As part of our series Connecting with Colleagues: An Occasional Series of Interviews with LDL Participants, we talked to Will Olmstadt, Executive Director of the Health Sciences Library at LSU Health Shreveport, about his strategies for fostering professional development.
While most LDL contributing institutions have one or two trained content administrators, Olmstadt encourages staff from across the library to attend LDL trainings, allowing broad familiarity with LDL content administration.
In this interview, Will provides insight on how LDL training can fit into a larger program of staff development.
What is your current workflow for LDL content administration? How has this workflow developed over the years?
One thing for context is that we don’t have a full-time archivist or digitization person, and we are not likely to get approval to hire one. We work with our historical materials in the course of our other jobs, and any digitization we do has to be absorbed in other duties. I can’t speak about the workflow in the past – most of the staff for our first batch of LDL content retired or resigned. The current workflow would ultimately fall under our assistant director for technical services and collections. As part of our strategic planning process in 2020, it’s my aim we will identify digitization priorities. Those priorities will shape our next workflow.
When we held an LDL training at your institution, you promoted it as a Staff Development event, and librarians from various LSUHSC departments attended. What do you see as the benefits of having more than 1 or 2 people trained in LDL administration?
I generally adopt a mindset that our staff need to be trained as broadly as possible. It both develops that staff member and strengthens the library. Because the LDL is a unique collection offering, I felt like it was a good chance for all interested staff to see the basics.
What other library-wide professional development events have you hosted?
Our ongoing internal training we call Issues in Contemporary Librarianship, which covers a variety of topics and is held about once a quarter.
We have one named professorship, the funds from which can be used for staff training and development. We have been able to make good use of those funds, for example, for 3 days of training from Innovative Interfaces. All staff were welcome to attend even if they didn’t use Triple I as part of their jobs.
In September 2018, we held an off-site staff meeting to emphasize customer service and communication. This meeting was mandatory, unlike our other events, partially because we had not gotten together as a staff for reflection and learning in a long time. We used the professorship funds to bring in facilitators who led us in the LEGO® Serious Play method. As a staff, we got together and built answers to some questions.
We routinely host Medical Library Association teleconferences that carry CE credit for librarians. These are a mixture of free and paid events. We have hosted teleconferences from other groups. In March, we are hosting a session from the Louisiana Clinical & Translational Sciences Group on using social media to promote science. We’re opening it to the entire campus.
How does the LDL training fit within your larger staff development program? For example, do elements of the training tie into ongoing events, such as your Issues in Contemporary Librarianship series?
Often we ask library staff who have been to unique conferences or meetings (such as Library Carpentry) to report on key things they learned. One quarter, we had a physician give us a review of biostatistics used to analyze medical research. We have also had our own librarians lead training sessions on new or emerging resources, like NIH RePORT for analyzing NIH funding. Our internal development is purposely broad and I feel LDL training is a good fit as part of our overall staff development. I don’t expect all health sciences library staff are suddenly going to turn into digitization librarians. But I think they profit from seeing some basics about ingestion and display of materials.
What is your process for planning these events? For example, how do you choose topics, and how do you recruit both internal and external speakers?
My associate director, Julie Esparza, and I, discuss Issues topics maybe 2 quarters at a time. Topics are often based on what we know is happening institutionally. Occasionally our staff suggest topics. We try to give our junior library faculty a chance to present Issues sessions because (a) it develops their skills and (b) it provides them teaching they can use for their promotion & tenure portfolios. The Medical Library Association teleconferences are usually scheduled well in advance – we often plan those a year at a time.
Beyond the specific knowledge acquired, how do you see librarians, and your library community more broadly, benefitting from these cross-departmental trainings and discussions?
I hope that learning more about our collections improves our reference, teaching, and liaison librarian service to the health sciences center community. I also like to think that when our staff learn more about certain initiatives, it makes them more engaged employees. (I haven’t measured that, but it’s an aspiration.)
I think ongoing staff development works best when there’s a mixture of unusual topics and more standard ones. Remember it takes time and commitment to gather staff together for these purposes.
Thank you, Will, for talking with us about how you integrate LDL training into your larger staff training initiatives.
