Merger and management: University of Rwanda libraries in a transitional context

Abstract

With a focus on management of libraries, this study is set in the context of a merger of the University of Rwanda with multi-sites and campuses. The study explores how librarians, library directors and representatives for university management understand and conceive of the libraries in relation to the merger. It addresses questions concerning the participants’ views on resource sharing as a potential strategy for managing libraries. Furthermore, the study reviews the challenges and opportunities as well as the enablers and constraints that the merger evokes on library work within the merged university. Qualitative methods in the form of semi-structured interviews, observations and document study were used to produce the empirical data. The key findings indicate that there is a variation in the study participants’ views and understandings of the libraries, the management of these, and resource sharing. This variation depends on where the respective participants are located in terms of positions in the organizational structure and geographical location. The study reveals that the tensions caused by the participants’ various views on libraries and library management can be traced to and visible in the overall university structure. These tensions result from the centralized command and control management approach that largely is in play to govern the libraries. According to such an approach, the libraries are considered peripheral units of the university system. More specifically, these tensions emanated from two contradicting understandings of resource sharing. In the thesis, these two understandings are referred to as resource sharing as a strategy for dealing with abundance or as resource sharing as a strategy for dealing with scarcity. The study, furthermore, revealed that the merger process caused a problem of disconnection between, on the one hand, the rhetoric about libraries and, on the other, the practices of library work and management at the libraries. The disconnection is manifested in management of libraries and the work taking place there. The situated practices at local libraries are enabled or constrained by the availability or the lack of necessary resources. The merger as a process and a strategy disturbs traditional existing practices at libraries, since it has not been negotiated as most participants expected it. Since the libraries were at different startingpoints at the initiation of the merger, harmonization and modernization processes became challenging. The results show that it is necessary to remediate the disconnect problem through establishing a functional organizational structure in which decision-making power to a greater extent than what is the case is delegated to the colleges, campuses and libraries. That is, an organization where library matters are attended locally at the respective libraries. Such a change in the understandings of the role of the libraries within the university would be a way to refocus the library system’s central role in contributing to the university’s mission. This would mean to reconsider the necessary requirement for the UR libraries to becoming modern and provide adequate services to the community. The study contributes to research that explore how libraries are managed in the context of a university merger where the library is not the key mover of the merger, but rather perceived as a by-product of the institutional merger. The study also contributes to research involving resource sharing as part of strategic discourse, particularly in the context of university mergers.