One of the first steps of achieving organizational clarity is establishing a common understanding of who we are, what we do, and what we aspire to achieve. Along with our guiding principles and values, the responses to these fundamental questions would help bring clarity to our organizational identity. To this end, we formed the RUL Affirmation Group consisting of faculty and staff from across the libraries. They were responsible for drafting a mission statement and a statement of aspiration. We are pleased to announce they have completed this important work. Their results were shared during two town halls on July 29, 2022, at 9:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.:
Author: Consuella Askew
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Consuella Askew’s First Letter to the Libraries
I am honored and excited to be appointed Rutgers’ 15th University Librarian. One of the most gratifying aspects of this role is the opportunity to witness your skills and talents in action at the Libraries. Your loyalty to RUL is admirable, and your determination to work with grace and dignity and in the university’s best interests is inspiring.
This letter for The Agenda comes at a time of evolution and opportunity. We continue our initiatives designed to address your concerns about RUL’s organizational clarity, culture, and communication. The RUL Affirmation group has worked diligently to define our aspirations and reframe our mission statement. They are incorporating your input from their recent town halls into final statements that will provide a common framework from which we can springboard. We are close to formally establishing the Staff Advisory Committee (SAC), which will serve as a counterpart to the Faculty Planning Committee. Thanks to the stellar work of the SAC Planning Task Force, bylaws have been drafted and are undergoing final revisions. Once that is completed, the task force will focus on stewarding the adoption of the bylaws and conducting the committee’s initial elections process. The goal is to have the SAC up and running by year’s end. We are also reviewing the Libraries’ organizational structure and how our core services are best delivered. We want to ensure we offer comprehensive student and research support across the university’s broad footprint in the most efficient and responsive manner possible.
We aspire to be the intellectual and creative center of the Rutgers community and recognized as essential to the university’s academic mission. It is a noble and obtainable goal. The future holds great promise if we continue to work smart, act with intent, listen to our colleagues and constituents, and pivot to meet the needs of today’s dynamic academic environment.
Since my arrival at RUL, I have been impressed by your ability to imagine and implement creative solutions, often in the midst of change. While things continually evolve, I know your willingness and desire to collaborate and meet challenges with intelligence and good humor will serve us well. I look forward to us working together for the benefit of the faculty, students, and staff of Rutgers University and the broader New Jersey community.
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Judy Cohn Retires after Distinguished Four-Decade Career
Judy Cohn, Assistant Vice President for University Libraries and Associate University Librarian at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) Libraries, retired on September 1, 2022. Her retirement serves as the final milestone of an illustrious 40+ year career that began at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey Rutgers Medical School, Raritan Valley Hospital, and culminated at Rutgers University Libraries (RUL).
Judy Cohn at Alexander Library, August 2022 (photo by Dennis Mark/Rutgers University Libraries). Judy received her BA (1975) and MLS (1976) from Rutgers University. She started her career as an Assistant Librarian at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ) Rutgers Medical School, Raritan Valley Hospital in Greenbook, NJ, where she oversaw its collection development and management of its audiovisual collection, along with some public services responsibilities. Her career trajectory aligned with the growth of what is now RBHS, as she moved from positions held at CMDNJ Greenbrook to the University Medical Center in Stratford, NJ, before settling in Newark. During this period, Judy also nurtured and guided aspiring health sciences librarians as an adjunct faculty member with the Rutgers University School of Communication and Library Studies. Within a few years of arriving in Newark to serve as the Director of the George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences, she began her ascent up the leadership ladder at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). She was promoted to Assistant University Librarian and Director for UMDNJ–Smith Library, then Acting University Librarian for UMDNJ. Before the merger, she was the Associate Vice President for Scholarly Information/University Librarian for UMDNJ for 11 years. In 2013, Judy became a part of the Rutgers University Libraries team as the result of the merger of Rutgers University and UMDNJ.
Her contributions to the Libraries, the University, and the library profession are substantial. Below are just a few examples:
Judy stewarded the UMDNJ Libraries throughout the UMDNJ/Rutgers University merger and the subsequent integration with the Rutgers University Libraries. In the aftermath of the integration and before the dust settled, she emerged as an invaluable member of the RUL Leadership Team, marshaling a talented and illustrious group of committed RBHS librarians and staff who fully immersed themselves in the RUL organization. In 2018, she organized the highly successful Scholarly Research Symposia for the RBHS faculty. Throughout the years, Judy had been called upon on multiple occasions to serve as Cabinet liaison to a Libraries working group, task force, or committee, including the Discovery Work Group, the Research and Scholarly Environment Working Group, and most recently, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.
Judy was a major contributor to the execution of the Resetting the Rutgers University Libraries plan in her role as the Assistant Vice President for University Libraries. She readily took on additional tasks to help the organization move forward, demonstrating her commitment to the success of RUL. Judy was a critical part of planning and implementing the team-building sessions for the RUL Leadership Team led by a group from the University’s Center for Organizational Leadership. Likewise, she was an instrumental partner as we collaborated with the re:work consultants, who led a group of our RUL colleagues through a strategic process resulting in drafts of new mission and aspirational statements. The consultants also conducted an organizational structure review of our Libraries. These are but some examples demonstrating Judy’s exceptional competence and effectiveness as a leader.
Judy’s expertise in Medical and Health Sciences librarianship was recognized by her colleagues at RBHS, where she served on the New Jersey Medical School Clinical Curriculum and Pre-Clinical Curriculum Committees. She boasts an extensive and illustrious history of professional service at the regional and national levels. Judy has led preeminent organizations in her field, serving as President of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, President of the Health Sciences Library Association of New Jersey (HSLANJ), and Chair of the VALE Executive Committee (VALEnj). While these leadership roles are indicative of her reputation and the esteem in which she is held in the profession, she has also been recognized by her peers for her contributions to the field with numerous awards, including the Health Sciences Librarian of the Year award from HSLANJ and the Distinguished Service Award from the UMDNJ School of Health-Related Professions.
Retirement Party
On August 26, 2022, the Libraries hosted a retirement party for Judy at Calandra’s il Vecchio Cafe in Caldwell, New Jersey. More than 30 colleagues, family members, and friends attended to celebrate her remarkable career. Special guest speakers, including Judy’s husband (Lee), sister (Sara), and daughter (Jesse), regaled the audience with humorous stories and tales of Judy’s impressive accomplishments. Colleagues also took the opportunity to express their happiness and gratitude for Judy’s leadership and friendship.
Judy enjoyed her “Still the Boss” ornament. 
Happy retirement, Judy! 
Judy with family, friends, and colleagues. 
Judy talks with guests at her retirement party. 
Vice President for University Libraries and University Librarian Conseulla Askew (left) presents Judy with a Proclamation of Gratitude for her 40+ years of service. 
Judy with members of the Rutgers University Libraries Leadership Team (from left: Dee Magnoni, Associate University Librarian at Rutgers–New Brunswick Libraries, VPUL/UL Conseulla Askew, Judy, Interim Associate University Librarian at Rutgers–Newark Rhonda Marker, and Director of Communications Dennis Mark). -
John Brennan Promoted to Senior Executive Assistant to the Vice President for University Libraries and University Librarian
John Brennan was promoted to Senior Executive Assistant to the Vice President for University Libraries and University Librarian (VPUL/UL), effective August 6, 2022. John had ably served in this role in an interim capacity for seven months and will continue to be an asset to the Office of the VPUL/UL and the Rutgers University Libraries administration.
John has been with the Libraries since 2005 as a Senior Administrative Assistant for Technical and Automated Services (TAS), where he managed an assortment of diverse functions that included budget monitoring and reporting, facilities management, project management, and oversight for work-study students. In his new role, John will provide diversified and confidential support to VPUL/UL Consuella Askew and her office in a wide range of library-wide strategic areas. Among his new responsibilities, he will be the primary point of administrative contact for the VPUL/UL and the University Libraries for internal and external constituencies, manage my schedule, and will provide oversight and management for the administrative suite of the University Libraries.
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Resetting the Libraries
As promised, my contribution to the Agenda this month focuses on our action plan for the current fiscal year. Please view the PDF to read the plan, titled Resetting the Rutgers University Libraries, in its entirety.
Inside, you will find further discussion about our focus areas for the year to come—communications, organizational structure, and organizational clarity—as well as the next steps for moving us forward in all of these areas. These activities will help lay a strong foundation for the next University Librarian and allow us to better align ourselves with President Holloway’s vision for Rutgers.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated in our information gathering activities thus far. Whether through the faculty/staff climate survey, the EHE conversations, or the various listening sessions I’ve conducted throughout the Libraries, your input was invaluable and helped give shape to this plan.
Please read the document carefully and let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I look forward to continuing my work with you all as we carry out the steps detailed in the plan.
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Turning the Page: The Next Chapter of Rutgers University Libraries
I want to take one last opportunity to thank you all for making me feel so welcome at my first State of the Libraries meeting as your University Librarian. Though we were again unable to meet face-to-face as is our tradition, I appreciated the level of participation and engagement that you all brought to the meeting despite what was a very lengthy and packed agenda.
If you were not able to attend, please do take some time to review the State of the Libraries staff resources site. There you will find a recording of the entire event as well as links to all the presentations that were offered.
That said, I thought it would be important to review once more the takeaways from my listening sessions with colleagues across the Libraries, as they are the pillars that are going to inform my work in the months ahead:
- Improve communications. Increasing transparency for decision making at all levels in the organization and improving the flow of internal and external communications.
- Change organizational culture. Breaking down our organizational hierarchies and rebuilding trust within. It also involves creating a culture of recognition within the Libraries, where we celebrate our faculty and staff’s successes and provide opportunities for upward mobility.
- Enhance organizational clarity. Creating a unifying mission for the Libraries, one that emphasizes the notion of “one Library” and will center the Libraries within President Holloway’s vision for the university.
As we discovered during our word cloud exercise at State of the Libraries, there are a wide variety of reasons why our faculty and staff decided to come to work at Rutgers University Libraries, ranging from the promise of lifelong learning to the opportunity to work with our diverse students and faculty. Whatever those reasons may be, it’s my goal to bring us together, to chart our path forward, and move us in a unified and purposeful direction. I hope you will join me in the weeks and months to come as we work toward shared understanding and move the organization toward more common goals.
To that end, please save the date of Wednesday, July 28 for our continuing work with the Center for Organizational Leadership and its Excellence in Higher Education Framework, Community Conversations: Focused and Facilitated Conversations with Colleagues from across Rutgers Libraries regarding Organizational Strengths and Areas for Potential Improvement. There are two identical sessions scheduled, one from 9:00 to 11:30 a.m. and the other from 12:30 to 3:00 p.m. Please feel free to attend whichever works best for your schedule.
As Dr. Moghe said in his address to us at State of the Libraries, “Nothing represents the university coming together as vividly as the Libraries coming together.” I look forward to working with you all as we embark on this work of coming together and as we turn the page to start our next chapter so that we may better serve the entire Rutgers community.
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Dana Library Transformation Project
An architectural rendering of the exterior addition. These are exciting times for Dana Library. Last month, we began a series of renovations that will address the highest priorities for improving the library that were identified through the Rutgers University–Newark strategic planning process several years ago. The changes will make the library more user friendly in numerous ways, including finally fitting out the third floor, which has been shell space since the construction of that wing decades ago.
The results of this project involve enhancements that will create new study and learning spaces for students, facilitate ease of access to the collections and departments within, and the construction of a new center to support teaching faculty:
Construction on the library began in March and is scheduled to be completed in April 2020. - An addition to the library is being built to better facilitate the flow of traffic to all five floors of the building. A larger stairwell and high-capacity, high-speed elevator are being installed to allow for large groups of people to move up and down the stairwell with ease, as well as shorten elevator wait time and accommodate more people.
- The centerpiece of this project is the construction that will take place on the third floor. This includes additional quiet study space for our students and the new P3 Collaboratory for Pedagogy, Professional Development, and Publicly-Engaged Scholarship at Rutgers University–Newark. This open study space will provide an additional 60+ seats, along with numerous conveniently located outlets for devices.
- This construction will also allow us to enhance our archives spaces and services. A space will be created to house the new Dana Archives departments providing our local university archives collections with a formal home. The Dana Archives and IJS will share the newly created reading room that will accommodate a larger number of classes and independent researchers at one time.
- This is topped off by an iconic architectural feature on the plaza side of the building that will serve as a beacon to campus visitors, students, faculty, and staff alike.
Construction has already begun and is scheduled to be completed in April 2020. I’ll plan to deliver updates from time to time in the Agenda, but if you want the latest information as it’s available, head over to the Dana Library Transformation Project blog, where we post updates at least once a week after our meetings (and don’t forget to sign up for the email list to receive alerts when new posts are published).
Thank you for following along on this journey toward the future of Dana Library!
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Envisioning the Future: John Cotton Dana Library
As the nexus of a dynamic university in the midst of transforming and reinventing its brand, Dana Library/Institute of Jazz Studies is poised to move into its next iteration. Our goal is to become a user-centered library that can nimbly respond to our users’ continually changing needs in innovative ways. The Dana Library/IJS faculty and staff embarked on a six-month process in order to identify our priorities and objectives needed to achieve this goal. The resulting document, Framework for Change: Vision and Goals for the John Cotton Dana Library Rutgers University–Newark, provides readers with a high-level view of our path to success.We began our work in spring 2016 by identifying three high priority focus areas–services, collections and space. These focus areas supported not only the Rutgers University Libraries priorities, but also the Rutgers University–Newark Strategic Plan. Each priority area was given individual attention and consideration by a dedicated group of Dana faculty and staff who volunteered to compile and consider available data about the area, add their valuable expertise on the area topic, and provide recommendations for how we can enhance these areas to better meet the needs of our users in the 21st century. The resulting compilation of this work led to a 30+ page document which detailed specific services enhancements, space needs, and collection management activities. This document will serve as our road map for next several years.
The Framework for Change document presents a broad overview of the detailed steps necessary for us to achieve success. This document will be used as an advocacy tool for our local university administrators and could also be used as a fundraising tool for donors. No matter how this document might be used externally, Dana Library has charted its course and is ready to embark on a journey to success!
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In Memoriam – Ed Berger
Ed captured this self-portrait last year.
Recently Consuella Askew and Wayne Winborne sent around a note announcing that our colleague Ed Berger passed away suddenly and quite unexpectedly in January. Ed was a wonderful photographer and spent many hours documenting the spaces and faces of Dana Library and the Institute of Jazz Studies. Many of his photographs are posted on his Flickr site. Here, we take a moment to turn the camera back toward the photographer and offer a glimpse into his time and the people who he called colleagues and friends at the Institute of Jazz Studies.
Ed played a vital role in the growth and development of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies where he filled a number of positions for nearly four decades. He was also an award-winning jazz writer and accomplished photographer, teacher, producer, and road manager.
A graduate of Indiana University with an M.L.S. from Rutgers, his most recent book was Softly, With Feeling: Joe Wilder and the Breaking of Barriers in American Music (Temple University Press, 2014), which received the Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Best Historical Research in Recorded Jazz in 2015. He was a frequent contributor to Jazz Times as writer and photographer and for many years served as co-editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies.
Berger taught at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University, and from 1979 to 2014 was co-host of Jazz from the Archives on WBGO-FM. He enjoyed a long association with jazz master Benny Carter, serving as Carter’s road manager for nearly two decades, as well as producing two Grammy-winning recordings for the saxophonist. Berger’s other publications include Free Verse and Photos in the Key of Jazz (2015, with Gloria Krolak); Benny Carter: A Life in American Music (2002, with Morroe Berger and James Patrick); Basically Speaking: An Oral History of George Duvivier (1993); and Reminiscing in Tempo: The Life and Times of a Jazz Hustler (1990, with Teddy Reig).
He was a beloved friend, colleague, mentor, raconteur, and a true lover of jazz and jazz musicians. His loss is devastating to all of us at the IJS and to the broader jazz community across the globe.
A public celebration of Ed’s life is being planned and will be announced at a later date.
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Dana Library Staff Development Day 2016
On May 13th, 2016, Dana Library hosted its second annual staff development day which was centered on exploring the question, “What does it mean to be a user centered academic library in the 21st century?” A “user centered” library was defined as one that optimizes the library experience around how users can, want, or need to use it, rather than forcing the users to change their behavior to accommodate it. Impending renovations to our third floor and the concurrent Rutgers University Library master facilities planning process for an overall building renovation prompted the need for us to take a critical look at where we are now in terms of services, collections and space and where we envision ourselves to be in the future. The full day agenda included invited speakers from the Rutgers University–Newark (RU-N) Division of Student Affairs representing the Office of ADA Services and Veteran Affairs, Counseling Services, and Judicial Affairs, and Student Development/Educational Programming, along with the Rutgers University Center for Organizational Leadership and Development.After a brief welcome and introduction to the day, the RU-N Division of Student Affairs started the program of events off with a highly informative and engaging session on student wellness and campus safety. The Dana faculty and staff learned more about the resources and processes concerning our students’ care and well-being while attending RU-N. Topics covered include the Campus Awareness Response and Education (CARE) Team, ADA Services, and understanding student behaviors. The latter portion of the presentation included an interactive role play activity based on the five basic styles for conflict management. This experiential activity, was entertaining—we identified a number of potential Emmy award winning actors amongst us—and allowed us to more easily identify conflict styles, along with potential methods to manage them.
The Dana faculty had already been engaged in a data gathering process to inform our self-analysis. The remainder of the morning consisted of presenting the data collected and compiled, sharing demographic information about the community we serve, and getting a detailed look at the services we provide, along with usage data. The information shared in the presentations served as background and context for the facilitated small group discussions regarding our services that took place in the afternoon. Recognizing that our services are for the most part centralized with little room for experimentation, faculty and staff discussed services that we would continue, those that might be discontinued or tweaked, and the potential for creating new services. The afternoon was full of rich and seemingly robust discussion evidenced by the resulting recommendations.
The activities of the 2016 Dana Staff Development Day serve to move us closer to the user centered library we aspire to be, as we become more aware and self-reflective of how we interact with our users and each other. Our work continues as we take action on those recommendations that can be easily realized in the short turn and enfolding those with long term implications into future goals for our library.
