Last month, we received the report from our consultants. The report was based on two days of visits at the end of July. I refered to the consultants' visit in my post on Talking to Consultants. The main thing my colleagues are keeping in mind is the limited nature of the consultants' charge: to assess the Libraries' organization and the extent to which it meets current and future needs.

I've read the report a few times and am still thinking it over. I've also talked about it with some of my colleagues. Although we've gotten no explicit instruction, I consider that it would be inappropriate to disclose too much about the contents of the report. But the phenomenon of the visit is fair game, and I think worth talking about.

The library hasn't yet, as a collection of departments or as an institution, taken up the report in an official way. We're all still digesting it.

Everyone I've talked to about the report agrees that the visit was a much-needed exercise in getting staff concerns at the most basic levels addressed and out in the open. As much as we might try to work from the inside, there is great value in having outsiders invited to come in, listen to what we have to say, and write a report that the Dean would consider. In fact, a few small changes have already come about as a result of this report. This is a positive sign.

I think the consultants did a very good job with their environmental scan. Although I had an individual session with them, and am not too familiar with what others had to say, I recognized the issues they described. The consultants also took their observations and made a number of logical follow-up recommendations. A bunch of them, in my view, were right on target.

Ironically, the weakest part of the report was the part that was nominally the point of the exercise: the proposals for a new organizational structure for the University Libraries.

It's not that the proposed scenarios were necessarily alll that bad. There was a logic to them. It's just that they've been proposed entirely out of context. This isn't the consultants' fault. I think they were given a nearly impossible task. They themselves state in their report that we need to get it together in a number of basic ways, including determining our vision, goals and priorities, and reassessing all staff positions. I couldn't agree more. But given this, how is it possible to recommend a reorganization? This seems to be putting the cart before the horse. The limited nature of the reorganization proposals reflects this bottom-line problem.

For example, our vision might take us in a direction that would lead to disbanding certain departments and forming others. In the proposed scenarios, most departments survive in their current form, albeit with different reporting lines.

So, I'll be glad if we concentrate on the observations about what's working and what we need to address. I'll also be glad if we consider many of the general recommendations - the ones that have little to do with our organizational structure. The structure can come later. First, let's deal with the basics.