Trends and Challenges for Academic Libraries and Information Services Copyright 1995 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ magazine, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 1995. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information technology in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu TRENDS AND CHALLENGES FOR ACADEMIC LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION SERVICES by Bil Stahl ABSTRACT: Many trends and challenges are, or will shortly be, confronting academic information professionals. To successfully accommodate these trends and meet these challenges will require us to undertake radical rather than incremental changes. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF TECHNOLOGY Predicting the impact of developing technology is difficult. The following set of general technology principles has proven useful to me in trying to anticipate the future impact of an emerging technology. The first paraphrases an infamous bumper sticker--Technology Happens. Rough starts do not signal the failure of a technology. Current examples of technologies that some are declaring follies, but which will likely become major technologies, are personal digital assistants (PDAs) and voice recognition. The second principle is that _the "best" technology is not always the most successful_. We have to go no further than the Beta vs. VHS videotape competition of a few years ago. Beta was widely acknowledged to be technically better, but the standard was set by marketing, not engineering. We can never lose sight of marketing's impact on the success or failure of a technology's adoption. The third principle is that _technology is additive_. We do not always get rid of old technologies when a new one comes along. However, new technologies do change the use of old technologies. For example, the telephone did not replace the postal system, but it did change our use of the postal system. The fourth principle is that the _developers and early implementers of technology rarely accurately predict the technology's best use_. The telephone was originally conceived as a device to help the hard of hearing. Technology's integration into our lives is far less controlled than we often believe. THE RATE OF CHANGE Modern society is experiencing a more rapid rate of change than any before. Change brings with it uncertainty, which is generally threatening. In the post-World War II period up until the 1980s, it was not uncommon for U.S. industries to take seven years to bring a product to market. Now automobiles go from design to product in less than eighteen months. In "high tech" industries this timeframe is often less than six months. The rapid rate of change applies not only to product development, but to an industry's ability to recognize a change in the market and to shift by eliminating obsolete products while developing their replacements. A current case of failure to do this is that of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_. The Encyclopedia Britannica Company underestimated the impact of CD-ROM-based encyclopedias on the market and planned to depend on their technical excellence to retain market share (a violation of the second principle above). The consumers quickly realized that they could buy a PC with a CD-ROM drive and a CD-ROM-based encyclopedia for about the same price as a printed set of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, and be able to do many more things with the PC than they could with the books. OUR STUDENTS Today's students come from an educational environment few faculty and staff in academic institutions have ever faced. In North Carolina the official illiteracy rate is 25 percent of the population, and is probably actually much higher because of phenomena such as "intentional illiteracy." (Intentional illiteracy occurs when a person who _could_ read does not read for an extended period of time and becomes functionally illiterate due to lack of practice.) On the other hand many homes have much more sophisticated information technology available to the students than they have access to at school. The majority of educational computer software sold is sold to parents and children, not to educational institutions. Schools are generally lagging behind in use of even basic technology. The national average for the number of telephone lines in K-12 institutions is three. What this means is that students entering academic institutions probably span a much greater range of educational experiences and proficiency than was true ten or twenty years ago. It also means that their understanding of and experience with technology ranges from being highly skilled to being completely in the dark. Likewise, students leaving the college or university are going into a world unlike that most faculty and staff have ever experienced. Experts predict that the average graduate will make seven _career_ changes, not job changes, before reaching retirement. Obviously this puts a whole new emphasis on types of retraining and retooling that do not require additional four-year degrees. In addition, it is predicted that three of these careers will be as self-employed individuals. An article published in _Fortune_ last year describes the relatively common situation today where college graduates start their working careers as self-employed entrepreneurs and eventually move into a job working for an organization.[1] Some predict that by 2005, 50 percent of the workforce will be self-employed at any given time! A common scenario will be that self-employed individuals will come together to form virtual companies to accomplish specific projects and then disband. The ability to use and apply networked information is vital to this type of economy, and is therefore a vital survival skill for our students to acquire. Some small rural towns are already beginning to capitalize on the new form of economy by investing in high-speed telecommunications infrastructures. This in turn allows entrepreneurs to enjoy the quality of life of rural small towns while being linked to financial markets and industries around the globe. Towns like Delta, Colorado, have substantially increased the number of jobs and significantly raised the per-capita income within one or two years by using this strategy. The advent of pervasive information technology linked by telecommunications networks may result in large population shifts away from the densely populated urban centers and the re-ruralization of America. "RACE THE LEADER, NOT THE CAR BESIDE YOU" This advice was given by one NASCAR driver to another, but is good advice for anyone today. We are truly in a global economy, and we must compete with the best in the world, not simply the best in our town, state, or country. Talent can be involved in just about any project from almost anywhere in the world. This not only applies to low-wage production work, but to high-tech skills and even to more common trades. Frank Knott of Vital Resources, Inc., in a recent presentation described the technology at a large law firm. In that firm any attorney can dictate a brief at any time of day or night and have it transcribed and a printed copy on his or her desk within three hours. The surprise is that the transcription is done in mainland China! This global competition is made possible by relatively cheap, high-speed telecommunications networks and digital technologies. Businesses such as some academic institutions, which view their primary stock and trade as serving the people in their local region, must begin to move away from that focus. As telecommunications networks become more robust and more pervasive, location becomes less important. Regions can be quickly invaded by competitors arriving via digital telecommunications networks. Students can already take a wide variety of courses from a wide range of institutions offering courses via everything from electronic mail and cable television to full-motion, interactive video networks. It is possible that within a decade students will routinely take courses from a vast selection of academic institutions without ever having to leave their home or workplace. AUTOMATION VS. TRANSFORMATION It is always helpful to remember our roots in order to understand how we have to change. Information professionals have been very successful in automation. Automation is the process of applying computing technology to an existing process. The process is the application. An automation project is a highly controlled activity. We can automate just about anything now. Show a good systems analyst a process, and s/he can probably design an automation project around it fairly easily. However, automation is no longer enough. Technology is getting into people's hands in many uncontrolled ways. People gain access to computers to do one thing, and find out they can do so much more! Information technologies have truly become "enabling technologies." The technology enables a change in behavior, which leads to a change in the process. This is the reverse of the traditional automation project and often puts the information professional at the back end of the process rather than the front end. As information professionals we must now lead and adapt rather than control. This is what is meant by AT&T's motto: Ready-Shoot-Aim. We must ready information technology that we anticipate will be enabling technology. We must lead by applying that technology to solve real problems. And we must quickly adapt when our customers find new uses for that technology. DISINTERMEDIATION One of the things automation did was to enable people to have access to information they could not readily get before. Automation was often a mechanism of disintermediation; that is, it removed the need for an intermediary. People no longer had to see a particular staff member to check the status of their budget, their inventory, etc. People have always wanted to be able to do things for themselves. Books are a technology of disintermediation. They eliminated the need for storytellers. In fact the creation of writing was widely viewed as a threat to civilization by some of the early cultures for this reason. In more recent times, if one looks at the number of telephones installed, one sees a modest increase in early growth until the advent of dial telephones, at which point there is a sharp rise. People usually prefer to place their own calls. Likewise many of us can remember when self-service stores were first introduced. As with the initiation of many new ideas, the idea of self-service was often carried too far. Stores quickly learned an important lesson. It wasn't that customers didn't want any assistance, they wanted "point of need" assistance. The important point of disintermediation is that we must find ways to eliminate a required intermediary. If a customer is required to go to a clerk, librarian, or computer support person to do something, then review of that activity needs to be a high priority, and ways must be found to remove the requirement. We must constantly evaluate whether the function of the intermediary is as a barrier or as a value-added service. There is often a misunderstanding of "value added." It is vital that the _customer_ can readily see the value added, not just the provider. The makers of Beta video recorders and the publishers of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ certainly added value--it just wasn't sufficiently apparent to the customer. Bob Freedman of Southern Bell uses the following story to explain this concept. A person is told this odd- looking piece of plastic costs $170 to make and $15,000 to install. The person really isn't too interested in it, until she is told that the odd-looking piece of plastic is a heart pump, and without one she will die. Suddenly it becomes a bargain, because the customer clearly sees the value added. Value added is, of course, often more of a product of marketing than of engineering. We information professionals need to learn and practice marketing at least as well as we do engineering. A value-added service that runs counter to the training of many librarians is that of filtering information. As we are increasingly surrounded by information, providing access to information is of less and less value. People cannot afford to consider every source of information about a topic. They need to find the one piece that gives the best state-of-the- art understanding of the topic, or that supports their position. Our value added must increasingly focus on the _quality_ of the information provided rather than the quantity. CONTINUUM OF EPHEMERALITY This is a term used by Charles Tuller of IBM to help explain why the transition of information from analog forms to digital ones is causing the information explosion. Because analog information is comparatively difficult to reproduce and distribute, ephemeral information tends to disappear rapidly. People such as publishers and librarians decided what information was worthy of being retained and what was "ephemeral." This environment made such functions as bibliographic control relatively easy. By contrast, digital information is very easy to reproduce and distribute, and therefore, even the most ephemeral information can be readily retained. Production streams cannot be controlled, so neither can we assume we can continue to provide adequate bibliographic control. Increasingly we must find ways to assist our clients in accessing information which we cannot rigidly describe and classify. While our control systems do continue to have value, we must be leaders in adapting new means of accessing information, such as content-based retrieval technologies. This change can be described using the analogy of a well and a river. Historically we have been keepers of the well. We engineered systems to provide input into the well, which was our library or our central database. We also maintained highly controlled output systems so we could always keep the well functioning to everyone's advantage. Our wells are now being over-run by an ever-deepening river. We are less and less able to simply turn on a tap to fill a customer's glass. We must find ways to extract the glass of water from the river, not the well. Throwing the customer into the river is not an option! The real common thread through all of these ideas is often missed. Our fundamental goal is not the use of information or technology. It has always been, and continues to be, to facilitate communications between people: the sender and the receiver. ============================================================= Footnote: [1] Louis S. Richman, "How to Get Ahead in America," Fortune, 16 May 1994, pp. 46-54. ************************************************************* Bil Stahl is the Director of Information Technology Planning for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has been a librarian for twenty years and has been extensively involved in library automation and networking for nineteen of those years. ************************************************************* Trends and Challenges for Academic Libraries and Information Services 2l R¼-R’Dƒxt ´ƒnYO r N­â/Word Work File D 1lTEXTMSWDTEXTMSWD«ŒšÃBn/ NºÿÚ$ r N­ê&`$n0 RƒR’R‚-B$_&N^"_PONÑNVÿüHç x&. $nl R¼-R’Dƒxt ´ƒnYO r N­â// Nº*ØŸ r N­ò&0 R Jeff Hansen2b