Relationship Building One Step at a Time: Case Studies of Successful Faculty-Librarian Partnerships

Building strong relationships between academic librarians and teaching faculty is paramount for promoting services and resources. While librarians face challenges ranging from new technologies to heightened expectations and fiscal difficulties, the key work remains in solid relationship building. Drawing on the experience of a group of subject librarians and teaching faculty at The Ohio State University, this study examines the qualities that help liaison librarians develop relationships with faculty and support ongoing library services. It explores how liaison librarians build opportunities for ongoing relationships and how they assess the successes or failures of those interactions. It chronicles interview findings that detail the importance of such skills as patience, expertise, follow-through, responsiveness, and individuality if librarians are to build solid relationships and fruitful collaborations. Finally, it offers some preliminary observations on the teaching faculty's understanding of the librarians' relationship-building efforts.