I’m excited to be back at Stony Brook Southampton for the 2017 Liaison Retreat. This retreat is a great opportunity to take a step back from our daily practice and work as a liaison group to improve our service to the faculty and students at Stony Brook. Our keynote speaker was Rebecca K. Miller who did a lecture and workshop focusing on team-based learning and working collaboratively with our constituents and with one another. She conducted an ARL SPEC kit focusing on liaison work that tied into similar SPECS from 1992 and 2007 that highlighted the move in libraries from collection value to people value. In the 1992 survey, liaisons indicated that subject-knowledge and the ability to connect users to the right resource in their discipline were essential skills, by 2015 communication was the top skill for liaisons. The profession has gone from valuing knowing the landscape of collections in a particular discipline, towards finding interdisciplinary resources across an unknowably large field.
We then did a group discussion based on our readings and finished the day with a round of lightning talks. It was a great opportunity to connect with colleagues!