Dear Colleagues:
Thank you for your service on the PAC, and thank you for your work in reviewing my tenure materials. I truly appreciate your effort and know that this represents a huge demand on both your time and energy. I feel very proud of the work that I've done since coming to JMU in May of 2011, and I hope that these materials will reflect what I feel have been my most important accomplishments. I would also like to acknowledge the professionalism and diligence of our colleagues across LET; I hope that it goes without saying that I would not have been able to accomplish as much as I have without their support, mentorship, and kindness.
When preparing my materials for my third year review, I identified three themes that I felt resonated throughout my work at LET. I believe these themes are still relevant and illustrate the foundation the work I did early in my time at JMU has provided for my current position, and some of the innovative directions LET has taken. In this letter, I will be revisiting those themes and expanding on the work I have done since my third year review.
Growth and Development of Media Resources Staff and Services
When I arrived at JMU in 2011, the Media Resources Department was in need of attention. It had been without a Director for a year, and due to important service commitments both within, and beyond JMU, my predecessor’s attention had not been focused on Media Resources for some time. In that first year, I tried to spend a lot of time listening to Media Resources staff about what they felt the areas of strength and opportunities for growth were both for the department and for themselves. I also solicited and received feedback from colleagues across LET about what they saw as the department's opportunities and challenges. The impression I got from these conversations was that the staff generally felt underutilized in the department and under-appreciated in the Library. They felt the department had much unrealized potential and that the staff were perhaps not working or being held to an acceptably high standard. In short, the department had both a morale and an image problem. The main work I saw for myself-- and my focus in those first years-- was in improving both of these.One of the first things I did was encourage and push the staff to be more involved in the profession outside LET. Brian, Judy, and Debbie all became active in seeking out professional development opportunities. I believe this encouragement and attention brought about an observable increase in morale and engagement. We regularly celebrated birthdays, took field trips, and had other non-work related opportunities to enjoy each other as people. I think, because of these efforts, the cohesiveness and collegiality of the department grew significantly.
When Patti Williams retired in 2012, I had the opportunity to make some necessary organizational changes to the department. At this point, Brian Simmons was responsible for overseeing the service point, maintaining the lab, and managing equipment loans. As we began to focus specifically on growing our media creation support services, this became an unmanageable amount of work. I was able to split Brian’s position into two more reasonable roles. We hired Debbie Pugh to take over equipment loans and lab support and to begin developing media instruction. Her efforts in developing instruction were so successful, we made this the sole focus of her new position in Innovation Services.
Beyond creating what I think was a happier staff, these efforts improved creativity, motivation, and risk taking. Every member of the department took on and succeeded at major projects, many at their own initiative. The benefit of this was an improvement and expansion of Media Resources services that wouldn't have been possible before. The collection was weeded and it's scope expanded. While circulation in other formats has seen significant decline, media has held much steadier. Equipment reservations and circulation continues to increase, and the type and amount of equipment offered has been expanded and diversified. One of the most obvious programs to come about through the initiative of MR staff is MadLab, and the expansion of media instruction. In the 2015-16 academic year, Media Resources instruction reached more than 1600 JMU students.
Many of the image problems the department had when I arrived, I believe, were problems of perception. However, there were a few concrete issues that we were able to address relatively quickly. Many of these were because of old processes and procedures that were in need of revision. One issue was a clunky and labyrinthine reserves process that Judy and I were able to update and streamline. Complaints from faculty about reserve issues dropped from several per semester to zero. Another issue was the inconsistent cataloging and processing of media titles. I worked with technical services to improve the standard for media cataloging and moved processing to Media Resources. Addressing some of these lingering issues made huge improvements in how the teaching faculty and LET staff viewed Media Resources.
Collaboration and Community Building
One of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of working at LET is the opportunity for so many collaborations. It was apparent to me early on in my time here that Media Resources had been suffering from it's relative isolation from the larger organization. By drawing Media Resources closer to other departments engaged in public services, we could create a better environment for our patrons and staff. I was fortunate to find colleagues eager to bring Media Resources in on existing collaborations and to look for new opportunities as well. Two key collaborations are particularly worth highlighting here: those with Carrier and Rose Public Services and CIT.Media Resources collaboration with Carrier and Rose began by expanding and developing partnerships that existed before I arrived. Elizabeth Haworth, Sara Williams and Stefanie Warlick were already doing many exciting things around building a Learning Commons. We discovered that we all shared similar philosophies on providing services to students and creating an environment for staff to grow and contribute, so finding a way for Media Resources to participate was natural. This partnership expanded when KT Vaughan was hired as the Director of Rose Library. This ultimately led to a reorganization of services known as Joint Library Service Leadership. This partnership worked toward a fully collaborative management model and centralized services such as outreach, training, and technology management. While ultimately short-lived, the JLSL model was an important step toward the current combined service point model.
In addition to the partnerships with Carrier and Rose Public Services, in 2013 Andrea Adams and I began planning an innovative collaboration between Media Resources and Carrier CIT. We had seen increasing overlap in the communities that we serve, and we feared there were unnecessary gaps in our service as we passed patrons off between each other. In conversations about these gaps, we discovered a wealth of opportunity for increased collaboration. We proposed a Balanced Scorecard Initiative to combine Media Resources and CIT public service points. The philosophy behind this initiative was that a seamless service model could be created to close the gap between teaching faculty's creation of assignments and student's completion of them. Because of difficulties with combining budgets and other administrative challenges, the initiative was sidelined. Based on recommendations from the APR and our new Dean’s desire to draw the Libraries and CIT closer together, in the Spring of 2016 Andrea and I revisited our project. We crafted an org chart for a combined Media Resources and CIT department. We are still in the very early days of the Innovation Services department, but we are excited about the potential of this new endeavor and believe it will be a positive force for JMU’s students and faculty.
Leadership and Positive Change in Service Commitments
I have had many opportunities for service in the past 5 years. Like many of my colleagues, at times it feels as though competing service commitments threaten to overwhelm my ability to focus on my basic job responsibilities. Service, though, is an opportunity to step outside one's department or unit-- or even institution-- to contribute and grow in ways that wouldn't be possible otherwise. I think my service has been diverse, and my hope is, that it has been impactful. I feel that I have shown leadership and made particular contributions in three service areas especially.The first service area I would like to highlight is my work as a member of the 2012-2013 PAC. This PAC was called upon to revise the Tenure and Promotion document, and as non-reviewing members, David Vess and I took a leadership role in the revision. Our first tasks were to lead four open forums to allow colleagues to discuss what their hopes would be for a new document and what their concerns and struggles were with the existing one. A clear mandate that came from this was the desire to see our document tied more closely to the faculty handbook. The revision we'd been tasked with quickly revealed itself to be a complete rewrite. David and I took on the majority of the work of the initial draft. The most significant and impactful change was the identification of the Associate Deans to fill the role of AUH. This allowed for the Library's document to exist much less in a state of exceptions, and to fall fully into alignment with the Faculty Handbook. In addition to making the process of tenure and promotion more clear and consistent for the Librarian Faculty, it has made our rights and responsibilities more defined. I'm extremely proud of my contribution to the PAC, and what I think has been a positive legacy for the Libraries.
I served two consecutive terms as AH Cluster rep on CDC from 2012-2016. Because of this length of service, I feel I was able to make a particular contribution to the committee’s consistency; in fact, I saw three different CDC chairs during my 4 years of service. During my time on CDC, we undertook two major review projects: databases and journals. I feel that my experience on the committee was particularly useful during this time, and that I was able to lead the AH Cluster through both processes relatively easily. The AH Cluster was, at the time, more than twice the size of any other and very diverse in subject expertise. This made it a particularly challenging group in which to build consensus.
One of the things I was most excited about when I began my position at JMU was the opportunity to take advantage of my relationships with colleagues at UVa to bring greater collaboration between the two libraries. My counterpart at UVa, Matt Ball, and I had the idea to create a group for media librarians across the state to share ideas and establish closer relationships. We sent out invitations to every college and university in the state and were delighted at the response we received. From that initial meeting grew VAAMPS, the Virginia Association of Academic Media Professionals. Matt and I served as co-chairs of the group and arranged several meetings for professional development and collaboration, before he accepted another position in 2014. One collaboration that grew out of this group was a VIVA sponsored project to identify at risk video collections within the state and to develop preservation and sharing of unique and rare materials. The result of this was an MOU that has now been signed by all of the Directors at participating schools, agreeing to collaborative preservation of our VHS collections.
The materials in this portfolio will highlight my activities in the areas of job performance, service, and scholarship. I hope you will find them useful in evaluating my progress toward tenure.
Thank you,
Erika Peterson