Advocacy and resourcing in special collections: Priorities, challenges, and advice from an OCLC RLP leadership roundtable

This post is one in a series documenting findings from the RLP Leadership Roundtable discussions.  

Rarely do we work in an environment where we have all the resources we need or would like; therefore, advocacy skills are an essential part of any special collections leader’s portfolio. Our recent OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) Special Collections Leadership Roundtable discussions focused on this vital topic of advocacy and resourcing. The rich discussion included how participants identify and make the case for their needs and address the challenges they face, with the hope that sharing obstacles and strategies can help everyone, including those reading this post!   

Across four discussion sessions, we had people join us from 28 RLP institutions.

Boston College	Boston University	Clemson University	Colorado State University
Emory University	Getty Research Institute	The Huntington	Library of Congress
Monash University	Montana State University	New-York Historical Society	New York Public Library
Northeastern University	Penn State	Rockefeller Archive Center	Stony Brook University
Syracuse University	University of California, Irvine	University of Kansas	University of Michigan
University of Nevada, Reno	University of Pittsburgh	University of Sydney	University of Texas at Austin
University of Toronto	University of Washington	Vanderbilt University	Virginia Tech

Participants commented on a set of framing questions:

• What are your top priorities for additional resources, whether they be staff, collections, technology, or something else?    
• Where do you expect decreasing resources and increasing resources in the next five years?   
• Can you share an advocacy success story? An advocacy challenge?  

After sharing responses to the questions, we opened the floor for discussion; high-level takeaways are summarized here.  

Priorities

Staff are needed across all parts of operations 

Nearly every institution in our conversations identified staffing as the overwhelming resource priority, with a range of needs within this category. Many are advocating for building their staff to better respond to contemporary program needs, including expanding teaching programs, shifting to greater remote access since the pandemic, supporting born-digital archival collecting, and increasingly emphasizing community connections and relationship stewardship in collection development. While in many cases there is a need for new positions or filling open lines, there is also significant need to build new skills in existing staff. One participant described being in the “long moment between physical and digital [collecting],” with a need for staff that can support both simultaneously.  

A staffing priority among many institutions is advocating for permanent staffing lines. Participants described some success in funding temporary positions, especially to deal with cataloging and processing backlogs. But it is significantly more challenging to secure ongoing funding to support permanent positions. With increasing attention to responsible and resource-sensitive stewardship and a continued desire to not just address backlogs but prevent their accrual, permanent positions dedicated to technical service needs were identified as necessary for building sustainable programs. An additional challenge for partners in academic institutions where librarians and archivists are faculty is that funds for new faculty lines are controlled by the provost, a role outside of the library.  

More space for collections and teaching 

Space was also a top priority for participants. For many, additional collection storage space was needed as institutions are nearing capacity for their physical collections. Digital storage was also a priority, and in many cases cited as a challenging priority to advocate for because it is relatively invisible.  

Space for teaching was identified as a priority nearly as often as collection storage space. As more programs are increasing their teaching engagement, special collections classroom space is at a premium. More than one institution in the conversation described having to turn away faculty requests for instruction because of space issues, not due to a lack of staff or collections resources. 

Support for changing access and engagement needs 

Shifts in the way that students and researchers engage with collections fueled priorities identified by some participants. During the pandemic closures, many archives and special collections responded to user needs with new or scaled up services that provided online access to collections, such as virtual reference services, digitization on demand, and teaching for remote or online classes. Despite the end of pandemic restrictions, user needs and expectations for access to collections seem to have shifted—seeking to maintain what were meant to be temporary accommodations. Discussants described trying to operationalize some of those changes, though significant uncertainty remains.  

Similarly, participants described a need to advocate for truly integrated teaching and learning, continuing a shift toward curriculum-aligned teaching in special collections and away from “white glove show-and-tells.” This kind of teaching and student engagement, along with alignment with institutional mission and goals, provides good fodder for advocacy stories. However, it is also staff time intensive, which in turn creates greater need for advocacy.  

Twin challenges: organizational turnover, funding misalignment  

Participants described seeing significant churn in leadership roles in the library and their larger organizations. Such changes can pose a major advocacy challenge. New leadership in the institution often means starting from scratch with articulating the value of special collections, as well as learning what a new administrator cares about to best communicate that value in terms that are meaningful to them. One participant described advocacy as a long road that requires sustaining relationships over time, and consistency of messaging to leadership about what needs are a priority. Leadership changes mean starting that relationship building all over again. 

Several people identified a mismatch between their endowment funds and their current programmatic needs. Traditionally, endowed funds in special collections are largely designated for purchasing new collections, not for stewarding them via cataloging, processing, conservation treatment, or digitization. A few archives have had success in going back to endowment donors or their descendants and reshaping allowed uses to better align with modern needs. A similar concern exists for expendable gifts from donors—that people want to fund things they view as exciting or novel, which isn’t always what a repository needs. As one participant put it, donors want to fund projects or purchases that are “sexy, and the backlog isn’t sexy.” 

Success stories and advice

Storytelling versus metrics 

Discussion turned to how people are quantifying need and outcomes, and what kinds of metrics are kept, reported, and useful in their advocacy efforts. The consistent theme across our roundtable sessions wasn’t the collection of a particular statistic, but the ways people were working to make those statistics meaningful to different audiences. Participants are thinking about which metrics matter to a specific person or role, or what best illustrates their point. For instance, one person had success in getting her University Librarian to engage with addressing their backlog after she started describing their backlog in FTE hours (actually years) rather than linear feet, and sharing year over year collection growth numbers, rather than just reporting for the past year. Two participants in New York City shared that they talk about the backlog in terms of how many Empire State Buildings it would be if you placed the boxes end to end, a striking visual image and one that can transform an abstract number into a compelling story. Others shared stories of enhancing metrics with rich detail, for example, augmenting teaching statistics with a story about the deep engagement or knowledge production that teaching facilitates.  

Development colleagues, from awkward to aligned 

Throughout our discussions, people asked for advice from one another, and much of that conversation centered on working with colleagues in development or advancement offices. The relationship between special collections and fundraising colleagues is an important one. When it functions well, both parties can help each other reach their goals. When it doesn’t, it can be counterproductive—allocating resources to low priority projects, committing the institution to collections that aren’t in line with mission and collecting scope, or just failing to raise funds needed for important work. Many participants asked variations on a question that basically boiled down to: how do you work with development to raise money for things that you actually need, and avoid getting saddled with projects you don’t want? The advice people offered was practical and actionable, and underscored the positive role of clear and open communication.  

Several participants created project briefs for colleagues in development, 1–2-page descriptions of funding needs that highlight why that work is important, exciting, or what it would enable. Creating briefs for projects at different price points that align with typical gift amounts can help development colleagues match donors with projects. Supporting fundraising colleagues in this way can help establish a reputation of being easy to work so that special collections is sought as a partner in future opportunities.  

Helping colleagues outside the archive understand the heavy lift of caring for archival or special collections was seen as an especially important communication goal. Development colleagues may place pressure on archives to take in collections as part of a major gift agreement, which can end up being burdensome to special collections. One participant aptly described them as “gifts that eat.” Educating colleagues about processing and stewardship work can inform the somewhat awkward conversations with these colleagues, and make sure those kinds of collections, if they must come in, at least come with money for their care and feeding.  

Another important communication tool is the call or contact report to share out when you speak with a potential or major donor. These keep everyone in the loop about what was discussed, support consistency of messaging and keep people from stepping on each other’s toes and are useful when handing off relationship stewardship to someone new.  

Participants also talked about making sure development colleagues know about events in special collections so that they can leverage them in their work. Special collections may still need to support one-off visits from donors, but it can save time and show the archive off in a way you want to emphasize.  

Next Steps

This set of roundtable discussions were rich and fruitful, and it was quite rewarding to see RLP partners share advice and strategies with each other for more successful advocacy. If you are interested in further advocacy advice from the field, I encourage you to join us on October 29 for an RLP Works in Progress webinar with Beth Myers from Smith College. She will be talking about how they used OCLC Total Cost of Stewardship tools to shift the way they worked with donors to build a more equitable, flexible funding model that centers the real cost of archival and rare book management.  

Our next round of gatherings of the Special Collections Leadership Roundtables will be in October; these will dig more deeply into a topic surfaced in these discussions—how institutions are responding to the evolving public services landscape in archives and special collections. If you are a member of an RLP institution and want to make sure you are represented in the roundtables, please reach out to me so we can make sure you are included!