Customizing Faculty Success to Showcase Librarian Work in an Academic Health Sciences Library

Background: In October 2019, the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine (SOM) launched Digital Measures, now known as Faculty Success. The platform’s primary focus was to collect, store, and report faculty activity data in order to streamline promotion and tenure processes. The program was then expanded to other health sciences colleges to create a new campus online directory. The original program was built for the SOM, and faculty at the Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center (HSLIC) experienced challenges with many data fields and reports. The existing options did not adequately represent library professionals and their work.

Description: Faculty Success did not accommodate many activities critical to the diverse types of librarianship. Therefore, HSLIC created an ad-hoc committee comprised of three library faculty and one staff member to address these concerns. Following an environmental scan of library professional CVs and Academy of Health Information Professional (AHIP) categories, the group removed irrelevant and redundant fields, defined current fields as they relate to library activities, created new fields for library activities not yet represented, and developed a custom CV template tailored to highlight what mattered most to the library. Throughout the summer of 2022, the committee shared their work with other library faculty, incorporating feedback until all activities were represented, and faculty consensus was reached.

Conclusion: Representing library instruction was a key, problematic area. Available fields did not convey the types of instruction developed and shared by library faculty. Another challenge was demonstrating archival work, collection development, and large-scale projects because existing categories did not showcase faculty’s activities in these areas. The new system will be vital to the library’s promotion and tenure process, in the creation of annual reports, and for annual faculty evaluations. Next steps include testing, creating user instructions, and self-entering CV data, a large undertaking, by June 2023. The library hopes the changes and templates will benefit other health sciences librarians using Faculty Success.