Technical services advocacy: Partnerships in the library and beyond

It can be challenging for technical services librarians to market their expertise internally, which can cause opportunities for collaboration to be missed. However, technical services leaders must connect their department’s in-house metadata expertise with digital scholarship projects in which their subject librarian and special collection colleagues are engaged. In this chapter, the authors explore how building relationships and internally marketing your department’s professional engagement can lead to technical services’ metadata expertise being effectively leveraged to bring better access to key collections. Two projects will be explored that exemplify this effort. The chapter will further show that these examples did not happen in isolation but as part of a concerted and proactive technical services effort to market and promote its metadata expertise throughout George Mason University Libraries. This effort involved creating and disseminating a technical services newsletter, advocating for technical services representation on internal groups dealing with digital scholarship and discovery, and recasting existing librarian and staff positions toward a sole focus on metadata.