Alignment: Libraries and Universities

I spent 14 years living and driving in Central Maine. Maine has a lot of snow and ice in the winter and once you were off the Interstate, the streets and roads were seldom in stellar condition. There were lots of ruts, broken pavement, and potholes that wreaked havoc on the alignment of your vehicle. You had one of two choices, get the car aligned on a regular basis or deal with a car that wasn’t quite aligned and know that your tires would wear unevenly, and at times the steering would be a bit wonky.

Alignment is certainly an issue beyond your automobile. In the academic library world, we often hear that the university library must be aligned with university priorities. While this seems pretty obvious, the ways in which libraries see their role in supporting institutional priorities is often complex. 

Recently I read a very interesting report “University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning Library Strategies with Institutional Directions” by my highly respected colleagues Constance Malpas, Lorcan Dempsey, and Rona Stein from OCLC Research and Roger Schonfeld and Deanna Marcum, from OCLC and ITHAKA S+R. The report creates a new institutional typology which provides a more robust and nuanced typology than the highly used Carnegie Classification. It also builds a “library services framework” that can be used to assess/discuss how university libraries align with their parent institution. While both institutional typology and the library services framework provide much to think about, it is the library services framework that intrigues me.

The Library Services Framework as they have defined it.

1.      Convene Campus Community: Provide spaces and facilitate programs for the community broadly or specific subpopulations to generate engagement, outreach, and inclusion.

2.      Enable Academic Success: Support instruction, facilitate learning, improve information literacy, and/or maximize retention, progression, graduation, and later life success.

3.      Facilitate Information Access: Enable discovery and usage of information resources of any format or ownership; provide for the preservation of general collections.

4.      Foster Scholarship and Creation: Deliver expertise, assistance, tools, and services that support research and creative work.

5.      Include and Support Off-Campus Users: Provide equitable access for part-time students, distance and online learners, and other principally off-campus/non-campus/remote users.

6.      Preserve and Promote Unique Collections: Ensure the long-term stewardship of rare materials and special collections, and maximize their usage.

7.      Provide Study Space: Provide physical spaces for academic collaboration, quiet study, and technology-enhanced instruction and/or learning.

8.      Showcase Scholarly Expertise: Promote research excellence and subject matter expertise of scholars and other affiliates; includes repository activities for open access preprint materials.

9.      Transform Scholarly Publishing: Drive toward modernized formats, revamped business models, and reduced market concentration.

“University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning Library Strategies with Institutional Directions (2018) https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2018/oclcresearch-university-futures-library-futures/report.html p 42.

Most library deans and university librarians will look at this list and resonate at some level with all of the elements of the framework. They will see these as core to their work, with some being more important, based on their stated mission and vision.

University level strategic directions are often four or five major areas (e.g. improve student success, increase the university’s research profile, etc.) with a number of goals that spell out how the university expects to achieve them. Libraries seldom find themselves explicitly mentioned in a university strategic plan, so the library must find ways to translate their efforts and map them to the strategic plan. 

This library services framework may provide a conceptual model to map key elements of a library’s program to the university’s plan in a way that resonates both with the library and the university. The nine elements will be familiar, at least in very broad strokes to the university library and parts will quickly resonate with faculty, researchers, students, student affairs, other campus departments, and the Provost’s Office. I certainly will be using this framework in my next job.

When a library maps its program to the university’s strategic directions and creates its own strategic framework, it is, in all likelihood in some sense in alignment with the university. That said, library deans/university librarians are often aspirational and may pick one or more of these elements to focus on as a way to build a program that will advance the library’s abilities and capacity. While this may seem to put them out of strict alignment, they are anticipating the future and watching the evolution of research, scholarship, and publishing. They are taking calculated risks that these investments will pay off and that their libraries will be seen as being critical partners in the educational and research mission of the university.

For example, when I was the Director of Libraries at Colby College, I chose to have the Colby Libraries join as a Founding Member of the Library Publishing Coalition. Colby did not have its own press and was unlikely to start one. That said, I felt this initiative was important as the library began to support other forms of publication – student journals, working papers, grey literature, and self-published works, where external peer review was not critical to the author.  Moving in this direction provided opportunities for faculty to do innovative student assignments (e.g.  a student peer-reviewed economics journal - Journal of Environmental and Resource Economics at Colby- https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/jerec/) and for the library to collect and showcase student work.

Two examples from colleagues can be seen in the work with virtual reality at University of Oklahoma Libraries (Rick Luce and Carl Grant) and with Artificial Intelligence at the University of Rhode Island Library (Karim Boughida). In both cases, these progressive library deans saw some nascent work in faculty ranks or saw these as new tools of scholarship that had broad disciplinary and interdisciplinary possibilities. They did this to support student innovation and creativity, which is often a university priority. Both saw their respective libraries as the logical place to showcase and support these new tools so that they would be available to all students and faculty.

I do not think of the library’s alignment to the university mission and strategy as a straight line, or even two parallel lines, like alignment in an automobile. Rather I prefer to think of library and university alignment as a double helix with the library and a university generally heading in a fixed direction (the axis of the double helix) and the library and university represented by the helices, with their trajectories moving out and away and then back again and crossing as new initiatives that support the strategic directions ramp up and are completed and new initiatives begin. At any given point, both are moving broadly in the same direction, but with the freedom to experiment with new initiatives and to fold those into existing work as they mature or to discard them if they are not fruitful.

I hope that using the double helix model as a way to think about alignment will encourage an element of creativity and innovation as libraries align their strategies with the university.