News from the Field

David Free

ACRL 2019-20, 2020-21 fiscal year financial reports now available

The ACRL Board of Directors, Budget and Finance Committee, executive director, and ACRL staff carefully monitored and reviewed the 2019-20 and 2020-21 fiscal years. The two fiscal year budgets are provided in a combined report due to unforeseen delays affecting the timing of financial closing. The association remains fiscally sound with excellent stewardship and strategic realignments that ensure effective member services, engaging programs, and sustained initiatives.

Typically, the ACRL budget operates on a two-year cycle due to the ACRL conference, which takes place in odd years, with deficits in even years and surpluses in the odd years. It is important to note that operating processes in academic institutions, associations, and businesses disrupted by furloughs, enrollment declines, and services, resulted in lost revenue globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social justice concerns, lost jobs, and human loss took a toll on everyone, yet ACRL remained steadfast in providing quality services and programs throughout the pandemic. However, because early limitations on in-person gatherings led to severe disruptions, the in-person ACRL 2021 Conference, the RBMS conference, and RoadShows were held virtually; nevertheless, the member committees provided resoundingly excellent conference opportunities and effective programs for members.

The full 2019-20 and 2020-21 fiscal year financial reports are available as supplements to the ACRL 2020-21 Annual Report in the December 2021 issue of C&RL News at https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/25246.

2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report Teaching and Learning Edition released

EDUCAUSE has released the 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report Teaching and Learning Edition. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, much still feels the same, though in some important ways our thinking and behaviors may be shifting in anticipation of longer-term changes in the ways we structure our lives and our shared places and spaces. In higher education, these shifts may reflect an evolution from short-term “emergency” or “reactive” modes of offering education during extraordinary circumstances to making strategic and sustainable investments in a future that will be very much unlike our past. As this year’s teaching and learning Horizon panelists gathered to reflect on current trends and the future of higher education, many of their discussions and nominations suggest that change may be here to stay and that there will be no return to “normal” for many institutions. This report summarizes the results of those discussions and nominations and serves as one vantage point on where our future may be headed. The report is freely available at https://library.educause.edu/resources/2022/4/2022-educause-horizon-report-teaching-and-learning-edition.

ARL, CARL, Ithaka S+R release final report on aligning the research library to organizational strategy

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), and Ithaka S+R are pleased to publish the final report of the commissioned research to identify the strategic priorities of higher education’s senior leadership, and to identify how and what more research libraries can do to advance them. Thank you to the 63 university presidents, provosts, senior research officers, chief information officers, and presidents and executive directors of partner higher education associations who participated in the research.

This report is the first in a series of collaborations to develop a shared narrative with key stakeholders and our members, including data and case studies that convey the value research libraries do and can provide in advancing the research and learning mission. The report is available for download at https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.316656.

ACRL releases Interim Leadership in Libraries

ACRL announces the publication of Interim Leadership in Libraries: Building Relationships, Making Decisions, and Moving On, edited by Jennifer E. Knievel and Leslie J. Reynolds. This collection gathers the expertise and experiences of interim leaders in a variety of roles and institutions and helps address the unique challenges of these roles and ways to make a lasting impact.

It’s common for libraries to use visiting, interim, temporary, and acting roles to solve a variety of personnel vacancies. And with the current, widespread retirements and turnover at the most senior levels of library leadership, more and more libraries are being led by interim leaders.

Interim Leadership in Libraries draws on evidence-based research, professional expertise, and personal experience to address the practical implications that arise from the decision to appoint interim leaders. Authors from a variety of institutions who have served in many different interim roles explore this specific type of leadership in five sections:

• Building Relationships for Interim Leaders
• Leading with Confidence
• Making Long-Term Decisions as an Interim Leader
• Leading Through Contraction: When No One Can Be Hired
• Moving On: When the Dust Settles

Chapters cover topics including serving as a nonlibrarian interim, leading through a hiring freeze, strategic planning and reorganization as interim, and developing future library leaders.

Individuals asked to step into interim or acting leadership roles face personal and professional challenges. Interim Leadership in Libraries will help these leaders, and those who work with them, learn from the successes and failures of others who came before them in order to have a lasting impact on their organization.

Interim Leadership in Libraries: Building Relationships, Making Decisions, and Moving On is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store, in print through Amazon.com, and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course now available

Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course, a self-paced open educational resource developed by Emily Ford of Portland State University, is now available. This structured self-paced course is designed to develop a better understand of the basics of peer review, and hopefully to critically examine it. It is geared toward LIS students and library workers, though it could certainly be used by any student or professional interested to further explore peer review. In eight modules the resource asks readers to engage in a variety of activities to learn the who, what, why, and how of peer review. It is geared toward library professionals, library school students, or other academic professionals who must understand and/or engage with the peer-review process. Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course is freely available at https://pdx.pressbooks.pub/peerreviewprimer/.

New from ACRL—Your Craft as a Teaching Librarian

ACRL announces the publication of Your Craft as a Teaching Librarian: Using Acting Skills to Create a Dynamic Presence, by Jeff Sundquist, Julie Artman, and Douglas R. Dechow. This entertaining guide captures how acting techniques can sharpen your instructional skills, establish your teaching identity, enliven your performance, and create an invigorating learning experience for your students.

Library instruction is like acting: There’s a live audience, in person or online; you may be doing a one-shot, limited engagement or play to the same crowd repeatedly over the course of a term; and you usually expect reviews. Most important, instruction is like acting in that you’re playing a role, and it’s crucial to prepare your performance before you go on in order to shine and to connect authentically with students.

Your Craft as a Teaching Librarian: Using Acting Skills to Create a Dynamic Presence—a revised and expanded edition of ACRL’s 2016 The Craft of Librarian Instruction—is divided into three charming sections:

• Prepare and Rehearse: Centering yourself, physical and vocal preparation, mindfulness, and avoiding stage fright
• Perform and Connect: Role playing, identity, action/reaction, and information literacy
• Reflect and Sharpen: Assessment and adaptation

Chapters feature exercises to explore on your own or with a colleague, question-and-answer sections to help you identify potential challenges and solutions, and tips on deepening your teaching skills. A glossary of acting terms and a “learn more about it” bibliography provide additional context for the methods and techniques presented. Your Craft as a Teaching Librarian can help you personalize and characterize your teaching presence and help those with little to no teaching experience, instructors dealing with shyness or stage fright, and more experienced librarians in need of a refreshed perspective, adding an undeniable star quality to your instructional performance.

Your Craft as a Teaching Librarian: Using Acting Skills to Create a Dynamic Presence is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store, in print through Amazon.com, and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

CUPA-HR releases annual workforce surveys

The soaring inflation rate has far outpaced pay increases for the higher education workforce. According to findings from CUPA-HR’s annual workforce surveys for 2021-22, overall median salaries for administrators increased by 3.4%. Professionals and nonexempt staff saw increases of 2.9%, and salaries for tenure-track and nontenure-track faculty increased by 1.6% and 1.5%, respectively. The inflation rate for 2021 was 6.8% and continues to climb.

This is not the first year that pay increases have not kept up with inflation. Pay increases for administrators, professionals, and staff last met or exceeded inflation in 2019-20. Nontenure-track faculty salary increases last met or exceeded inflation in 2016-17, and tenure-track faculty salary increases have not kept pace with inflation in any of the past six years.

Learn more on the CUPA-HR website at www.cupahr.org/press-releases/higher-ed-pay-increases-have-not-kept-pace-with-inflation/.

ASERL expands oral history collection

The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) has announced it will rekindle its partnership with the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History to expand its collection of oral history interviews with leaders who played key roles in ASERL’s growth and development over the years. ASERL first collaborated with the Nunn Center in 2016 to collect ten interviews with its earliest leaders. This new project seeks to grow that history, reflecting ASERL’s growth from a social organization to one of the leading voices in American research library cooperation.

The interviews conducted in 2016 involved significant time and effort on logistics—interviewers traveling across the region, heavy recording equipment in tow, to record interviews face-to-face with their subjects. Thanks to the proliferation of online meeting tools and their ease of recording, the process for the 2022 interviews will be much simpler.