Saturday, October 23, 2004

Meeting Paula Kaufman, Library Director of U of I - Urbana Champaign

Paula Kaufman spoke to the group about the role of the Director. She has been at U of I for five years.

She explained that she has very little hands-on management in the library -- this role is delegated to the Associate Directors -- as she spends three-quarters of her time outside the library. Basically, her role is to secure the library's financial and political future; to make the strongest case for money on campus and to then explain to library staff why we didn't get as much as "they" gave us. Some of the difficulty in this case was getting the staff to see that the library was part of the greater whole! About 20% of the university budget was allocated to the library and these came from state funding, tuition, research grants & contracts, and gifts - funds from individuals, corporates, grants etc. There was currently a fundraising campaign for the library on campus with several campus partners. (I attended a football match - Illini vs UCLA - which was a fundraiser for the library and during which the library was promoted, and fundraisers honoured)

Part of Paula's role is to build a shared vision with staff in the library. It is also balancing the generational expectations and challenges of having four different generations in the library. Handling user expectations especially when the users demand instant responses -- she pointed out that we don't need to meet every user expectation. And then there is the challenge of recruiting and retaining librarians and staff & fostering career development.

The library is open to everyone in the local community, and has a good working relationship with the local public libraries. U of I library is also part of several multi-type consortia. (A thought here is that this is something that the libraries in South Africa should look at - yes, we have interlibrary loans etc, but maybe the issue of multi-type regional based consortia should be explored more)

Paula described the different staff that she has working in the library:-

1. Faculty who are librarians who are either research or service librarians on a tenure track; they have faculty status (my peers' business cards reads "Associate Professor"), hold advanced degrees and have excellent records of research and scholarship (means published) and service (which includes service to the professional association, presenting at conferences etc)

2. Academic Professional staff who are not librarians but could work in the Development office as fundraisers, or perhaps IT professionals and so on

3. Civil Service Staff who are not faculty -- this include library support staff (clerks and assistants)

4. Graduate Assistants who are pre-professional employees. These are usually MLS students. There are currently about 104 working in the library, covering the various reference desks etc. (Some are involved in presenting training sessions in the library, answering chat-reference queries etc)

5. Student workers who then work at the circulation and reserves desks.


(A very good book that she recommends is the Effective Executive by Peter Drucker.)

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