The past four years have been a time of major transition for the acquisitions department at Northwestern University School of Law Library. The arrival of the new Associate Dean for Library and Information Services and a new Associate Director for Technical Services in 1996 marked the beginning of a new era for the technical services department. The department was renamed in 1997 to Bibliographic Services to better reflect our changing responsibilities. In 1998, the Voyager system from Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., replaced NOTIS. Most recently, the law library was officially named the Pritzker Legal Research Center in April 1999.

August 10, 1998 was V-Day or the first day the Northwestern University libraries began using all modules of the Voyager system. NOTIS had been the integrated library system for about 20 years and the procedures that were in place at that time were in many cases 10 or 15 years old. The Library had never changed the workflow procedures in acquisitions or serials simply because they worked. The old adage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” was the motto. A year after the migration to Voyager, the Associate Director for Bibliographic Services and I felt it was an appropriate time to review the department’s workflow and procedures. The Associate Director decided to do a job audit of each position in Bibliographic Services and to begin with the acquisitions department.

What is a job audit? The terminology may sound a little complicated, but if you think of it in terms of a job interview you get a better understanding of our intentions. The process of the job audit basically involved interviewing each staff member about how they did their jobs. During a monthly departmental meeting, staff were told that over the next four weeks the Associate Director would be sitting down with each member of the support staff. She wanted the staff to show her exactly how they performed each step of their daily tasks, what tools that they used, and what suggestions they had to improve the process. Before [...continued]