The evolving public services landscape in special collections: Insights from an OCLC RLP leadership roundtable 

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

Multiple recent shifts in practice have impacted special collections public services programs, including a significant increase in use of off-site collections storage, widespread implementation of Aeon and other online request systems, and digitization-on-demand programs. And pandemic-era changes in serving our researchers have significantly altered user expectations. In October 2024, special collections leaders from Research Library Partnership (RLP) institutions gathered to discuss how these changes in the public services landscape impact priorities, resourcing, and strategy. 

These conversations gathered 27 people from 26 RLP partner institutions.  

Art Institute of Chicago	Clemson University	Colorado State University	Cornell University
Emory University	George Washington University	Huntington Library	Library of Congress
Michigan State University	National Library of Australia	New York Public Library	New York University
Rockefeller Archive Center	Rutgers University	Syracuse University	University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles	University at Buffalo	University of Calgary	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
University of Kansas	University of Michigan	University of Sydney	University of Tennessee, Knoxville
University of Texas at Austin	Virginia Tech

Participants commented on a set of framing questions before engaging in informal discussions: 

1. How have user expectations shifted since the pandemic, and how has your public services program responded?   

2. How are public services changes impacting your needs and plans? Please consider implications like staffing, services, spaces, infrastructure, security, and technology. 

3. What statistics are you keeping on public services, collection use, etc.? What key performance indicators are you using to evaluate success? Are you (or do you wish you were) collecting any new data to account for changes? 

This post summarizes high-level takeaways and key themes from our discussions.  

Post-pandemic changes 

The pandemic put a sudden end to business as usual in special collections reading rooms. Closures drastically limited researchers’ ability to access collections in-person, and archives quickly pivoted to providing new and expanded services for remote access. In most cases, these services were created under exceptional circumstances and weren’t sustainable in the long-term. However, when reading rooms reopened, neither special collections nor their users reverted entirely to pre-pandemic ways of working. Roundtable participants described an array of changes, many still in flux, and the way that already limited resources are impacted by these changes. 

Reading room usage and practices 

Participants had mixed experiences regarding in-person reading room numbers returning to pre-pandemic levels. Some repositories still had not regained the level of visitation they had before 2020, while others had seen a return to their previous levels and still others are now busier. A consistent phenomenon people reported was that in-person visitors now spend the majority of their time in the archive photographing material, which they will more carefully examine and analyze when they return home. Because of this, researchers are requesting a higher volume of material per visit, in some cases putting strain on paging, shelving, and space capacities created to support a smaller volume of material passing through the reading room each day. Some places are considering adding copy stands or other tools to help researchers take better photographs and help the repository better care for materials. 

Many people reported moving to a system of appointment-only or appointments strongly encouraged for access to their reading rooms, in response both to decreasing and increasing attendance numbers. For less busy repositories, it helps guard against using limited resources to staff an empty reading room. For busy reading rooms, it helps to manage space, box requests, and make the workload more predictable and manageable for staff, ultimately allowing for better and more consistent service. Requiring appointments has also become increasingly necessary as more materials are housed remotely and require advanced notice for use.  

In one session, we had a robust discussion of the ethics of requiring appointments and how that practice squares with a desire to provide equitable access to collections. There is a tension between wanting to be open, welcoming, and equitable in providing access, and asking for appointments to best allocate resources. One participant explained: “I think part of it is there’s a difference between how we all feel about appointments as a concept and the actual realities of the situations in which we’re in.” Another said: “It’s stressful to run a reading room, to support the public, and appointments can make that easier. How do you support equitable access and care for your researchers, and your staff and colleagues at the same time?” 

Remote reference services and digitization requests 

People unanimously reported that remote reference requests remain high, even with reading rooms open and in-person research possible again. Researchers grew accustomed to pandemic-era support for remote research and now expect that level of service. Many special collections are still figuring out what pandemic-era services to keep, and at what level they can offer them. Some are continuing virtual reading room programs—usually virtual access via a document camera that is operated by an archivist—but with a decrease in availability. Others have discontinued such services. Nearly everyone is wrestling with how much digitization-on-demand they can and should do for researchers.  

Across the board, digitization requests have increased. One person explained: “What we’ve noticed is that people are much more reliant upon scans. They seem to be weighing the cost of a visit—coming out to [Institution], driving there, flying there … versus how much they’re willing to pay for 300 scans of something. And we’re finding more people asking for a lot more material because they don’t want to make the effort to come here, and they’re willing to bet that [scans] will be good enough.” 

A myriad of challenges make the higher volume of scan-on-demand difficult. In most institutions, patron-driven digitization falls outside of the more normalized workflows of planned digitization projects and requires decision-making across a wide array of practice areas—administration, permissions, staffing, equipment, delivery, storage, preservation, and description, to name a few. For some institutions, digitization-on-demand also competes with overall digitization capacity, limiting the ability to pursue more comprehensive digitization of individual collections.  

Multiple institutions had stopped charging for digitization because administering it is burdensome and doesn’t come close to cost recovery. Many participants felt stymied in their efforts to develop a sensible and sustainable workflow for digitization-on-demand, especially one that allowed for the reuse or publication of the scans produced for researchers. As one person put it: “I feel like scan-on-demand, it’s like the special collections Groundhog Day. . . as soon as you think you worked something out, you just go back to square one.” 

Regardless of which services archives choose to continue or discontinue, scaling back from pandemic practices is a necessary adjustment to manage scarce resources, impacting both researchers and staff. One participant explained: “During the pandemic, I feel like we all put in extra efforts to try not to have a break in our services. And what that meant was providing things digitally. And then everybody got used to us trying to bend over backwards to provide things digitally. So, trying to pull back from that a little bit has been tricky. And we’ve been navigating what that looks like for limited staffing.”  

Managing researcher expectations 

Another participant expressed that managing researcher expectations is one of the “more difficult things that we’re doing right now,” echoing the sentiments of many others. They described researchers as being more impatient, and in some cases, rude and disrespectful to library staff. This is a phenomenon that has been discussed in many other areas of customer service, and people were frustrated and disappointed that it’s happening in libraries, too. 

Instruction impacts 

Many participants reported an increase in instruction requests and teaching activity post-pandemic. More faculty want to bring undergraduate students into special collections to engage them in hands-on experiences with tangible artifacts, as a corrective to the time these students spent in online learning as high schoolers during the pandemic. Often this is in addition to existing efforts to build undergraduate instruction programs, while continuing graduate instruction work. Staff are at or near capacity in their teaching workloads in many programs, but repositories are loathe to turn away instruction requests. Multiple people reported that their teams are so busy teaching they aren’t able to track statistics and impact of that teaching, making it difficult to have the data needed to advocate for more teaching resources. 

Changes in instruction programs are pushing the limits of physical spaces, too. Increased instruction translates to more student visits in the reading room as well as a greater desire for visits by small student cohorts engaging in group work. Reading room layouts and other space constraints make facilitating group visits difficult. For already busy reading rooms, accommodating student appointments can also be a challenge, and one that participants in higher education settings feel an urgency to address. Additionally, class sizes are increasing. Many special collections teaching spaces no longer fit an entire class, so classes must be split into sections to accommodate them, with associated challenges for scheduling and staffing these additional sections.  

Staffing, job responsibilities, and supporting teams through change 

Staffing resources aren’t keeping pace with instruction and reference demand. Pandemic-era hiring freezes have resulted in many open or newly filled positions. In many cases, new hires are replacing long-term employees with deep collections knowledge, and expectations about timeliness must be recalibrated for newer staff who do not know the collections as well, as reference questions require more time to answer. Staffing instruction and the reading room can also be a challenge given new hybrid work expectations from employees.  

Institutions are experimenting with a number of different strategies to manage the increased workload. Some are beginning to use ticketing and other systems to make reference work more efficient, often using LibAnswers when the main library is already using that tool, as well as other stand-alone solutions. Many are lowering the threshold for when they stop putting work into answering a question and suggest hiring local researchers. They are also helping to manage expectations for remote reference with auto response messages listing typical turn-around times, with people mentioning timelines that varied from 2 days to 4 weeks. 

Several institutions are working to spread the responsibility for reference more broadly, asking staff beyond those in public services roles to take shifts on the reference desk and answer remote reference questions. This often means asking people to work as generalists or cross-train on subjects outside their area of expertise. One institution implemented a weekly stand-up meeting for everyone doing reference, which has helped familiarize everyone with each other’s areas of expertise, made them more comfortable talking with each other, and made everyone’s work more visible to each other. Another institution is using a different strategy to intentionally build subject knowledge: “We’ve been … pairing librarians together on reference requests around particularly tricky collections so that the newer librarians can learn from that.” This generalist approach can be jarring for staff, especially those who draw identity from their specialized knowledge. One participant explained, “We’ve had to make the shift from providing what I like to think of as boutique services to our users, which [are] personalized services, to really thinking about how we can spread our capacity over the number of requests that we’ve received. And this I think actually has been a harder transition for our staff than it has been necessarily for our researchers. So many staff members see their work and their professional identities tied to being able to have personalized conversations with researchers, being really available to researchers, being really available to faculty.”  

Institutions are experimenting with the scope of responsibilities of public services roles to try to create sensible and manageable portfolios and set people up for success given the changing landscape in this area. As positions become open, they are being reimagined. Some are separating instruction, outreach, and reference; they see the portfolio as too big for one person to do it all. Several people discussed creating a reading room supervisor or similar position to deal with the logistics and administration of the day-to-day work of keeping the research function supported, without the additional responsibility of building an instructional program. 

Across the conversations, there was a common concern for how best to support people doing public services work. Change is the constant right now, which can feel messy and chaotic for staff. Front-line workers must deal with their own feelings about change in addition to communicating that change to the public—and then absorb users’ feelings about it. While participants didn’t always know how best to address this, it was heartening to hear people’s desire to care for their teams. 

Measuring impact 

One way to support teams doing public services work is to advocate for resources for this work, and data is a critical part of advocacy in our current environments. The key statistics being collected were consistent across the group, including:  

• Reading room statistics, including how many people, what days and times they visit, and appointment versus drop-in use. 

• Researcher statistics, including their affiliation, if they are faculty, independent scholars, or graduate or undergraduate students, and whether they are new or repeat visitors. 

• Collections usage, in the reading room, for teaching, and in exhibitions, and which are included in digitization requests.  

Many participants reported recent implementations of the Aeon collection request systems, resulting in improved collection and reporting of statistics.  

The conversation around statistics echoed our previous roundtable on resourcing and advocacy, in that people are trying to figure out how to more effectively measure and communicate impact. One participant said: “The narrative is being shifted… not ‘how many people came to your reading room?’ but ‘what’s the impact of your services?’ … We know [we] can no longer say we had this number of people come through the reading room in the fall because that means nothing. I need to say … [we supported] 40 dissertations and three works of fiction and nine documentaries.” Publications that cite archival resources demonstrate impact but are difficult and time consuming to track. Some of the ways that institutions are trying to surface publications that used their collections include Google Alerts, asking people to e-mail citations, or requesting a copy of the completed book, but no one felt that this provided a comprehensive view of impact. Participants are interested in combining qualitative with quantitative data to tell more compelling stories or combining different data points to get insights that aren’t obvious by just looking at individual statistics, however, they don’t necessarily have staff with the capacity and skill set for this work. 

Conclusion 

Our conversations around the changing landscape of public services work in special collections were incredibly rich, surfacing new issues and offering nuanced perspectives that will inform future decision making. While challenges abound, there was also an acknowledgment that these are good problems to have—those stemming from people wanting to use your collections.  

Our next round of gatherings of the Special Collections Leadership Roundtables will be in February 2025. 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 ensure you are included!