Page 26 - Campus Technology, March/April 2019

FEATURE IT Management
“Everyone just thought the IT folks just fix computers all day and librarians only
help people find books. Nobody really knew all
the intersections. Nobody really
understood, oh, we actually have a lot in common — especially around teaching and
learning.”
While Davidson’s IT and library are not a merged organization and have no intentions of becoming one (CIO Kevin Davis reports to Presi- dent Carol Quillen and Forrest reports to Wendy Raymond, dean of faculty), to Forrest, there’s no “separating the library from the information from the technology.” As she put it, “We’re just stron- ger when we work together, period.”
Fostering Communication
If Davidson could be thought of as an example of the enthusiastic early days of cohabitation, Centenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport might be viewed as a marriage that has weath- ered years together. There, the John F. Magale Library and IT divisions merged in 1998. Both Christy Wrenn, director of library services, and Scott Merritt, director of IT, worked at the insti- tution when that unification took place.
Wrenn recalled the merger not as a way to curb administrative costs, but as the result of “another surge of putting libraries and IT departments together, and most of the technology at that time was in the library. That’s when Centenary brought the CIO in over both of our departments to develop the technology across campus.”
The primary concerns of the library staff at that time revolved around awaiting decisions about where IT was “going to live and what offices they were going to use.” She can still recall the details: “They took a conference room, a lounge, a kitchen; but this only seemed challenging at first.”
The IT crew, on the other hand, was delight- ed. “We were in the basement of the adminis- tration building,” said Merritt. After the move, “Everything was much nicer.”
Through the years, the merger has morphed. Both units now have their own budgets and
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2019