Technical Services Transparency

Abstract

Technical services departments in academic librariesA cademic libraries now provide patrons with large numbers of electronic resources. As the number of resources grows, so does the potential number of breakdowns in access. This potential for problems means communication is vital between the technical services staff who manage these resources and the public services staff who interact with patrons.The Oxford English Dictionary defined communication as the transmission or exchange of information, knowledge, or ideas by means of speech, writing, mechanical, or electronic media.1 Technical services units often seek to use their departmental documentation, which was originally intended for others within the department, to reduce communication barriers between the library staff who work on the public side of the organization and technical services. While a card catalog and a binder filled with typed procedures used to suffice, technical services staff now must document and communicate information about thousands of resources managed in dozens of different tools. The challenge for technical services units is to find successful ways to communicate pertinent information with all library staff in a rapidly changing technological environment. Examples of information needed by public services staff are how to access e-books and how to report electronic resource access issues.At Miami University Libraries, the authors of this paper (at the time of the project design and implementation, they served as the bibliographic systems librarian and the electronic resources and serials librarian) sought a new approach to the challenge of documenting and conveying important information to staff outside of the technical services department. Their solution was to choose a platform already familiar to public services staff, LibGuides

Online Documentation Portals in Library Technical Services: Shedding Light on Local Practices and Procedures

“…The authors identify several benefits that came with the adoption of a centralized system for documenting and sharing procedures: the ready availability of easily shared documentation, the ease of updating wiki pages within the portal, and the institution of a habit of creating documentation (Diffin, Coogan, & Fu, 2013). In the same year, Bazeley and Yoose (2013) reported on using LibGuides software to develop an online home for technical services documentation at Miami University Libraries, highlighting the site as a valuable communication mechanism not only within technical services but between technical services and public services. Efforts to consider this site for inclusion on the following list were unsuccessful, as it does not appear to be available to the public at the time of this writing.…”

“…An examination of a handful of currently available technical services portals revealed that Confluence is another widely used system. The literature also indicates the use of LibGuides for this purpose; an informal survey of available portals shows limited adoption of this system in practice (Bazeley & Yoose, 2013).…”