2019 North Carolina Serials Conference: Communication Is Key—Facilitating Discovery and Delivery to Connect Users to Information

A recent direction for library technical services (TS) departments is the idea of becoming more outward facing. This is a tricky concept in our space as it involves outward expression of our values and worth, something that many technical services departments have struggled with—not because of a lack of substance but because of the behindthe-curtain nature of TS work. How do you make the invisible seen? The 2019 NC Serials Conference held in Chapel Hill, NC, provided some insight into strategies for becoming outward facing with a focus on communication. The theme for this year’s event was “Communication Is Key—Facilitating Discovery and Deliver to Connect Users to Information.” The keynote sessions, concurrent sessions, and lightning rounds focused on the idea of communication from different spaces, including promoting who we are and our value, strategies for communicating with stakeholders, building better communities, and creating tools to enhance communication. A running theme through these sessions involved understanding our roles, power, and influence and becoming active participants in defining who we are and how we evolve. Galvan’s keynote address “More than Things” emphasized these ideas by discussing the ambiguity and complexity of our work and the difficulties in communicating what we do. Her talk included the important ideas of marketing and promotion. Technical services professionals need to do a better job of articulating value, not just to build awareness but to create opportunities for partnerships and to influence the spaces around us. Shelby’s report “Convergent Evolution of Innovative Teams in Technical Services” is a great example of defining value and building partnerships in a technical services environment. Data-related work has increased in technical services, including data cleaning and normalization, writing queries, and building databases and data warehouses. This work has coincided with the need to build partnerships with folks who intersect with these data spaces both across technical services and outside of technical services with departments like information technology (IT). Many of the efforts described in this report involve advancing discovery and performing data work at scale. Partnering with stakeholders who have data needs both promotes the services offered by technical services and illustrates immediate value by improving or enhancing the work of others. Partnerships for technical services staff should not be limited to groups within the library. Outward-facing technical services departments should think about their work within a user-focused frame. Technical services operations are critical to faculty and students, but the technologies used to access collections evolve quickly and need to be nimble to continue to meet user needs. Often, TS professionals have very few direct interactions with users (especially in larger libraries), resulting in the need for mediated information exchange with other departments, which may or may not actually happen. Understanding user concerns is critical to a technical services librarian’s ability to be both responsive and innovative. Numerous sessions at the NC Serials Conference emphasized the need to talk to users to continue to be responsive and be better at what we do. Galvan’s keynote talk emphasized the value of directly talking to people who use and need library services. Hill’s article discusses the need for market research to understand everyday user needs to inform our approach to discovery. Another article by Nickels and Davis focuses on a two-year project to investigate the needs of researchers based on interviews with faculty and librarians to determine better services and support to meet researchers where they are. This type of work is critical to provide library staff with an understanding of faculty needs. One example of an interaction between a librarian and faculty member is found in Ashmore’s report, where she describes Argabright’s work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to help researchers set up ORCID IDs. Argabright’s pop-up strategy is designed to both educate and support faculty in this effort. Another example is provided by Teague, who provides tips and tricks for better communication with certain student populations about library resources. These kinds of outreach efforts provide opportunities for potential collaboration outside of the libraries. As library services become more complex, automated, and outsourced, vendors are another critical group that provide data services, metadata, and tools that support our workflows. Several of the articles in this special issue focus on the complex communication processes required to