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This chapter discusses hurdles posed to a medium-sized public university library in the Midwest when they were asked by their Dean to create a faculty workload worksheet, rationale, and ultimately a set of guidelines. Faculty in other departments compute their loads using formulas based on course loads. How many hours they spend in the classroom, and how many hours they spend preparing for that time in the classroom are factored into the course loads expected for a full teaching load, with release granted in course load equivalents for research and/or service. Because librarian work does not typically involve teaching credit-bearing courses, a major challenge to constructing guidelines is equating library work with course loads. Calculating faculty workload for librarians commensurate with other faculty on campus is often complicated. To all of these challenges add the unique issues that are faced by the technical services (TS) librarian. TS work supports instruction and research but may involve little classroom contact with students, so it has even less resemblance to classroom instruction than other librarian work has. TS librarians spend their time in a wide variety of tasks. Exactly how to formulate this time in accordance with the rules for other departmental faculty is a challenge. The specific situation at this university added more complications as there was also a campus-wide mandate to ensure all workload policies are consistent and equitable.

Faculty unionization is growing, and library faculty members are included in many collective bargaining units. Yet there is a dearth of information on how well collective bargaining contracts address the sometimes unique nature of library faculty work. This article explores contracts in a number of Ohio universities and from selective institutions around the country to see how well they accommodate the professional and work-related needs of librarians. Major contractual issues addressed include governance, academic freedom, workload, salary, and the retention, tenure, and promotion (RTP) of faculty, among others.

Although a great deal has been written about the challenges and opportunities for collaboration between librarians and professors in higher education, most recommendations for faculty–library collaboration are written by librarians, published in librarian-oriented venues, and rely on second-hand accounts of professorial perceptions and experiences. Dialogue between librarians and professors is missing. In this chapter, the authors present a duoethnographic inquiry into a librarian–professor collaboration: the authors collaboratively examine their four years working together on the senior seminar course “Small Business Management” at Acadia University, Canada. In considering the evolution of their course and their collaboration, the authors reflect on six dimensions of their experiences: the way their collaboration has shaped the course learning outcomes, the value the authors have derived from collaboratively reflexive teaching, the workload tensions the authors have navigated, the challenge of “fitting in,” and the role of library champion. The authors then conclude with four insights from their professorial–librarian collaboration that might be transferable to other contexts of higher education: the importance of openness, collegiality, time for collaboration, and attention to the cultural gaps between professorship and librarianship.

While the important role of information literacy instruction as a central service in academic libraries is well observed in scholarly literature, there has been little examination of the impact of the rapid increase of instructional duties on practicing librarians, whose traditional instruction duties have expanded or whose positions have not traditionally required leading a classroom. The study in this chapter explores librarians’ perceptions of the impact that increased instruction tasks have had on their day-to-day and long-term goals, perceptions of the support they receive in performing their instructional duties, and what types of instruction training they have received throughout their career. The ways in which the addition of instruction duties for librarians have been perceived by the librarians themselves as they strive to increase support for instructional services without impacting the library’s ability to continue to perform traditional public and technical services functions is discussed as a marker of the future needs of the field and the necessity of recognizing professional strain.

This study takes the position that the vitality of academic libraries is grounded in the working experiences of its librarians. It suggests that a full understanding of problems facing contemporary information professionals in the post-industrial workplace requires an analysis of the labouring aspects as well as the professional nature of their work. The study of changes in the academic library work experience thus depicts the state of the library, and has implications for other intellectual workers in a social environment characterized by expanding information technologies, constricted economic resources, and the globalization of information production. Academic librarians have long recognized that their vocation lies not only in the classical role in information collection, organization, and dissemination, but also in collaboration with faculty in the teaching and research process, and in the contribution to university governance. They are becoming increasingly active in the protection of information access and assurance of information quality in view of information degradation on the Internet and various compromises necessitated by interaction with third party commercial information producers.

Academic libraries are increasingly involved in the support of student entrepreneurship on their campuses, both in programming and the curriculum. As the understanding that librarians are a key component for student success as part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem widens, libraries have been adapting and designating various staffing models in response. This chapter includes a literature review of case studies to examine various types of staffing in academic libraries providing support to entrepreneurship and innovation programs. The chapter highlights best practices for each of several staffing models. Potential models range from entrepreneurial outreach done by business librarians, creation of the entrepreneurship librarian position within an institution, how library-owned innovation/incubator spaces are staffed, and other creative models deployed for providing support to the entrepreneurial student.

Library buildings are routinely reimagined, remodeled, or built new to meet the changing needs of their community. The move from collection-centric to user-centric service models has generated numerous writings about the library as place and space. The one concept lacking in the scholarly discourse is the changing roles of librarians to meet the needs of these new spaces and places. How do librarians fit in the new equation? When addressing the professional identity of librarians, which aspect of their work will need to evolve and which will need to be let go? A critical facet of sustaining services in new spaces is the need to develop the sustainable librarian – to remove the stigma of the librarian as “jack of all trades, master of none.” In order to realize this new mindset of mastering our domain we need to begin reimagining our work. Some ways, this can be accomplished by writing increased flexibility into position descriptions and creating organizational structures to better support librarians within the new spaces. With these new developments to our professional identities, librarians may learn to employ entrepreneurial skills in order to continuously anticipate services and develop skill sets to aid the library’s ability to fulfill its purpose. The authors provide a literature review to discuss the changing role of the academic librarian to meet the evolution of the library building and services. We will provide an example through findings and practices of Grand Valley State University and how it reimagined roles in the early 2000s and continues to reimagine roles in a new building and a renovated branch library. The change of spaces and places in academic libraries to accommodate user needs and perceptions has impacted how academic librarians work in these spaces and places. Library administrators need to rethink workflows, and organizational charts by examining flexible workloads, cross-training initiatives, professional development around new skills, and the letting go of obsolete practices.

Originality/value – in this chapter, the authors will discuss how library leaders are charged with translating the new roles of their librarians to meet the needs of their community in these new spaces and how library leaders may look beyond the literature of the profession for ways to facilitate change.

Small branch libraries are found in many academic institutions. The purpose of this study was to look at specific aspects of management of these branches and in particular the librarians in these branches from an organizational perspective. The organizational structure and support for branches and librarians was looked at in two institutions, Lund University in Sweden, and Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa. An analysis was made through observation, documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with affected staff at both institutions, and the input compared to determine commonalities as well as differences. The small branch academic librarian is a vital part of the organizational landscape. Although needing strong support from the central organization in terms of mentoring and staff development, they provide a unique contribution to the profession as a whole as they fill the role of specialist generalist – a breed of librarian capable of working with the specialist in their own field, but at the same time covering all the specialized fields that users would expect in an academic library. Although a lot has been written about centralization and decentralization and the subsequent place of small branch libraries, the actual role of the librarians as a unique one within academic institutions has not been highlighted in the literature. This study aims to highlight this and assist libraries in assessing and improving the working relationship between the central organization and the small branch librarians.