Competency M: Management

“Hello Peter, what’s happening? Ummm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, mkay?”

Bill Lumbergh, Office Space

Introduction
Library management can often be difficult and even brutally thankless work. There are budgetary restrictions, grant proposals, city council meetings, and performance reviews. What a list! Communication with smooth, successful interactions with coworkers, colleagues, and interns are vital skills that cannot be overlooked. While perfectly seamless interactions are rarely possible, there are myriad ways to become an unflappable and tidy member of a working library crew. This seems to strike most as a feat that is daunting at best and disastrous at worst. The eternal complaint throughout one’s entire school and work career typically regards the dreaded “team project”.

Groupwork in Library and Information Science: Boon or Nightmare?
Mandel et al. (2020) state: “Alumni reported mostly positive experiences with teamwork, reflecting that teamwork assignments are necessary for the MLIS program because teamwork is a critical skill for librarianship.” Even so, Mandel et al. (2020) also state that current students misremember having more teamwork opportunities than they have experienced in reality. Nobody really likes group work, so it seems, but it is unfortunately a “necessary evil” as they say in terms of completing a collaborative and socially pivotal job like Library and Information Science (LIS).

“One of the major problems in discussing luck in [library] management is that statistical evidence about how often good or bad luck happens is not quantifiable and is based upon personal perceptions of events that lack statistical reliability,” Holley (2020) states. He continues: “The laws of statistical probability do apply to gambling casinos where the house always wins in the long run because of odds assure that the gamblers will lose. The same rules don’t apply to the lucky or unlucky events that the library manager will encounter.” It seems to stand to reason that many managers of library systems (and other facilities) attribute negative events to bad luck and positive events to their own cleverness and management skills. Haven’t we all had a boss like that?

Does Shuffling The Collaborative Cards Help?
Liu et al. (2022) question whether a concept known as “team freshness” matters. Essentially, shaking up a team every so often defines the concept of keeping a team “fresh”, and Liu et al. (2022) are of the conflicted opinion(s) about whether or not this concept helps or hinders team cohesion; there is evidence for and against both. Ultimately it likely depends on the dynamics of the original team versus the new team. If a team member was exceptionally difficult in the beginning and is replaced with a team player, of course, a fresh team would help! However, if a new team gets this formerly difficult person in their group, woe be to them!

Dutta and Rangnakar (2024) describe what is called communities of practice (COP) that result from collaborations between coworkers in the same or a similar field caring for one another and having positive interactions. They postulate that positive relations during COP interactions strengthen overall team bonding and cohesion. It seems that with the right recipe of compatible people working toward the same goals, management, cohesion, and cooperation in a library setting aren’t so bad after all.

Conclusion

While group projects and team dynamics may not be the favored activities of many, they are doubtlessly necessary to produce positive outcomes in increasingly collaborative environments, particularly in libraries. Time will tell whether society overcomes the hurdles and stereotypes of the dreaded “group project”.

Artifact 1
Assignment:

Course: INFO 298 Virtual Reality (VR) and User Experience (UX) in Libraries
Description:
While this project has been used in other competencies, this competency fits this evidence particularly well because there were a lot of interviews, discussions, and notes taken with the PhD candidates and alumni of the PhD Gateway Program at the SJSU iSchool. I also needed to collaborate and discuss difficult project parameters with other members of the team, work on challenging projects like finding assets in Sketchfab, experimenting with Mozilla Hubs and Blender, and working briefly with Unity. These tasks would be nearly impossible or at the very least, prohibitively difficult without training and cohesion of team bonding, which a lot of us did seem to do, particularly towards the end of the project. Although I was working on the PhD Gateway Program project alone, this check-in process with the other members of the class allowed me to participate not only in interactions with members of the PhD Gateway Program but also with direct classmates who were working on similar VR projects, goals, and aspirations.

Artifact 2
Assignment:

Course: INFO 283 Library Marketing
Description:
This artifact shows leadership and innovative thinking processes on my part, as I came up with the entire concept of Solaris Regional Library and its history, budget, and marketing based on the beautiful sunsets that I was witnessing in my (then-new) home in Parker, Colorado that year. I determined that with photographs of the mountains and sunsets to inspire me, I could make an innovative new library based on these parameters. I did essentially take the lead in this project by doing much of the work alone. I sometimes asked my colleagues at UXSG (User Experience Student Group at SJSU iSchool) and used previous collaborative inspiration from my time at Savannah College of Art and Design. I have always been a person of big ideas and it takes the skills of “thinking large” and “thinking outside the box” to pull off a project of this type. This is also a project that future employees of the library could easily adapt to their personally changing needs.

Artifact 3
Assignment:

Course: INFO 283 Library Marketing
Description:
This artifact outlines the pros and cons of the overall Libary Marketing class, and whether or not I enjoyed the collaborative efforts I was asked to participate in with my team. While I did not mind the collaboration aspect or interacting with my peers, I did not appreciate using Pinterest or VoiceThread for marketing and communications. I find VoiceThread to be incredibly buggy and difficult to use, and I find that the User Experience (UX) is very poor. Often, I had trouble even accessing some of my course materials and didn’t find it worth it to try and find out what I was missing. I can see if I needed to rely on it more than I did that it would have made a difference to me, but as it currently stands, I was able to communicate with classmates and group partners long enough to achieve desired goals and outcomes. While group projects are also not always my absolute favorite thing in the world, I enjoyed working on all of the projects listed here within my artifact list, this one included. Reflections are always useful, even if only for one’s own personal edification.

References
Dutta, A., & Rangnekar, S. (2024). Preference for teamwork, personal interaction, and communities of practice: Does co-worker support matter? VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, 54(4), 841–860. https://doi.org/10.1108/VJIKMS-11-2021-0284

Holley, R. P. (2024). Library management: What’s luck got to do with it? Journal of Library Administration, 64(7), 862–869. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2024.2393058

Liu, M., Jaiswal, A., Bu, Y., Min, C., Yang, S., Liu, Z., Acuña, D., & Ding, Y. (2022). Team formation and team impact: The balance between team freshness and repeat collaboration. Journal of Informetrics, 16, 101337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2022.101337

Mandel, L. H., Moen, M. H., & Karno, V. (2020). Teaming up to teach teamwork in an LIS master’s degree program. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 15(2), 85–99. https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29684