The Future of Tech Services: A Journey In Time and Space (My "Term Paper" for SLIS 5390)

Arise, Gentle Reader, and stride past the swinging wooden doors of my time machine. Perhaps the device will seem somewhat familiar to you. My time machine resembles an old fashioned British police telephone call box – and it’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. But it has the magical ability to travel to different times and places. Who would not desire a machine such as this one? Where shall we go? Shall we travel to the dawn of time to see the dreaded Tyrannosaurus Rex devour a Brontosaurus? Or perhaps we would enjoy sneaking out to the Lyceum of Ancient Greece to hear the great Aristotle orate philosophy with his student Theophrastus. Or maybe we could travel into the far future to see how man travels to the far distant galaxies.

Alas, I am sorry to say that none of this is to be, for the time machine that I possess has the ability only to travel between the Technical Services departments of libraries. Not to worry, though, for that can prove just as entertaining and enlightening as, say, travelling to meet Shakespeare to find out how he wrote all those darn plays.
So our first stop is the Technical Services department of a library in times past. Here you will find Librarian Broomhilda, her beady eyes peering through bottle-thick glasses, laboriously filling out a selection form to get the library’s copy of the latest Stephen King novel. There you will find Librarian Pomadora, her hair piled into a towering, slate gray hair bun, searching the Library of Congress subject headings file for just the right descriptors for the 650 field of her MARC record. And there is Librarian Aloysius, his bow tie tight around his neck, as he slaps the Dewey Decimal numbered label on the back of the book, while swabbing stains off a sticky copy of “If You Feed A Mouse a Muffin.”

Now let us back into our time machine and travel to the Technical Services Department of the far future. Is this not amazing? For in this magical time, we see all patrons have electronic discs implanted in their craniums – and, amazingly enough, packets of information, which we call b-books or “brain books” are transmitted directly from the author’s computer desk into the reader’s cerebrum. Librarians of this eon are eugenically bred: Their lower bodies are that of fish so they can swim through the ocean of information, while their arms are twenty feet long (the better to grab documents off of a top shelf). For user comfort and ease of recognition, these futuro-librarians retain their human heads, though they no longer keep their hair in buns (except for a brief period of a few decades in the 2700s).

All right, I daresay this isn’t where the future of Technical Services is headed. But let’s face it: This is no longer the time to worry about the future of Tech Services. For better or for worse, the Future of Tech Services has already arrived – and, rather than bun-haired librarians with the bodies of fish, it consists of the thorough reorganization of a department into a sleeker, efficient, and cost effective movement that is better integrated with the more public departments, as well as the patrons.

Where is the future of Tech Services? Well, there are several aspects of it that are worth addressing. The Tech Services departments of the Fin De Millennium have seen some astonishing changes already, mostly having to do with innovations in content and in carrier method. No longer is the world of information restricted to mere books or magazines. Nowadays, libraries need to stock DVDs, e-books, downloadable language classes, CDs, and MP3s. All of these items need to be processed – and titles can appear in all the various forms, requiring ways of differentiating the catalog and acquisition records. At the same time, patrons expect their items with all the speed and accuracy that those quick powersearches on Google have inured them to expect. There’s nothing wrong with this: Why should someone go into a library and expect slower and less fulfilling service for their information needs than they can get at home?

The problem is articulated in Bradford Lee Eden’s cogent article in Information Technology and Libraries. He describes how today’s patrons desire ease of access, often preferring speed over accuracy. “Users are not accessing the OPAC anymore; more than 80 percent of information seekers begin their search on a web-based search engine” (Eden, 2010)
Eden’s article suggests a draconian revisiting of what Tech Services means, with awareness that the excuse “but this is the way we’ve always done it” is not adequate to justify the department’s existence. He notes, “Libraries are investing huge resources in staffing – fiddling with MARC records at a time when they are struggling to survive. “
Eden warns that the future is in the full on digitization of resources – and when that comes about, the identity of the individual Tech Services departments, as well as of libraries in general, will undergo a vast sea change. “Why do libraries continue to support the infrastructure of buying and offering the same books, CDs, DVDs, journals, etc at every library, when the new information environment offers libraries the opportunities to showcase and present their unique information resources and one-of-a-kind collections to the world?” Eden queries.

This suggests even to a casual reader that a main challenge confronting Tech Services departments is one of proving relevance. This is the traditional cri de Coeur one finds echoing through almost all arguments about libraries, but which is particularly pungent when used to discuss Tech Services, whose employees often serve invisibly behind the scenes and whose work is frequently taken for granted even by the movie stars of the library world, the Public Service Librarians. If the materials appear, perfectly formatted, on the shelves like magic, it is easy to imagine that the there is little effort required in their creation.

At the ALCTS Creative Ideas in Technical Services Discussion Group Meeting at the ALA Annual Conference, described in a 2009 paper by Linda Haack Lomker, several Tech Service librarians suggested that it would be useful for backroom staff to occasionally trade places with their Public Services counterparts. “Technical Services staff members are more visible when they serve on public service desks. It can be a good idea to get out there and work with public service colleagues. Doing so can facilitate communication… People can appreciate the work when they see it,” Lomker summarizes.

So as to change the fusty, back office image of Tech Services, Eden intriguingly adds, “I would even suggest changing the name from ‘tech services’ to something like ‘collections and date management services’ or ‘reference data services’.”

But the question truly is “what does the future of Tech Services look like in the 21st Century?” We can break it down into several significant changes that we are likely to see, whether we like it or not, as evidenced by paradigm shifts in the library industry as a whole.

DIGITIZATION.

Of course the facetious conversation about data being transmitted directly from information source into the patron’s brains was intended as a joke. However, the truth is that this decade has seen a substantial change from materials being put on shelves, processed, and stored, to their being available instantly through one click of the mouse. The last three years have seen the entire concept of digital librarianship expand at what is fair to call an exponential scale. Rather than retreating to the shelves to retrieve a bound copy of “Technical Services Quarterly,” the eager library student may merely stay at home, find the catalog and then click on through to the full text article he or she wants to read.

Notes Eden, “My library is looking at making tech services more holistic and aligning them with the digital.”

This implies, of course, a significant diminution on the reliance of physical copies – even as it suggests that Tech Services staff will be needed to become more computer savvy in order to process and interact with the new material. As patrons come to expect ease of access in digital materials, we can expect to see more focus in Technical Services on the processes having to do with this aspect of the collection. The changes are probably most likely to affect the Acquisitions staff, who, in addition to being knowledgeable about selections and ordering must become familiar with licensing, full text, and various processing concerns. The general thread is that it might be, in the long run, best to totally get rid of many of the physical aspects of Tech Services entirely and use the resources elsewhere. “A lot of tech services staff are dedicated to serials check in and bindery. Are these strategic things we should be doing in this transformative environment?” opines Eden, for example.

OUTSOURCING.

The notion of dispatching a library’s cataloging to an outside vendor – or using outside cataloging for one’s records is already normative, but the future appears to hold with even more services being sent out of the library.

It seems exceedingly likely that the future of many Tech Services departments actually will take place outside of the Tech Service department – indeed, outside the library entirely. Acquisition, for instance, can be handled out of house via approval order, and, indeed is frequently already done through companies like Baker and Taylor. It seems that the future will include most other services being handled out of house. Notes one speaker at the ALCTS ALA meeting, “The big advantage is timeliness. The major disadvantage is not getting what is expected, for example, binding that may not meet LC standards.”

The use of outsourcing frees up staff who can be used for other purposes – “Staff can be used for other work such as cataloging backlogs or projects or to cover work in other areas” (Lonker, 2010).

In Norm Mederis’s separate interview with Eden in 2010, the Tech Services prognosticator adds, “We shouldn’t be spending 80 percent of our time on materials we can outsource. We’ll never go back to the staffing levels we had before, even when the economy turns around. The concept of investing in library personnel will never happen again.”

Eden particularizes the plan, explaining that all areas of Tech Services are capable of being outsourced. Why not hire vendors to select, process, and catalog the books and save the staffing costs from the library’s budget? “First step is to outsource English language print materials. There’s no reason why any tech services department needs to be touching these materials. Outsourcing to vendors can do this more cheaply than paying catalogers to futz around with bibliographic records that are already OK” (Eden, 2010)

MORE REALISTIC STANDARDS.

Another, somewhat less pleasing-sounding trend is the notion of imposing looser standards on the process of creating records. The idea is repeated often in the literature that perhaps it is not necessary to have absolutely perfect records for each item in the library collection. Notes Eden, via Mederis, “Records do not need to be full. ‘Good enough’ is fine. Users couldn’t care less about this added stuff.”

Accepting a “good enough” records standard would allow information centers to quickly make their way through their backlogs. In addition, because most records creation and management would come from outsourced points of origin, each library could become its own specialist in its own local material. “(We should aim for) system-wide shelf readiness, the elimination of non-Romance Language backlog through a ‘centers of excellence’ approach, where libraries with certain language expertise would centralize the specialized cataloging.”

TO THE CLOUD.

Elsewhere, the future is likely to involve the total export of any Tech Services database operations. The literature is replete with discussions of the imminent arrival of cloud-based Integrated Library Systems (ILS) that will be capable of performing many of the acquisitions, processing, and circulation operations formerly based physically in a Tech Services department. If the Tech Services director can subscribe to OCLC’s new ILS system, the library’s physical department can be streamlined and staff can be reassigned, re-trained, or encouraged to find different avocations. The process is described in a 2010 Library Journal article.
“Web-scale Management Service (WMS) comprises three different modules focusing on different ILS aspects… Three main WMS modules have been developed: license and subscription management, circulation development, and acquisition and workflow” (Rapp, Library Journal, 2010). The fact that the information is based remotely, rather than on the library’s computers, will allow the department to save on costly computer equipment.
“The traditional model for an ILS is that the library pays a large up-front licensing fee for software and then a maintenance fee every year. WMS would instead use a subscription model, akin to other OCLC services. There would also be an implementation fee,” claims the article. Some librarians are fearful of losing control over their information, but the fiscal rewards might be worth the trouble, notes Eden in his article. “The only things missing are some type of inventory and acquisitions module that can be formatted locally and a circulation module,” he writes.

REORGANIZATION.

Ultimately, these new developments will allow for the entire Tech Services department to be reorganized. At my library, the Santa Monica Public Library, the lines of authority have recently been redrawn to promote a more efficient management style. Certain other divisions have been re-defined as being appropriate to “Tech Services,” which at SMPL is known as “Information Management Division.” The Principal Librarian in charge of the entire department oversees not only cataloging, acquisitions, and processing, but is also in charge of circulation.

CONCLUSION.

As I started this paper, I first thought that the future of Tech Services was likely to be rather exciting and optimistic. Sadly, following the admittedly basic reading of the available literature, the future is one about which we must be more ambivalent. Yes, the functions of tech services are going to exist – books will always need to be bound, tagged, cataloged, and ordered. But the fact that so many of them are being outsourced to vendors leaves the impression that these are no longer going to be jobs that librarians will do in libraries. These will be jobs done in the office of vendors, who may or may not want librarians in the jobs (it depends if they can get cheaper workers who don’t have library degrees, after all). At the library itself, there may be one or two Tech Services librarians to handle licensing, local cataloging, and easy preservation. And perhaps the folks hired to do those jobs at vendors offices may have MLSs. But will they be librarians? I don’t know. It might just be that the future of tech services in the 21st Century will involve no librarians at all.