Changing places: personnel issues of a joint use library in transition.(moving public libraries to a college campuses, employment status research)

ABSTRACT

A field study of a joint use library in transition was undertaken to identify personnel issues that arose when a public library program moved from a middle school setting to a college campus in the same community. Qualitative research methods were employed to collect data that would provide insight into the impact of change in employment status (from school board employees to college employees) and identify implications for staff adopting new work roles, management practices, and training models. The research was a follow-up of the 1995 doctoral dissertation that reported findings of a six-month field study of the combined Azalea Public Branch Library/Azalea Middle School Media Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, "Factors Affecting the Operation of a Combined School/Public Library: A Qualitative Study."

INTRODUCTION

On May 15, 2005, a new joint use library facility opened in Pinellas County, Florida, after more than three years of collaborative planning and development between the city of St. Petersburg and St. Petersburg College. The West St. Petersburg Community Library replaced the Azalea Branch Public Library/Media Center that had operated in a shared facility at the Azalea Middle School for eighteen years. This partnership change came about through the efforts of college leaders and city officials following successful implementation of a public/college joint use program at the Seminole Community Library in the same county. The Seminole collaborative provides library services to community users and St. Petersburg College students in a library facility operated by employees of the city of Seminole on college property. Although there are significant differences between the Seminole and St. Petersburg Intergovernmental Agreements that set forth provisions of partnership with the college, the first collaborative exemplified the benefits of sharing library space and resources, paving the way for a second joint venture. The following research report specifies personnel issues that arose with dissolution of the Azalea partnership with the School System and transition of school board employees to a college setting. In this report the City of St. Petersburg will often be referred to as the City; College will be used to denote St. Petersburg College; and the Pinellas County School System may be identified as the District or School System.

THE 1995 AZALEA LIBRARY FIELD STUDY

In order to provide context for a story of personnel concerns in a period of dramatic change, the researcher must first provide details of the collaborative partnership as it was before the transition. These details are found in a doctoral dissertation, the report of a qualitative case study of the Azalea Public Branch Library, which identified factors that affected the operation of a combined middle school/public library in densely populated Pinellas County on the Gulf Coast of Florida (Bauer, 1995). The Azalea joint-use facility operated under the leadership of a librarian who acted as manager of the public library branch and worked collaboratively with a school library media specialist employed by the District to run the school media program. The branch was one of six libraries in the St. Petersburg Public Library System, and the system, as a member of the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative, was involved in resource sharing with twenty-four public libraries in the county.

The salaries of all employees of the combined library at Azalea (with the exception of the teacher in the media position) were paid by the St. Petersburg Public Library System but, as School Board employees, all Azalea Library personnel were supervised and evaluated by middle school administrators. This staffing model, one of the provisions of the agreement between the city and the school board when the program was implemented in 1988, was the result of careful consideration by a feasibility study committee under the leadership of the director of the St. Petersburg Public Library System. A change in employment status was possible only through a change in the formal agreement between the city and the school board.

The goal of the six-month field study conducted in spring and summer of 1994 was to provide a comprehensive understanding of the complex reality of a combined school/public library by examining the methods of operation. The researcher used the methods of naturalistic inquiry, which included observations, interviews, focus group meetings, and examination of library documents. Using a "process" framework as defined by Schein (1987, p. 15) meant that the researcher focused on how things were done rather than what was done. It seemed, therefore, appropriate to use qualitative methodology.

The library was viewed as an agency, "a strategy for performing a complex task which might have been carried out in other ways" (Argyris and Schon, 1978, p. 14). Presenting "slice of life" episodes, the researcher focused on the human processes common to all organizations that make a demonstrable difference to organizational effectiveness in general. These processes are identified by Schein (1987, p. 15) as communication, building and maintaining a group, problem solving, group growth and development, leading and influencing, performance appraisal and giving feedback, and the intergroup processes of cooperation and competition.

In the tradition of naturalistic inquiry, the study took place in a naturally occurring program that had no predetermined course established for the researcher (Patton, 1990, p. 39). Assuming that the best way to study process is to observe it directly, rather than to infer its nature from the known input and the observable output, and using an illumination model, the researcher sought to describe and interpret rather than measure the effectiveness of the combined program. In the spirit of naturalistic inquiry, the observer sought to avoid imposing constraints on outputs. Whatever outputs occurred were collected, analyzed, categorized, and interpreted after the fact (Guba, 1978, p. 3). This discovery of theory from data that is systematically obtained and analyzed is grounded theory. In this discovering of theory, the researcher generated conceptual categories or their properties from evidence, and then the evidence from which the category emerged was used to illustrate the concept (Glaser and Strauss, 1967, p. 110).

The findings of the field study were organized into five major categories,…