"A Library System Hanging in the Balance": An Open Letter From Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers

In order to reduce labor costs, HL increasingly sends books and materials to external vendors for outsourced cataloging. The results are alarming: outsourced materials are frequently cataloged with mistakes in title, author, subject, or call number. Since staff members often do not have time or permission to make corrections, the errors have led to thousands of materials becoming undiscoverable. The materials reside physically on shelves or in the Depository, but patrons are unable to locate or retrieve them. Precious books, films, journals, documents, and other treasured resources are being lost.
At a professional school library, one staff member recalls a backlog project where the school sent more than 8,000 titles to an outsourcing provider, and describes the results as “deplorable”:
[Clip]
In all library departments, students and temps provide valuable assistance to overworked permanent staff, but dependency on short-term staff actually creates more work. Although temporary workers initially seem lower in cost, the amount of time that permanent staff spend training students and temps on sophisticated tasks and checking their work cancels out most or all of the savings.
[Clip]
Librarians and assistants regularly work on projects that span departments and require advanced skills. Often these projects fall outside of official job descriptions, but they are vital to patrons’ efforts to carry out research, develop curricula, teach courses, and diagnose patients. If staffing levels are cut further or jobs are over-simplified, these critical functions will suffer.
[Clip]