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Reconsidering silos
Journal of Digital Media Management,
11
(1),
62-78
(2022)
Abstract
While organisational silos are often viewed as an obstacle to overcome, this paper argues that they are a necessary feature of the workplace environment and should instead be approached in a manner that maximises their potential. This case study describes an approach used by three specialised areas at an academic library — cataloguing and metadata services, digital collections and digital preservation — to retrospectively manage the technical debt incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the sudden shift to remote work, library workers developed an action plan to continue an in-process migration with minimal disruption; however, this necessary action significantly exacerbated an already complex file storage system. Although retrospective management of technical debt can be complicated by the management needs of multiple stakeholders, staff members in several areas of specialisation approached the project by identifying needs related to the subcategories of a digital object entity — the intellectual entity, representation entity, file entity and bitstream entity — and developed high-level solutions to meet these needs. This approach exposed three types of silos (context, schemas and processes) and related communication challenges, which can complicate cross-team collaboration. Yet by reconsidering organisational silos as interconnected units of specialisation, staff members successfully applied specialised knowledge, advocated for their management needs and collaborated to resolve the technical debt.
Keywords: professional specialisation; communication in organisations; teams in the workplace; academic libraries; digital preservation; organisational effectiveness
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Tammy Troup is a digital preservation librarian at the Iowa State University Library, where she is responsible for development of policy, oversight of technical procedures and assessment of bitstreams in support of the long-term retention of digital objects. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science from Kent State University, where she studied digital preservation.
Heather M. Campbell is a metadata management librarian at the Iowa State University Library, where she oversees the creation, normalisation and quality assessment of metadata for the library’s digital collections. She holds a master of science in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Chris Dieckman is a cataloguing and metadata librarian at the Iowa State University Library, where he is responsible for overseeing the cataloguing of library materials and assisting with metadata creation and enhancement. He holds a master’s degree in library and information science from Kent State University, with a specialisation in cataloguing and metadata.
Laura Sullivan is a digital collections librarian at the Iowa State University Library, where she manages the digital collections platforms and digital surrogate files. She holds a master of arts degree in library and information studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a specialisation in archives and records administration.
