The library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world.
You enter and you do not know whether you will come out. (Umberto
Eco, The Name of the Rose, 1983, p.158.) Thus one of the characters
of Umberto Eco's famous novel about libraries, describes the
significance of his medieval library and its greatest danger--people
become hopelessly lost in searching ideas, and some even die there
by the literal, but careless, application of digital information (licking
poison absentmindedly from their page-turning fingers).
Like a labyrinth, libraries--until the last century--were
protected, walled spaces dedicated to preserving knowledge by
keeping their contents safe, within a web of expertise.
We are now in a period of time that is insistently re-inventing
itself as something totally new because of information and electronic
communication. The library has posed a special challenge to the
freethinkers who would appropriate the library into a symbol of the
dawning new age, merely by adding an adjective: electronic, virtual,
new, information, digital, multimedia . . . . While there is no
agreement as yet on the single best adjective, there is agreement
that the library must itself be changed fundamentally if this self-
consciousness about an information revolution is to be more than
rhetorical labeling.
The Technical Labyrinth
In the next century, transformed by digital information and
electronic communication, the library becomes the common ground
of the university and the community. Students will need the library's
books, periodicals, CD-ROMS, workstations, network gateways, and,
above all else, librarians; they may also need a place to study,
adaptive learning technologies for the physically impaired, or a place
to meet.
At the same time, the library must provide a virtual reality in
the form of an electronic meeting place and a point of access to
remote information. Given the costs of meeting the goals stated
above, only through shared electronic resources can local libraries
ever hope to meet patrons' needs. More than any other traditional
asset, the library is the means by which American universities will
transform themselves into something entirely new.
None of the expected attributes of new century learning can be
met unless the library becomes a labyrinth that spans the world,
wherein access to all information is contained even if the connections
are uncertain and ever-changing.
At IUPUI, the University Library has been created with
connections as the organizing principle for both its physical and
virtual manifestations. Students, faculty, librarians, citizens,
technologists, administrators, government officials, vendors, and
representatives of partner institutions all participated in
conceptualizing the information system. Designed by Edward
Larrabee Barnes, the five-story University Library building provides
seating for 1,740 and shelving for up to one million volumes. It has
about 273,000 square feet of space, 94 percent of which can be
assigned. Its totally new information system was planned in two
stages by Ameritech and IBM, both in partnership with IUPUI and
Indiana University librarians and technology staff. The information
system is a multiple vendor, multimedia network designed to
accommodate remote users with an open architecture capable of
evolving with technological developments.
The Library has 640 individual study carrels, each of which is
fully networked; there are 42 rooms of varying seating capacity for
group study of two to 10 people and 40 faculty studies, all of which
are networked; there are networked and technologically rich
adaptive educational services rooms; and there are three electronic
classrooms, including a 100-person auditorium. There are currently
130 workstations deployed throughout the library and an additional
20 laptop computers (more are planned) may be checked out from
the circulation desk to be plugged in to the information system at
any of 350 sites within the Library.
The Library's information system is based on World Wide Web
protocols and runs over the Internet. The scholar's workstation is the
heart of the user-friendly system. It allows students: (1) to use the
widest possible array of information resources, including multimedia;
(2) to integrate them in personal applications using a series of
personal productivity tools (e.g., references, word processing, spread
sheets) provided online; and (3) to store products for future use until
they are transmitted to other users such as faculty or collaborative
learners or downloaded to appropriate out-put devices, including
laser printers installed throughout the building. Up to 56
workstations may use and control unique full-motion video
simultaneously, and there is no practical limit to the simultaneous
networked use of text, numbers or graphics.
The library interface was designed for easy use by both novice
and expert. Three different colored screens alert users to whether
the workstation is intended for express bibliographic use, for full
function workstation operations, or for librarians who have certain
additional management capabilities beyond those available to
patrons. Providing full access to library, university, and Internet
resources, the interface offers guides to specific products and
resources, including an electronic suggestion box, help functions, a
wide range of bibliographic and full-text resources, the electronic
catalog systems of numerous libraries around the world, over 100
CD-ROMS, and a number of site-licensed online information resources
such as Nexis/Lexis or Britannica Online.
In brief, it is already possible for many undergraduates to
research and prepare their course papers, incorporating video, sound,
data, graphics, photographs, and text, at a workstation without
having to consult paper resources. Current remote use and delivery
of electronic materials is limited due to license restrictions and the
availability of fiber optic connections outside the library. However,
many on-campus sites (mostly classrooms) are currently connected
and a plan for full connectivity (including offices) is being
implemented. Off-campus locations are partially available through an
installed fiber system, including many of the region's school districts,
informal learning organizations such as museums and the zoo,
governmental offices, and some corporations. Off-campus, full-
function interactivity is an essential part of the plan for the library
in the next stage of development, contingent on commercial network
providers. In the meantime, 100 concurrent modem connections for
text and communications can be supported.
A Center on Teaching and Learning has been established at the
very heart of the building, offering a full range of electronic devices
and technologies that allow faculty to achieve any teaching or
communication objective, from pressing their own CD-ROMS, to
preparing digital slides, to making overhead transparencies. It also
has a trained consulting staff to help faculty learn how to use and
develop the technological tools as well as information resources. The
professional staff is supplemented by faculty mentors, colleagues
who have successfully used information resources in their own work
and who are willing to help other faculty. The Center takes full
advantage of the pedagogy of learning by teaching others, ensuring
that the faculty mentors continue to develop an ever-greater range
of skills and applications. Literally and figuratively, the University
Library is the place where the teachers for the next century are
being prepared.
The Human Interface
The third major innovation of the new IUPUI University Library is
the recognition and development of librarians as collaborators and
co-equals with faculty and computer specialists alike. While it is not
rare for librarians to hold faculty status (about half nationwide enjoy
the benefit of tenure), few are developing active roles in teaching
and applied research as are IUPUI librarians. They will continue to
collaborate with faculty in opening new pathways for students to
discover and to use information resources. As their level of
experience and expertise grows, the role this team plays within the
university is likely to expand to include direct participation in
teaching and learning.
The fourth innovation of the University Library stems from the
recognition that the creation of electronic resources for IUPUI
courses as well as the use of existing resources is a complex matter
strongly influenced by copyright laws and university policies on
intellectual property, copyrights, and patents. As a joint venture of
the Indiana University School of Law--Indianapolis, the School of
Library and Information Science, and the IUPUI University Library, a
Copyright Consulting Center has been established. This center helps
faculty, librarians, and technical staff across campus decide how they
can use copyrighted materials in courses and other projects. At the
same time, the center also helps departments and schools develop
new electronic products in such a way that individual rights and
property interests are protected, while assigning to the university
control over intellectual materials that are integral to courses and
curricula.
Until the last century, the idea of the library as a labyrinth
meant that the facility was designed to keep information and the
secrets of knowledge held within the confines of the library itself,
with librarians playing a solitary role of determining who could have
access and when. When the labyrinth coincides with the world, then
the library becomes a place of concourse, the intersection of people
and imagination. As the library changes, so changes the university
and the forms of learning. Eco's medieval semiotician puts it thus:
Because if this new learning they wanted to produce were to
circulate freely outside those walls, then nothing would distinguish
that sacred place any longer from a cathedral school or a city
university. (Eco, p.185.) When the means of learning are everywhere,
then the university is everywhere, too.
New Goals for Libraries
IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis) is a
metropolitan university of some 27,000 students, 1,400 faculty and
179 degree programs from associates to M.D.s and Ph.D.s. The campus
dedicated a new University Library in April 1994, designed as a
learning and information center with four primary, cumulative
objectives: (1) providing electronic communications to the fullest
possible extent with access to worldwide information resources; (2)
making the use and application of electronic information an inherent
part of teaching and learning; (3) ensuring that the general public
has the capacity and means to pursue its education as individual
citizens through every reasonable means; and (4) serving as the
symbol of a new type of university, simultaneously capable of open
access to learners and high quality research.
In its goals, IUPUI is enacting a struggle occurring on most
American college campuses as educational institutions try to come to
terms with the impact of technology on learning--first as a practical
matter involving decisions about finances and priorities, and second
as a more ephemeral debate about the changing definition of
learning, as Carol Twigg and others have reminded us in earlier
issues of Educom Review. At IUPUI, the following factors have
influenced our concept of a new labyrinth of learning:
Students will be more diverse in age, preparation, learning goals (not
all will seek degrees), and backgrounds; the library must meet their
needs equitably and efficiently.
Students will pursue education as a life-long necessity; the library
may provide the institutional continuity between periods of
enrollment.
Students will view education as a consumer good, investing time as
well as money based on comparative value; the library must add real
value to education to justify its cost and do so in ways related to
learning outcomes instead of number of volumes or size of staff.
Technology will make it possible and perhaps even necessary for
faculty to develop asynchronous modes of interaction with students
who increasingly will take advantage of distance learning
opportunities; the library must support students and faculty at times
and places convenient to them.
Technology will make it possible for students to pursue multiple
paths to the same learning objectives, requiring faculty to play a new
role of facilitator of learning in addition to (or instead of) evaluator;
the library must become the principal means for students to create
their own discovery pathways without having a standard course
syllabus on which students or librarians rely.
Technology will make collaboration a dominant mode of teaching and
learning, research and service, because of its ability to remove
barriers of time and place while facilitating work across disciplinary
boundaries; the library must supersede the monastic metaphors of
individual study, quiet, and unique classifications of resources by
becoming a place of concourse.
Faculty will be required to be much more flexible and adaptive while
themselves engaging in life-long learning in order to meet changing
institutional needs; the library must support faculty development
beyond individual research, giving priority to institutional instead of
personal information resource acquisitions.
Universities increasingly will be linked to the communities and the
peoples they serve as distinctions between K-12 schooling and
university education diminish, as partnerships based on social
service as well as economic development expand, and as the people
involved in these enterprises move back and forth between the
university and other institutions; the library must support these
activities and changing roles, through collaboration with other
libraries and shared resources.
William M. Plater is executive vice chancellor at Indiana University
Purdue University Indianapolis. [email protected]