Untapped Resources: Graduate Assistants and Collection Development

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In response to budgetary crises, academic libraries are often forced to relegate traditionally professional librarian duties to student assistants, paraprofessionals, and other support staff. Among the newly transferred roles is collection development including the analysis, selection, and maintenance of materials and resources. Review of the literature reveals that this trend has substantially grown over past years; however, the scope and level of responsibility of the transferred projects has been limited. Additionally, the literature severely lacks mention of the roles played by graduate students working in academic libraries, while pursuing their MLIS degrees. The objective of this session is to explore the use of graduate student assistants working toward their MLIS degree in the conduction of complex collection evaluation, selection, and analysis from the perspective of one graduate student assistant and one professional academic librarian. The attendees will learn about the benefits of involving graduate student assistants in the collection development process, in terms of the need to acquire hands on experience prior to firsttime professional employment, issues of current subject specialty knowledge, curatorial objectivity, and professional development in the mentor-mentee relationship. Introduction Collection-related duties have been part of the job description of public services library professionals since the 1970s (Wang et al., 2010). Sometimes referred to as the “liaison model,” this approach combines the typical responsibilities of public services, such as reference, instruction, and research consultations with outreach, relationship-building, and collection services for faculty and students. According to Wang et al. (2010), it is necessary for collection development to be an integral part of public services, in order to expand, diversify, but also more importantly, to increase the depth and focus of library holdings. Communication with faculty doing research in collection areas is necessary for this, along with an awareness of the research needs of the university community at large, which can only be gathered at the point of need and within the context of the service-desk environment. The expansion and diversification of public services duties, however, also brought a great need, both on MLIS programs and on university libraries who work with MLS graduate students, to adequately prepare them for liaison duties. Additionally, the traditional “reference” duties continued to expand to include multimodal technologies, serving the needs of many and remote users. Although a scheduled activity, reference is no longer only restricted to a 9 to 5 format and, in order to properly serve users, reference librarians are more so than ever actively engaged in reaching out and responding to unmet needs. On the other hand, funding for new positions has inversely diminished in recent years, creating both a gap in users’ need for both responsive and timely public services and well-crafted and immediately accessible library collections. In fact, it can be argued that budgetary restrictions today are shaping library operations more than anything else in the recent past, possibly since the advance of digital technologies and the Internet. Paraprofessionals and student assistants play an important and timely role in filling the human capital gap. Although frequently utilized in general public services, such as reference and instruction, the profession has been much slower in transferring the roles of collection development, such as the analysis, selection, and maintenance of materials and resources, to a non-MLIS workforce, including graduate assistants. Moreover, it is unclear if the curriculum of MLIS programs emphasizes collection development strongly enough. The reality is that most librarians entering the workforce have had little if any practical experience with collection development. This is somewhat counterintuitive, considering the importance of hands-on experience in the process. It is also not necessarily a failure on the part of MLIS students to seek more experience, but may be an oversight on the part of professionals