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Reflections on WiLS’ 2013 Transition: Strong Roots, New Branches

by Stef Morrill
September 2022

When I was a kid, I failed a quiz on the explorers. Twice. Keeping the names and dates of a bunch of interchangeable men in my head was impossible for me. I was not a happy history student for many years. Then, through a strange turn of events, history became my major in college, and I fell in love with the stories of the past that help us understand where we are now, how we got here, and how we continue into the future.

If you gave me a pop quiz on the dates and names of important WiLS events, I would probably also fail that. I can’t give you that kind of history. Instead, I would like to share the story of a specific time in WiLS history: the transition from being part of UW-Madison to being an independent non-profit.

Like many stories, this one begins with a life-changing event over which our protagonist, WiLS, had no control.

For many years, OCLC, a large library vendor, used regional service providers, including WiLS, to provide services such as training, support, billing, new product awareness, etc. Some “networks,” as they were called, provided services to one state; others covered multi-state territories. The networks assessed a surcharge on all OCLC products sold in their area to support this work and their organizations.

In 2009, OCLC decided to consolidate most of these services and prohibited the networks from assessing a surcharge. At that time, this surcharge was a significant source of income from WiLS. Providing OCLC-related services was probably the service WiLS was most known for. Six WiLS staff members were involved in OCLC services, with four spending all of their time on OCLC services.

Networks around the country began to close or consolidate, but WiLS took a different path. They asked their members to continue to pay the equivalent of the surcharge as a membership fee. They introduced a new suite of services, including workflow analysis, re-training of staff, original cataloging, ILL borrowing, metadata creation, business intelligence, and project management/consulting that members could receive for this membership fee.

It is a testament to the value of WiLS to its members that most continued to pay this fee in the first years after the OCLC change, even though these fees were significant. For example, {some member} paid {some big number} as a membership fee.

As time passed, it became more difficult to justify this fee, especially because the members paying the most were the largest institutions with ample staff and did not need the new services. This created tension between WiLS and its members and threatened the budget model developed post-OCLC.

Around this time, on April 1, 2011, I became the director of WiLS. I knew the challenges I was facing. I also knew the value of WiLS to the community and the potential positive impact the organization could have. My job was to find a way to keep WiLS going while fixing the budget concerns. WiLS had reserves, so I didn’t have to do this overnight, but the organization could not continue if nothing changed.

As concerns about the budget increased, I worked with UW-Madison HR to creatively cut staffing costs. Avenues like furloughs or buyouts were unavailable to us because of the rigidity of the UW infrastructure. Cutting positions could only be done by seniority, not service need. There did not appear to be good options to stabilize the budget as part of UW.

Meanwhile, UW-Madison began questioning the practice of having legal non-profits (501 c3s) within the university structure. Many non-profits, like WiLS, benefited from in-kind contributions from UW, including space, continuing education, HR consulting, etc. UW-Madison was considering dramatic changes to its non-profit relationships. WiLS was told that if these changes were made, we would have to spend 30% more for the same staff and move out of UW-Madison. When there were already budget challenges, this change would not be feasible.

In May of 2012, the WiLS Board and I made the decision to separate from UW-Madison and become an independent non-profit. We would lay off all 16 of the staff, close our office in Memorial Library, give up the affiliation that made some of our services to UW-Madison possible and reinvent ourselves. It was a considerable risk with tremendous costs.

It was also the most difficult decision I made in my library career. Sixteen people would lose their jobs. Even if we hired them back in “new WiLS” (as it was called at the time), they would lose their health benefits and access to the state retirement system.

We also didn’t know if any of this would work. WiLS would be a very different organization. We didn’t know if members would support this change. We didn’t know if we could make enough revenue to support the organization long-term.

Reflecting on the decision, Matt Rosendahl, one of the board members at the time, wrote, “I remember driving five hours home from Madison and crying for much of the trip…I mourned what was being lost – the familiar WiLS presence that I knew – and for the WiLS staff members who were so severely impacted by the change.”

In June of 2012, all WiLS staff members received their layoff notifications. They had one year to find new positions. WiLS would transition away from UW and become a separate entity on July 1, 2013.

And then began the work of recreating the organization. Early in this process, one of our long-time members asked if this change was “evolutionary or revolutionary.” I answered, “revolutionary.” WiLS had 40 years of providing excellent service to its members. We did not want to lose that. But the infrastructure needed to provide that service would change completely.

Last year, I read Good Apples: Behind Every Bite by Sue Futrell (I’d highly recommend it!). I learned that many apple farmers change what type of apples they grow based on their current popularity. So, if consumers want Galas, they will stop growing Macintosh and switch to Galas. No surprises there. But I did not know they don’t cut down their trees and replant them. Instead, they cut off the Macintosh branches and graft Gala branches on their existing rootstock.

This, to me, is the perfect analogy of what happened with WiLS. It had strong rootstock, grown from its first 40 years. We cut off all the branches on most of the trees in the orchard and grafted new ones to provide what our members needed.

However, none of us wanted to go through that level of cutting again. We wanted to create a flexible and agile organization that could cut back a tiny percentage of its branches to change rather than the extreme pruning we had done in this transition. We wanted any future change to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. As another board member at the time, Marc Boucher, describes it:

If we are going to survive, we have to be nimble. We have to see where there is a need and if we can fill it. It’s scary. You don’t know if it’s going to work. We are going to try, we may fail. This might not last a year or two. Let’s try…this idea of constant revisioning – rebuilding itself.

So, we began to build this organization that could rebuild itself by learning what our members wanted. Kathy Pletcher, retired director of the UW-Green Bay Cofrin Library, conducted needs assessment focus groups around the state. Cooperative purchasing was the most valued service that WiLS provided, so we retained that in the service portfolio.

One of our other flagship services, Interlibrary Loan Lending for UW-Madison, would no longer be a part of WiLS. It would stay with UW-Madison and be provided by UW-Madison staff.

We continued down our path by making some fundamental choices about how we would work:

  • We would keep the WiLS name. The name had 40 years of service to libraries in Wisconsin behind it. We would re-brand around the name to give a new identity. We would de-emphasize the “Wisconsin Library Services” part of the name to provide more flexibility.
  • We would no longer have an office space. Many years before COVID forced most of us to work from home, we decided not to have an office. It saved money and gave us the flexibility to grow and change as needed. We would get meeting space from our members.
  • We would have fewer staff, and most would have the same title and job description. We could not have staff members locked into position descriptions and achieve the desired flexibility. We would hire for skills, knowledge, and, most importantly, temperament. We needed kind and thoughtful people who could empathize with member needs and see potential solutions. We needed people who could deal with ambiguity and constant change and would work well in the office-less environment. We would begin with only seven staff (compared to the 16 before the transition).
  • We would not charge for membership and would charge a small, flat fee as the entry for cooperative purchasing services. We wanted everyone to be able to know what WiLS was doing and to participate in services as they needed them. To do that, we made the price of entry low. Membership would be completely free. Members would only pay $100 to be part of cooperative purchasing services.

We would continue to fill in the details until July 1, 2013, when WiLS officially became a separate entity. We had done everything we could to create an organization that would thrive long into the future.

It’s hard to believe that all of this happened almost ten years ago. It is gratifying to write this history when WiLS is doing so well and celebrating its 50th anniversary. This story was not easy to live through for any of us, but I’m grateful that I could do the job I was tasked with and reimagine, along with the Board and others, an organization that could be there for its members, whatever their needs may be.