Rethinking Technical Services

New Frameworks, New Skill Sets, New Tools, New Roles

Edited by Bradford Lee Eden

Publication date:

13 November 2015

Length of book:

122 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442257894

Volume 6 of the series Creating the 21st-Century Academic Library is focused on academic library technical services operations, and ways that they have been transformed and reimagined for working in today’s higher education environment. The literature on the place and role of technical services, technical services librarians, technical services staff, and technical services operations has expanded and grown in the last few years as decreased budgets, a focus on essential public services, and information discovery on the Internet has driven the profession to re-examine the need or importance of this back-end (or hidden) library department. Topics discussed in this book include frameworks for the networked environment, roles for metadata librarians in the areas of research data and digital initiatives, the renewed focus on the discovery of information and its place in academic libraries, the new “normal” in academic library technical services operations, emerging roles and opportunities for technical services managers, the re-training and re-skilling of technical services staff, hidden collections and needed or unexplored areas of expertise with technical services librarians and staff, the faceted application of subject headings (FAST) and obsolete or outdated subject terminology within Library of Congress Subject Headings, and a conversation about downsizing and moving forward within a law library technical services unit.

Introduction

Chapter 1: A framework for transforming technical services in a networked environment
Christine Korytnyk Dulaney

Chapter 2: Transforming roles for catalog/metadata librarians through new initiatives: research data, digital humanities, and the digital repository at the University of Connecticut Libraries
Jennifer Eustis

Chapter 3: Age of discovery: a new model for libraries
Amanda Melcher

Chapter 4: Keep calm and carry on: the new technical services
Joelen Pastva, Gwen Gregory, and Violet Fox

Chapter 5: Emerging roles and opportunities for the technical services manager
Charles Sicignano

Chapter 6: Re-training and re-skilling technical services staff
Roman Panchyshyn

Chapter 7: Brave new world of technical services
Barry Gray, Anthony McMullen

Chapter 8: LC subject headings, FAST headings, apps: diversity can be problematic in the 21st century
Karen A. Nuckolls

Chapter 9: Is the “brave new world” heuristic? The professionalization of technical services as a conversation
K. Brooke Moynihan, Hildur Hanna

Index
About the Contributors
About the Editor

Eden’s Rethinking Technical Services is specific and practical, and describes some interesting innovative projects…. If you are reading to find out where technical services experiments are going on and might continue (without guarantees its forecasts are correct), Eden’s book is… revealing…. [This book] merit[s] a serious reader’s attention.