Job Transition (guest post by Georgette Nicolosi)

Georgette Nicolosi is the Business and Engineering Librarian at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri. She supports faculty within Business, Economics, and Engineering Management/Systems Engineering, but also serves as the university’s Online Learning librarian. Prior to her position at Missouri S&T, Georgette was the Communications and Business Librarian at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her MLIS from Syracuse University and her MSc in Marketing from The London School of Economics and Political Science.

In Fall 2023, I transitioned to a smaller institution, with approximately 6,000 full-time enrolled students. This move came after working at a campus with around 49,000 full-time students. At the larger institution, I was one amongst seven business librarians and was a liaison to two specific subject areas within business. At my new institution, I am the only business librarian for the business college, which includes three departments. Furthermore, prior to joining my current library, librarians were not subject-specific liaisons and just tried to collectively assist patrons as best as they could. The transition to having subject-specific liaisons began in August 2023. Furthermore, a little bit after I arrived at my new institution, librarians were officially inaugurated as non-tenure track faculty, widening our pool of responsibilities and our representation on campus. As a result, my responsibilities have expanded significantly, both in my liaison areas and within the library. With only fourteen full-time staff and faculty members, we all find ourselves needing to stretch beyond what one might consider our ‘usual’ roles.

Several publications have explored the experiences of librarians transitioning between different types of libraries. For example, Ladd and Reid (2020) discuss transitions from academic to corporate libraries, and from public to academic libraries. In 2020, Herman Buck and Duff published a book aimed at guiding librarians through such transitions, providing advice on adjusting to a new environment regardless of its size or type. Their focus included strategies for orienting oneself and managing culture shock. However, there has not been much open access discourse regarding those making institutional transitions, particularly in relation to size of the institution and infrastructure. 

I wanted to use this post in order to share my experiences transitioning into these new responsibilities and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. My hope is that by sharing my journey, I can offer insights to others facing similar challenges or considering a change in their roles.

Scope of Responsibilities 

As mentioned, changing institutions naturally comes with a shift in the scope of responsibilities, even if you find a role that behaves the same way and comes with the same requirements. However, this shift is even more drastic when moving to an institution of a different size. While I was at my larger institution, I was primarily focused on business librarian-related situations, whether these situations were patron interactions, or thinking about ways in which we could do programming surrounding business-related topics. I would volunteer at library-wide functions, but I was not heavily involved with planning or set up. Now, in my new role, I find myself wearing multiple hats and handling a broader range of services, such as thinking about the website interface, working our annual book sale, creating book displays, formulating a training course for our circulation employees, re-thinking our library spaces, learning about research data management, and much more. Balancing these additional responsibilities can distract me from my focus on subject-specific programming, but working on new projects is fun and brings variety to my day. Things I learn while working on these new projects are often highly applicable to my liaison-focused responsibilities. For example, working more closely on collection development and displays has pushed me to consider how to better collect within business-oriented fields, and how to create more impactful programming on financial literacy, leadership, and other related topics.

Library Dynamics

One of the most obvious changes to my workday is in relation to team dynamics. Moving to a smaller library means I’ve had to adjust to working more closely with a smaller team of colleagues. At a larger institution, I often communicated remotely, through email, when I had a question about something outside of the business library. Within the business library, I worked with my co-workers when there was a business-related item to tend to, but we often also worked remotely since we were primarily focused on our liaison areas. Now that I am in a smaller institution, remote work is limited due to the fact that we need to all step up and work on everyday library functions, and fill in for people when they’re not in the office. Additionally, we have to work more closely and quickly, particularly on library-wide decision-making regarding acquisitions or strategic planning. Whereas at larger institutions there are usually multiple levels of administration and hierarchies, at my new institution, the research librarians report directly to the Dean and Associate Dean. The Dean also works closely with circulation and other patron-focused teams. As such, interpersonal communication sometimes feels more important when working at a smaller institution as communication failures can easily lead to disruptions. This also means that we all have to be flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances and see how we can quickly learn new skills (i.e.., technical services operations, cataloging, interlibrary loan) if we have turnover or other sudden changes. 

Additionally, I have become the only business librarian at my institution, which comes with some challenges, though I know working as the sole business librarian is not a unique situation. However, for me, this means I more heavily rely on outside resources, conferences, communications, and events to learn about what is new and current in business librarianship. I also pay closer attention to what my faculty is working on so I can keep up with the literature. The faculty at my new university is fortunately pretty vocal about what they need, but overall, I’ve found I need to be much more proactive when it comes to keeping up with the business world whereas before, I could rely on others.

Setting up Partnerships

My position is entirely new, so setting up partnerships and establishing relationships is something that I’ve had to start immediately, from the ground up. In my old position, the majority of relationships I had with offices or people on campus had already been established by the previous librarian in the role. However, as the liaison program at my new institution is fresh, I had a lot of work to do in terms of distinguishing myself on campus. 

I started out by emailing the department heads of my liaison areas and asking to introduce myself at faculty meetings. I also introduced myself at the board meeting for the business school. Secondly, I set up office hours in my departments. Though, in my experience, office hours can be hit or miss, it at least allows me to meet my faculty face-to-face, even if it is just by way of greeting. I don’t expect to receive lots of questions during these periods, but there have been situations in which ideas and conversations have spurred as faculty walk by. Additionally, I’ve created newsletters through the Smore platform that I send out, quarterly, to faculty and office administration. I know that some campuses require all communication to be sent out using campus marketing, but thankfully, I’ve been able to use Smore and create a neat design. The nice thing about Smore – depending how you deliver your newsletters – is that it allows you to see analytics. I’ve found that all my faculty at least open the newsletter, and most interact with other links, spending a few minutes reading through. I also have always gotten “thank you” emails after each send-out. As such, I think it has been a great way to interact with faculty outside of standard email communications. 

Other departments that I’ve begun working with are the student success center, our K-12 STEM programs center, and the financial office. I also formulated the relationship between Graduate Education and the library, and created an online module about the library for graduate students to complete upon campus arrival. Relationships are still growing and shaping, but it seems that, slowly but surely, more faculty, students, and staff are understanding why liaison librarians are important. My next step is to create a partnership with our entrepreneurship center, as this was something I did at my previous institution and there is much that can be done within that space. 

Collection Development 

Finally, collection development is the aspect of librarianship that changed the most when I moved to a smaller institution. When I worked at the larger institution, I was rarely involved in strict acquisitions-related decision-making. Looking at costs of databases, in particular, was taken care of by department heads or senior librarians. I was mostly consulted regarding specific journals or when we weeded physical items. I was not at that institution for very long, however, so this could have changed with time, but it still appeared that decisions based on subscriptions and other high-value products were made by senior faculty within the library. Since arriving at my new institution, I’ve had to learn how to look at our budget and the costs of subscriptions, and I often think about what products are best to serve our campus. As expected, the number of resources accessible at a smaller library are fewer than at a larger one, which makes acquisitions decisions difficult, especially when prices increase. As such, we are often monitoring the usage of our products, assessing when products can be swapped out for other ones, and being creative with using open access resources. This is the first position in which I am directly involved with contacting vendors for quotes, and where I am actively purchasing by-request materials by faculty. Due to our limited resources, we commonly receive book requests. We also often work with faculty to locate articles or offer other solutions when we cannot deliver an item by purchase or through InterLibrary Loan. These processes consume much of our day-to-day responsibilities and are tasks that I had not experienced prior. Though consuming, these processes keep me close to business subjects and emerging topics in business research as I need to keep an eye on what type of material faculty are requesting and what resources we can offer patrons.

Conclusion

In transitioning from a larger to a smaller institution, I’ve experienced a great shift in my daily routine and how I approach my job. The broader scope of duties I now have requires adaptability and flexibility but provides lots of learning opportunities despite the challenges. I hope others who have experienced a similar transition can relate to this post, and those who are considering a transition may find this post useful. I enjoy reading about the structure of other librarian jobs, so I hope to see more literature on day-to-day job responsibilities or job changes. Have you experienced a similar transition? Or are you considering one? Tell us about it in the comments!

References

Buck, T. H., & Duff, S. (2020). Guidance for librarians transitioning to a new environment. Routledge.

Dana L. Ladd & Janet M. Reid (2020) Transitioning between Libraries: It is All About Skills and Experience, Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 20:3, 231-241, DOI: 10.1080/15323269.2020.1778992