From Engaging Liaison Librarians to Engaging Communities

Anne R. Kenney is University Librarian at Cornell University; e-mail: [email protected]. © 2015 Joan K. Lippincott, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. “It would be interesting to revisit UMN Libraries in three years and see how they are doing,” wrote Kara J. Malenfant in her 2010 article “Leading Change in the System of Scholarly Communication: A Case Study of Engaging Liaison Librarians for Outreach to Faculty.”1 Malenfant had documented a culture shift underway at the University of Minnesota (UMN) Libraries that focused liaison work outward toward campus engagement. In preparing this companion essay, I interviewed University Librarian Wendy Lougee, who affirmed that the forces at work then had ripened and matured at UMN. She noted that the shift described in the article had been underway for some time, so the expansion to scholarly communication was a natural extension of efforts to embrace a full spectrum of services from creation to curation. The library had earlier brought in R2 consulting to streamline workflows associated with the full spectrum of “selection to access” for monographs, moved aggressively to reconceive technical services, shifting greater investment to shelf-ready approval plans, devoted resources to developing a campus repository, and in general had embraced the concept of the diffuse library.2 These process improvements freed up capacity within existing staff to pursue other work. Within this context, the University of Minnesota became an early leader in the liaison movement, and Associate University Librarian for Academic Programs Karen Williams articulated a forceful sea change from a collections-centric to an engagement-centered model for librarianship. In the process, the campus came to view the library as a critical component in the scholarly communications infrastructure. The leadership and change process at UMN provided a strong exemplar for others to follow. Probably its most significant impact has been to influence the adoption of liaison functions at other academic libraries. At both ALA meetings in 2014, for example, approximately fifty coordinators of liaison programs from thirty-five academic research libraries met under the auspices of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to discuss ways to improve the liaison model.3 Similar gatherings and presentations on liaison activities have become a normal part of library conferences today. Given the fairly widespread take-up of the liaison model, what are some of the challenges that have arisen since Malenfant’s 2010 article? This essay focuses on six key issues that will affect the model moving forward.