Library Scouting and Insight Building in Supporting the Future of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship

Library scouting and insight building may provide a framework for looking at supporting the future of teaching, learning, and scholarship. Based on the ideas from “business scouting”; looking outside ourselves and our immediate industry for new models, disruptors, market forces, etc., library scouting looks to the knowledge and research ecosystem of faculty, granting agencies, and publishers for actionable insights into what academic and research libraries should be paying attention to.

While academic librarians talk about the disruptive changes in the ecosystem, our organizational models, workflows, budget priorities are, in many ways, still quite similar to the way they were 25 years ago. That said, the ways in which our faculty use our resources and services (collections, interlibrary loan, data services, information literacy training for students) is, in many ways, remarkably different than it was even 10 years ago. Likewise, our students’ use of the library (spaces, collections, services) too is radically changed.

Much of our thinking on the future of libraries has been additive as opposed to radical. We have struggled to maintain our core functions; our way of looking at the world while business and industry has turned much of conventional thinking and processes on its head. As a profession, we have not been particularly good at scouting out potential disruptive technologies or business models that fundamentally change our ecosystem. These disruptions change our users’ behavior and how they look for, use, and share information and knowledge and in turn, this disrupts or should disrupt the way we look at our work. Amazon, Google, and Apple unleashed a suite of services that totally changed how people interact with information, and the library profession as a whole was overlooked. While we have recovered in some sense and found ways to incorporate these services into our work, would our work and world look differently if we had seen these coming? If nothing else, maybe we would have forgone the bemoaning of students use of Google, Wikipedia, or Amazon instead of our OPACs and demanded better discovery systems from our vendors.

My challenge to myself, as well as others in the profession, is to look outside of the library profession and look to the broader world in which our faculty and students do their work. Because libraries are non-profit and few libraries have an R&D unit, we depend on the information industry and creative individuals (librarians, technologists, programmers, students) who create new products and workflows that make their work easier.

While libraries will continue to change and evolve based on changes in the information ecosystem, it is critical that librarians, faculty, and students come together to think creatively about the libraries so that the changes in libraries are not entirely driven by market forces, campus administrators, or librarians or classroom faculty who have a static view of libraries. We must rather look at the type of teaching, learning, and scholarship happening on our campuses now and are likely to happen in next 5 to 10 years, and build spaces, services, technologies, and staffing to support these.

We are well into the first generation of faculty who have received their doctorates in the digital age. Much of their research and study were influenced by the technology and resources that were available in digital/electronic form, and immediately accessible on their computer or mobile device. Their workflows are influenced by new products and services that come directly from information providers (Mendeley, Zotero, FigShare, etc.) Even disciplines that rely heavily on traditional printed books, find their scholarly work influenced by digital catalogs and indices; digitized collections of primary source materials, and finding aids. Most of these faculty also graduated from universities where large percentage of the book collection were in off-campus storage systems, where material was requested, paged, and returned to the library for their use.

Most new faculty graduate from major research universities, whose libraries are robust with both broad and deep print and digital collections, as well as support for digital scholarship, data management, copyright and publishing assistance. As newer faculty begin to redefine scholarship, it is critical then, to be looking to new faculty to understand their needs and expectations of what libraries should do to support their research, scholarship, and teaching, as well as what they expect for their graduate and undergraduate students. For the foreseeable future, new faculty, new areas of research and scholarship, new forms of pedagogy, technological advances, and students with very different expectations will continue to stretch the definition of library. They will come to your university with a set of expectations, good or bad, about what a library is and what role it plays, if any, in their lives and work.

We know that some faculty will continue to publish articles and monographs, though it is already apparent that these traditional outputs have limited value in some areas of scholarship as they are too slow, cumbersome, and in some cases not able to adequately represent modern scholarship. In order to accommodate new research outputs, it is likely that an increasingly diverse set of scholarly outputs will created. These might include datasets, 3D models, virtual and augmented reality, digital critical editions, documentary films, digital media, hybrid books that are a mix of text and interactive video, visual simulations, etc. It is also likely that some of even traditional scholarship will be developed using complex digital tools and methodologies like text and data mining, mass geolocation, gene sequencing, prototyping, etc. This type of multimodal scholarship will also spill over into pedagogy and the type of assignments that faculty will assign to students. It is also critical to think about the visual and performing arts where performance as scholarship is important and may not fall into easily defined categories and require new types of support for both faculty and students.

As a library dean, I think constantly about the future of libraries, and about content, and publishing, and research data, and copyright, and a seemingly endless list of other concerns that inform the work that academic libraries do to support faculty teaching and research and student learning, creativity, and scholarship. In this work I look to my Dean/University Librarian/Director colleagues across the academic library landscape (Oberlin Group of Liberal Arts College Libraries, state university libraries, Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information), and to friends and colleagues at the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. These heavy hitters provide a glimpse into the future for academic libraries and for the major issues that need to be addressed, many of which will only be addressed collectively.

While we in the library profession have reasonably good insights, it is critical, in thinking about the future of the academic library, to convene a series of ongoing conversations with faculty both in disciplinary as well as cross-disciplinary groups to talk, not about the library, but about the type of teaching, learning, and scholarship that they envision for themselves and their students over the next 10-15 years. Ideally, these conversations would include people from the office of research, campus IT, as well as those on the edge of the Academy that faculty interact with as part of their work; granting agencies, business and industry, professional associations, and publishing. It is likely that such a rich set of conversations would confirm some of the directions that we are seeing in today’s research library and would certainly challenge our assumptions and directions in others. In the ideal world, I would also invite key people from Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and others as they influence the information ecosystem of our users.

Likewise, an ongoing conversation with undergraduate and graduate students for how they see the library in their life is important. Students use the library very differently from faculty and balancing the needs of both students and faculty may be challenging. Lynn Silipigni Connaway, OCLC Research Scientist, has done extensive research in this area and published an important study “Library in the Life of the User: Engaging with People Where They Live and Learn” https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2015/oclcresearch-library-in-life-of-user.html. Lynn’s research can be used to test what you are hearing from your own students and to probe areas that need further understanding. As new students arrive on our campuses every year, it is important to constantly be looking to hear from students.

Circling back to the idea of “library scouting and insight building” how might we think about collecting these conversations not only from our own campuses but across the higher education landscape. What insights might we build from being able to mine these conversations; aggregating comments based on discipline, type of institution, senior faculty vs junior faculty, type of scholarly output, use or non-use of library resources and services, etc.? Insights might also lead to collaborative projects and also providing opportunities to address some problems at scale. How might these insights influence our budget allocations, our use of spaces, the type of positions we create, the skill set we recruit for.

As a starting point, an interesting startup, Libdot (libdot.com) is attempting to do this in the area of the future of work in academic libraries. Hopefully, we could collectively think about how we might address other areas of this where we are collecting and mining data on how our primary audience is doing their work. There is no expectation that this would be a magic bullet but rather a new tool that would provide some collective insight that goes beyond the anecdotal.

From this broad understanding of what faculty see as a future of their teaching, learning, and scholarship it would then be important, as a next step, to think about what type of library space, collections, technology, services, and staffing are needed to support this work.