In Jonathan
Rose’s recent book, The Well-Tempered
City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us
About the Future of Urban Life, he talks about the concept of VUCA and
how that applies to thinking about the future of life in cities. VUCA, an
acronym for vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, originated
with students from the US Army War College to describe the times after the Cold
War. While Rose specifically adapts the concept to help talk about life in
modern cities, I think it also can easily be used to describe the ecosystem of
academic libraries and modern research and scholarship.
We live in a
world where the only constant is change. Within the academic library world, the
changes in the past twenty years have been monumental and in some cases
unanticipated. We have fortunately adapted to many of these changes and
continue to provide exceptional services to our students and faculty. That
said, we often have a sense of angst about what is coming next and how we will
adapt and change. While we expect budget challenges and changes in IT, and in
the higher education landscape, many of us were surprised by the negative
cultural changes, and “war on diversity” that became clear after the 2016
presidential election.
Volatility: the quality or state of being
likely to change suddenly, especially by becoming worse (https://bit.ly/2W2d4L4)
·
Budget: Library
budgets have been volatile for the past several decades; complicated by
decreases in state funding for higher education and/or rising materials costs
(books, journals), and new technology costs. The continual battle for dollars
has resulted in reduced staffing and collection decisions that sometimes compromise
the library’s ability to effectively support students and faculty. Budget
volatility also compromises a library’s ability to be flexible, innovative, and
quickly respond to new opportunities or to develop new services that support
scholarship and student learning.
·
Google: When Google
first appeared on the scene, many librarians felt a bit off-kilter, as if their
world had tilted. As we have adjusted and taken advantage of Google over the
years, there remains an element of volatility with Google. Google is a
commercial company that looks out for its own interests and products or
services that we have used and come to depend on may or may not be part of
Google’s long-term strategy. One example is the Google books project where
there was the promise that Google would digitize most of the worlds knowledge;
not so much anymore.
·
Xenophobia: Most of our
universities have prided themselves on their ability to attract and retain
large numbers of international students. These students from many of the
world’s countries bring a very real global perspective to our campuses and to
our libraries. The rise of xenophobia and some current federal policies has
drastically affected international students’ ability and willingness to come to
the US to further their education. This volatility in international student
enrollment affects many individual academic programs but also diminishes the
cultural richness of our campuses. Because international students are limited
to working on campus, many international students end up working for the
library, often one of the largest student employers on campus. These
international students bring new perspectives as well as language and cultural
expertise that many libraries need.
Uncertainty: a state of
doubt about the future or about what is the right thing to do (https://bit.ly/2YEWy0m)
·
Politics: On any
given week, there is likely to be news from national, state, or local politics
with laws, policies, or budgets that impact the work of higher education, and
the students and faculty that we serve. Political uncertainties, such as the
future of the DREAM Act, or protections for LGBTQ people, TITLE IX, or free
speech rulings, all impact our students and faculty, and the type of services and
information that we need to provide to meet their needs.
·
Technology: Technology
has had the most change and has brought the most promise as well as the most
uncertainty to our work. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will
bring new uncertainties as well as new opportunities. AI is likely to assist
with basic reference questions, and might also provide new algorithms that
improve book selection for highly specialized fields. Robots in the library may
provide new delivery services for in house book retrieval. While these
technologies might make some jobs obsolete, it will likely also give rise to
new and more complex jobs.
·
Anti-intellectualism: The rise of
anti-intellectualism, the disregard of science and evidence-based policy, and
the concomitant “fake-news” has added significant challenges to higher
education, and made it more uncertain that the general public sees higher
education as a public good. Students more than ever need good information
skills to seek out and evaluate information for both their professional and
personal lives; our information literacy efforts do matter.
·
Staffing: As the
library world continues to change, there is a growing need for new types of
expertise to meet new demands and to provide new and more complex services to
support student learning and faculty research. It is uncertain, given limited
resources, which of the many needed types of expertise that a library can
develop and sustain over time. Library deans and directors need to be very
strategic and creative in building new staffing expertise.
Complexity: the state of having many
different parts connected or related to each other in a complicated way (https://bit.ly/2QaBzzw)
- Open Access: Open Access and libraries’ roles in supporting it continues to grow in complexity. While it is clear that most libraries and many scholars are moving the scholarly production towards open access, the means of getting there for all scholarship while still meeting faculty goals for journal prestige is complex. Recent moves away from the big deal with Elsevier (University of California system) is encouraging libraries and faculty in pushing publishers towards a sustainable open access business model. The hybrid publishing world that we currently inhabit provides added complexity to library resource management units that need to manage and make available thousands of licensed and open access resources through their catalogs and discovery systems.
- Data: We live in a data-intensive world and libraries role in discovery, purchase, creation, and stewardship is complex. We offer data management services to faculty. We purchase/license data sets and license large scale digital corpora to enable text and data mining. As many scholars are still unclear in their own minds on how they handle their research data for the long-term, it is incumbent on libraries to work with researchers, campus IT, and subject-based data repositories in proposing long-term solutions.
- Artificial Intelligence: AI and machine learning make many people feel a bit uneasy. Will AI take over our jobs and makes us obsolete. While there certainly is a level of vulnerability, it seems, from my perspective that AI will provide us with additional capabilities and provide libraries additional opportunities to play a significant role in much of the new scholarship that is developing.
- Diversity and Inclusion: Our work on building a diverse and inclusive library has a level of complexity as every institution is somewhat different and brings different resources, expertise, experience, and cultural awareness to the task. The complexity is exacerbated by our blindness to the systemic racism that exists in our institutions and libraries.
- Library future: Our future is open to one or more interpretations, and in my opinion, that is a good thing. Libraries have become more dynamic and more involved in the process of research and scholarship than at any point in their history. We have the opportunity to be proactive and invent our future.
- Print collections: Long the backbone of academic library collections, the print collection on any one campus has an ambiguous future as circulation of the print collection continues to decline. While print as a collective whole in the academy is somewhat more secure, individual campuses are likely to make a host of different decisions around how much of the print collection to keep in a readily accessible format. There is certainly no single right answer. Schools with Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences are likely to give preference to their rich and deep monograph collections, while more STEM-focused schools will divest themselves of parts of the print collections in order to meet other scholarly needs.
- Higher education: For many in the wider public community, the future of higher education is indeed ambiguous as parents, businesses, and politicians question the value of a university degree. Even within the higher education community, there are campus leaders that are changing the way education happens. Libraries can play a role, at least in their local communities, in showcasing the groundbreaking work of campus faculty, as well as student research that is helping solve real-world problems.
VUCA, as a
framework, was created to help explain or frame a difficult and perplexing
time. While I think it is an interesting framework to think through a variety
of library and higher education issues, it should not, in my opinion, be taken
as a framework that echoes Dante’s “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”. In
this VUCA world, there are opportunities to show leadership and create value on
our campuses.
John Mertz,
a business thought leader, proposes that in the face of VUCA, leaders be
reliable in vulnerable situations, trustworthy in uncertain situations, direct
in complex situations, and understandable in ambiguous situations. Krista
Skidmore from Flashpoint Consulting advises leaders to have Vision,
Understanding, Clarity, and Agility as a means of dealing with a VUCA world.
As a
library’s greatest strategic asset is its people, it is important not to let
VUCA forces demoralize people. Regardless of our approach, library leaders, as
well as individual librarians and staff, can respond to VUCA times by being
proactive, creative, and developing an agile mindset that allows our libraries
to quickly respond to new opportunities and challenges without taking a year to
plan. Libraries that truly embrace diversity and inclusion and fully empower
its people to contribute to future solutions and reward them for their work
will have an advantage.
Perhaps a
rewrite of our approach to VUCA could be as follows:
Volatility: In the face of volatility
leaders can validate strategy, value their staff, and show some verve.
Uncertainty: In the face
of uncertainty leaders can unite
people, be upbeat, and unleash the power of a shared purpose
and vision.
Complexity: In the face of complexity
leaders can champion the library, celebrate faculty scholarship and
student learning, connect the
library to the campus and the community, and cultivate administrative and donor support.
Ambiguity: In the face of ambiguity library
leaders can acknowledge they do not
have all the answers, activate an
inclusive leadership approach, and adopt
an agile approach to library strategy.
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