flanerie

• fail to communicate throughout the process with your staff
• have your first communication about it be a website that prominently tells you how to update your resume
• announce three different town hall meetings in a day in which you can’t actually answer half the questions people ask
• say that layoffs are “imminent,” and indicate that some librarians will have to re-apply for their jobs, but don’t provide any hard numbers or indication as to who in the organization will be affected
• announce it the day before a major library conference so huge swaths of your staff will be at the airport instead of at work hearing your half-plans

All of which being what Harvard’s library administration did today. Shocking, more so because no one has any idea what’s going on, or what’s going to happen next, and then they have to go to work under those conditions for a month before anyone in library administration will tell them more. One should expect better from the leaders of what’s supposedly the best research library in America. You have to wonder if other academic libraries are going to see this and get ideas.

Solidarity.