Out of the Darkness: how can librarians' skills help us to change our organization?

Expo Center

In 2020-2021, the libraries of the Catholic University of Louvain have been confronted with major challenges: new objectives for providing support to research (RDM, …), the development of new learning centers, the announced retirement of our Chief Librarian, the installation of a new ILS platform, and the pandemic which has involved new services for faculties (loan of co-modal teaching material, click & collect, …). Too many challenges together and it soon became clear that the structure of our organization, which had remained unchanged since 2001, was not adapted to meet these challenges. For our librarians, facing the changes was like entering a dark age worthy of Lord of the Rings! And how to get out of this darkness?

105 staff members make up our teams, spread over 10 autonomous faculty libraries and a central service that manage common issues (ILS, electronic resources, …). The first step of our transformation was based on the skills of the first people involved: the teams themselves. Round tables by themes were organized so that, together with the directors, new organizational models could be proposed. Two models emerged: (1) a central service strengthened by increasing its team and responsibilities (marketing director, technical director, human resources, budgets, …) with reduced and merged libraries, or (2) faculty libraries strengthened with staff also strongly involved in transversal working groups managing common subjects (acquisition and ILS, communication, support to research, …) with a central service mainly dedicated to the general coordination of these groups.

The communication will present the process of decision, the alternatives in term of organization, and the final choice. At each step, the IATUL participants will be implicated in an interactive questioning with the help of the Wooclap tool.