dec06b.indd


from the inside 
Ray Metz 

A librarian’s awareness 
Strengths of the profession provide a campus advantage 

Iam proud to say that I have been a librar­ian since 1978. Academic libraries are as 
important today as they have ever been. Many 
things tempt others to think that libraries may 
not be as important as they were; the most 
talked about probably being the digitization 
of information. But around the world each 
year knowledge/information is threatened to 
be lost due to political regime change, natural 
disaster, war, or acts of terrorism. Ensuring 
continued access to the world’s knowledge is 
as important today as it ever has been. 

Academic librarians are more important 
today than they were 25 years ago. Librarians 
have always been required to be principled 
visionaries, but I’m less convinced that we 
have an agreed upon vision within the 
academy to be principled about today. And 
if there is an agreed upon goal, it may be 
skewed towards a traditional interpretation. 
It’s an exciting time to be an academic librar­
ian, but one filled with more questions than 
clear answers. It’s a time of more opportunity 
for us and a time for more risk. 

For the last five years, I’ve been the chief 
of staff for the chancellor at the University 
of Michigan­Dearborn. A primary focus of 
the job has been to work with organizational 
development and planning for the campus. 
I had worked for this chancellor when he 
was the provost at Bucknell University. He 
is a person of the utmost integrity and is the 
most supportive boss I had ever worked for. 
In short, I couldn’t say no when he offered 
me the chance to work for him again. 

For 14 years prior to moving to Michi­
gan, I held leadership positions in merged 
library and computing organizations. The 

more I have worked with other parts of a 
campus, the more I have valued and appre­
ciated libraries, librarians, and the education 
I received in library school and working in 
academic libraries. I can’t state that strongly 
enough. The more I work with others on 
campus, the more I appreciate my being a 
librarian. Many of the strengths and skills I 
use in my current role come from being a 
librarian. The following things I believe help 
to give librarians a potential advantage when 
working on a campus. On many campuses 
these are untapped advantages. 

• Librarians understand what’s important 
to a university. Librarians understand that the 
faculty are the center of the university, per­
haps because we either have faculty status or 
quasi­faculty status. It is easy for administra­
tors to start seeing the university through the 
eyes or their organization’s needs. Librarians 
begin by understanding that faculty are at 
the core. 

• Libraries are experienced and successful 
collaborators. Libraries and librarians have 
needed to cooperate and collaborate on proj­
ects and services for decades. Most campuses 
recognize the need for more collaboration, 
but many on campus don’t know how to co­
operate or collaborate. Many of you may have 
noticed that others on campus don’t jump into 
collaboration as easily as we do. 

• Librarians know how to thrive in com­
mittees. I don’t have the data to back this up, 

Ray Metz is chief of staff for the chancellor at the 
University of Michigan-Deaborn, e-mail: remetz@umd. 
umich.edu 
© 2006 Ray Metz 

C&RL News December 2006  672 

http:umich.edu


but my experience says that librarians know 
how to get things done on a committee or 
task force. We know how to be a member. 
We know how to be a chair. Librarians don’t 
seem to hesitate to become responsible for 
an assignment when others may. Every time 
we step forward and produce results, we 
increase the likelihood of success for the 
library. This is a skill that individual librarians 
have leveraged, but we could become inten­
tional in our attempt to influence a campus 
by doing this. 

•  Librarians understand the power and 
influence of information. How many of us 
are on campuses that seem to operate by 
myth rather than data? As librarians, we seem 
to have a natural inclination to be curious 
about information and data. The more we 
learn, the more we want to know—again, a 
bit like faculty. 

• Librarians are systems thinkers. We 
have acquired. We have organized. We have 
provided access. We have provided service. 
The library is a system. Librarians are systems 
thinkers. Many of the issues facing universities 
are systems problems, so librarians are well 
positioned to be of value to the campus. 

• Librarians are constantly learning. We 
love to professionally grow, and the best 
among us like to learn about ourselves. The 
leaders of our profession are constantly seek­
ing such opportunities. It is surprising to me 
how little professional development learning 
happens elsewhere on a college campus. We 
are an organization based in learning; some 
colleges and universities are sparse in their 
support of staff learning. 

Communicating the value of libraries 
Even though I think great things about 
academic libraries, we can always do better 
when it comes to making our case to univer­
sity administrations. There is no substitute for 
creating a quality library with quality services, 
but there are other ways to improve our po­
sitions on campus. My experience says that 
we could do a better job of being connected 
to the most important goals and issues of a 
campus. I take great pride in our library at 

the University of Michigan­Dearborn because 
it is involved and present when important 
issues of the campus are being discussed or 
dealt with. 

Colleges and universities have struggled 
for the past decade trying to establish better 
assessment and review of outcomes for the 
educational product they provide. It is no 
surprise that academic librarians have also ex­
plored better ways to evaluate their libraries 
and library services. I believe we have been 
headed down the right path, although I don’t 
have a sense that we have had the impact 
we would like to have outside the library 
with these efforts. Too many decisions are 
still based on the general campus culture for 
libraries, campus politics, or on the amount of 
charisma/persuasion capability of the library 
leader. This problem is more likely a systemic 
problem of universities than it is a problem 
of our individual libraries. 

The next shift in direction for how to com­
municate our value to our administrations is 
likely to be a result of the thinking follow­
ing the U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret 
Spelling’s Commission report on the future 
of higher education. I don’t know how this 
will shift how we communicate our value, 
but watching how universities and colleges 
respond may give us an idea how libraries 
will respond. Will it be rankings? Will it be 
metrics? Will it be testing? How do we quan­
tify successfully our value that in the past 
has been more intuitive or understood as a 
truth? Frankly, I think this is one of the more 
important questions facing us. 

Another way that I believe libraries can 
communicate their value is by creating a 
mandate for change in the library. Good 
universities and colleges are seeking library 
leaders that are looking to bring both stability 
and change to the campus library. Organi­
zations accept stability easily. They accept 
change with less enthusiasm. How is having a 
mandate for change an important part of com­
municating the library’s value to a university 
administration? Having a mandate creates an 
agreed upon expectation for accomplishment 
ahead of time. When the library accomplishes 

December 2006  673 C&RL News 



the mandate, the administration can see that 
it has accomplished what it said it wanted. 
(administrations are simple in this respect 
. . . “We want you to do x. You did x. You 
did good!”) 

Not all libraries see the importance of be­
ing involved in campus goals or issues that 
do not have a direct connection to libraries. 
While every library seems at times stretched 
to accomplish its stated goals, I have come to 
view most campus goals and issues as hav­
ing a budget component (fi nance partner), 
a people component (a human resource 
partner), a technology component (an IT 
partner), and an information component (a 
librarian partner). Not everyone has this set of 
assumptions, but when I was in an IT and/or 
library role, I viewed this as an opportunity 
to provide additional value from the library. 
The more it is done, the more likely people 
on campus will ask the library’s opinion. 

However, the most powerful voice librar­
ians have in presenting their case to the 
university is the voice of everyone else on 

campus—faculty, students, staff, and others. 
Unless you are the most charismatic of librar­
ians, the campus culture for libraries is the 
most influential. I’ve worked on campuses 
where libraries are still the heart of the cam­
pus and librarians are trusted colleagues. 
I’ve also worked on campuses that have 
been planning the elimination of libraries 
because of digitization since the early 1960s. 
Do I need to say on which campus it was 
easier to get ideas and projects approved and 
implemented? 

(This reminds me of the tremendous thank 
you academic librarians owe the librarians 
who work on campuses with cultures that 
are lacking in their support for libraries. They 
maintain a vision for a great future when few 
around them encourage them to do so. As a 
profession, we often acknowledge the librar­
ians who have accomplished great things on 
receptive campuses.) 

One of the suggested topics for us to ad­
dress in this column was to consider giving 

(continued on page 683) 

C&RL News December 2006  674 



in providing students with a framework for 
developing information literacy skills. At the 
very least, we helped familiarize them with 
the variety, location, and types of resources 
offered by the university libraries. 

The exhibit was well­received, and we cre­
ated an exhibit with a similar framework for this 

year’s book—Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond 
Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A 
Man Who Could Cure the World. It touched on 
contemporary public health education, Haitian 
history, medical services to the poor, the history 
of medical missionaries, and global develop­
ment, among other topics. 

(“A librarian’s awareness,” cont. from page 
674) 
advice to librarians about ways that they 
could work most effectively with college/ 
university administration. The advice I would 
give would be: 

• first, the obvious . . . realize that no two 
college/university administrations or admin­
istrators are the same, and 

• second, align the library with institution­
al goals. (No, I don’t mean find ways to align 
your goals to the university/college goals. I 
mean set the library goals as an outgrowth 
of the campus goals.) 

So, why the title “The Librarian’s 
Awareness”? 
Well, the simple answer is that I believe that 
librarians are uniquely prepared to be suc­
cessful with university/college administra­
tions. We have an awareness that few others 
on campus have, yet, we haven’t tapped into 
it fully. Why? Perhaps librarians feel the pres­
sure to make sure they give every ounce of 
attention they can get to the library. Perhaps 
it’s that we just get too caught up in our own 
issues. Perhaps it’s our sense of needing to 
position ourselves rather than the library. My 
experience says the more I talk about the is­
sues that are important to my peers around 
me and to those higher in the organization 
than me, the more likely they are to listen to 
and support my issues. 

Writing this has given me the chance to 
think about academic libraries and academic 
librarians. It seems a bit presumptuous of 
me to be providing advice to anyone on this 
topic. I haven’t worked in an academic library 
for five years. I’m also over 50, which means I 
need to start questioning if I’m assuming that 
too many of the things I learned years ago 

December 2006 

still apply. Or if it’s time for me to let some­
one with new answers try to address the old 
questions. Nevertheless, I offer the above in 
good faith and with good intentions. 

Finally, I used to roll my eyes when uni­
versity administrators would talk with library 
staff and indicate how they loved libraries, 
loved to read, and how both changed their 
lives. I now know that many of them meant 
it. And I feel tempted to say the same thing. 
Because I do love libraries. I do love to read. 
And libraries and reading have transformed 
my life from being a farmboy in central Il­
linois to being a very fulfilled staff member at 
the University of Michigan­Dearborn.