Are shelvers really circ?
Ok, I'm sure that most of you know that here at Central, shelvers (LAIs mostly) belong to Circulation. In a way that sort of makes sense, as they are grouped together in the location that actually handles the books. However, I've come to the conclusion that this causes a lot of workflow problems and communication problems (or the latter causes the former). As you branch guys know, you can talk to your librarians about any issues you have with the stacks. For example, you go over to the 600's and you see don't have any shelving room. You can go to your adult librarian and say, "Well, the 600's are packed really tight and we don't even have shifting room. We either have to do a massive shift or some weeding." Either way, they make the decision but with your input. Here at Central, any such requests have to go from department head to department head. If the children's shelvers can't shelve because the shelves are too tight, they have to tell Susan who tells Sara. Sara then informs the Children's librarians that her shelvers have noted a problem and makes a request. Then they either take 6 months to respond for whatever reason or basically say no. Recently we had a situation where the fiction shelvers wanted to shelve the books with co-authors only by author and title, disregarding any extra authors. However, it is established that we shelve by both author's names (ex. Norton first, then Norton and Moon). Well, instead of just talking to the fiction librarians directly, Arthur brought it up in a staff meeting where Sara assigned him the task of asking all the branches how they do and reporting back to her so she could as fiction if they could possibly change it. I haven't heard any further progress on this.
Basically, what I'm saying is, do you guys think that shelvers should belong to the librarians or to the SLAs? That's basically what the division comes down to. My idea was to put all SLA and LAII positions in Circ and give the shelvers directly to the librarians. This relates to my other idea of creating a non-SLA but non-librarian position for those SLAs who are doing librarian jobs (such as Raeside and Laroche and the children's SLAs) and giving them to their departments. I say all SLAs and LAIIs should be in circ where we would have a more discreet function and be more unified in roles, whereas shelvers should not be in circ simply because that's where they come to get the books. They don't have work areas back here aside from the holding shelves. Their work is in the stacks. I think we need to change it around because shelvers can be a very valuable asset to the librarians if they can actually use them. Anyway, you guys hit me with some thoughts on it.
posted by Nat-Wu at 10:55 AM
6 Comments:
At NL all the part-timers, LAIIs and our equivalent to LAIs, the student shelvers, reported to the SLAs. That had more to do with the fact that we knew what we were doing, whereas neither of the circ supervisors I worked for did. We sort of had overlapping authority over them...which did have the effect of them coming to me sometimes when they didn't want to ask Christina for something. I was like the overly permissive father or something, though I did often crack down on the shelf-reading. Anyway...uh, what were we talking about?
9:56 PM
Well, I feel that if you folded all the SLAs and LAIIs into circ we would have enough staff to man the counters without using LAIs to fill in. They don't really do much of that now.
For various reasons you may or may not guess, I think it would be difficult simply to say, "Try to communicate with your selector" and have anything happen. That system only works if you have a circ superviser who is in favor of it, whereas...well, that's not the case here. I'm talking about a permanent reorganization which I feel would be better for the location overall.
8:27 AM
As far as the department titles, that does get somewhat fuzzy. I do think that the divison of duties should be shelving at the bottom and should approach librarian-like duties the higher up one gets in the system. So, in reality, the SLAs have more reason to work under the Librarians directly than say the LAIs.
It seems like communication is the problem to me, not departments. The SLA's should be in direct communication with the librarians, and it shouldn't require meetings to ask questions or make some of the simpler decisions. But since the LAIs do actually physically circulate the books, unlike anyone else, I think circulation is the best name for their department.
As I said in my latest post, I think the library should be run by managers, not librarian-manager chimeras. And, thus, I think LAI's should be able to relay information or requests to the manager, who also has authority over the librarians. So, if a certain DeVry trained manger for example, were in charge of the Central Library, they should have direct authority over both circulation and the librarians. Communication then becomes open and clear...there are no more confusing webs of requests or elaborate chains of command. In a place like CL, given their size, it does seem necessary for a chain of command that is somewhat more complex then simply everyone and one manager, but not a lot more complex.
So, perhaps there is a Central Manager (CM) who is directly in authority over the Central library (both circulation and librarians). And they could have an assistant if necessary (say for schedules or some such responsibilities). The circulation department should function directly under this person, as should the librarians. And it seems that each department should have a "Lead" employee at any given time who could make certain decisions and relay information to the actual manager. But, in all of this, the chain of command should be no more than two people long.
I understand that there are some functions that departments handle, like schedules, but I bet that the "lead" employee could make the desk and bookdrop schedules, whereas the actual manager (or assistant manager) could dictate the official monthly schedule for all the staff. This would obviously put a lot more on the managers' plates, but good! Let them work for their 60+ thousand dollars a year!
8:45 AM
Well, there are possible alternatives to the organizational system I was proposing, but I think we're talking about the same thing.
As for the details, what I was arguing for is taking the circulation aspect off of the shelvers and let them shelve. Then circ would be SLAs and LAIIs who actually are responsible for circulation, i.e. checkin and checkout. It makes sense to me. Shelvers shelve, Circ. circulates books, and librarians do whatever librarians do. In that case, I think my idea of attaching shelvers to librarian's departments makes sense. Of course if things were organized differently that wouldn't make so much sense.
I agree that each department should have a head that reports to one overall Central manager. However, I think it should be a titled department head instead of just someone filling the role. Someone has to have authority, because one manager cannot expect to oversee the internal functionings of the 6 or 7 departments that Central has.
9:49 AM
What does it really matter if a shelver is assigned to Circ or another department?
If a selver belonged to ,say, Adult Services, they'd still have to go to Circ for carts of books to shelve, or would there be people in Circ who would only be concerned with getting books on carts and delivering them to the departnments? If so, then the departments would have to have space for those carts, and space for the shelvers. And, what happens if, on those odd thimes when a section is caught up, what does that shelver do? As it stands now,if a shelver is caught up, they can help shelve another area. But if a shelver 'belongs' to A.S, they probably wouldn't be shared with Children's, would they?
10:04 PM
I agree that it would cause complications, but I think that we don't belong to the same department just because we work in the same physical space. This is roughly analagous to when I was a member of the Flow Team at Target. We unloaded trucks into the back room, built pallets out of there, and took the stuff out to stock. However, there was an entirely different unit that worked in the back room. They organized the stock and did inventory. Our workspaces overlapped completely in the back, but because of our function we were a different department. The difference is, of course, that that would make all the shelvers their own department which really would be over-management. Anyway, I just discount the idea that we have to be the same department because we share space. It's not true.
I acknowledge that it works the way it is and there's no pressing need to change. However, I'm looking at some fundamental flaws in our process that could be worked out by letting the departments have their shelvers. Unlike a retail store where the stockers stock the whole store and have nothing to do with the individual sales departments, our shelvers have a lot to do with the librarians because the librarians are the ones deciding what to stock and what the physical arrangement will be. In a sense, the shelvers already work for the librarians without reporting to them.
12:13 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home