As liaison librarianship has evolved from a collections-centric to an engagement-centric model, liaisons have had to grapple with new and evolving competencies and skills that are focused on how to engage with diverse constituencies and stakeholders. But what does that mean practically?
Liaison Engagement Success: A Practical Guide for Librarians will answer that question for academic liaison librarians, whether they are new to the profession or new to the liaison role. It offer specific proven strategies for engaging with user communities. Every community is different, and a liaison who takes up the tasks of engagement will need to be committed to building relationships, being flexible, and listening well, in order to understand the community’s needs and meet them.
This book offers specific strategies for :
Getting to know a user communityFinding effective strategies for proactive outreachCollaborating with others for effective engagementEvaluating and assessing the engagement that is happeningThe book features practical tips and case studies for engagement with different disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, STEM, arts, professional disciplines, and with non-academic units.
Ellen Hampton Filgo is the director of the liaison program in the research and engagement division of Baylor University Libraries. She received her MSLS from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is also a 2017 cohort member of the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians. As the director of the liaison program, she manages a team of liaisons who reach out to and engage with their assigned schools, departments, and major programs on campus to provide high quality and effective research, information literacy, collections and scholarly communication services. She is also the liaison to four social science and humanities departments.
Sha Towers is the associate dean for research and engagement in the Baylor University Libraries, leading a team of directors who oversee the liaison program, public services, instruction and information literacy, special collections, data and digital scholarship. He holds the Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Texas and the Master of Music History and Literature degree from Baylor University. He is a 2011 cohort member of the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, and in 2018, he was promoted to the highest rank of faculty librarians at Baylor University. Towers served as the head of the fine arts library at Baylor for nine years, during which time he developed a new model of librarian engagement with the faculty and students in the arts fields. As a result of this work, he was invited to lead the reference department in a major reorganization with the goal of transitioning the reference librarians to a more proactive liaison model. Towers led the liaison program at the Baylor Libraries from 2012 until 2019.
Towers and Filgo have authored and presented on engaged liaison work in numerous venues, both separately and as co-authors and co-presenters.
