the story of why the resources are down. Earlier this week our main database provider, EBSCO, went offline unexpectedly due to an error on their system back end. Curiously missing from the usual network of communication was any contact from the provider. Not a peep, not on twitter, facebook, or e-mail.

From a library perspective, when a major content provider goes down, it is a legitimate disaster. For electronic resources librarians, all the usual work stops and crisis management mode takes over. At my institution we alert all library staff via e-mail of the problem to let them know we are aware of the problem and are monitoring it, we update our public services wiki so that staff sitting at service points like the circulation desk and reference desk are aware. As we get more information we send out follow-up e-mails to our library staff. When the problem is resolved we alert them that way, too. During the day we follow twitter, facebook, and the lsw page on friendfeed to see what other librarians are saying, to get any hints of information that may be helpful to our patrons. Unfortunately for all of us, we did it all this week without the help of EBSCO.

I’ve sent a note to our database sales rep outlining what I’d like to see when e-resource problems arise, and she graciously acknowledged the note noting that she would forward to her director for consideration. In the meantime, however, damage has been done. Choice tweets were plucked from the twittersphere, highlighting the frustration of library patrons trying to access the downed resources, collated at http://storify.com/jeremygsnell/ebsco-the-reckoning. What a shame that we weren’t able to respond to their concerns with any real information about the problem. I wonder if a degree of trust patrons have with their libraries has been broken as a result of this.

We’ve taken the opportunity here to examine our own disaster planning process for when something like this happens again. There are a variety of options for communicating outages and problem resolutions. I wonder which of these your institution uses:
e-mail to library staff
e-mail to university
e-mails to faculty liaisons
blog post
note on the main library web page
alerts in the ILS
facebook
twitter

When I’m back from ER&L I’ll be drafting a communication plan for how the library will respond when an individual resource goes down as well as when a suite of resources goes down. Do you already have such a document? If so, please consider sharing.