Eileen Rhodes was named one of Library Journal’s 2021 Movers & Shakers for her work bringing Open Educational Resources (OER) to Capital Community College in Connecticut, enabling students who struggled with the cost of textbooks to continue pursuing their degree. We recently reached out to Rhodes and learned she’s currently the interim library director for Connecticut State Community College (CSCC), a role that’s shifted her priorities and sent her in new directions.

LJ: How did the shift from director of library services to interim director come about?

Eileen Rhodes: When I received the Movers & Shakers award, I was working for Capital Community College, one of 12 community colleges in Connecticut. Since then, we’ve consolidated into one unified community college, Connecticut State Community College, with 12 locations, official as of July 1 this year. When I first expressed interest in the interim director role, it was really scary. But being in an inner-city school like Capital, where I had a lot of students with a lot of needs, OER was such a force for me.

Faculty would come to me and say, “Manchester has this resource, can we look into it?” I’d look into it, and the pricing was way outside my budget. I hate to say it, but this suburban, mostly white campus was getting these really wonderful resources. And I wasn’t—and more importantly, our students weren’t. I was really frustrated with this inequity. So when the schools said they were going to consolidate, I felt like I had to do this, because we have our have and have-not schools. I knew what it would take to get us to a place of equity.

What were your priorities when you moved into the new role?

I became the interim library director in June 2021. Each location has a director and to start the process of figuring out what we wanted to consolidate, we had several strategic meetings. Maureen Sullivan, a consultant who’s a former ALA president, joined us. She has a really brilliant mind and is very strategically oriented.

We decided on five projects but put one on hold because it was too big. Our main focus was for the students and faculty to have the least disruptive process possible. We knew we wanted a centralized collection of e-resources, a database everyone would have access to. We had 12 disparate collections that were all over the place. Then we wanted to share a virtual chat service, because we were all redundantly running our own. We wanted to have a centralized website, and we wanted to pull all of our LibGuides together.

Those projects all came to fruition in August of this year. We have a centralized website, and we did manage to execute the shared virtual chat. The goal with that project was to free up staff time because we had 12 campuses answering the same kind of general questions. It’s been a huge shift and a lot more helpful for instruction librarians who are trying to interface with students in real time, preparing lessons. They don’t have to just sit on chat all the time. For our LibGuides, we did a massive migration. We have them organized by campus, but we’re also in the process of centralizing. We have one APA and one MLA guide that we’re all using. We’re going to do more of that as we go forward.

What was it like to move so quickly on so many huge projects?

It’s been a huge undertaking to do that much in a couple of years. The fact is, it was sort of dictated: You will consolidate. But we were given the freedom to choose what we wanted to consolidate. That was huge too, because if they had micromanaged it and told us what we had to do versus what we wanted to do, it wouldn’t have worked as well.

There was some pushback. We had a lot of frustrated people because they were used to doing their own thing. And the workflows changed considerably. One of the products we added in our Springshare Suite was LibInsight. I’d never used it before, but to be able to collect the data across the 12 sites and submit one ACRL [Association of College & Research Libraries] survey, we had to do that. Before, everyone was doing something different to collect their data. Now we have a standardized way. There’s pros and cons to all of that, but I think it does make the experience for the students more equal across the 12 campuses.

What was the project you didn’t have the bandwidth for, and will it happen going forward?

It was a collection development project. We were looking at preventing redundancy in purchases of printed materials. We wanted to take a look at our collection as a whole instead of 12 separate collections. I had a team for each project, including this one, and they did an external interview of different libraries that are in various phases of consolidation and some that weren’t, but were large, [with] a similar number of full-time employees as ours.

One of the things that came out of that was a lot of folks are trying to figure out how to manage collection development on a larger scale. When there’s a consolidation at play, it changes the equation from “you have this one complete collection at a location” to “all of the collections are serving all the different programs of study areas and curriculum across 12 campuses.”

That was tabled because it was so massive in scope. But we’re planning to pick that one back up. We needed for this fall semester to play out a little bit first, see how all these changes impact the staff and if there’s any tweaking we need to do with the virtual chat, the workflow, etc.

What do you see as your future in the CSCC library system?

Before the consolidation, I was trying to paint a picture for some people as to what I do. It was like, we built the foundation, now we’re going to build the floors, and then add all the trimmings and everything to the house.

I feel like my biggest piece of the interim position was to make those changes and improve things for my students at Capital. I worked for a year, then I realized we weren’t going to actually consolidate until July 2023. So I stayed on. Then the third contract came up and they said, we’d like you to sign again. They’re telling me that they’re going to post the permanent position this fall. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m going to apply. I really miss the direct interaction with my students, and that ties me to my passions and what I can actually do to facilitate change.

I feel I’ve done a lot in this role. I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been a ton of work. I’ve got two young children at home, so I’m also interested in rebalancing my work-life balance a bit. If I do end up back at Capital, I’ve gained a whole new skill set and achieved a lot that I think would serve me well back at that campus.