Becoming a Digital Library

Susan J. Barnes

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135522919
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

This excellent reference traces the construction and maintenance of the digital collections and services that have been available day in and day out to users worldwide for more than a decade. It examines applicable guidelines for any library looking to build and manage systems, conduct and evaluate projects, and scout new directions for mainstreaming and hybridizing the building of a digital library. Including contributions from seasoned experts in specializations such as staffing, collection development, and technology project management for digital libraries, Becoming a Digital Library discusses the techniques for finding and training the right people to build a digital library.

1: The Culture of Engaged Institutions

Angi Herold Faiks

MINITEX, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.

Janet A. McCue

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, U.S.A.

This first chapter describes the cultural characteristics of an innovative library that embraces change:

• Values of engaged institutions: responsiveness, academic neutrality, accessibility, integration, coordination, respect, and resource partnerships.
• Foster shared goals, communicated within workplace and during recruitment and training.
• Reinforce goals through teamwork, especially where digital library projects have library-wide impact.
• Staff have strong sense of responsibility accompanied by self-confidence, qualities encouraged by high expectations and trust.
• Staff members who are trusted and respected feel free to propose ideas that may lead to visionary projects.
• Shared belief that all staff are responsible for providing service.
• User feedback reminds us that “we can and must do better.”

Libraries building digital collections and services have an obligation to foster engaged cultures characterized by innovation, teamwork, partnerships, trust, and a focus on customers’ needs.

1. INTRODUCTION

In February 1999 the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State & Land-Grant Universities challenged these institutions to serve both local and national needs in a more coherent and effective way. The Commission called upon academic institutions to become “engaged” and to be more productively involved in their communities. According to the Commission, seven characteristics define an engaged institution: responsiveness, academic neutrality, accessibility, integration, coordination, respect for partners, and resource partnerships.

Although the Commission’s report focused exclusively on universities and did not address libraries specifically, these characteristics of engagement can reflect a library’s culture as well. The culture of an institution consists of the values of an organization and the management practices that reflect those values. Mann Library at Cornell University is driven by the values of a library (e.g., free and equitable access to information), by the values of a land-grant academic institution (e.g., building collections and services that support the teaching, research, and extension needs of the community), and by the values of engagement. These values are shared by the staff and are reflected in the library’s mission and management practices.

This chapter highlights the digital projects and management practices that foster a creative culture. The first section reviews the principles of engagement and highlights some of the programs and services libraries have developed to become more productively involved in their communities. The second section focuses on institutional culture and the management practices that promote successful and sustainable engaged libraries.

From the implementation of Mann Library’s first Web Gateway in 1995 to the growth of the library’s geospatial repository in 2001, there has been a conscious decision to engage the entire institution and to mainstream digital projects into the fabric of the organization. For example, the organization relies on the skills of catalogers and the talents of programmers to develop metadata structures, while the institution depends on the vision of public services and the knowledge of selectors to create a repository of information resources. The library does not build a parallel universe to develop digital collections and services. Instead, there is a strong commitment to foster the resident talents of the staff and, when new skills are required, to embed these talents—to mainstream them—into the appropriate department. This ensures that no department languishes as a print-only service and that each unit has the talents to participate fully in the development of digital collections and services. These digital projects require coordination, teamwork, and respect for partners. They have succeeded in wearing down barriers between departments in the library and fostering the trust and shared values required in an engaged culture.

CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGAGED INSTITUTIONS

The Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities listed seven characteristics that define an engaged institution:

Responsiveness requires that we listen to our community and regularly ask what they need. Responsiveness implies a two-way conversation and that the institution gains useful feedback in the process.

Respect for partners involves equality and a recognition that each of the players provides valuable contributions. It is characterized by mutual respect and an awareness that through lively collaboration, problems can be defined, solutions proposed, and success measured.

Academic neutrality builds on the tradition of “neutral facilitator and source of information” so that different perspectives or competing theories can be studied and discussed.

Accessibility relates to untangling the bureaucracy of our institutions so that users can negotiate the landscape and discover the resources and programs available to them.

Integration links the intellectual capital of the institution with the services and outreach mission of the university. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged, and there are incentives to reward both interdisciplinary work and the effort required to translate the work of the academy into practical knowledge for the community.

Coordination ensures that we know what is being done and by whom so that information and research can be shared and communication can be coordinated.

Resource partnerships ask whether there are sufficient resources to complete the task. “The most successful engagement efforts appear to be those associated with strong and healthy relationships with partners in government, business, and the non-profit world.”

2. CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGAGED INSTITUTIONS

2.1. Responsiveness and Accessibility: “We Can and Must Do Better”

In an engaged institution, there is a sense that “we can and must do better” [1]. The Kellogg Commission asserts that academic institutions are confusing to outsiders. So, too, are their libraries. Key to the process of engagement is making institutions accessible and more responsive. Libraries often employ a variety of traditional techniques for reaching out to users, including publishing newsletters, developing instruction programs, and hosting tours that highlight services and resources. As the collections and services become increasingly digital, libraries are finding ways to stay “high-touch” in a hightech world.

At the University of Pennsylvania, resident library advisors provide one-on-one help at campus residences. The library’s program is part of a 24-hour academic support service offered to students when and where they need it. Whether a student is stumped by a math assignment or a research paper, the program, dubbed “The Wheel” (at http://www.Collegehouses.upenn.edu/wheel/), provides online and in-person help for writing, mathematics, information technology, and library research. Each college house has its own library advisor who provides help with networked resources, plans workshops, and hosts informal and convenient sessions with reference librarians in the evenings, when students are in their dorms.

Designing spaces—whether in the physical or digital landscape—that make the library more accessible and approachable is also important. Libraries are increasingly incorporating cafés and coffeeshops into their buildings, adding collaborative computing spaces in group study rooms, and developing interfaces that make the digital landscape more welcoming. Gateways, online tutorials, and extensive help files are now commonplace features of the digital scene. But as digital collections grow to hundreds or thousands of titles—each with its own idiosyncratic features and inscrutable title—it becomes increasingly difficult for users to navigate and make use of the resources. To address this need, several libraries have recently introduced services that allow users to create their own customized selection of resources. For example, the library at North Carolina State University created MyLibrary@NCState to provide an information system with which users can organize and collect electronic resources they frequently consult [2]. The service is dynamic, customizable, and portable. Users can create their own “collection” of electronic resources, subscribe to a current awareness service, and consult the interactive help embedded in the system. Developers also made the source code freely available to other institutions and invited programmers to help enhance the system. Services that can be personalized, technologies that are “push” instead of traditional “come-and-get-it” programs, ensure that the library is both “high-tech” and “high-touch.” Users want ready access and skills to use the technology. When they need assistance, they want the responsiveness of a human being (see Chap. 7 for a description of Cornell’s MyLibrary project).

Knowing your users, providing the resources to meet their needs, adapting, modifying, and abandoning old services, and developing new ones are all central to the goals of accessibility and responsiveness. Responsiveness implies listening, conversing, and discussing options. The Kellogg Commission implied that too often academic institutions do not ask the right question or truly listen to the replies of their communities. Do we offer our services when and where they are needed? At the University of Pennsylvania, the library answered that question by taking services to the campus residences—when the students were in their dorms. Do we use language and terminology that are understandable? At North Carolina State, the developers of “MyLibrary” used the well-known language of the Internet to design a service that made library resources much more accessible.

Libraries can solicit user feedback and become more responsive in a number of ways: from formal structures, such as faculty committees and user surveys, to informal input garnered from suggestion boxes, instructional classes, and departmental meetings. Libraries have utilized focus groups to help define the features of digital services, online surveys to understand how students use their services and collections, and volunteers to test-drive new services. Listening to these users can help us learn what they like, how to improve the product, and where to go next. This future direction is important to next year’s student and tomorrow’s faculty member. More details on listening to users are provided in Chapter 8.

2.2. Integration and Academic Neutrality

Academic library services are designed to complement the teaching, research, and outreach mission of the university, a characteristic the Kellogg Commission terms “integration.” Integration ensures that institutional scholarship is connected to the service and teaching mission of the university and that the institutional climate encourages outreach activities. One of the hallmarks of the land-grant movement was taking the work of the academy and translating it for the good of the community. This translation— typically handled by cooperative extension agencies—would ensure that the research from the university could be put to practical use and that real-life problems could be solved.* The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which established land-grant institutions around the United States, were founded on the idea that a higher and broader education should be accessible to all who desire it. Land-grant libraries, in turn, extend this mission by supporting the educational information needs of their statewide constituents [4].

Knowing that the audience is broader than the local university population frequently has an impact on the design of services. For example, the Mann Library’s original conceptual design for its Gateway incorporated icons that reflect the accessibility of resources to different constituencies. Specific icons designate those resources restricted contractually to the university community and those available to the public. Staff created the system and collected its resources with this wider community in mind, staying true to the mission of a land-grant library. Similarly, the Geographic Information System (GIS) team developing the CUGIR (Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository, at http://cugir.mannlib.cornell.edu/) site designed the system so that the general public could have access to the rich geospatial data reflecting the environmental and biological features of the state (see Chap. 7 for more information about the CUGIR system, and see Chap. 5 for a description of the team that created it).

Examples of integrating the library with the work of cooperative extension can be found around the country, from the University of Wisconsin’s Steenbock Library’s document delivery service and video satellite training efforts for extension, to Michigan State University’s extension distance learning initiatives. For the cooperative extension community scattered throughout New York State, the Mann Library developed an aggressive outreach program in an effort to integrate library resources and services with the work and needs of extension employees. Library programmers worked with campus technology specialists to install a proxy server that allowed extension educators to connect to licensed library resources. The library appointed an extension liaison who offered classes as part of the extension’s in-service and orientation programs on campus. Her close work with campus extension led to invitations to participate in regional and statewide conferences held in rural outposts in the Adirondacks and bustling offices in urban centers. Here she taught extension educators how to connect to the library’s Gateway, find full-text journals, search databases, and navigate the complex information landscape. With so much of the collection now available electronically, extension educators throughout the state can gain access to much of the same material as their campus counterparts. Outreach efforts also are leading to partnering opportunities with extension. After seeing examples of several of the information systems the library created, extension staff asked the library to provide insight into how to organize, describe, and deliver cooperative extension information. In this case, integrating the library’s services into the extension culture led to a better understanding of the expertise available in the library. Librarians served as consultants and partners to those working through information organization and access issues with other digital material.

In addition to being integrated into the research and teaching mission of the institution, outreach services need to remain academically neutral. Faced with controversial issues— from genetically modified plants to sustainable agriculture—land-grant institutions and their libraries must strive to maintain academic neutrality. Although the Kellogg Commission reminded the land-grant community of the importance of academic neutrality, particularly with contentious public-policy issues, this role of neutral facilitator and provider of information is one that libraries have always taken seriously. This value is clearly stated in the Bill of Rights of the American Library Association: “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues and materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval” [5].

2.3. Partnerships: “Almost as Much to Learn as We Have to Offer”

Several characteristics of the engaged institution relate to partnerships. The Kellogg Commission states that these partnerships should be characterized by mutual respect and by the realization that each partner has “almost as much to learn as we have to offer” [6]. One of the most successful partnerships that the Mann Library enjoys is a long-standing agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). For the past six years, the library and the economic agencies of the USDA—the Economic Research Service, the National Agricultural Statistics Service, and the World Agricultural Outlook Board— have collaborated to make available the commodity reports and data sets published by these agencies available on the USDA Economics and Statistics System Web site. The economic agencies provide the reports while the library guarantees that they will be posted on the Internet within 10 minutes of receipt. The library also provides an e-mail subscription service, an extensive archive, help files, and an e-mail and telephone reference service to system users around the globe. Every day about 7000 users visit Mann’s USDA site, where they download an average of 3700 files. Chapter 2 provides more details about this site and how it is maintained.

This partnership was recently recognized with the USDA Secretary’s Honor Award. The award acknowledged the staff of the libraries and the agencies “for establishing an innovative Department of Agriculture-University partnership for cost-effective and timely delivery of important economic information” [7]. The service relies on collaboration, innovation, and trust. Throughout the year, the government information librarian works closely with the agency staff. The acquisitions staff who “check in” the electronic reports have an easy relationship with the agency personnel. The parties meet annually to discuss the service, plan new initiatives, and review any problems. “How can we do better?” is a phrase echoed in these planning meetings. In 2001, the partners planned a new enhancement to the service by designing “AgMaps,” an interactive mapping utility for crop data. Each partner contributed funds, expertise, and commitment to the project. These “resource partnerships” make the collective stronger than the individual parts and help ensure that the work is coordinated.

A similar effort at collaboration is occurring at the national level in an organization called the AgNIC (Agriculture Network Information Center) Alliance. This partnership relies on the collective strength of its members to provide a free and unrestricted portal to agricultural information on the Internet (http://www.agnic.org/). Each member agrees to provide content and service related to a particular aspect of agricultural information. For example, the University of Arizona provides resources on rangeland management; the University of Nebraska, water-quality resources. At the Mann Library, both the USDA Economics and Statistics System and CUGIR are AgNIC sites. In addition, the Mann Library is working w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Books in Library and Information Science
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Contributors
• 1: The Culture of Engaged Institutions
• 2: Mainstreaming
• 3: Resources for the Digital Library
• 4: Investing in Staff: Hiring, Training, and Mentoring
• 5: Teams and Teamwork
• 6: Information Technology Services
• 7: Project Management and Implementation
• 8: Input and Feedback from Digital Library Users
• 9: New Frontiers and the Scout