Friday, September 06, 2013

Why ILL should be headed by a Librarian

The public library workplace is all too often a minefield of office politics.  So much depends on one’s professional rank insofar as who gets listened to and whom can be safely ignored or snubbed.
Any department or unit that is NOT headed by a librarian is at a distinct disadvantage vis a vis other departments and units which are.

In a large system, cooperation between the branches is key, especially for system-wide functions like Interlibrary loan.

Our main library building is undergoing extensive renovations and as such had to make the painful decision to close our doors to the public.  We only have a skeleton crew of the circulation staff on site besides Support Services, which in our organizational structure includes ILL.  The OPAC had to be adjusted to disallow holds to be routed to our main branch, but this impacted ILL as well, as I was no longer able to place holds myself.  We engineered a low-tech work around, wherein I would simply email my ILL Liaisons at each branch with my daily pull requests from their stacks and they would route the items to me via the interoffice mail system (which is still operational) instead of through the traditional circulation system.

This worked well at first, but there has been a regression to the mean insofar as, once again, some branches are more responsive and reliable than others.  Also, apparently, my email sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, is easy to ignore, etc.  I’ve also been scolded for improper use of the “Mark as urgent” function in email.  Evidently because of my Asperger’s, I’m just not competent or to be trusted with this function.  ;-)  Just because I subjectively think something is urgent is not sufficient cause for me to mark it as such.  I’ve tried to argue my case but been shouted down one too many times, even by one of my local advocates.  It’s just a fight not worth having.  You’ve got to pick your battles and found this ground to be untenable.

Many of my ILL Branch liaisons are actual librarians, and in the smaller branches, the actual branch manager.  They easily outrank me, a mere Clerk.  All of my efforts to get them to respond to my ILL requests have to be done by begging, obsequious pleading, etc.  It’s not as if I can throw my weight around or apply the pressure of collegiality, as an equal.  I feel as though ILL as a whole unit gets less respect because the highest ranking person in our unit is a Paraprofessional.  I feel like if we had an actual librarian in charge, our requests might be attended to more promptly by all branches.  If we were headed by a librarian, we would be better positioned to complain directly to the administration about recalcitrant branches who were lax in their responsiveness to ILL requests, which reflects negatively on the system as a whole.  As it stands, we just have to keep our heads down and fill our existing requests to the best of our ability during this time of utter dependency on the branches.  Alas, the stacks in the main building are temporarily closed and thus I’m not able to pull books held in my own building until we-reopen at the end of the month.


Although I think things will improve once our stacks revert from closed to open and we resume full circulation operations, I still think the lack of a librarian in charge of ILL has an impact on the effectiveness of ILL as a whole within the system.  Because we’re not headed up by a peer of equal standing, we can be snubbed and ignored more easily by those units which are so headed.  It’s not as if this is mean-spirited or deliberate.  It’s just benign neglect and inattention, mostly, though in the end our ability to be a full ILL partner with other libraries still suffers regardless.