Business Librarians: Understand your staffing and institutional context

In 2016, Elizabeth joined JMU as the Business Librarian. As someone new to JMU but not new to business librarianship, she was able to observe and bring a critical eye to the operations during her first year. She took note that her workload seemed higher in comparison to her other colleagues. As she worked through understanding campus, she identified that the CoB, including the affiliated Hart School of Hospitality, Sport and Recreation Management and the School of Strategic Leadership Studies, comprised 25% of JMU’s total enrollment. This meant that her other eleven colleagues were splitting the remaining 75% of student enrollment. Thus began the process of starting to describe the workload imbalance to her supervisor.

Supervisors: Consider each staffing request as an opportunity to investigate workloads

In 2017, Carolyn became the interim director for the liaison librarian program. In the first month, she was asked to pitch a position, likely to support business or social sciences. In her review of institutional data, Carolyn observed that business enrollment had grown about 40% over the previous six years while social sciences enrollment was steady or slightly declining (James Madison University, Office of Planning, Analytics and Institutional Research. n.d.). Our library staffing support remained the same for each discipline. Carolyn was familiar with this scenario; she previously entered a position with an outsized liaison workload and had successfully advocated for a second position to support JMU’s health sciences programs several years earlier.

So, in parallel, we each identified and started thinking about this workload issue from their distinctive perspectives. Together, we needed to work to more fully understand the situation, learn to communicate the story to others, and navigate the staffing systems in the Libraries and on campus.

Business Librarians: Benchmark with external peer information

Elizabeth began gathering data by looking externally. She started by getting a list of JMU’s comparable peers and the institutions in its competitive and aspirant groups as identified in its most recent accreditation report with the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

Using that list, she reviewed websites of the institutional research offices at each university to get business school enrollment and faculty totals in the summer of 2017. She then perused those institutions’ library websites and research guides to estimate how many librarians were assigned to business areas. She learned that solo business librarians were common among JMU’s comparable peer group but that several of those schools still managed to have better faculty-to-librarian and student-to-librarian ratios. She shared this data with the business school leadership so that the numbers would be on their radar.

Figure 1:

Comparing student and faculty populations at JMU’s AACSB comparable peer and aspirant groups. Data was collected in summer 2017.

Elizabeth then set out to interview several of the business librarians on the list to learn how her work duties differed from theirs, as liaison responsibilities could include instruction, consultations, and/or collection management. She additionally asked about tenure status, recent instruction and consultation statistics, and typical distribution of efforts across job areas.

Supervisors: Benchmark with internal institutional data

Carolyn investigated the data specific to JMU to continue exploring the case for a second business librarian. She began to pull data that was already tracked within the Libraries:

• consultations or reference questions answered each academic year (from Springshare’s LibAnswers platform)

• instruction sessions taught each academic year (from an internal Google Form)

• research guides maintained per liaison, both for subjects and courses (from Springshare’s LibGuides platform)

This data helped show some workload differences across the eleven colleagues who were considered liaison peers at JMU. Elizabeth often led the department in number of consultations. Her instruction sessions were in the middle of the pack. She tended to be on the higher side in terms of subject and course guides maintained, because the College of Business and Hart School offer eleven undergraduate majors and four graduate programs. These guides worked as asynchronous or self-paced learning pathways to unique resources and research questions, reducing the need for support for repeat questions.

Carolyn also looked at JMU’s Office of Planning, Analytics and Institutional Research to add context to those numbers, which included:

• Number of students per librarian

• Number of faculty per librarian

• Undergraduate and graduate programs supported by each librarian

Additional colleagues also suggested consideration of the Credit Hour Production and General Education Credit Hour Product from programs supported by each librarian. Below is a summary of how this data looked at JMU before a second business librarian was hired:

Figure 2:

Comparing data across JMU’s 11 liaison librarians, including the business librarian.

x-The reason different dates were used for the counts for faculty and students is a result of the different data collection and reporting cycles from JMU’s Office of Planning, Analytics and Institutional Research and what information was available when the initial review by liaison was developed.

y-Average per librarian excludes the business librarian’s data.

z-During the 2020-21 academic year, all librarians were pitching in to staff the Ask the Library chat service, and each chat was counted as a consultation.

Figure 3:

Comparing total Library Guides (LibGuides) managed by liaison librarians.

x-Inconsistent tagging of guides as subject-level or course-specific in Springshare means these are imperfect data

y-Average per librarian excludes the business librarian’s data.

One number that proved more effective than students or FTE per librarian was faculty per librarian. Faculty often ask liaisons more complex questions than students, whether they are looking for instruction for their students, a library guide for their course, or help with research projects. Supervisors should not be afraid to lean into this number to establish an ideal baseline ratio for librarians at their institution.

We did not address collection management work in their internal data review. We would recommend this be additional data to consider, depending on whether or not collection responsibilities are part of a liaison’s expected workload.

Framing the story for internal library colleagues

Of course, it is not enough to have the data. You must turn it into a story that does not make you sound complaintive and explains how the workload imbalance reverberates throughout the organization. An overburdened liaison has limited capacity to work on departmental or organizational initiatives, can unintentionally force other liaisons to pick up the slack in fulfilling organizational service obligations, and is at risk of burnout and leaving the institution for a more sustainable workload (McHone-Chase, 2020; Albro & Fic, 2022). For those reasons, this becomes an organizational problem and not just a singular personnel situation.

Fortunately, Carolyn was able to tell this story as the director of the liaison librarian program. The first step focused on telling the story within the department of other liaison librarians. She started by being transparent about sharing data about liaison workloads throughout the department and setting aside time for conversations about the differences. She used existing systems for sharing staffing gaps and needs in the organization as a bigger purpose for having the conversation and out of a desire for the group to help identify what the priorities were to advance to the overall organization, instead of a top down or director-only decision.

Buy-in was key to developing shared understanding. These conversations can be extremely tricky to navigate, especially in ways that prevent anyone from feeling attacked for teaching fewer classes or handling fewer consultations each year. Boiling liaison work down to quantitative numbers is not universally appreciated, either. Opportunities were available for all department members to provide feedback on the meeting approach, the data presented/gathered, and the advocacy approach. The department had agency and voice to shape the regular revisiting of this data and the renewal of this conversation every year or two.

As a leader, Carolyn had to be open to their feedback and demonstrate that she heard them, whether through changes in how she gathered data or sought feedback or by having follow-up conversations about reasons that their ideas could not be fully implemented. Therefore, the work involved building both the story and an organizational culture where it was safe and welcome to raise questions, disagree, and work towards a shared resolution. Care for individuals was central to the work and it was important to balance care for Elizabeth as the individual whose work was under greater review and care for every other liaison.

Contextualizing business librarianship for library colleagues

Beyond developing the culture in which to safely have these conversations, we had to carefully work through the content and context of business librarianship, as well as build an understanding of how it compares, contrasts, and intersects with other disciplines. Business collections are often more complex than those in disciplines that rely mostly on abstracting & indexing services and reference works (Cramer, 2011; Kim & Wyckoff, 2016). Business librarian instruction can also be more practical and focused on a particular database that a professor believes students need to understand to complete an assignment, rather than touching on threshold concepts in the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Click et al., 2021).

Business research is multidisciplinary, and therefore business liaisons often do not support only business students and faculty. While more than 90% of Elizabeth’s consultations come from people affiliated with the CoB, she also answers questions from students in other colleges who are pursuing individual business plans or minoring in entrepreneurship, as well as faculty from other colleges asking about access to case studies or business news subscriptions. For example, a business plan competition at JMU in Fall 2022 drew entrants majoring in Integrated Science and Engineering, Psychology, Industrial Design, Hospitality Management, Engineering, and Political Science – in addition to business school students majoring in Economics, Business Management, and Marketing. Colleagues might not realize that while engineering or nursing librarians likely only get questions from students in those majors, business librarians often get questions from across campus and sometimes from the local community.

With the department on board in supporting the need for additional business support, Carolyn was better positioned to advocate for the position as part of organization-wide needs. The departmental buy-in also allowed for every person in the department to be an advocate in their own networks and relationships across the organization. This reduced the risk of one person being dismissed and made it a departmental priority.

Framing the story for the business school

For the College of Business, the conversation also needed to be presented as a compelling and persistent story based on the gathered data. Elizabeth took every opportunity to remind those in the CoB of the staffing situation with statements like “Do you know that the only college bigger than the business school at JMU is Health & Behavioral Studies? And they have three full-time librarians, compared to your one?” She also developed deep relationships across the college, including with the dean, who understood the value and impact of her expertise as a component of the college’s success. In short, she made herself invaluable to them and helped recast the perception of what a librarian could be. Because of her efforts, she raised enough awareness that the issue made its way into the 2021 Continuous Improvement Review for AACSB:

The CoB is supported by a full-time business librarian, Elizabeth Price, who works with faculty to identify, review, and either license or purchase new library resources to support teaching, research, and professional development. … For the past four years, CoB and Libraries jointly funded a Peer Research Advisor (PRA) program, where two to three undergraduate students are hired and trained to assist their peers with the research-intensive business plan deliverable for COB 300. PRA is an innovative initiative designed to enhance utilization of library resources. It is critical since JMU averages one liaison librarian per 1,670 students while the business liaison librarian serves over 4,000 students. To further increase liaison librarian capacity, the CoB is funding a part-time library assistant, beginning July 2021.

The fact that the CoB agreed to support a part-time staff position demonstrated how much our story resonated. The position itself was one of the mitigation strategies that will be discussed in the next tip.