Librarian in Charge
In the absence of the Director and Assistant Director, the Librarian in Charge is the staff member designated to direct the library’s response to emergencies, troubleshoot technology problems, handle building-related issues, and respond to patron complaints, policy questions, behavior issues, and other situations that cannot be managed by other staff.
Starting April 1, Librarian in Charge will be listed on When to Work and they will identify themselves on Slack when they are working as the Librarian in Charge. The Librarian in Charge will handle building maintenance issues, technology issues, escalated patron concerns and behavior management issues. They will be the manager.
It will be critical that you bring issues to the Librarian in Charge via Slack or in person. The Librarian in Charge will respond to your question as quickly as they can. These questions will be their first priority outside of working with patrons.
I will be directing questions to the Librarian in Charge in order to help those individuals get acclimated with all types of behavior, building, and Polaris information. If the Librarian in Charge needs assistance, Department Heads and I will be there to help out, but we do need to run things past the Librarian in Charge first.
My goal with this is to pass institutional knowledge about the building and policy implementation to more staff so that we have answers readily available and to keep things running if library administration is unavailable. I also want to respect that frontline staff have the most knowledge about day-to-day library work. Having Assistant Librarians be more involved with questions and concerns will keep our responses at the procedure and policy level more connected to the work that staff do on a daily basis.
Thanks in advance for your help with this. Please let me know if you have questions.