The Engaged Librarian Framework at The Ohio State University Libraries by Craig Gibson (Professional Development Coordinator, The Ohio State University Libraries) <gibson.721@osu.edu>
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racing the intellectual lineage of key documents in any organization identifies priorities, goals, and values over time, and reveals what leaders and stakeholders value at various points, and how cultures themselves shift in order to address those priorities, goals, and values identified in those key documents. Strategic plans offer the most obvious example for most library organizations, but the genres vary: annual goals statements, white papers, thought pieces, key addresses by the director or dean, and proliferating blog posts by members of the organization. These documents show the intellectual trajectories of various ideas as they evolve over years and identify inflection points in organizational culture: aspirations for a new set of operating principles, plans for specific actions to effect change, and articulations of the “hopes and dreams” of the organization and its leaders. In the past fifteen years, the academic library community has engaged in concerted discussions on the future of the liaison librarian role — whether that group of librarians are known as subject specialists, subject librarians, research librarians, departmental librarians, or by some other name. These concerted discussions drew upon major agreement in the profession that key drivers impacting the liaison role include changes in the technology environment, in scholarly publishing, in teaching practices, and in the increase of more diverse student populations, all resulting in transformed faculty and student behaviors in seeking and using information and scholarship. These changes are also influencing how key academic leaders such as Provosts and Deans themselves understand academic libraries and their mission in the future. Notable discussions have occurred through the ARL Reimagining the Library Liaison institutes and workshops associated with it (Association of Research Libraries, 2015-18); through the ARL-sponsored Toronto/Columbia/ Cornell Liaison Institute (Association of Research Libraries, 2015); through numerous papers and studies presented at ACRL conferences; and through the examples and influence of thought leaders and practitioners in the profession such as Jaguszewski and Williams at the University of Minnesota (Jaguszewski and Williams, 2013), and Anne Kenney at Cornell (Kenney, 2014). Rita Vine of the University of Toronto has worked extensively with ARL and other librarians on the issue, and served as Visiting Program Officer on “Reimagining the Library Liaison” during 2017/18 (Vine, 2018). The discussion has been rich and has surfaced many issues surrounding the liaison role that continue to enliven debate, reflection, and changes in practices among liaison librarians, either individually or in cohorts. One research library that undertook to expand the conception of the liaison librarian role through the lens of “engagement” is The Ohio State University. The development of its Engaged Librarian Framework marked an inflection point for its organization, while also bringing to the fore a number of issues that are ongoing and unresolved because of the expansive meaning of “engagement” itself and the ongoing discussion about individual versus group work, relative priorities of various elements of the Engaged Librarian Framework across different liaison roles, and ongoing changes in the university itself. 12 Against the Grain / September 2020
Developing the Framework In 2011, a team of new Associate Directors arrived and promptly formulated, with the previous Director of Libraries, a new Strategic Plan for the period 2011-2016. One of the key drivers in the new strategic plan was a need to be connected more to campus constituents while also ensuring tracking of progress on initiatives and projects. One of the major points in early discussions about the new strategic plan was to build upon previous individual successes around engagement with academic departments but to mainstream those successes in a programmatic way. The then Associate Director for Research and Education took previous work done in a “tactical” strategic plan used for a briefer time period, before he arrived, and focused on the concept of “engagement” found in that briefer plan, and decided to build a new Framework for engagement based on it. That Framework drew upon his previous experience at another institution in leading liaison librarians and also in thinking about new metrics for engagement. In fall 2011, he led a planning group of library faculty to create the Engaged Librarian Framework as an open, living document that would reflect work already done across the cohort of liaison librarians (known more traditionally as subject librarians at Ohio State), but also to include curators and archivists and Area Studies Librarians. To this end, the planning group included representatives from the major divisions within the Libraries with key internal stakeholders, those most involved in thinking about what engaged librarianship means. The divisions were Research and Education; Special Collections and Area Studies; and Technical Services, Collections, and Scholarly Communication. The group met for three months and created what became known as the Engaged Librarian Framework (ARL SPEC Kit, 2015), which still serves as a foundational document for the Libraries at Ohio State today, even if it does not address more contemporary issues that have surfaced in recent discussions more generally about the role of liaison librarians. The ELF group drew upon other models already available in academic libraries: notably those of the University of Minnesota Libraries, the University of Iowa Libraries, and Duke University Libraries. Each of these models drew upon Minnesota’s work and documentation, which grew out of a concomitant research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (University of Minnesota, 2006). That project identified key research needs of faculty and graduate students in the humanities and social sciences as points of opportunity for library involvement through what we often call the “research lifecycle.” The lifecycle was an archetypal model of how researchers conduct their work through an array of variable streams of activity, whether ideation through brainstorming with colleagues, initial data collection and hypothesis generation, finding collaborators, literature reviews, tracing patterns in research, seeking grant support, and publishing findings. During the time the Framework was in development, a libraries-wide workshop was held on Engaged Librarianship, led by the Associate Director, and key discussion points were documented and saved to expand the draft of the Framework continued on page 14
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