Monday 6 July 2009

Library champions

Here's Xiaoguang Yang, director of Beihang university library, Beijing, on advocacy as quoted in the latest Australian Library News...

'Two strategies key to successful lobbying for academic library funding are: communicating
clearly with the library’s funding body, and deploying library champions. Our practice is to make the key professor of each discipline responsible for helping spread the good word, university-wide, about the library.’

While liaison librarians don't communicate directly with the library's funding body, almost everything we do in the liaison role has an impact on how the library is perceived and hence the support we receive from the schools and wider university community. The subscription cancellation project is an example directly related to funding that hopefully will have a' trickle up' effect in that the message will travel upwards to those who make funding decisions not just from the library but also from schools.

Our school based library champions could be our LOs, but this is not always the case. While I'm not really a fan of military style verbs like 'deploy' the term 'library champion' is kind of catchy and fits in with the terminology currently in use in schools eg Criterion referenced assessment champions

Thanks to Karmen for helping us keep up to date with what's happening in libraries across Australia with Australian Library News

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