Jim Williams: As I look at the future of the library, I think it is going to be rather exciting and transformative. I like to think of the library of the future as an information concourse; a place where you get the information you need on site, or through gateways to any information destination on the globe. Libraries are also going to be much more engaged, regardless of type, in the process of teaching people to think critically about the information they have retrieved. And, librarians, in addition to being a very highly regarded group of professionals, will increasingly have a background in a particular discipline beyond librarianship. These librarians are going to be called upon to be excellent teachers in terms of the analytical and interpretive function that libraries will be performing for society.

And, if using the Internet continues to be analogous to drinking from a fire hydrant we will probably also begin to see library Web pages providing critical reviews of the literature prepared by librarians and their faculty counterparts in the fields and disciplines of academe. There is a crying need for such sifting mechanisms, and the library can address this need in a strategic way with the assistance of others in the academy. Such reviews don't exist, and the critical sifting goes wanting.

ER: They don't at all?

Williams: Not in terms of the kind of frequency that used to exist in specific disciplines. And I think here is a place where librarians with a subject background can work with other faculty members to produce reviews of the literature that people will use as they initiate a query on a specific topic. Obviously, if you are a person who is creating such reviews, you should also be able to assist people in accessing information that's directly related to the canon of a particular discipline. The Internet does not give you a credible starting place in some refereed format, and these e-reviews would fill that void in our technologically and information rich future. Likewise, an increasing amount of associated teaching by librarians will accompany this sifting function, and that teaching will also be a central activity in this exciting future.

ER: Is that in the future or has it already started?

Williams: That future is in many respects already here. And, as you know, some of it is occurring for people in remote environments, because continuing and distance education have become a strong agenda for some institutions, as they have discovered a market for higher education beyond the residential campus. A critical part of remote access is access to libraries, and more importantly, access to a heartbeat, to a librarian who can perform a very direct sifting function for the teaching, learning and discovery enterprise of continuing and distance education.

ER: Has the training of librarians changed a lot in the last couple of years?

Williams: The training of librarians is indeed beginning to change. We deans, as major employers, are beginning to find that there is a great deal of receptivity when we sit down and talk to the deans of library schools about what kinds of graduates we need from their programs. What we are beginning to see now, as a pretty strong movement in library and information science education, is a trend toward developing graduates who come out of these programs with a specialty. And that specialty can be intellectual property. That specialty can be management information systems. That specialty can be public policy. That specialty can be networking. It can be telecommunications, etc.

So when we talk for example about intellectual property, we are beginning to see library education programs that are preparing people to work in an acquisitions post that involves licensing information resources, which in turn requires some legal training and some business training. We don't own many of the resources that we are making available to our various clientele. Thus, there is nothing capitalized by the library. We are increasingly providing access to information resources through licenses or lease agreements.

ER: Give an example or two.

Williams: Well, for instance, we don't own the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What we have is a license agreement that allows us to provide access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica for a very restricted audience. That audience happens to be the primary clientele on the Boulder campus and the license allows us to do certain things with that subscription that may or may not include permission to provide information to other libraries. That license may allow us to download portions of that database. That license may allow us to make a copy of the entire database for preservation purposes. And the process of negotiating a license agreement that is particular to the University of Colorado is both a legal transaction and one that is based on quite a bit of good, solid business sense; so library education programs are beginning to prepare people to work in that kind of a licensing environment. Of course, we still need people who know how to do the business of acquiring paper-based products. So we are talking about library operations that have one foot in the past and one foot in the future.

ER: What is the morale of the people who have to keep one foot in the past? Is the level of morale pretty high or not so high or what?

Williams: I would say - and I'm going to generalize here - that the morale is very high in those cases where the people who are doing the traditional work have a strong sense that their traditional work is still highly valued by the institution. And the morale is high when there is a strong collegial relationship between people who are doing that traditional work and people who are doing new forms of work. It's important that people doing the more traditional tasks continue to understand and appreciate that what they are doing alongside the new kind of work is all a part of the same mission, which is helping people make connections with the information they need. I mean, what we are really talking about here is a different package the information comes in, and a different kind of business relationship in which we acquire that information. But we are still doing it for the same purpose.

ER: By the way, what is your own background?

Williams: I'm an old medical librarian. I spent at least 12 years of my life working in a special library environment - one of the most exciting, as a matter of fact, because in the days when I entered health sciences librarianship, there was quite a bit of federal money available to the National Library of Medicine for programs focused on equalizing access to health information all across the country. And there were extramural programs that provided extramural grants that enabled us to get out there and beat the bushes and develop hospital libraries and inter-institutional relationships with medical schools to ensure that health professionals all across the country had access to information.

So those were exciting times. I ultimately became head of the Medical School Library and Regional Medical Library Program at Wayne State University in Detroit, and during my tenure there President Carter appointed me to the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine. But I also had my sights set on becoming a dean of libraries and managing a system of campus libraries within higher education.

ER: You mentioned how good the funding was at medical libraries awhile back. Is that still pretty good?

Williams: Yes. The National Library of Medicine is a part of NIH [the National Institutes of Health] and there is still a very strong national investment in health information, with the health sciences library community very much a part of that agenda.

ER: What about the funding of university libraries?

Williams: Well, you've got university libraries that are part of private institutions, and you have university libraries that are part of state-funded institutions. And for the most part, when you look at what's been occurring over the last 10 years, while our libraries have been able to get inflation-fighting fiscal resources on an annual basis, we are actually acquiring less because of rising costs and inflation that traditionally exceed our allowances. Had we the capability to keep up with inflation on our information resource base over the last 10 years, you would be saying that our institutions had been funded quite well. The bottom line is that we have actually lost buying power as a result of inflationary increases on information resources. Focused through the lens of our mission, we have become less resourceful institutions at a time when the scholarly record is doubling every 18 years.

A lot of this has to do with the way the publishing community is developing cost models for the publications that we acquire either through an actual purchase or through a licensing arrangement. The worst pricing model, particularly when we are talking about electronic resources, is one where publishers hinge access to electronic publications on the purchase of paper-based products. In the academic library community we are doing everything we can to get the publishing community to uncouple that pricing model because it is not a workable model.

ER: What makes it an unworkable model?

Williams: Well, the academic library world and, in some respects, the special library and public library worlds are all moving toward a consortial approach in terms of inter-institutional relationships. The library consortia world has even moved into the international arena, with the recent establishment of the International Coalition of Library Consortia. The primary reason why these consortia exist is to share human, material and fiscal resources; when I say share resources, I actually mean leveraging resources with those of other institutions. So, in this case it's leveraging fiscal resources in order to acquire commonly needed information resources. And the model that's being presented to us by some members of the for-profit publishing community, (where there's a linking of the traditional paper-based products with the purchase of electronic products), doesn't work in the consortial world. It makes no sense, for example, for every member of a consortium to continue to acquire paper in order to purchase the electronic version of a publication. In this scenario we end up capitalizing the paper version while leasing the electronic version and this mixing process does not represent best business practice. It's just not a sustainable model.

What we need is a model that breaks that entire mold and allows us as consortium members to purchase only the electronic form. This can be negotiated either on a FTE basis, in terms of the number of people we are going to serve, or on a simultaneous use basis, which I would prefer, because everybody on campus is not going to be accessing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, at once. That's the kind of rethinking of pricing models that has to occur, because more and more is becoming available in electronic format and more institutions like mine are beginning to acquire information resources through a consortial relationship.

Pricing models are very important these days. And, if I had to predict I would say that we will probably see some sectors of the for-profit publishing community also engaged in cooperative projects related to best practice on pricing models. Their survival and our survival - their survival as a for-profit community and our survival as either public or private institutions - is going to be based on best practice. A large part of that best practice has to do with best practice in establishing licensing agreements. Our long-term survival will also depend upon our ability to create other venues for the publication of the academy's intellectual property; other venues where the academy and the scholar retain the rights to that intellectual property.

ER: You talk about the difficulty of forging these agreements. But what about the difficulty of actually implementing and policing, administering them?

Williams: Well, the good news is that when I look at the International Coalition of Library Consortia, there are at least 75 members from institutions all over the world, and each of those consortia has an executive officer charged with the responsibility to pursue the enlightened self-interest of the consortium. In some cases these officers are librarians and in other cases they are from other professional ranks.

For example, the executive director of our local, state-based consortium here in Colorado has a background as a budget officer for the city of Denver. He has a business background and he has learned the library business. And so you have people in these consortia who bring to the table a broad array of business experiences, either in libraries or not. So, the business of policing what we are doing is being professionally managed by these executive officers. They have experience in human resources management. They have experience with intellectual property. They have experience in working with the for-profit sector. They have experience in strategic planning. Some have experience in higher education and they all have extensive knowledge of our core values based on very frequent meetings with members of their consortia. Many of them also have staffs that include people with telecommunications and networking experience.

So when we acquire electronic resources conjointly, for example, there is actual experience in the consortium as to how to go about providing access to these resources. And many of these consortia have legal representation available to them when things really do get sticky. In our case, we actually have a law firm that is on retainer when we need that kind of advice. So the policing piece is one that I would say is very professionally organized and sustained.

ER: Well, let me ask you one final question: Look into the future for as many years as you want to and predict whether the library is going to become more important to the life of a campus or institution, or is it going to be about the same, or is it going to have to go through some rough periods?

Williams: Well, I like to think that the very best model on a campus like mine for the library of the future is what occurs at the branch library level. And when I say the branch library level I am talking about a disciplinary library like engineering or music or the geological sciences or business or mathematics or physics. On my campus we have libraries that are called branch libraries in which there are librarians who have a very collegial relationship with other faculty in those disciplines.

ER: Are the ones you mention ones that are actually on your campus?

Williams: Yes. And those collegial relationships are ones that are experiencing change even more than the change we've seen in the last 10 years. A large part of that change has to do with the fact that librarians are designing courses, teaching and publishing with faculty members in other disciplines. Those librarians are shaping the kind and the content of the services in their libraries in a much more integrated way, based on the pedagogy and curriculum of a particular discipline. Those librarians are actually engaged in reframing their libraries away from a supply-driven, just-in-case kind of service, to a demand-driven, just-in-time/just-for-you based service. The day has come and gone when libraries can be supply-driven.

I say that in relation to what I was talking about a bit ago regarding the inflationary pressures on our budgets. In order for us to do the responsive job that we are called on to do, we have to shape our services and programs in a much more demand-driven way (driven by institutional vs. individual priorities). And that means we've got to have a different kind of relationship with our users; I include here the students that we serve, as well as the faculty; the teaching function that I was talking about earlier exists for both groups. We teach the students to become continuous learners regarding the resources that we acquire or provide access to; but we also have an obligation to work with the faculty in a much more integrative way when they are doing course design, for example, because there is no adequate way to do course design without integrating the information resources in a particular discipline. And if you really want to teach people to be continuous learners, a part of that process has to involve the librarian working with the faculty member who is the primary provider of instruction. And so it's a collegial relationship between the librarian and the faculty member, but one that is very strongly based on an integration between pedagogy and information resources. This is the branch library model, and one that must scale for the research library of the future. This takes me back to the excitement that I was talking about when we started this interview. And that excitement is one where I see the research library of the future as a technologically and resource rich information concourse that functions independent of time, independent of place, and independent of personal pace.


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