August 2018 Topic
As a Library Director, what are the top 3 challenges that keep you awake at night?
Staff
- Repurposing Positions
- Supporting user needs with a (limited) staff
- Sustainable positions for the future of the library
- Distributing workload across the library
- Staffing – changes in staffing due to purpose and need of organization.
- Requesting & Justifying Value-Added Services by Adding New Staff
- Administration is fine with status quo
- Locating and Retaining Talent
- Staff Burnout
- Resolving Conflict and Managing Difficult Conversations
Budget
- Unsustainability of Collections Pricing
- Raising Costs of Existing Products
- Break Up Packages
- New Unaffordable Publisher Products
- Stagnating Budgets
- State Support for Higher Education - impacting budget and organizational support.
- Budgetary limitations due to low enrollment within the institution
Environment
- Creating/Sustaining a Positive Work Culture
- Space design
- Justifying Renovations for Value-Added Services
- No resources to support renovation
- Weeding Collections to Repurpose Space for Users
- Maintaining relevance when “traditional” space is no longer visible.
Other Restless Nights
- Keeping Up-to-Date
- Technology Trends to Benefit Users
- Showing Library’s Relevance to Stakeholders
- Project Management Support
- Developing Programming that Interests Users
- Learn everything they need to learn to be successful.
- Merging with University Library System – New procedures
- Overall Capacity – Lots of interesting activities that increase new/other needs. Due to need, need new staff to support projects with expertise library is recognized for.