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Copyright 1997 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 1997, pp. 45-51. 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 resources 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: [email protected]
Scholarly communication has changed dramatically in recent years. Electronic mail between professors and students has introduced distinct pedagogical benefits; electronic bulletin boards and discussion lists are increasingly in use as a forum for scholarly discussion; electronic journals are facilitating the more timely exchange of theory and research among scholars; and videoconferencing promises to improve distance learning through its interactive capabilities. New media not only add value to interactive communications, but also provide powerful new means of accessing information to support teaching, learning, and research.
It is not surprising that the academic library has witnessed more technological change over the past decade than perhaps any other campus area. Innovations in hardware, software, and the very infrastructure of the institution have constituted only part of that change. An even greater revolution has occurred in the library culture; few on campus have seen their day-to-day work and general job responsibilities change more dramatically than librarians.
Regardless of the promise of the "virtual library," the commitment to providing optimal customer service still remains the primary goal of libraries. More specifically, librarians still seek to further students' ability to conduct research and to improve their critical thinking and evaluative competencies and writing skills; to support faculty research and teaching; and to continually evaluate, augment, and generally enhance the libraries' collections, which are increasingly diverse in both subject matter and format.
With the ever-growing electronic availability of information on both national and global networks, many libraries have turned their attention to providing access rather than building local collections. In seeking to enable patrons to locate material (increasingly full-text) where they require it most -- in dormitories, in offices, in classrooms, or at home -- librarians are stressing the need to provide resources to faculty and students at locations other than the library building. As Hauptman and Anderson point out, what users desire is "a 'seamless' system [that] will integrate all types of information, whether accessible on site or deliverable from some distant location....Users just want to retrieve the information."1 With the advance of the technological revolution, librarians will play a major role in meeting this expectation, continuing to be in the forefront of helping faculty, students, and others gain access to the vast multitudes of information -- whether digitized, print, or multimedia -- "at a time when intellectual capital is encroaching on physical capital as the driving force in the world economy and order."2
For at least the next decade or so, the library as a building with four walls will continue to exist. A complete technological transformation resulting in a true virtual library where no human librarians or information specialists come into contact with the public is not yet nigh for most institutions. Flesh-and-blood librarians will undoubtedly continue to fulfill a very useful role for years to come. In particular, they will continue to refine their client-centered function as intermediaries and facilitators.3 Indeed, with the proliferation of new technologies on campus, there will probably be a greater need to have many intermediaries deal with the public. It will be more and more critical that libraries consistently keep the user at the forefront of their mission. In the technological library, there should no longer be any justification for the criticism that librarians too often treat users as "adversaries rather than as allies."4
While librarians will continue to serve some of their current roles, what are some of the new or changing roles they will play in an increasingly networked information environment?
Above all there must be strong communication and an effective partnership between the institution's library and its computing service. A major challenge here is that the two entities are quite distinct on many campuses, sometimes even characterized by an atmosphere of mutual jealousy. As a result there is often a duplication of effort and a waste of resources. This is poor management of resources and budget, and is also grossly inefficient. Both services need the other in order to attain the same ends for their institution. Librarians need technologists' systems, computing, network, and other technical expertise, while information technologists can learn much from the library's knowledge of users' needs. As the CAUSE Current Issues Committee concluded at their meeting at CAUSE93 in San Diego:
What is obvious is that the roles of the two professions now overlap significantly as higher education migrates ever more steadily toward a networked information environment .... Opportunities for collaboration exist in many areas, including providing help desk services, information retrieval interface design, development of campuswide information systems, user training, Internet use, and faculty and student support.6
On the other hand, just as it is desirable for librarians to work more closely with the technology staff, it can only be beneficial if information technology personnel become more involved in library technology deliberations. For example, information technology staff members serving on the committees of the library's reference and collection development departments might learn much about the library's and library patrons' needs. Their participation could contribute greatly to the formulation of technology policy both within the library organization and in the wider institution. In addition, in many institutions communication between the information technology division and the library might be fostered and general technological development advanced if the two areas were to publish jointly a campus newsletter on networking and other technological issues, including participation by interested faculty and graduate students.
Though it is easy to call for diminishing insularity, to actually effect it will require strong political acumen from both library and campus leaders. It has been aptly stated that librarians must "become more assertive and political in their actions,"7 perhaps serving on more non-library committees such as budget committees, curriculum committees, long-range planning committees, student committees (as ex-officio members), and so on. The main goal of librarians should be to ensure that all members of the campus community know what information resources are available to them and how the library staff can faciliate access to them, within the physical walls of the library or elsewhere. Libraries must focus at least as much, if not more, on outreach as on in-house service. W. Patrick Leonard, vice chancellor for academic service at Purdue University North Central, is adamant on this point: "... if librarians and their staffs remain in libraries, they will soon be placed on the list of endangered species ... Librarians should get out of the library and into classrooms as instructors and into offices and conference rooms as participants in the curriculum-building process."8
On many campuses, part-time students -- the numbers of whom are increasing quite dramatically nationally -- are often somewhat neglected in bibliographic and other library instruction sessions. Many of these students attend classes in the evenings and on weekends, times when fewer librarians are available. But it is these students in particular who stand to reap great benefit from the electronic information revolution. As many of them have little time to use the physical library, the ability to access material from home or office terminals will greatly facilitate their educational experience. It is imperative that librarians find more non-traditional ways to reach these students.
Of course, the optimal functioning of the new networked library will require many skills and knowledge areas that presuppose many diverse types of library personnel. Woodsworth et al. provide a persuasive list: "subject specialists, technicians, and professionals from other information fields -- e.g., programmer/analysts, network designers and managers, marketing specialists, and experts in artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences."10 Clearly the Master of Library Science programs of many library schools will undergo changes in the years to come. In fact, it is likely that many of the professional personnel working in the networked library will not possess an MLS degree.
While only a minority of librarians will need to be computer "experts," most should be able to instruct the more technologically naive faculty member, at his or her own office workstation, in some basic computer skills. Librarians, "experts in the complexities of production, organization, and access to stored information," must sit down with faculty in their offices, learn their research needs, and as information experts help them identify and access the best resources.11 Presentations on library and information issues before entire academic departments would also be beneficial. The instruction can then be far more focused and meaningful for its subject specificity.
Librarians, accordingly, should work far more closely with faculty in advising how accessing electronic information resources can enhance their teaching. They might, for example, help establish teaching models that are not teacher- and classroom-centered and that are accessible at all times of the day and night, with video, sound, pictures, and text all playing an important part. In addition, librarians can provide professional help in creating home pages for the professor and his or her courses; in designing appropriate information-resources based curricula; in placing course lectures, graphics, other media, and bibliographies on the Web, where students can access them from anywhere twenty-four hours a day; and devising assignments that can be completed electronically.
As Fisher and Bjorner have suggested, "Since information access now takes place anywhere, users expect that instruction will be available anywhere as well."13 Thus librarians must focus increasingly on using electronic means to teach information access. Patrons will need to be able to use, from any workstation both inside and outside the library, software that will bring them step by step through the library's CD-ROM and online databases as well as guide them in effectively utilizing the vast array of Internet resources. The great advantage of such tutorials is their portability -- all a person needs is access to a computer to use them. 14
Increasingly in the networked environment, specific and general instructions will be built into automated systems. Pointing to the inevitable proliferation of information "knowbots," Farber believes there is "no question that computer-based assistance will go far beyond beginning instruction, that so-called intelligent agents will find and assemble information for users."15 But this day of true artificial intelligence for library information systems has not yet arrived -- and it may still be years away. Moreover, this future, rather than signifying the end of the profession of librarianship, may advance the librarian to a new paradigm, one where his or her assistance to the user, though different, will be both needed and invaluable.
Certainly librarians (or information specialists or whatever they may be called, for terminology will change) should play a major role in creating these knowbots and other forms of artificial intelligence and in making them as user-friendly as possible. However, even today we must strive to make library technology transparent to the user. Wagner, speaking of university technology in general, wisely declares: "If a particular technology system is so cumbersome that it requires massive time and effort to figure out how to use it, you can be assured that people will not be lining up for access codes."16
A particularly beneficial way for librarians to break out of their insularity is to become much more closely involved in the work of software developers and other computer specialists. Librarians can help in the design of technology-based information services and share their intimate knowledge of what users want and need. As just one example, the campus community could benefit greatly from database help screens that have been designed with input from library professionals. The instructions on such screens often leave much to be desired. One reason why library users still seek the face-to-face assistance of librarians is that they understand users' needs, and the difficulties they can encounter in learning new electronic tools. Skilled librarians now have years of experience in helping patrons utilize electronic media, an experience that equips them well to work closely with information technology personnel on the design of systems interfaces, help screens, computer instructional programs, and other software that campus constituents will use. As Richard Lipkin has observed, many librarians have the "experience computer scientists want to integrate into a digital library."17
Predicting the future is deceptively easy; predicting it correctly is a random walk. Some of the predictions will be correct, but most will be partially to completely wrong. Nevertheless, we can fairly easily see the general direction of change, although not the precise direction or the exact speed with which it will occur. Doubtful? Witness the "just around the corner-ism" of the paperless society, predicted since the mid-'70s at least. Planners and managers have the task of organizing for change while doing their best to keep options open for divergence from today's educated guesses about the directions of information technology, colleges and universities in general, and what the correspondingly dynamic academic library should be. Libraries are -- for good reasons -- inherently conservative organizations, and academic institutions are even more so. On the one hand, most of us believe that radical change, even beyond what has already taken place, is essential. At the same time, libraries and librarians in their traditional as well as emerging roles make unique contributions and add value to their institutions, and to lose either the opportunity or the heritage could be disastrous.
To make continuous change palatable and enable more fundamental change of the kind that Brendan Rapple urges, academic libraries need to organize so that changes quickly become a part of normal everyday life -- "the way we do things here." Organizations that change successfully meet four conditions.
How do these elements fit together? The critical shift Rapple describes (and with which I agree) is shifting value from the things to skills. In the information world, this means from information objects, which are static, to human capital, which is dynamic and, problematically from the planner's point of view, self-motivating. We need to invest seriously in the human capital of our organizations in ways designed to build organizational capability for the desired behaviors. Humans expect to understand not only what is needed, but why, and most importantly, because of what underlying principle. Altered behavior will most successfully be based on shared understandings of values, and built into mission statements, with corresponding job descriptions and clearly articulated performance expectations.
Knowledge and skills can be built through training, and training has to be ongoing. It is not enough to be a "generic" librarian; almost everyone needs new skill sets that were not learned in graduate school. We automatically assume that the librarian can learn technical skills and information content. But so too can s/he be trained to be a good teacher, or to be an "outreach person." It goes without saying that work tools must be provided: technology-enhanced classrooms, offices, or at least desks in academic departments away from the library; the appropriately powerful individual workstation; and software, equipment, and assistance to develop new approaches to information, such as point-of-need assistance for users, online teaching and consultation, or information-skills teaching packages.
None of this comes cheaply; it can't be done on the margin. Up-front investments and resource commitment can pay off handsomely if they are used in a planned way to jump start and carry through an activity to full implementation. It is important to move on to the final stage, where the new activity becomes part of normal operations, not simply an add-on project. This is a difficult segue, from pilot or project status to routine business. Truly new financial resources of any magnitude for new activities are seldom available. Rather, reallocation is necessary, and that is never easy. Setting priorities that have specific outcomes is poorly done in academia generally, although some libraries and service departments are learning to do so. In any event, reallocation won't be possible without establishing priorities. It is likely that organizational restructuring will be necessary, via new or changed departments, or new job titles, or different specialties.
Individual librarians must continue to change and adapt, balancing their traditional values and incorporating new priorities, to be sure. But it is unfair and unrealistic to expect that they will do so unaided. Those responsible for planning and organizing must create organizational conditions that facilitate and purposefully move toward new goals. The key to successful organizational change is matching vision, expectations, and resources on behalf of the task to be done.
First, I think we need to begin to consider ourselves a part of a larger curriculum-support group that includes computing professionals, media resources specialists, instructional technologists, language-resource-support specialists, and writing and tutoring specialists. With our colleagues, including the faculty, we need to take a close look at the work that needs to be done now to support teaching, learning, and research, rather than defending the library of the past. We need to learn as much as we can about these other specialists and define our role within that larger group.
Then we need to teach our new colleagues as much as we can about how we access and manage information and how we teach students and faculty how to find, evaluate, and use information to further the teaching/learning enterprise. Librarian and "computarian" work are growing together, as evidenced by the growing number of organizational mergers of libraries and computing centers on campuses. (I get at least a call a week from a president or vice president wanting advice on how to go about merging the two entities.) The information professional of the future will most likely be a hybrid of librarianship and computing, media specialization, and instructional technology, and we need to start thinking about how we as librarians add value to the teaching/learning/research support services and what we need to learn from our colleagues.
Librarians should volunteer to work on projects with their colleagues in academic computing and/or instructional technology. Work on the campuswide information system (CWIS) is a natural for partnership with "computarians." Librarians have a deep understanding of how people look for and use information, both print and electronic. They are and should be strong players in the development of truly useable online information. One way of assuring that faculty and students find quality information online is to develop online information spaces to support the curricular needs of the campus. Another is to work with faculty to develop information spaces for their classes. In an age when we might not see information seekers face to face, it is especially important that we lend our good thinking to the way online networked information is organized and presented.
Librarians have excellent experience in producing subject-specific bibliographies for students and faculty. The subject-specific home page with links to relevant quality information available on the World Wide Web is very similar work. Librarians should do it.
Librarians should learn as much as they can about workflow restructuring and work analysis. Much of what we do in the arena of processing, inventorying, and circulating material could stand a good hard look. Our processes are often redundant and time consuming. If we reduce the amount of time we spend getting "things" labeled and on and off the shelves, we can put that effort into broadening our understanding of where the information revolution is taking us and into learning the new skills we need to be effective in the new workplace.
We also need, as do our colleagues, to understand change and how to manage and embrace it rather than try to ignore it. Technology is driving us all in directions we never expected, and we are in a better position than our faculty colleagues to understand how we can harness it.
Librarians of the future will seldom stand alone in their support of faculty and students, so we need to bring our skills to the table and share them with our colleagues. I think those skills include:
Will the library as "place" disappear? Rapple finesses this point by arguing "not soon." A more likely answer is "no." Students and other library patrons will continue to need a place to search for and use information -- despite their ability, aided by technology, to gather information without barriers of space and time.
Will the journal as we know it -- in print -- be replaced by an electronic format? Would that it became so, but this is unlikely until (a) the current and the restrospective contents are accessible electronically, (b) the infrastructure inadequacies are remedied, and (c) the price for the electronic format is both liberated from and more attractive than current prices for the print subscriptions. Electronic journals may also present issues related to reward structures for faculty authors -- promotion, tenure, and raises -- but if the electronic journal is today's printed and refereed scholarly core journal, reward structure issues should be minimal and soluble. We cannot underestimate, nor can we predict with any confidence, the revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary, potential of journals in electronic format to fundamentally alter patterns of scholarly communication, that is, for some scholarly journal titles in print format to become marginalized by those present and prospective in electronic format.
Lastly, from a strategic and organizational perspective, what of the roles of libraries and computing organizations (to name just two)? One can predict that they will approach merger as the electronic revolution continues; for example, the library's systems will be managed by the computing organization as is now the case in some institutions. My view is the opposite, that in fact computing organizations are more likely to shrink to the size needed to operate the "utility," and that distributed processing and the dynamic of "local control" are more likely to move applications development and user support out of the central organization and into user organizations, for example, the library's systems group, the systems group of School X, College Y or Z, or the systems group of the business office or student services area. In this scenario, coordination across unit boundaries is the paramount managerial concern.
Back to librarians and their roles. Twenty to twenty-five years ago "bibliographic instruction" was the new, hot development in academic librarianship. Teaching students, and other library users, how to use and find resources and evaluate what they found was the calling of the new missionaries. How much different is that from the current vision of teaching how to find, then evaluate and use what is found? Different tools to be sure, but different in kind?
A final point. Technology makes leaping over barriers of space and time easier -- any-time, any-place information access. I would argue that this disintermediation, besides being an inescapable consequence of the technology we exploit, is in fact a necessity and desirable in order to serve a constantly growing community of users with a constant or shrinking cohort of staff, be they librarians or other. Any-time, any-place access makes it possible to serve more with fewer.
A postscript and a dilemma. How can faculty be helped to adjust to a world in which "get it at the library" is replaced by the verb "to library" -- where place becomes also process -- and to recognize that just as information seeking is without spatial and temporal constraints (and arguably more congruent with student lifestyles), so too must teaching become.
2William H. Graves, Carol G. Jenkins, and Anne S. Parker, "Development of an Electronic Information Policy Framework," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1995, 17.
3Maxine Brodie and Neil McLean, "Process Reengineering in Academic Libraries: Shifting to Client-centered Resource Provision," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1995, 46.
4Oscar Handlin, "Libraries and Learning," American Scholar 56 (Spring 1987): 218.
5Donald N. Langenberg, "Information Technology and the University: Integration Strategies for the 21st Century," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45 (June 1994): 324. <
6CAUSE Current Issues Committee, "Current Issues in Higher Education Information Technology," CAUSE/EFFECT, Spring 1994, 6.
7Virginia M. Tiefel, "Library User Education: Examining Its Past, Projecting Its Future," Library Trends 44 (Fall 1995): 329.
8W. Patrick Leonard, "Libraries Without Walls-Field Service Librarianship," The Journal of Academic Librarianship 20 (March 1994): 29.
9Peter G. Christensen, "Using English Department Library Liaisons in a Term Paper Clinic: Reviving the Scholar/Librarian Model," Research Strategies 12 (Fall 1994): 206.
10Anne Woodsworth, Nancy Allen, Irene Hoadley et al., "The Model Research Library: Planning for the Future," The Journal of Academic Librarianship 15 (July 1989): 135.
11Joanne R. Euster, "The Academic Library: Its Place and Role in the Institution," in Academic Libraries: Their Rationale and Role in American Higher Education, ed. by Gerard B. McCabe and Ruth J. Person (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995), 8.
12Steven W. Gilbert, "Technology and The Changing Academy: Symptoms, Questions, and Suggestions," Change 27 (September/October 1995): 59.
13Jean Fisher and Susanne Bjorner, "Enabling Online End-User Searching: An Expanding Role for Librarians," Special Libraries 85 (Fall 1994): 286.
14Elaine Cousins, "Developing Effective User Training Programs at the University of Michigan," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1994, 55.
15Evan Ira Farber, "Plus Ça Change...," Library Trends 44 (Fall 1995): 435.
16Ellen D. Wagner, "The Technology Aside: Building a Strategic Plan to Strengthen Academic Programs," CAUSE/EFFECT, Spring 1994, 20.
17Richard Lipkin, "The Library That Isn't There: Digital Libraries Transform Books, Photos, and Videos into Bits and Bytes," Science News, 3 June 1995, 344.
Brendan A. Rapple ([email protected]) is Collection Services Librarian, O'Neill Library, Boston College. His primary collection development responsibilities revolve around English. He also teaches in Boston College's College of Advancing Studies. Dr. Rapple's main research interests are library instruction, education in 19th-century England, and education in Ancient Greece.
Joanne R. Euster ([email protected]) has been University Librarian at the University of California, Irvine, since 1992. In twenty-nine years as a professional librarian, Dr. Euster has directed libraries in Washington, Louisiana, New Jersey, and California. She has published widely on a variety of topics, including library management and leadership and the role of the academic library, and consults on library organization and management nationally and internationally.
Susan Perry ([email protected]) has over thirty years of experience in the information resources and services world. She has been the director of libraries in Washington State at the Evergreen State College, in California at Stanford University's J. Henry Meyer Memorial Library, and has also been a director at the Stanford University Data Center and a media services director at Evergreen. Perry is currently serving as College Librarian and Director of Library, Information, and Technology Services at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
C. James Schmidt ([email protected]. edu) has more than twenty-five years of experience as a manager in public and private academic libraries in Michigan, Texas, Ohio, New York, Rhode Island, and California. Dr. Schmidt has served as library director at the State University of New York, Albany, and Brown University, and is currently at San Jose State University.