The role of the paraprofessional in technical services in libraries

While the 1980s were a time when "the walls came a-tumbling down" between public and technical services, the 1990s have been characterized by a fundamental questioning of the need for, and viability of, technical services in libraries. With a downturn in national economies, significant budget reductions to libraries/information services in both the private and public sector, management emphasis on rethinking, reengineering, and restructuring whole organizations and their internal component work processes and activities, a greater focus on the delivery of services, increasing efficiencies in productivity to be gained through emerging new technologies, and ever-growing access to shared operational resources and effective partnerships, some library administrators have turned to outsourcing parts or all of technical services as a means of reducing costs, maximizing dwindling resources, and reallocating staff expertise to service-focused areas within the library. Some libraries have reorganized and reoriented some technical services activities, renaming their administrative units to reflect this shift. Bibliographic services, collections access services, support services, or bibliographic access services are some examples of unit names which reflect less of a "technical" focus and more of a "service" orientation beyond the traditional backrooms of acquisitions, cataloging, and physical processing. This "rethinking" of technical services has not yet solidified and, for the foreseeable future, administrative approaches and structures remain in flux.

What has been the role of the paraprofessional in this more or less half-century of history of technical services? To answer this question, it is necessary to consider the parts of the whole--the component functional units within the technical services entity. Having engaged in that deconstruction, it will then be possible to revisit the original question and to continue with some speculations concerning the role of the paraprofessional in technical services of the future.

THE ROLE OF THE PARAPROFESSIONAL IN COMPONENT FUNCTIONAL UNITS OF TECHNICAL SERVICES

At this juncture it may be useful to reiterate Tauber's (1954) definition--i.e., that technical services may include several or all of the functional units of selection, acquisitions, cataloging and classification, physical processing, binding and repairs, and circulation (pp. 9-21). While acquisitions, cataloging and classification, and physical processing (including binding and repairs) have remained, across time, the "core business" of the domain of technical services (Howarth, 1995), selection (and/or collection development) and circulation have alternated in the literature and in administrative application between public and technical services. Preservation and conservation, though not included in Tauber's definition, are sometimes, though not consistently, considered a functional component of technical services. For the purposes of the following discussion, we will refer only to those functional units prescribed by Tauber.