Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Downloaded 2021-04-06T00:38:56Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Title New directions for academic libraries in research staffing: Acase study at National University of Ireland Galway Author(s) Cox, John Publication Date 2017-04-10 Publication Information Cox, John. (2017). New Directions for Academic Libraries in Research Staffing: A Case Study at National University of Ireland Galway. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 23(2-3), 110-124. doi: 10.1080/13614533.2017.1316748 Publisher Taylor & Francis Link to publisher's version http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2017.1316748 Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/6760 DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2017.1316748 https://aran.library.nuigalway.ie http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ie/ 1 New Directions for Academic Libraries in Research Staffing: a case study at National University of Ireland Galway John Cox, University Librarian, Library, National University of Ireland Galway Abstract New research needs, global developments and local shifts in emphasis are demanding a broader range of interactions by librarians with researchers and are challenging previous staffing structures. Research has a higher institutional profile and academic libraries have responded by creating new roles and staffing models, with stronger linkage across campus as partners rather than supporters. Particular circumstances at National University of Ireland Galway have shaped its Library's staffing configuration for research. These include the emergence of digital scholarship across campus, opportunities offered by a new research building, the growing importance of archives and the publication of a new institutional strategy. Significant reductions in staffing and budget are influential too. Distinctive features in the revised staffing model are organisation by function instead of subject, prioritisation of engagement with digital scholarship, distributed management of archives and special collections and a particular emphasis on contribution across multiple teams. This case study reports early gains and challenges. Introduction Staffing for research services has been an area of strong emphasis and typically expansion for academic libraries in recent years. This article describes experience at National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway which has adopted a new staffing model, maximising specialist skills and teamwork to meet an expanded range of researcher needs and expectations. The case study explains local circumstances, the 2 structure adopted, early experience and points of learning. It is preceded by a literature review to provide global context. Global Trends in Research Services A review of the literature from the past five years or so indicates, in the initial period at least, some concerns by library managers. These are directed in particular at a lack of recognition by researchers of libraries as partners or keys to productivity (Corrall, 2014), along with reduced engagement, (Delaney & Bates, 2015), limited awareness of what librarians provide (Cooke et al., 2011), and among doctoral students a lack of understanding of the information environment (British Library & JISC, 2012). It is also understood that researchers can look elsewhere to meet emerging needs if libraries are unable to deliver, but this is also recognised as an opportunity to set out a new agenda and to develop new roles (Auckland, 2012). Academic libraries have created new staffing positions in response to stronger institutional focus on research, increased emphasis on measuring research performance, notably the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), and changes in the scholarly communications environment, including expectations of open access to funded research. These posts are usually of a specialist nature and targeted at “higher- end” (Corrall, 2014, p. 32) engagement with researchers further upstream in their work (Auckland, 2012). They have focused initially on areas such as systematic literature reviews, bibliometrics, open access and data curation. Changes in the way research is recorded and communicated, often incorporating datasets and other outputs besides formal publications, have created a need for expert advice by libraries on publishing, discoverability, rights management and altmetrics (Johnson, Adams 3 Becker, Estrada, & Freeman, 2015, pp. 12-13), including the development of social media strategies to promote research (Persson & Svenningsson, 2016). To some extent this first wave of new research-focused roles might be considered a natural evolution from traditional library expertise in discovery, information literacy, copyright, and the organisation of information. The active involvement of academic libraries in digital humanities initially and then digital scholarship at large has occasioned a more radical shift in the scope and nature of their engagement with research and researchers. Digital scholarship is a term affording many definitions but is fundamentally linked to the opportunities offered by digital technologies and content to enable new modes of enquiry, commonly across disciplines, and to make new connections, often by manipulating vast quantities of data. Libraries can take a relatively passive role as a supplier of digital resources or advice or can become an active partner, recognising a shift “from the consumption to the creation of scholarship” (Clay, 2016, p. 134). Ad hoc engagement with digital humanities in 2011 (Bryson, Posner, St Pierre, & Varner, 2011) has since then for many libraries become mainstream involvement with digital scholarship, spawning a series of new activities (Cox, 2016). A survey of members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) on support for digital scholarship in 2016 identified 19 activities, all of them featuring to some extent in the 73 responding libraries (Mulligan, 2016). These activities range from digitisation and metadata creation to digital mapping, data management and software development, representing a considerable expansion in library interaction with researchers. Other headline findings included the involvement of librarians, archivists and IT professionals in library teams, collaboration across and beyond the campus, the creation of new posts, typically at senior levels and often not requiring a professional librarian qualification, and the expectation of further growth in digital scholarship engagement. MacKenzie and Martin (2016) describe 4 similar patterns and a breadth of activity for libraries in the UK and Ireland, including a range of services established at the University of Salford (Clay, 2016), while McRostie sets out an impressively ambitious Research Information Program focused on maximising research data at the University of Melbourne (McRostie, 2016). Clearly a significant expansion in library engagement with researchers has taken place and digital scholarship has been a factor. The concept of library as partner, not simply service, has also advanced, with library staff occupying a new space, located much more prominently in the researcher’s orbit (Posner, 2013; Vandegrift & Varner, 2013). Examples are the University of Sussex Humanities Lab whose core staffing includes members of library staff (MacKenzie, 2016) and the involvement of the Library in the Social and Cultural Informatics Platform (SCIP) at the University of Melbourne (McRostie, 2016). A related development is the linkage of library provision to the research lifecycle to enable partnership at all stages rather than, as traditionally for libraries, only at the beginning and end (Corrall, 2014). This can be seen in staffing structures at Brown University where a recent recruitment process for its Center for Digital Scholarship intends that librarians will work through all stages of the research process (Maron, 2015), while at King’s College London the Library Research Support home page is sub-titled “Support through the Research Lifecycle” (King's College London Library, 2016). Close collaboration with other parties on campus is another recurring theme, described by Corrall (2014, p. 35) as “boundary- spanning activities”. These include working with campus research offices, IT services and academics around open access and research data and are very much in evidence in the case studies referenced earlier at the University of Salford and the University of Melbourne. Some academic libraries have executed significant changes in their organisational structure for research. The subject librarian role has come under the spotlight, and the broadening of research support 5 activities as well as trends towards interdisciplinary research have led to its supplementation with specialists at some institutions (Jaguszewski & Williams, 2013). Other libraries have shifted from subject to functional models (Hoodless & Pinfield, 2016; Jaguszewski & Williams, 2013). Those who have done so have been motivated by a desire to strengthen research support, putting an emphasis on improved cross-campus collaboration and communications (Eldridge, Fraser, Simmonds, & Smyth, 2016). The University of Manchester led this change in 2012 and reported success in developing new or enhanced research services in areas such as open access, citation analysis and data management (Bains, 2013, 2014). Multiple staffing models are possible for digital scholarship engagement activities (Vinopal & McCormick, 2013) and can be seen across ARL institutions (Mulligan, 2016). Whatever configuration is adopted, staff skills are a concern. Auckland (2012) listed 32 potential skills required by subject librarians and identified a significant gap in provision for nine of them . The ARL digital scholarship survey specified visualisation, data curation and management, and computational text analysis as the three most critical areas for skills development to meet emerging demand (Mulligan, 2016). Inskip sees a need for librarian skills and competencies to change fundamentally and for the librarian to be a polymath or a blended professional with a merged set of identities and practices, capable of working across different groups on campus (Inskip, 2016). Library Enablement of Research at NUI Galway: local factors Founded in 1845, NUI Galway is a research-led and research-intensive university across a wide range of disciplines. It is one of seven Irish universities, with over 17,000 students, who are increasingly international in origin, and 2,500 staff. Research is focused on selected areas of strength, including biomedical engineering, digital humanities and data analytics. Its strategic plan aims to achieve a 6 position in the top 200 universities worldwide by 2020 and it is currently ranked in the top 250. The James Hardiman Library places a strong emphasis on enabling research and this is reflected in its own strategy to 2020. Its vision is that the Library will be a catalyst for success as the University’s hub for scholarly information discovery, sharing and publication. Local factors and institutional priorities are rightly recognised as shaping any academic library’s staffing model for research (Auckland, 2012; Hoodless & Pinfield, 2016). Certain events at NUI Galway in recent years have been highly significant in this regard, none more so than the opening of the Hardiman Research Building in 2013. Adjoining the Library, this building co-locates archives, special collections, digitisation facilities and library staff who have research roles with the University’s leading research institutes for the humanities and social sciences. This shared location has had a huge impact in advancing the positioning of the Library as a partner with the academic community, promoting collaborations around digital scholarship projects, seminars, exhibitions and a visiting fellowship scheme. The University has placed a particular emphasis on archives as a point of distinction and a vital research resource and the new building, in addition to providing vastly improved accommodation, has delivered much stronger use of collections and attracted a number of prestigious donations. A notable addition at the time of writing is the archive of former President of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. Another event with long-term impact for the Library has been the establishment of a partnership in 2012 between the University and the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre and one of its foremost cultural institutions, to digitise its archive (Bradley & Keane, 2015). The creation of the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, completed in late 2015, was the world’s largest ever theatre archive digitisation project, comprising more than a million pages in addition to audio-visual and other media. The Library led the 7 project, working alongside an external contractor and learning a lot about large-scale digitisation and the academic potential of digital collections (MacKenzie, 2016). Positive outcomes included a further raising of the profile of archives in the University and a new perception on campus of the Library as a source of expertise in digital humanities and digital scholarship. Expectations of the Library were certainly raised and openings emerged to work with a range of partners active in digital projects. This brought challenges in terms of staffing and infrastructure, but also opportunities and culminated in the publication by the Library in 2014, following a series of mutually beneficial consultations, of a Digital Scholarship Enablement Strategy (National University of Ireland Galway Library, 2014a). The strategy positioned the Library as one of a number of key players in the University, eager to engage and collaborate. It foregrounded the quality and range of the Library’s archives and special collections as a particular strength, recognising that research collections are a key factor in engagement by libraries with digital scholarship (MacKenzie, 2016) The growth in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to academic work in recent years, exemplified by digital scholarship, has asked questions of library staffing models (Jaguszewski & Williams, 2013). NUI Galway adopted a new academic structure in 2008, consolidating over 60 disciplines into five Colleges and 16 Schools. This structure has promoted interdisciplinarity and blurred the subject divisions on which a large part of the Library’s staffing was based. National factors also added impetus to a review of staffing. Ireland suffered a particularly sudden and deep recession in 2008 which had serious implications for university staffing and budget levels (Cox, 2010). Although an economic recovery has taken place, this has not as yet meaningfully impacted the universities. The Library at NUI Galway has almost 20% fewer staff than in September 2008, reduced from 82.5 FTE to 67.2 FTE, but has needed to respond to a range of new researcher behaviours, requirements and expectations. Incremental adaptations have become unsustainable, calling for a radical change and this 8 realisation informed the development of a new Library strategy in 2014 and 2015. Another national factor of relevance to library staffing models has been an increased emphasis on research, with a particular focus on measuring its impact. This is clearly stated in the Irish Government’s research strategy document, Innovation 2020 (Department of Jobs Enterprise and Innovation, 2015), which also indicates a strong expectation of open access to research publications and data, mandating a range of actions and interactions for libraries, research offices and academic units. Alignment with institutional strategy has been the other main driver for the Library at NUI Galway. The University published its Vision 2020 strategy in April 2015 (National University of Ireland Galway, 2015). The University Librarian was a member of the drafting group and this proved advantageous in informing early work on the Library’s strategy. The University strategy foregrounds research, emphasising citation impact, researcher training, international profile and global impact through publications in particular, while also referencing archives as a differentiator. These areas of emphasis influenced Library discussions around staffing for bibliometrics, researcher skills, open access, archives and digital scholarship. The range of factors described in this section proved to be major influencers in the development of the Library strategy to 2020 and they shaped the staffing models adopted for its delivery. A New Library Staffing Model for Research The thrust of the Library’s Journey to 2020 strategy is towards delivering new value by recognising greater self-sufficiency among researchers and targeting areas of new need (National University of Ireland Galway Library, 2016b). One of its six priorities is high-impact publication of research, data and digital content. The strategy takes a user-centred approach, looking outwards and putting the three 9 main Library assets of space, collections and staff skills at the disposal of researchers in different ways, all geared towards discovery, sharing and publication. It promotes interactive locations to showcase and engage communities with research through exhibition and maker spaces, accessible collections such as digital archives to enable new approaches to knowledge creation, and evolving skills and infrastructure for digital publication to bring research outputs to global audiences. The focus throughout is on a new value proposition and a major reshaping of the Library agenda based on consultation, listening and recent experience. The strategy anticipates multiple, often overlapping, touchpoints for researchers and others with the Library, calling therefore on fluidity in the team structure supporting it. The change in organisational structure has been radical rather than incremental. More than half of the Library staff members have changed role or line manager following the creation of five new teams in early 2016. Introducing change on this scale has called for considered planning and management. A key principle from to the outset was to invest heavily in consultation with staff to promote their fullest participation in the process of developing the new agenda, identifying emerging demands and shaping the new staffing model required. Consultation included a series of horizon scanning workshops repeated until all staff had participated, individual meetings by the University Librarian with each member of staff, and six thematic seminars, again repeated for full staff attendance, to agree priority actions for each of the six strategic thrusts in the Vision for the Library in 2020 (National University of Ireland Galway Library, 2014b) which had been developed collaboratively. Meetings to brief staff took place as the new team structure was being created and populated. The whole process from initial workshops to establishment of teams took about two years, time well spent in terms of achieving staff buy-in. By the time the new teams were announced, there were few surprises. Nevertheless the senior management team recognised as important the need to provide support for individuals and teams. Not surprisingly, some staff expressed 10 concerns about taking on new roles, giving up favoured activities, discontinuing some services and changing team or manager. There were questions too about the unproven value of new areas of priority. Managers organised lots of team briefings and individual meetings to clarify queries. Away days have been encouraged for teams as needed too. Overall, there has been an impressive commitment to embracing new roles and taking on significant change. The new teams are:  Operations: aligning Library space and staffing with changing needs  Collections: integrating management and development of, and access to, information resources  Marketing and Engagement: promoting the Library and understanding user needs  Research and Learning: enabling research and developing academic skills  Digital Publishing and Innovation: creating digital collections for innovative research Table 1 shows the new team structure relative to its predecessor; the teams are presented in alphabetical order in each column as efforts to map new to old are of limited value. Table 1. New and Previous Team Structure New Teams Previous Teams Collections Customer Focus and Research Services Digital Publishing and Innovation Information Access and Learning Services Marketing and Engagement Organisational Development and Performance Operations Staff Development and Service Environment Research and Learning 11 In terms of its alignment to research there are a number of distinctive features of this new staffing model relative to that which preceded it. The first of these is the formation of a separate Digital Publishing and Innovation Team, representing a prioritisation of engagement with digital scholarship. Although the team is relatively small, comprising 5.9 FTE, it has a diverse skills profile which includes programming, metadata, web publishing, information services, strategy and communications. Its members have library, archives and IT backgrounds and job titles include Digital Publishing and Data Management Librarian, Digital Archivist and Digital Library Developer. This fusion of talents, backgrounds and perspectives is beneficial in an area as multi-stranded as digital scholarship and facilitates an agile response to the range of projects involved. The new team advantageously brings together staff who were formerly dispersed throughout the Library in a variety of roles. There is a particular need for IT skills as the systems infrastructure is diverse and core to progress. It helps greatly that the Head of the Team has a strong track record of development with library technologies. Another new departure is separate management of archives and special collections according to their public-facing activities and internal management processes. Previously all aspects of archives and special collections were managed within the former Research Services Division. The new arrangement allocates 60% of staff effort to public engagement in the Research and Learning Team and 40% to the management of collections in the Collections Team. The rapid recent growth in archives had created difficulties in balancing demand between front- and back-of-house activities, sometimes to the detriment of the latter. New collections were acquired but time for optimal storage and cataloguing was compromised by the high profile of archives in research, teaching, exhibitions and information literacy. The intent is to manage acquisition, storage and cataloguing systematically by aligning these vital functions with the management of all Library collections, while continuing to maximise the use of 12 archives and special collections for academic and public engagement. A challenge will be to achieve the intended balance of effort, retaining some flexibility within a disciplined approach and recognising a need to manage new demand, sometimes to a more phased timetable than heretofore. The Heads of the two Teams understand the need for clarity of reporting and also for connectivity with the Digital Publishing and Innovation Team around digital archives. The engagement of three teams with archives and special collections represents a new level of distribution, with attendant risks but also the opportunity to connect this growing area of activity better with the Library at large. NUI Galway has joined other universities in moving from a subject to a functional model of organisation, distributing its former Subject Librarians across the Research and Learning, Marketing and Engagement and Collections Teams. Its reasons for doing so are similar to those reported elsewhere (Hoodless & Pinfield, 2016) but the staffing and budgetary cuts noted earlier have been a significant factor too. It is no longer feasible to devote a large proportion of professional staffing to individual Colleges and greater flexibility of deployment is needed, especially as the range of expectations has broadened so much beyond collections, information literacy and reference, the core subject librarian areas of engagement (Jaguszewski & Williams, 2013). The new Research and Learning Team now offers a more generic approach to information literacy, extending coverage to new skills needed in the changing scholarly communications environment. A particular emphasis is to complement the Research Services Librarian whose remit is focused on specialist graduate skills, researcher enquiries, bibliometrics and open access advocacy across all disciplines. This is breaking down a division, artificial from the user perspective, between staffing for teaching and learning and research which the previous structure had surfaced. These new arrangements have not been immediately accepted by academic staff in all disciplines. A particular has been the School of Law. The loss of their subject librarian has created concerns and a number of meetings have taken place to monitor the transition to the new structure and to ensure the 13 availability of subject-specific information skills training where required. Members of the School of Law are beginning to acknowledge some gains from the new strategy and teams too, including access to new archives and collaboration on the establishment of an open access journal. Some other, more general, points can be made about the modus operandi of the new structure in enabling Library engagement with University research. A multi-contributory approach is at its core, taking into account the wider range of interactions with researchers, and teams have replaced divisions. Success depends on strong collaboration and fluidity across teams, not just among the three teams working on digital archives, for example, but leveraging important contributions from the other two teams in relation to spaces, skills development and communications. A culture of collective responsibility for the new agenda at large, rather than only for a team’s immediate remit, is being encouraged. This has been a particular focus in the senior management team. The team has participated in two away days to reinforce mutual support, teamwork and ownership of the whole strategy and has initiated a new series of bimonthly meetings to exchange progress across all areas in the annual operational plan. The positive impact of these new approaches has been evident in a willingness by members to share staff between teams at busy times or to compromise on filling vacant posts in order to enable the recruitment of new skills of benefit to the Library at large. As a result new positions have been created by filling vacant posts differently, sometimes at changed grades and in different teams. This has been unpopular at times as it has reduced the staffing in some teams but has been seen as essential in order to introduce specialist skills to meet new priorities (Martin, 2016). Because numbers are stretched there is openness to outsourcing, of digitisation or cloud-based IT infrastructure for example, or to complementing rather than owning a function such as bibliometrics for which the University’s Institutional Research Office is better resourced. Depth often needs to be 14 sacrificed in favour of breadth of coverage, but it seems better to engage across a range of emerging activities than to risk exclusion of the Library when it has an important contribution to make. Engagement brings opportunities, including participation in funding bids, to supplement reduced resources. The mentality is therefore one of maximum partnership with researchers, engaging visibly in their space at seminars and other events and recognising that participation opens up communication (Cox, 2016). The First Year The new structure has generated some benefits, as well as a few challenges, in its first year of operation. Library engagement with digital scholarship has broadened and is on more solid foundations following the establishment of the Digital Publishing and Engagement Team which works to an annual plan and has developed a prioritisation process. The range of projects to create digital collections has expanded, notably the digitisation of the archive of Ireland’s second largest theatre, the Gate, as a complement to the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive. The Library led the funding bid for that project and has also secured University funding for the cataloguing and digitisation of two other newly acquired archives. The presence of staff with IT skills in this Team has spawned new work around interface development, text and data mining of digital collections, and crowdsourced transcription. These are activities closely linked to the three areas referenced earlier as priorities for skills development in the ARL digital scholarship survey (Mulligan, 2016). The involvement of more than one team with archives has influenced a more holistic approach to their acquisition and processing, including new workflows to harmonise metadata across different platforms for paper and digital collections. The development of resourcing plans and bids, in order to ensure a 15 plan for storage and cataloguing of collections before a commitment to receive them is agreed, means that acquisition takes longer but will have greater academic impact. A new Archives Strategy Committee, including a number of research leaders on campus, has been very supportive of this approach. The focus is on linking archives to strong academic engagement. Partnering on bids for resources to enable faster processing of new collections has yielded funding for two contract archivist posts to date. The new Committee has also overseen the creation and publication for the first time of an archives strategy (National University of Ireland Galway Library, 2016a), drafted through a collective exercise across three teams. The strategy charts a course for the period to 2020, covering collections management and discovery, publication of digital collections, academic engagement, and resourcing. One early outcome is a project initiated by the Collections Team to audit and reorganise archival holdings, aiming to yield an increase of more than 15% in available space for new additions. Another is a publisher contract for a book on Irish theatre archives, to be edited by an archivist in the Research and Learning Team with contributions from a number of academic and Library staff in the University. That initiative signifies an escalation in Library engagement with researchers, as partners where opportunity arises. This has included organising a series of digital publishing seminars to showcase work on digital collections, publishing a number of reports to highlight the academic impact of archives (National University of Ireland Galway Library, 2017), and ongoing consultation around the new strategy. All of this activity has been backed by a more concerted use of social media, facilitated by the Marketing and Engagement Team. Stronger researcher engagement has had positive results, including the joint funding bids for archives resources already mentioned, a partnership to provide a drop-in advisory service for digital scholarship projects and a project, led by the Operations Team, to develop a reconfigured exhibition space. A closer working relationship with the Research Office has emerged too. Collaboration includes the implementation of a University policy on open access to research outputs and 16 better integration of the research management and repository systems, again facilitated by increased IT expertise in the Digital Publishing and Innovation Team. Connectivity with a range of partners on campus is underpinning the development of advisory services and technical infrastructure for research data management. This is an area of growing demand for which Library involvement was difficult to activate under the previous structure. The reaction of the research community to new Library initiatives has been encouragingly positive to date. Attendance at events such as seminars on archives or digital publishing has been strong, sometimes with standing room only, while Library staff have been invited to participate in academic projects, notably the Digital Cultures Initiative (National University of Ireland Galway Moore Institute, 2017) which seeks to join up digital scholarship activities on campus. There are, of course, some downsides in the new organisational model. Staffing is very thinly spread in places and delivering a broad range of information literacy programmes has been achieved with difficulty while a key staff member was absent through illness. A deeper offering in areas such as bibiliometrics and systematic reviews is inhibited by lack of numbers. Involving more teams on collaborative projects can sometimes take longer due to the need to convene larger groups, familiarise staff with new areas of work and fit around different peaks and troughs of demand for each team. Failure to see the joins across teams can happen and there is a need for the University Librarian and senior management team to monitor the embedding of the new structure to ensure that collaboration happens, communication across teams takes place and stakeholders, including user communities, university management and funders, are fully engaged. The broadening of activity calls for an ongoing prioritisation of resources to meet demand and this involves some delicate balancing acts. Keeping up with the need to develop staff skills is also very challenging and the value of a more strategic approach, as implemented at Manchester when it adopted a new structure in 2012, is evident (Bains, 17 2013). Unlike at Manchester, no additional funding has been made available for staff development, although this line item in the Library budget has been protected at least from the impact of cuts necessitated elsewhere. The new strategy and team structure highlighted a need for new skills early on. Before the teams were formally established the Head of Operations met with each of the other Heads to identify development priorities and has proceeded to source opportunities to acquire new skills; progress has therefore been gradual depending on when courses arise. Development has been fastest when larger groups can participate together in webinars or courses organised on site such as one on social media strategy. Learning on the job with mutual support among colleagues has been a common approach. Participation in new working groups locally, for example one on research data management, has proved to be an effective route to learning and understanding. Another approach which is receiving new emphasis is learning through stronger engagement than previously with cross-institutional initiatives. These include proposals for digital scholarship projects with external partners and membership of a series of new groups created at national level by the Consortium of National and University Libraries (CONUL). In addition, recruitment opportunities arising from upcoming staffing retirements are being targeted with a view to importing new skills of value across the whole Library rather than filling posts on a team-specific basis. Conclusion New research needs, global developments and local circumstances are demanding a broader range of interactions by librarians with researchers and are challenging previous staffing structures. Doing more with less remains the mantra, but libraries are at a vital juncture and risk exclusion from emerging areas of contribution and from associated funding opportunities. The Library at NUI Galway has faced many 18 changes and challenges in recent years and adopted a distinctive organisational model to accommodate new researcher expectations, the mix of staff skills required and the need to maximise teamwork to deliver on a new agenda identified in its strategy to 2020. Some important points of learning have emerged along the way. These include fitting new staffing models to local factors such as the emergence of digital scholarship across the campus, the opportunities offered by a new building, the growing importance of archives and the publication of a new institutional strategy. Planning for change across a generous time horizon, in this case two years, has been helpful in engaging Library staff with shaping the new agenda and understanding the rationale underpinning it as well as the need for a different structure of teams and individual roles. Communicating continuously with researchers post implementation is especially vital in addressing concerns, building confidence in the new agenda and selling its benefits positively and early. A key event in this regard was the public launch of the strategy which attracted an engaged audience from across the campus and was led by the Registrar and Deputy President with speakers from leaders in teaching and learning and research. The launch provided an opportunity to emphasise the alignment of the strategy with University priorities and to confirm the Library’s intent to generate new value and partnerships. It also reinforced the new teams and the commitment of individuals to the new directions being taken. A particular feature of this event was the honest account of their experience of change by two members of staff who had taken on new roles. The launch has been supplemented by an ongoing emphasis on proactive communications with influential groups such as the Academic Management Team and the College Vice-Deans for Teaching and Learning and for Research. Fuller attention to communications, including an orientation of language used towards partnership instead of service, has to date generated an increased and more broadly based interaction with the 19 academic community. A less close relationship is a concern commonly expressed about moving from subject to functional organisation (Hoodless & Pinfield, 2016) but this has not happened so far. The phrase carpe diem (seize the day) resonates strongly too. Library managers have recognised that the opportunities offered by the new structure need to be taken early on if they are to be realised, even if this creates extra pressure. Otherwise, traditional approaches may reassert themselves and the moment for change may be lost. A strong base has been established in terms of commitment to engaging with digital scholarship, developing partnerships around projects and resources, maximising archives and special collections as an institutional differentiator, and taking a more strategic approach to developing or introducing essential skills for the Library team as a whole. The ongoing challenge is to build on these foundations by sustaining momentum, facing outwards and being alert to opportunities It is early days in terms of the new agenda and structure, with numerous challenges in evidence but also many good signs and much to build on, especially if an improved funding climate makes it possible to deepen the resource base in areas where the Library is creating new value. The University Management Team is very positively disposed towards this evolving agenda and the additional funding it has awarded to digital projects and archives processing positions the Library better now and for the future. 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