Introduction

In my 20 years’ professional experience of leading five UK academic or research libraries, the most difficult, frustrating yet essential institutional relationship has been with the estates or facilities department. Throughout this chapter, ‘estates department’ or ‘estates director’ refers to the people and senior leader who manage, maintain and develop the physical infrastructure of a university and its associated services and utilities. The latter services can include the management of catering facilities, vending machines and student accommodation – which I define as ‘facilities’ even though ‘estates’ and ‘facilities’ are often used interchangeably. The importance of the estates/library services relationship has intensified in line with the increased higher education (HE) sector focus on ‘student experience’ during the 2000s as evidenced in the United Kingdom's (UK) National Student Survey (NSS), a national tool for benchmarking student satisfaction, as well as with the marketisation of HE in the UK.

Unlike other HE support services which can (rightly or wrongly) be replicated in some part at department level to enable local control and oversight of specialist or niche library functions, e.g., the library systems team, the security/reception team, porters, etc., the same is not true of estates services and their unique remit to maintain and develop the institutional estate. Yes, it is true that most large libraries employ some form of facilities or environment manager post, but such a role is mainly concerned with managing relationships and service levels on behalf of the head of service with estates colleagues and their sub-contractors. Such a role is rarely involved in the nuts and bolts of planning or constructing a new building or directly responsible for maintaining an existing library estate. This fact, in my view, creates a form of perpetual insecurity and paranoia arising from the lack of control over a key part of library operations that shades the working relationship between library and estates teams, especially when the library team are fielding estates-related calls from their customers.