Wendy Scott, Associate Director for Organizational Design and Learning, retires from the Libraries

If the Libraries is NC State’s competitive advantage, as our vision statement asserts, then for nearly thirty years Wendy Scott has been our competitive advantage. From her pioneering work in developing the Libraries’ prestigious Fellows Program to her tireless fight for fair and competitive wages for Libraries staff, Scott has been a major force in shaping what it means to be a librarian in the 21st century. While it certainly feels strange to say goodbye during this period of Coronavirus Response, nothing can mute our gratitude for her decades of transformative librarianship and collegiality or the lasting impact she has had on our campus and our profession.

Scott joined the Libraries in 1991 as Librarian for Professional Development and Education. As a member of the senior administrative team, she has provided leadership and management of the Libraries’ personnel (human resources) program. She has led and managed the recruitment, appointment, and evaluation processes for more than 220 FTE staff and developed and implemented a comprehensive plan for the professional development and continuing education of the Libraries’ diverse, talented, and technology-focused workforce. During her time with the Libraries, she advanced to the position of Associate Director for Organizational Design and Learning, and she served on numerous Libraries and university committees, task forces, and teams that addressed a wide variety of human resources-related initiatives. 

Among her many significant accomplishments, Scott played a key leadership role in the creation of the nationally recognized NCSU Libraries Fellows Program. One challenge for early-career librarianship was a pigeonholing phenomenon, as too many librarians were settling too quickly into whatever job they happened to land right out of library school. To combat this trend, Scott worked with then-Vice Provost & Director of Libraries, the late Susan K. Nutter, to lead the development of a program that instead offered new librarians a two-year appointment during which they develop expertise and skills across multiple departments, with a focus on science, engineering, and digital librarianship; on diversity; and on library management. 

Fellows are fully integrated members of the library faculty, with competitive salaries, performing as entry-level librarians half-time in a home department. The remaining time is devoted to a project in an area outside of their home department. These projects support strategic Libraries initiatives while providing concrete and innovative opportunities for Fellows to interact with librarians from other departments; develop novel skills, often with emerging technologies; accumulate impressive portfolios; travel to industry conferences and symposia, and achieve at a professional level. “The Fellows Program facilitated experiences that helped me build a strong foundation in academic librarianship,” our Lead Librarian for Interdisciplinary Research Hannah Rainey points out. “As a Fellow, I was able to expand existing skills while also acquiring knowledge and experience in emerging library services and technologies. Most significantly, the Fellows Program provided me with a cohort and professional network of former and future Fellows that will continue to benefit me throughout my career.” 

Besides contributing an important professional development opportunity to the library profession, the Fellows Program has been a recruiting boon for the Libraries, having attracted the best and brightest library school graduates for more than 20 years now. The Fellows Program has been a crucial element in developing our depth of talent and cultivating our culture of excellence, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity. Many graduates of the Fellows Program have become leaders in our organization, and others have gone on to be leaders and innovators in other academic libraries, other sectors of higher education, and other adjacent industries. 

Since the program's inception, ninety-five percent of Fellows have been offered academic positions or have entered doctoral programs upon completion of the program. Former Fellows have held positions at Harvard, Yale, Duke, and Syracuse, and Library Journal has named five former Fellows “Movers & Shakers” in the industry, adding to the Program’s reputation as a training ground for library trailblazers. One of those “Movers & Shakers,” our Acting Ask Us Librarian Pete Schreiner, notes that “from day one of my Fellowship, I was engaged in important, user-focused work in a cutting-edge academic library. I was trusted with the responsibility of supporting student success and even got to design and launch a new service point! My colleagues are awesome, and this has been an amazing place to start my library career.” 

Another major victory for Scott, and just another example of her ongoing commitment to improving the Libraries' ability to recruit and retain highly skilled employees, was the Libraries' career-banding initiative that culminated in 2009. Scott worked persistently and persuasively for years to guide the implementation of North Carolina's Career Banding Salary Administration Policy for our SHRA positions. Unlike many of the position titles in the state system, the library SHRA positions had not been revised or updated since the 1970s. Jobs were described and compensated for work that had been automated or assigned to student assistants. A market study of SHRA positions across the Libraries showed that our positions were among the five worst paid in comparison to market. 

Scott represented the Libraries on a statewide career banding task force and collaborated intensively with leaders and managers in the Libraries and with NC State Human Resources colleagues in this effort, resulting in a revised set of position titles, descriptions, competencies, and, importantly, new, market-driven salary ranges that more accurately reflected the complex, technical skills and duties of our staff. This enabled the Libraries to implement significant, market-rate salary increases for 76 positions, which has had an enormous cumulative impact on our ability to set the standard for the 21st-century research library.

When the James B. Hunt Jr. Library came online in early 2013, it was touted by Time and others as the Library of the Future. In order to leverage this signature building to raise NC State’s profile and enhance our campus’s reputation, Scott developed our Visitor Relations program, which has been crucial to building relationships and collaborating with the thousands of library, architectural, and higher-ed colleagues who have visited the Hunt Library in its first seven years.

And the library of the future can’t be staffed by the librarians of the past. As library spaces and technologies had to adapt to the ever-evolving landscape of research, teaching, and learning, so too did library staff. In order to support these immersive, experiential, technology-rich spaces, the Libraries needed a staff with the skills and experience to not only engage fully with this new kind of library, but we also needed a staff that could convince faculty and students that these resources would transform their work and then facilitate their leveraging of those resources. 

Thanks in large part to Scott, we were already there. For decades, she has led the charge to not only recruit candidates from the best library schools in North America but non-traditional candidates from other sectors as well. She has placed a premium on hiring and developing staff with the technical skills to support a technical campus. Our Libraries has also demonstrated a deep commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts in our staff development, hiring, and recruitment, and Wendy pushed for those efforts and changes. Scott has created for us a culture that values creativity, experimentation, adaptability, and excellence, and in doing so, she has moved the needle significantly on contemporary librarianship.

With her deep understanding of the university’s mission and structure, the essential roles and skills of librarians and library staff, and the overarching challenges and trends in higher education, research, and scholarship, Wendy Scott has played an absolutely essential role in transforming the NC State University Libraries into one of the best academic research libraries in the country over the past three decades.