The Academic Library is dead. Long live the Academic Library

The Academic Library is dead. Long live the Academic Library. The phrase, typically given as the “The King is dead. Long live the King” in response to the death of a king, and hailing his successor, is appropriate for thinking about the academic library of the 21st century. Like the old king and the new king, there are similarities in role and purpose but the new king represents some fundamental changes; a new day with new opportunities and new promise. While some in the media and even in our own profession have predicted the complete death of the academic library, I think the news of its death is, as Mark Twain said, “an exaggeration”.

It is true that higher education and the world itself have gone through fundamental changes and continues to evolve on a seemingly daily basis.  Higher education is being challenged by new models, public opinion, media spin, government policy and legislation, and rapid technological change. Radical and continual decreases in funding, changing demographics, increased resource costs, and changes demanded by accreditation associations all have contributed to the mood to re-think/recast the higher education arena, which is the arena in which the academic library lives.

While higher education has indeed changed and will change even more, many of the fundamental roles of libraries have been surprisingly consistent and enduring. Libraries still provide collections of information resources, staff, facilities, services, and technologies, all to facilitate engagement with information and ideas, learning, scholarship, innovation, and creation. That said, academic libraries have taken on additional roles such as scholarly publishing, data management and data curation, large-scale digitization, and closer partnerships with faculty in student engagement and learning, and in faculty scholarship and research. Libraries always have been places of learning, intellectual engagement, creation, and dissemination. These are part of the enduring thread that ties the academic library of the past to the academic library of the future.

What is the academic library of the future?

A variety of challenges are shaping the academic library in today's colleges and universities. Some view that academic libraries are in crisis. I rather think that academic libraries are more alive and robust today than at any point in their history. Challenges can serve to dissipate complacency and to refine and reinvigorate our role and to allow the librarians and staff to play an increasingly more significant role in the educational and public purpose of the university.

The Library’s de facto hegemony as the purveyor of information is gone. Some bemoan the fact that “Google” stole our business. Regardless of what one feels about Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Facebook, they all have played a predominant role in making the world at large aware that everyone is an information consumer, and in many cases, a creator/provider as well.  They have made the world global in a new way. This new awareness of the value of, and need for, information can and should provide us with opportunities to exploit our knowledge and expertise to draw users to our rich resources; our collections, our staff, and our services.

Historically we have talked about libraries primarily in terms of collections, facilities, budgets, circulation counts, staffing, etc.  While this model served the academy well in the past and these are elements that are still important, this King is dead.

In thinking about the academic research library of the future I want to talk about it differently I want to talk about it in terms of its qualities or attributes and in some cases its aspirations. 

The academic library of the future is characterized by

Engagement: The academic library is engaged. It is engaged across the entire spectrum of the university and with higher education, locally, nationally, and globally. The library must be involved, in conversation with, and work with, all of the work of the university. We must be intimately part of the undergraduate experience, graduate students and also the work of the senior researcher. We must be engaged with athletics – scholar athletes, and with the arts. We must work with the VP of Research, the deans of the colleges, the research centers, student government and clubs, etc. The work of the university is our work in that we must understand the information /knowledge needs of all of these and lend our hand in supporting their work.

University aligned: The academic research library must be aligned with the values, goals, and strategic priorities of the university and likewise develop values, goals, and strategic priorities that advance the work of the university. We do not exist in and of ourselves. While we have individual ways of operationalizing these values, goals, and priorities we check these operationalizations against what the university community needs.

Collaboration: The library cannot be self-sufficient. The attitude of self-sufficiency is arrogant and certainly does not build community. The library must collaborate across campus with other learning, teaching, and research partners.  It must also work locally, regionally, nationally to build scalable and sustainable solutions. Examples where collaboration is necessary are stewardship of legacy print collections, digital preservation, data management/data curation, large-scale digital libraries, global learning communities. Collaboration takes work, trust, talented people, and sometimes money. We must be strategic in our partnerships so that we maximize our efforts for the benefit of the university and our students, teachers, researchers.

Embracing Change: Change is the hallmark of life. Rapid and disruptive change is the hallmark of now. The library must embrace change as an opportunity; an opportunity to meet new challenges, change current practices, explore new opportunities, move forward. Embracing change means we are alive and growing.

Responsive and Nimble: Paired with the idea of constant change, some of which we cannot control, the library must be nimble in responding to change. We must not be constrained by historic or past models of collections or services in making decisions to meet new demands. We must not build organizational structures that can’t be changed in response to new needs. We must not plan to plan. We don’t have the luxury of taking a year to make a decision on most things. We won’t always slay the sacred cow, but we need to be able to ask the hard questions and make appropriate and sometimes difficult choices. Like change, some people find it difficult to be responsive and nimble (after all we are people of habit). How many of you park  your car in the same place, sit in the same chair at meetings, etc.). I think it is the role of library leadership to support people well in times of change.  Change affects all from the custodian to the Dean.

Innovation and a Can-Do Attitude: Our students, faculty, researchers live with constant innovation in technology and services, mostly driven by the consumer marketplace. If they cannot accomplish what they need with an existing company or service, they go elsewhere.  The Library must be constantly innovating; be in constant beta mode. NO is not a word that is tolerated well so we must have a can-do attitude in our approach to helping students and faculty be successful.

High-touch/high-tech: Users expect and need a high touch and high-tech approach. While not everyone will need an in-person interaction every time they come to the library, or interact with the library virtually, the expectation is that the library and library staff are approachable and are eager to help with the work in which the user is engaged. High-touch builds community and inclusion. Because we live in a highly technological age the library must be where the users are in terms of technology, and in some cases out ahead, so that we can respond to anticipated need. The library and its services must work for the iPhone and the Android tablet, and the high-end graphics-intensive workstation. We must embed ourselves in appropriate apps and web applications. We must use these technologies ourselves and be comfortable and fluent with them. We expect students to learn to understand the library and some of its weird jargon and ways – we must feel comfortable with the tools they use too.

User-centered: We must meet the needs of our users. We must work constantly to understand the needs of our users (all of our users) and design, change, evolve services and collections to help users be successful. We do not design services primarily for our needs/convenience.

Being Smart:  The academic library will survive and thrive based on its people. The library staff is the library’s greatest asset. All members of the library organization must contribute to its success – to think and work smart. We must support and develop our staff from entry level position to the Dean in order to continue to move forward. We must provide a work atmosphere and a work culture that support the staff in the critical work they do in working with students, faculty, and researchers. This takes time and money.

We must also help our users to be smart. We must provide them with critical information skills and technology skills for the future. (Critical thinking, information fluency)

Values-driven: We must adhere to and live our stated values:  These values will be ones of the library profession (patron privacy, freedom to read/freedom of information, collection and preservation of knowledge), human values (open communication, trust, respect, diversity), leadership and business values (creativity and risk taking, great customer service, staff development), etc. These values help provide the raison d’etre and esprit de corps for what we do.  If we espouse values and do not follow them then we have failed in our mission and our strategic directions and work will falter and be damaged. We will lose the trust of our users.

Sustainable and Scalable: Since we are unable to mint our own currency, we must build models of collections and services that are sustainable over time and scalable to meet the needs of a large university. This is where many of the points above come in (innovation, nimbleness, collaboration/partnership). Sustainability in terms of “green” must also be a priority for the library- reducing the carbon footprint, waste stream, and costs.

Global and Diverse: We must be global and diverse in our outlook, our service, our collections, our policies. We live in a global world and the curriculum increasingly reflects a global perspective. Global resources does not mean the same as international- we must represent the world to reflect our users’ needs and our commitment. Our staff must also be global in their perspective and be comfortable in a diverse environment.

World-Class:  What does it mean to be a “world-class” research library? In the past, we would have said that was Harvard, or Oxford, or Berkeley, or MIT. More often than not our view of a “world-class” university library was defined by the size, depth, and breadth of its collection.  In today’s digital world the onsite collection issue is not nearly as salient, as there are ways to provide ready access to much of the world’s knowledge whether you are a researcher in a small town like Waterville, ME, Memphis, TN, or right here in Los Angeles. I think today the World-Class library is characterized by its staff, its services, its innovation, it willingness to be engaged across the campus as a key learning partner. It also means a constant striving to be better – to do the best in all that we do. It certainly is not the attitude of the “Rolls-Royce” – I’ve arrived but more in the attitude of Southwest Airlines – great customer service with a constant learning and improvement cycle.

Leadership: The Library has a leadership role that it can and should play. Because the Library belongs to the whole campus (not vested in one department/division), we have the opportunity to lead without stepping on too many toes. Major university libraries have taken the opportunity to step to the foreground in providing state, national, and international leadership in the library space and must continue to do so in strategic and collaborative ways.

Advocacy: The academic research library must play a strong advocacy role, not only in the university but in the state, the nation, and the world.   We live in a world where governmental forces want to limit rights, sequester/block /censor information. We have publishers who want to change copyright for their benefit and not ours or our users.  There are forces that want suppress publications that show certain groups in positive light (LGBT, Muslims, etc).  The library must play a strong advocacy role around freedom of information, open access, copyright and intellectual property, diversity, and fairness. 

It might be easy to say that all modern organizations need to have these attributes, and for the most part, I would agree. In the past we have defined the library in terms of collections, buildings, services, with a predominant emphasis on collections- we were in the collection building business. Today that is not our business. We are in the learning, teaching, and research business. Our collections, our staff, our facilities, our technologies are all tools that help us in that business.

Let me switch gears and talk about the future library in terms of some more tangible elements:

Collections: Collections will continue to be a critical focus of the academic library with digital collections being a primary focus though print will play an important role in some disciplines- e.g. the arts. Some of the changes in print will be caused by market forces beyond our control, e.g. e-books (in various formats) and e-journals (almost complete).  Other changes are the result of large-scale digital collections (HathiTrust, ECCO, EEBO, etc.) or aggregations (Digital Public Library of America and Europeana). Other changes are because of new forms of media (MP4, streaming audio and video) blogs, twitter, etc. and new forms of scholarship which are moving beyond print.

Research libraries have large legacy print collections and a move to a collaborative/shared model is necessary for long-term sustainability. We already see this with journals (West Storage Trust, CIC), monographs (Maine Shared Collections, Eastern Academic Scholars Trust, and HathiTrust) and government documents (Association of Southeast Research Libraries).  We will see this continue to scale up to a national solution.  Faculty acceptance of shared print models is directly tied to access and delivery- the US is geographically large so delivery models need to match.

Special Collections will increase in strategic value and will be a distinguishing mark of a research university. SC must engage students as well as faculty, external researchers, and the community. We must showcase our treasures. SC provides opportunities for outreach and funding as well as collaborative research projects that build inter-institutional cooperation as well as community research partnerships. This is an interesting and challenging area of the future – collecting and preserving the physical heritage but also ingesting new digital special collections and making them available.  

Services: The services the library provides will constantly evolve. We will probably still be circulating some books in 10 years but not necessarily laptops or even things like Kindles.  The need for information literacy training and research help will not go away and the library will have to find ways to embed elements of these in various services.  We will never have sufficient staff to meet with all the classes we should. We will need to experiment with new technological or partner solutions to provide a scalable and sustainable service (MOOCS or something like that).  It is doubtful that we will have “reserve services” or scanning services – other than specialized options in 10 years. We will probably do more print on demand or purchase on-demand options.

Facilities: We live in a hybrid world of physical and virtual. While our students and many of us spend hours online, the physical library still is a critical value to a research university. Facilities have become less print collection focused and more focused on learning spaces. Spaces may be technology-rich or quiet and contemplative. The library can and should be the intellectual center of campus; that place on campus where intellectual curiosity runs rampant and students and faculty engage in conversation with each other and with ideas ranging from Plato to astrophysics, race relations to aesthetics, queer theory to economics, presidential politics to poetry. Today, more than ever, library as place plays a critical role in the educational process. Libraries are not mere study halls but laboratories of scholarship, creativity, and innovation where people interact with information and ideas.

The 21st-century research library should have a reading room that provides contemplative space to read, think and write. The library should also be replete with technology enabled spaces to access information, create digital projects, and communicate and collaborate with others. Space for individual study, group study, and casual conversation over coffee, space for lectures and special events, and places to display physical and digital collections are all critical parts of the 21st-century library.

Technology: Technology is ubiquitous and fluid. We live in a technology saturated world and the saturation level will increase, some in ways that we have yet to imagine. The library must provide the technology that our users expect to be able to do their work (writing, research, creating, innovation, inventing). Staff must also have the technology they need and of the types that our users have.  We must have a robust infrastructure that continues to be refreshed to meet the bandwidth needed. We need 99.9% reliability.

Staff: Staff is the key resource of the library and the key to the library’s success. Librarians and staff need to be in constant learning mode and the library needs to support that learning with professional development funds (conferences, online courses, etc.). When positions open they need to be examined to see if they should be deployed in new ways and then we must hire the most talented people to fill those positions. We must create a work environment and compensation that helps these people to succeed and contribute to the mission of the library and the university.

Funding: Funding, while always an issue, will increasingly be a driving force in changing what happens in academic libraries.  Collection costs for more than 20 years have risen at a rate far higher than inflation and campus supplied budgets.  University campuses are receiving less money from state government. It will be increasingly necessary to raise funds to support operations and to find grant funding for specific projects. There will be a need overtime to endow positions to ensure that we have the staff resources that we will need to serve the university community.

Conclusion

Drawing this all together (Connecting the dots)

The academic library of the future needs to be one of engagement, collaboration, re-imagination.

The future of the academic library is tied to engagement with the university community which we serve. Engagement means conversation with students, faculty, research, administrators, with funders, with policymakers, and media pundits – not once but on an ongoing basis.  The Dean and the Executive Council can set the tone, and provide leadership and support, but engagement is everyone’s job. Libraries don’t fall into the guaranteed category of “death and taxes”. We will be an essential part of the university’s mission and the university’s success as we show the fundamental and indispensable role that we play in the learning, teaching, and research process. We won’t calculate a return on investment (ROI) that reduces facilities, collections, and staff to mere numbers (though spending our resources wisely is key). We can and should calculate an ROE- Return on Engagement that shows that the Library is integral part of the university – a strategic asset that helps ensure success and long-term sustainability. The Return on Engagement shows that we make a measurable difference to students (in and out of the classroom), graduate students, faculty and researchers, administrators, -the business, cultural, and scientific community, the world.

The academic library is not a solo enterprise. Our future is a community and collaborative one. Collaboration will involve the whole of the university community. Collaboration will also involve building collaborative partnerships with regional, national, and international partners around collections, services, technologies, etc. Collaboration is built on trust and mutual respect – it comes from building community (engagement, conversation, shared values).  Community takes time to build. It is a job for everyone – a job that is local in its touch, global in its outlook.

Re-imagine, is for some a scary word, or at least worrisome. Will the academic library of the future be one that I recognize – one that I feel that I can be part of? Like my opening statement of “the academic library is dead. Long live the academic library,” re-imagination is a way of looking at the essential role of the library and imagining new ways of making the library essential to our users; not essential for its own sake but essential in providing users with the resources and skills to learn, invent, create, teach, and thrive in a global world.  Libraries have always changed; we have always re-imagined our services, our collections, our roles.

We must engage, collaborate, re-imagine all the time.