Academic libraries commonly use the liaison model to enable librarians and
faculty members to work in partnership to improve library services and, ultimately,
to improve educational outcomes for students. At larger institutions,
liaison work has tended in the past to revolve around subject bibliographers
or specialists who are often partnered with departmental faculty members
tasked with representing the needs of their academic department. There has
been some move away from this classic model in recent years (Williams &
Jaguszewski, 2013). In smaller institutions, often with smaller librarian-faculty
ratios, liaison work has tended to revolve around instruction and collection
development. In such environments, liaisons are frequently quite informal
and centered upon partnerships between individual librarians and faculty
members. In both cases, there is evidence that while many libraries have
intermittently evaluated their liaison program, they have not evaluated the
work of individual liaison librarians. Until recently this was certainly the case
at Rollins College.
Rollins College in Winter Park, FL, has the Carnegie classification “Master’s/
L.” With an annual FTE student population of just over 3,000 and a
fulltime faculty of just over 200, including 10 faculty-librarians, it is the oldest
institution of higher education in Florida and has deep roots in the liberal
arts. The College is served by a single library, the Olin Library at Rollins. The
College has for many years valued the close relationship between librarians
and teaching faculty in the development of library services and collections.
In the last six years the librarians recognized the need to reform their somewhat
informal liaison program. This reform led to the development of an
explicit description of the role of liaison librarian (see Appendix 1), a rebranding
of the program as Your Librarian (Carpan, 2011), and recognition
of the need to evaluate the work of individual liaisons. A literature review
revealed no usable models for such an individual liaison evaluation, so the
librarians developed their own. The role description, evaluation instrument,
and procedure are shared here with the hope that they will prove useful for
similar institutions.