tance as a part of the wider university puzzle – but all of these departments need to put forward their business case and fit that in with the university priorities. Libraries, just like any of the other entities in a university, will have to make the case for its funding. Which means advocacy is vital.”
Selling the university
Having said that, Regina is keenly aware that universities need to ‘sell’ themselves to students and libraries need to help them. One of the chapters she has written is called ‘Selling’ the University: The role of the Academic Library. Here she acknowledges that “few (if any) students will choose a university based on its library,” although she adds “they certainly will complain if they don’t have a library or learning resource centre to support their studies.” However, her review of the marketing materials of 20 UK institutions found that libraries were showcased in all of them. Another factor she highlights is that prospective students “are less inter- ested in university-created website ‘sales’ content and prefer first-person accounts from other students” and these often include pictures of students in libraries.
Selling the library
The circuitous route to demonstrating the library’s value to students is mirrored in selling it to decision-makers. In the book Regina describes her frustration over an Executive Leader at a previous institu- tion who felt the role of the library was unclear. “The fact that the library was well used and sometimes at capacity, did well in national satisfaction surveys and was in demand by external researchers seemed to count for little…. I was seething at the fact that I had to sell what I knew was a fundamental facility and service.” Her experience is lent some weight by a survey carried out by Tim Wales to find out the most effective bargaining chips – “to rank a list of negotiating tactics or arguments used with estates departments to get things done in order of effective- ness” – which put “development of good personal relationships in advance” at the top of the list, followed by “student expe- rience”. Not until you get to number 11 in the list do you find “library or archival collection concerns” and Tim notes: “Per- haps the most striking conclusion from these results, especially to our illustrious librarian forebears, is of how little im- portance the core aspects of librarianship relating to collection management and stewardship are in this list.”
Practical advocacy
The book offers a number of practical solutions. One is a process that every leader needs to do anyway: write a business case.
28 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
UEL Docklands Library.
Regina said: “Anna O’Neill’s chapter (A Practical Guide to Writing a Successful Business Case to Influence University Estates Strategy) talks a lot about work- ing in collaboration with her colleagues, facilities management, and across the organisation to develop the business plan – how IT helped her to define the cost for getting the infrastructure for what she needed and how facilities helped her to visualise what the space would be. That’s a good example of working collaboratively to get an outcome.”
Anna says that writing a business case acts as an icebreaker for the development of “good personal relationships” (from Tim Wales’s list of bargaining chips) add- ing: “At the nexus of professional services and the faculty, library business cases can be well placed to garner wider support, deliver on multiple agendas and strategies and derive maximum benefit.” She said: “My very strong belief is that the key factor in improving the chances of a successful outcome is extensive consul- tation and socialisation of the key con- cepts of the business case… The work you will do…will have benefits across many other areas of your working life.”
Politics
Another key issue for professionals in librar- ies and FM is the misalignment between career paths and building projects. Regina says: “So you have the overall institu- tional vision which means the project can be handed from one estates director to another, or one library director to another. The theory is that if it’s strategic, then - barring any major changes, like we are seeing now - you know that 10 years down the road the project you envisioned should be up and running.”
She points to the chapter by John Cox, (Politics, Persuasion and Persistence:
The Learning Commons Project at the University of Galway), former University Librarian at the University of Galway, say- ing: “That was a project that went on for 25 years and construction of the building had not commenced by the time John retired in the past year.” John highlights how the physical needs of
the building might not change, but politics will always influence the project: “If the range of factors [described in the chap- ter] has shaped the building, politics have driven the direction of the project at large through a series of ups and downs, changes in institutional leadership, harnessing of student support...” He also said that dif- ferent approaches are needed for different circumstances: “Some key moments have needed to be navigated and sometimes confronted robustly.”
Regina said: “So one of the key themes that came out in the book is that your proximity to, or access to the decision makers will have an impact on how well your voice is heard. And if that is the case, how do you build those partnerships to be heard at the right level?”
“You might be looking to the future,” she says, “but you still have to accommodate the people who are currently using the spaces. We still have those national met- rics and people will complain if they have had a bad experience. You don’t want them saying “I’m glad there’s going to be a shiny new building in the future, but that didn’t help me.”
“I would rather have members of a library team who know intimately what activities happen within that space be involved in those conversations. Having the right people engaged around the table is so important rather than individuals just making decisions based on the square meterage available within a specific space.’’ IP
Summer 2025
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