To be or not to be, is NOT the question

Unlike Shakespeare's iconic question, it is not a question, as some may think, that is related to the future of the library. Despite the sentiment expressed in the popular press and actions by legislators, the library as a cultural and educational institution is alive and making a significant impact on our students, researchers, and our communities.

The real question for libraries and librarians is "What's next?” As the world changes, how do libraries, especially academic and research libraries, change to meet the needs of a new generation of students and faculty. What's the next role of the library? Are we courageous enough to create and redefine the library to meet 21^st century needs?

Change is the new black. Library leaders must build a culture that is, as Steven Bell says “change-ready.” The role of the library continues to grow and evolve as we move into the future. Changes are driven by globalization, shifts in pedagogy, new and evolving forms of scholarship, the information universe, and of course technology. In a world of change, libraries also celebrate the key values and services that have been part of their historic raison d'être.

Today's academic and research libraries are centers for intellectual engagement, social conversation, reading, writing, creating, reflection, physical and digital collections, technology and infrastructure to support digital scholarship, digital creation, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Today’s libraries are also people centered with spaces, furniture, technology, and services based around user needs.

Librarians and support staff are critical to the libraries’ success. The role of the library and its staff is much more complex than building a collection of materials and making sure the lights are on, and the doors are open. They are critical partners with faculty in the education and success of students and supporting faculty teaching, research, and scholarship.

We live and work and breathe the world of information and knowledge in all of its complexity. Change in our world is not incremental but exponential. With Google ingesting the equivalent of the Library of Congress every day, we work to provide a collection of print and digital resources that support the teaching and research needs of students and faculty. We provide discovery and access tools that help students and faculty find the information resources they need, whether they are on campus, in the libraries of our partners, or in a library or website on the other side of the world. We build strategic partnerships and buy resource sharing tools that help provide physical and digital access to these resources, and we use the information sleuthing skills of our staff to find the "needle in the haystack" information that no computer system can uncover.

We are stewards of both physical and digital information resources, and we work to collect preserve the cultural, scholarly and institutional record. We work with campus IT and other data services to assist with data management and data curation. We buy, license, create, digitize, catalog, describe, curate, and make our resources available and we do it over again as technology and resources change and grow. We push the envelope with new digital scholarship tools such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and large-scale digital visualization. We keep our traditional skills and add new ones.

We champion intellectual freedom and the right to read and discourse on any topic without censorship. Our areas of interest and concern encompass intellectual property rights, copyright, copyleft and fair use, free culture and open access, and ethical use of information.

Like classroom faculty, we work with students to be critical thinkers, to understand how to find, evaluate, and use information effectively. We help students understand the scholarly record and how disciplines advance knowledge, publish their research, and how libraries and information providers make these resources available. We keep abreast of the changing world of scholarly publishing and how these changes affect access to information necessary to advance scholarship.

We are passionate about social issues, especially when it comes to the intersection of information access and historically marginalized groups. LGBTQ rights, homelessness, treatment of immigrants, minorities, and privacy are all issues that make us take notice. While our efforts in these areas are to be applauded, we do make missteps at times and contribute to the problem rather than help. We are getting better at recognizing these missteps, apologizing, and moving forward in positive ways. We want to build and live in a diverse and inclusive world.

We build partnerships across campus that help us fulfill our role in the educational process. We work with the Writer's Center, Tutoring, the Research Office, Dean of Students office, the Museum, campus IT, Dining Services, facilities, and others to provide resources, facilities, and services that help the teaching, learning, and scholarly enterprise. We strive to provide space and services that are information and technology-rich and spaces that are quiet and contemplative. We have cafés and vending machines to keep you full and caffeinated. We are not your grandmother's library.

We also build partnerships with other academic and research libraries across the US and around the world. We do this to build capacity, share resources, provide preservation services and accomplish things that no single library can do on its own. These partnerships help build staff expertise that we share across campus to better serve our students and faculty.

In our spare time, you might find us talking about cyberinfrastructure, the growing role of the citizen scientist, digital humanities, a first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, preserving print collections, building a collection of classical music on iTunes, what to do with eBook readers, streaming audio and video, the Human Genome project, dance performance in the library, civic engagement or the latest iPad app. We live and work in a world where every aspect of the changing world of information is our discipline. We tend to be information junkies with interests in every discipline. We live as both agents of change and also agents of cultural preservation.

What's next? We can’t clearly see all that will happen but bring it on - we’re up to the challenge.

An Interest in Everything: One of the Perquisites of Being a Librarian

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am an audiobook fan. Perhaps fanatic might be a better word. I typically listen to three or four books a week. If you see me at home, in the car, walking on the street, or on an airplane, you will likely see me with headphones stuck in my ears.  No, I am not trying to block out the world, or not engage in conversation, but I am probably deep in a book. You might have to speak twice to get my attention.

The Los Angeles Public Library has an incredible audiobook collection, and anyone with a California Driver’s License is eligible for a card (Thanks to John Szabo, City Librarian, and a good friend). With over 327,000 titles, I am like a kid in a candy store.

In the past several months I have listened to Donna Faulkner’s Mandela. Adrian Miler’s The President’s Kitchen Cabinet, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There, Judy Shephard’s The Meaning of Matthew, and Katie Martin’s The Great Escape and so many more.  In case you might think that my total diet consists of biographies, and history, never fear. I listen to my share of fiction including Islands by Ann River Siddons, The Painted Queen, by Elizabeth Peters, Curious Minds by Janet Evanovich, and The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates to name but a few.

This past week, I was almost finished with David Ritz’s RESPECT: The Life of Aretha Franklin, when I awoke to the news of her passing. What an amazing life and talent. The Queen is dead, long live the queen.

One of the things that I enjoy about the library profession is the explicit permission that it gives me to be interested in almost everything. Because of this permission, I have developed a wide-ranging group of interests both in and outside of the library profession.

I have always liked bookstores and given the chance I can get lost in a good bookstore for hours. Blackwell’s in Oxford, Waterstones in London, the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, Powell’s in Portland, the Tattered Cover in Denver, or one of the many Barnes and Noble bookstores across the country, and you will find me intrigued and happy – perusing the shelves. Not only does the presence of these thriving bookstores assure me that books still have interest and value, but they constantly amaze and please me at the variety of titles they carry.

Given time you might find me perusing poetry or politics, history or art, travel or literature. I almost always spend time in the art and architecture or home improvement sections. I wanted to be an architect as a kid, and I’ve renovated multiple houses. I’m a foodie, so cookbooks are always a good bet, especially if they’re well illustrated. I occasionally will browse business and technology titles as well.  If I’m at a store like Barnes & Noble, the magazines also are a must for cooking, travel, art, and popular culture. There are just so many things to choose from.

My interests certainly cross over from the print to the digital.  My email box is always overflowing with interesting emails from colleagues in the library profession on such diverse topics as intellectual freedom and privacy, international relations, diversity and inclusion, information literacy, critical theory, linked open data, library services platforms and on and on. I also get regular emails from the  Coalition for Networked Information, Open Science Framework, Force 11, and the International Federation of Library Associations, to name but a few. Not to be drowned in libraryland alone, you can also find emails on architecture, food, technology, travel, and of course some major newspapers like the LA Times and the New York Times.

Of course, no modern librarian with a wide-ranging taste for topics could go without a daily dose from social media.  Twitter, of course, includes feeds from dozens of major libraries (Library of Congress, British Library, BNF) and librarians but also a range of scientific and cultural organizations, as well as universities that I find interesting. Instagram provides a nice menu of food, travel, and fitness, and Facebook keeps me connected to family and friends.

I know I am not unique in my range of interests. I’m constantly amazed with my librarian colleagues – they really are renaissance people. If you don’t know any librarians, get to know some and be sure to introduce your students to them. Librarians are awesome in helping students, regardless of discipline, to navigate the information jungle.

Reflective Library Practice: The Role of the Library Dean

I have always been fascinated by the idea of reflection. I am amazed when water, which is often turbulent, becomes mirror still and reflects the landscape that surrounds it with a mirror image upside down reflection. In the next hour or the next day, the water is no longer still, and the reflection is gone – the reflective moment is gone.

Reflection takes on a different tone in the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter. The Mirror of Erised reflects back, not what is in front of it but rather the deepest, desperate desires of the person looking in the mirror. It reflects our internal hopes and dreams. Dumbledore noted that “‘Men have wasted away before it, not knowing if what they have seen is real, or even possible.’" It is a potentially dangerous reflection.

Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors provides another idea of reflection. The Hall was built to not only reflect natural light but to enable the see and be seen needs of the king and the court. Its 578 mirrors reflected every glance, nod, and bow, and of course every faux pas.

Of course, reflection has another important meaning, namely “to think deeply or carefully about.” This type of reflection is often seen in academia, or in religious or spiritual practice.

The importance of and interest in reflective library practice grows out of the increasing busyness of life and work, and the increasing stress levels found in the library workplace. The idea of reflective practice has its roots in the works of John Dewey and was further developed by David Schon in The Reflective Practioner in the early 1980s.

Tell a member of the general public that you are a librarian, and you often get a response similar to “it must be great to read books all day.” While librarians do like to read, there seldom is the free time to sit and leisurely read a classic, something from the NY Times bestseller list, or even one of the many professional library journals. As most libraries are understaffed, and the areas of responsibility are large, the idea of free time is, for most, just a myth.

We like to think that libraries are great places to work with low-stress levels and always harmonious relationships. While overall, I do think libraries can be good workplaces, many librarians and staff feel overwhelmed at times at the workload, the increasing level of responsibilities, and the constant need to retool for the newest technology. Staffing levels in most academic libraries have decreased over the past 25 years, and especially after the financial crisis of 2008-2009. As staffing levels decreased, remaining staff were required to pick up additional responsibilities, usually without additional compensation. This difficult staffing situation is further exacerbated by libraries willingness to take on new technologies, new services, and new initiatives without giving up anything they are currently doing.

One of the many responsibilities of library deans is to support the librarians and staff in their libraries. This involves supporting their professional development, the work they do, the work environment, and them as persons.

As we think about reflective library practice, I believe there is value in including all four types of reflection described above. Mirror reflection stands things on its head; providing a new perspective. Often when we pause to reflect, especially when it comes to a stressful situation, we fall into the Mirror of Erised – we see what we want/need; not necessarily what is actually there. However, surfacing those needs/desires is important, even if they cannot be sustained. The Hall of Mirrors model reflects everything; showing things from multiple perspectives. Reflecting as thinking deeply and carefully provides an opportunity to take multiple modes of reflection and parse out meaning and possibilities for the future.

As we think about ourselves, our professional identities, and our work, it is important to develop some reflective practices. I believe that there are six things that the Dean should model and encourage.

Take a break: We tend to work until we drop; ignoring the natural rhythms of our bodies and our mind’s ability to sustain attention. Every 90 minutes or so it is important to take a break and change what you’re doing. Stand, stretch, take a 5-minute walk, or sit quietly. These all break the cycle and renew our abilities.

Pause and reflect: Encourage staff to take time to pause and reflect on their work. Ask why about any and all aspects of the work. There are often ways to improve how we work if we can pause long enough to think of new ways of working.

Retreat: Use retreats as a means to get staff together to do planning. This can be an effective strategy because of a change of venue and a concentrated time. Don’t program the entire retreat. Retreats will be most effective if they provide some down time and time for reflection.

Mindfulness: Develop a practice of mindfulness: a type of meditation that makes you aware of thoughts, feelings, and environment in a gentle nurturing way. Mindfulness improves focus and creativity and reduces stress.

Listen: Part of reflective practice is to listen; both to your inner voice as well as to others. Follow the advice of Polonius in Hamlet ‘Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice." Encourage staff to develop listening skills as you develop your own.

Develop resiliency: Resiliency is the ability to bounce back from tragedy, trauma, threats, as well as personal and workplace stress. Building resiliency comes from developing self-care, not seeing yourself as a victim, and concentrating on your goals, and choosing your response to negative people or events. To build resilience there needs to be a strong level of self-awareness and self-reflection.

Creating a reflective library culture will only come with the support of the Dean. Encourage a variety of types of reflection. Modeling self-reflective practices will encourage adoption by others.

The Room of Requirement: Being What the Users of Our Libraries Need

People familiar with the Harry Potter books and movies will recognize the “room of requirement” and understand the important role it played in Harry’s life and the story of Hogwarts. Located on Hogwarts’ 7^th floor across from the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, the room requires you to walk past the area of the door three times, thinking of what you need. The room can only be accessed when a person (or a house elf) really needs it and they will find it equipped with just what he or she needs.

While there are early references to the room from Albus Dumbledore, Harry first use of the room occurs in The Order of the Phoenix as a place to train Dumbledore’s army. He also used it The Half-Blood Prince to hide his potions text, and in the Deathly Hallows to find the Horcrux made with Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. The room also is referred to as the Room of Hidden Things, an interesting mix of museum storeroom, and junk drawer where Hogwarts students and teachers have hidden things over the centuries.

As I pondered the “Room of Requirement,” I saw that the idea contained in the “room” might provide some insights into thinking about our approach to the people who use our libraries. I soon discovered that I was not the first to make a connection between the “Room of Requirement” and libraries. In July 2015, in a letter to the editor of the Missoulian, Julie Biando Edwards, describes the Missoula Public Library as a room of requirement. She writes “The public library is the Room of Requirement. It’s every place we need it to be – because it is the one place where we can step into other worlds as we figure out our place in our own.” (https://bit.ly/2OkYmGG).

Libraries often approach their role in very defined ways: some historical, some technological, and some dictated by institutional affiliation. Some of our approaches are unconscious, while others deliberate. Like the “Room of Requirement”, the users of our libraries come with expectations and needs. Students come with a set of needs, many of which fall into areas that are in the broad purview of student success. Faculty have a more sophisticated set of needs and interests, as well as more sophisticated methods of obtaining information. The “room of requirement” approach might help libraries think through how users approach our libraries, and where their needs don’t match up with what we have on offer.

Using the “room of requirement” model, I think there are five things we might consider.

1.      Listen to the users: Find ways to “listen” to users on a regular basis. While we don’t have the magic of a room that hears the user’s need and automatically configures a space tailored to their need, we do have a variety of methods and tools available to us to help us listen. Consider student advisory boards, simple surveys (one or two questions), whiteboards, and of course individual conversations with students we see in the library and on campus.

2.      Consider the unexpected: Our users will sometimes ask for things that may seem unusual. While there are many things that will be totally out of scope or out of our power to make happen, do not automatically dismiss these unusual requests. It could be that these unusual requests represent unmet student needs that the library, or the library and other campus partners can meet.

3.      Develop services that fit into the lives of the users: Our users approach our universities and libraries, with ideas of space and services that are primarily formed from the retail world.  Starbucks, Amazon, Apple genius bars, smartphones, ubiquitous WiFi all shape our users’ expectations. Find a librarian or staff with UX experience and charge them with making recommendations on improving the approach we take with our services and spaces.

4.      Limit policy: While some policy is necessary, we tend to create policies to meet any and every possibility. Taking a cue from Nordstrom’s customer service ethos, provide some broad guidelines and empower staff to solve problems for students and faculty.

5.      Reinvent the Library regularly: The magic of the “Room of Requirement,” in some sense, was that it was always new; based on the needs of the moment and the person or persons who needed it. One of the wonderful things about working at a university is the constantly changing group of students. Every year a new cohort of students comes to campus and helps make the campus their own. This act of making it their own is a type of reinvention because the needs and interests of this year’s students are similar to but not totally the same as last year’s students. Every year is a new opportunity to partner with our users to make the library theirs – a space for inquiry, creativity, innovation, scholarship, and community.

Library Visioning: Moving from Disparate Voices to Common Values and Expectations

Ask any group of students, faculty, librarians, and administrators the question “what is a library?” you will get as many answers as people. Those answers will run the gamut from very traditional ideas of the library as a place for collections and individual study, to very social learning spaces with few books and predominantly digital collections. As academic libraries look at the future and administrators and outside funders, ask serious questions about the nature of libraries, it is important to have a basic set of values/principles that most people can agree to.

I participated in a library visioning exercise several years ago which included librarians, classroom faculty, students, and administrators. I was struck by both the commonalities and differences of thoughts around the role, value, and purpose of the academic library in the 21^st century. Not surprisingly there was a strong emphasis on “acquiring knowledge” which invokes the use of both physical and digital collections. Equally close was the idea of collaboration. Collaboration evokes the idea of group projects as well as a collaborative learning environment that involves students, faculty, librarians, information technologists, and writing professionals. While we often talk about the very social and gregarious nature of today’s library, the discussions placed a significant value on the idea of “sustained and singular focus” in terms of internalizing knowledge.

The idea of “socializing” within the library resonated more with students and librarians. The planning group that we have been working with saw “socializing” very broadly. It encompassed more than meeting with friends in the library to chat or to have a cup of coffee but also the more diffuse idea of “alone together” which denotes sitting and working in proximity to other students even if there is no conversation or exchange of ideas. The idea of “experiential learning” within the library context carried less weight, even though this seemed prevalent among other academic libraries. Within Special Collections there is a sustained effort to engage students and faculty with primary sources as objects as well as texts. The Makerspace movement, that is gaining traction in the public library and academic library space, is another example of “learning by doing.” Close to the bottom of the list was “conveying” which has the idea of students/faculty using the library as a space/venue to share what they have learned. While the uptake of this idea by many faculty is small, there are a number of faculty who have used Special Collections to have their students do curated physical and digital exhibits as a way of conveying what they have learned.

Having been through several discussions/visioning exercises, it is quite clear that there is not always agreement on “what is a library?” It is clear, however, that the library is valued and important to teaching, learning, and knowledge creation, and each faculty and each student who comes to the library brings a set of expectations of what they should find. As teaching, learning, pedagogical styles, and scholarship changes, it is critical that “what is a library?” grows and changes to support learning and scholarship across all disciplines.

I think it is important to move from a series of disparate voices to a set of shared values and shared expectations around the 21^st century academic libraries. I propose the following nine values/expectations that I think might bring some common understanding.

Libraries are a place of learning: Libraries, from their inception, have been places of learning and will continue to be so in the future. Learning in libraries happens in a variety of ways – reading, writing, discussing, disassembling, and reassembling ideas to create new knowledge. In the past learning and scholarship in libraries came from books, journals, archives, a librarian, pen and paper, and perhaps a typewriter. Today’s library with its computers, visual display walls, digital scholarship centers, librarians, and technologists, as well as books –ejournals, digital collections, and special collections are still places of learning. New forms of content and new technologies expand options on the ways and types of learning that a library can support.

Libraries collect and provide information: Libraries have, since the time of the Library of Alexandria, been places that have built collections. Collections are normally curated and come in a variety of formats (scrolls, cuneiform tablets, incunabula, printed books, journals, indexes, LP, DVDs, microforms, digital, to name but a few). For most of the 20^th century, the collections were in physical formats that were housed in one or more campus libraries. Currently, most academic libraries spend 70% or so of their collections budget on digital collections. With the advent and growth of digital collections, collections are still essential but much more invisible and easily accessed from outside the library building. Special Collections, those things that are unique, are increasing in prestige and libraries are devoting more space, budget, and staff to support these collections.

Libraries provide tools of scholarship: The Library has always provided some tools for scholarship. Historically the tools were metadata based which enabled access to the collections; book and card catalogs, indexes, finding aids, etc. With the advent of computers and digital information, catalogs, indexes, finding aids, and discovery tools, again all metadata based, changed the format and are available through the web or apps. Libraries supplemented these tools with computer labs and laptop checkouts. Apple and Google and a variety of others provided smartphones and apps that provided a complimentary set of tool. In the last several years we are seeing a new set of scholarship tools emerge that challenges libraries in terms of space and expertise. These newer tools include large-scale data visualization studios, makerspaces, digital humanities/digital scholarship labs, and virtual reality and artificial intelligence labs. New tools of scholarship will be developed and expand the opportunities libraries will have to support teaching, learning, and knowledge creation.

Libraries provide expertise: Librarians and staff have been and will continue to be an essential component of libraries. Without adequate professional and support staff, libraries devolve into a physical or digital warehouse.

Libraries provide space: Libraries provide space for collections and people. Historically, new libraries were built or expanded to provide for collection growth, and to a smaller extent to provide additional study space. As the rate of growth of the print collection has slowed, and student populations have skyrocketed, it is student space that is driving renovations, and in some cases new buildings. Libraries also have provided space for display of unique and special materials as well as space for lectures and events.

                                                                                            

Libraries support individuals and groups: Libraries have historically supported the work of individuals, be it individual students, or the solitary scholar. This is still an important part of the space that libraries provide and one that many students take advantage of daily. However, as learning has become more social and also more project-based, the need for different types of spaces has grown. Group study rooms, places for informal conversation and study, places where students can study in proximity to others (referred to as “alone together”) are all needed in a modern library.

Libraries support a variety of learning styles: We recognize that people learn in different ways and libraries work at supporting different learning styles through types of space, furniture, and services they provide. Students will use different parts of the library with different furniture and levels of collaboration or solitude depending on their needs at a given moment.

Libraries support diversity and inclusion: While I believe most people would agree that this should be a library value for the 21^st century, it is the one, that as a profession we struggle to realize. Not only do we need to diversify collections, but we must make our libraries places that are welcoming and inclusive to all of our students regardless of race, ethnicity, gender preference, sexual orientation, country of origin, language, socio-economic status, etc. Equally importantly we need to build a staff that more closely reflects our student bodies, and make those diverse librarians and staff feel welcome, included, and provide them opportunities to grow, thrive, contribute, and lead.

Libraries support the whole person: The library of the past placed many restrictions on how people used the library and collections, and people, in order to use the space and the collections, mostly complied. Over the last few decades we’ve moved from a model of the “user in the life of the library” to one of the “library in the life of the user” (See: Lynn Silipigni Connaway. The 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). Flipping this model on its head, in reality, reflects that our users are “whole people” and they see the library as only part of what they need for their own achievement. When they come to the library they bring their whole selves – a self that is social, a self that will use a variety of spaces and technologies depending on the their need, and a self that doesn’t understand why creature comforts (food and drink) which they use at home when they do similar activities would be banned from the library. This reality causes us to rethink our approach to food and drink, to space, furniture, hours, services, and technologies. This whole person approach has also led to libraries creating spaces for meditation and prayer.