Short-Term Staff, Long-Term Benefits

Book excerpt: This book offers a novel, more efficient, and mutually beneficial approach to attracting, training, and working with short-term staff in ways that benefit all involved: the organization, the short-term staff, and library personnel in general. After recent cutbacks in funding, many libraries now suffer permanent gaps in their staffing—gaps that have necessarily been filled by temporary staff and volunteers in order to complete essential work. Unfortunately, short-term staffing presents its own issues. But having temporary staff doesn't have to be problematic or frustrating: this book shows how short-term workers can offer libraries much more than just a solution to being shorthanded. This book will help readers better plan and more efficiently manage short-term staffing arrangements, covering how to best work with community volunteers, students earning service or academic credit, library school internships, grant contract staff, librarian post-graduate residencies, and work-study student employees. The authors present models of temporary staff human resource development and demonstrate how to apply them effectively in libraries of any size, describing how to train and enculturate short-term staff into your organization to maximize productivity. When temporary and long-term staff are set up to work together properly, having temporary staff benefits the organization with more than just their labor—the situation can refresh and update the skills of incumbent employees, too.