People often respond better to stories than to explanations.
As most academic libraries are, the University of Colorado Libraries is heavily dependent on the work of student assistants and other hourly employees to perform many of the tasks that keep us afloat. One of the hourly employees in our cataloging department is a professor emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. One day last summer the head of cataloging came to me with a grin and told me that he had been talking with Bill Grupp, the former head of Spanish and Portuguese, about whether he wanted to come back to work in the fall semester, and he had said yes, of course he wanted to keep working, because he found it fascinating. He went on to say that he had been at the University for 30 years, and had had no idea what went on in the Library. He said he thought that it would be useful if every new faculty member were made to serve a 6-month internship in technical services, so that they could have some appreciation of all the work that went into getting books and things and making them available to the faculty and students.