Leveraging Library Resources in a World of Fiscal Restraint and Institutional Change

Kevin Gunn, Elizabeth Hammond, Kevin B. Gunn, Elizabeth Dankert Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415538756
• eBook ISBN: 9781135716158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Given the continuing cataclysmic shift in the economic landscape in the last few years, librarians have been forced to reevaluate not only the traditional services that they offer but also their continued existence and relevance to their academic institutions. Given the 'new normal' of tighter constraint on personnel and materials budgets, librarians now are compelled to find new ways of offering services and forging new relationships with departments and programs outside the traditional library setting.

This volume highlights a number of projects being implemented in academic libraries including: rethinking the entire concept of a library, redefining physical space for new collaborative uses, adapting entrepreneurial techniques to acquire funding, creating new research tools and improving services, forging new consortial partnerships, allying more closely the mission of the library with that of the institution, and adapting public library programs to academic libraries. By re-examining the purpose of an academic library under continuing financial duress, librarians can ensure that their libraries will continue to have relevance to higher education.

This book was published as a special issue of College & Undergraduate Libraries.

Introduction

In the last three years, we have seen the economic landscape shift under academic libraries. Librarians have had to reposition themselves in creatively managing their institution’s library resources. With little new money, fewer staff being hired or replaced, and materials budgets frozen or cut, librarians have been forced to take stock of their situation. With funds tighter than usual, a different type of fiscal restraint has entered the halls of academe. Leveraging library resources has become the ‘New Normal’ for many of us. Some of the themes of this shift include re-engineering the library, creating new tools and services, making new consortial arrangements, and meeting institutional priorities.

Theoretical

Our opening section has two articles that question the existence of the traditional library. In New Wine, New Wineskins, McDonald proposes an Information and Learning Center (ILC) to replace the traditional academic library. The ILC would overcome the limitations of traditional roles of academic librarians in such areas as library instruction and collection development by shifting the focus onto a new type of position, the information and learning specialist, who would be available to focus exclusively on the individual student’s needs rather than on the needs of the academic library. Other People’s Money: Adapting Entrepreneurial Techniques to Build Capital in Challenging Economic Times by Farrell discusses the “predator” model of entrepreneurship as an alternative to the “collaborative imperative” of traditional information literacy models.

Case Studies

Smith and Galbraith, in Library Staff Development: How Book Clubs Can Be More Effective (and Less Expensive) than Traditional Trainings, argue for the inexpensive implementation of employee book clubs to foster professional development. In The NYU Survey Service: Promoting Value in Undergraduate Education, Phillips, Guss, and McGarry discuss the establishment of a Web survey tool by the Data Service Studio to allow university affiliates to create and administer surveys for their own ends.

In Engaging the Campus Community through New Roles and New Relationships: The McMaster University Library Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, Trzeciak, MacLachlan, and Shenker write of funding three postdoctoral scholars through fellowships from the Council of Library and Information Resources to facilitate the creation of the Virtual Museum of the Holocaust and the Resistance, the opening of the Lyons New Media Centre, and new teaching opportunities at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Collaboration With Other Units on Campus

In Cool Collaborations: Designing a Better Library Experience, Fox, Carpenter, and Doshi demonstrate a number of projects in the library at the Georgia Institute of Technology, including a ‘virtual’ aquarium, ‘virtual’ posters to showcase students’ research, an exam relief program called “Stress-Buzzters,” a library rock ‘n roll radio show, and last, a display wall for architecture students, all highlighting the opportunities of doing interesting projects with minimal funds. The Third Place: The Library as Collaborative and Community Space in a Time of Fiscal Restraint by Montgomery and Miller addresses the concept of space and how libraries must reinvent themselves as spaces for collaborative learning and community interaction in order to be considered the third place after work and home. In Strategically Leveraging Learning Space to Create Partnership Opportunities, Doan and Kirkwood discuss the new LearnLab in the Management & Economics Library at Purdue University. This new type of space created within the traditional library has encouraged unique and unexpected opportunities for collaboration with other university programs and initiatives within the institution’s strategic plan. Lastly, Hitching Your Wagon to the Right Star: A Case Study in Collaboration by Engle describes her adventures in establishing a library presence in the first-year orientation program at Texas A & M University, commonly known as ‘Fish Camp.’

Collaboration With Other Libraries

In Delivering Information Literacy Instruction for a Joint International Program: An Innovative Collaboration Between Two Libraries, Alleyne and Rodrigues discuss a collaborative project between Mount Saint Vincent University Library in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and Bermuda College Library in Hamilton, Bermuda. Their paper demonstrates how international cooperation between institutions can occur for classes in library instruction and information literacy. Wagner and Gerber discuss the implementation and sharing of a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) among the eight institutions that make up the Cooperating Libraries in Consortium (CLIC) in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Building a Shared Digital Collection: The Experience of the Cooperating Libraries in Consortium outlines the selection, acquisition, implementation, maintenance, and ongoing assessment of the system.

Kevin B. Gunn, MA, MLIS
Elizabeth D. Hammond, MLS

New Wine, New Wineskins

JOSEPH McDONALD

Malone University, Canton, Ohio, USA

Academic libraries face an uncertain future. Rather than attempting to develop libraries based on an unknowable future, the author argues it is preferable to address student learning needs with a set of information and learning instructional services established on teaching and learning principles and activities. Evolving from and replacing the present academic library, this new organization, the information and learning center, is staffed by a new academic professional, the information and learning specialist, who addresses the student’s need to gather and manage information, read, and write as an integrated set of experiences directed by the curriculum and teachers’ pedagogies.

Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else. Love for the future is self-love—love for the present self, projected and magnified into the future, and it is an irremediable loneliness. (Berry 2005, 61)

The future of academic libraries, never far from professional concerns, is now engaging librarian thought and speculation with what seems an unusual intensity and urgency. In 2010, the Association of College and Research Libraries (Staley and Malefant 2010) presented twenty-four scenarios for the possible state and condition of academic libraries in the next fifteen to twenty years. These addressed many possible futures based on an equally daunting set of assumptions. A discussion of them and the process by which the assumptions and scenarios were derived is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, a brief description of the ones understood to be the most likely to occur seems useful and will be a foil against which an alternative understanding of the library’s future can be presented.

Nine scenarios were seen as those with a high probability of occurring and having a high impact on libraries:

1. Breaking the textbook monopoly
   Teachers will create their own course materials and will not rely on external publishers.
2. Bridging the scholar/practitioner divide
   Librarians will become the mediators of the large amount of material made available as scholars and practitioners engage in timely dialogue, making scholarly materials more quickly available than by the normal peer review process.
3. Everyone is a “nontraditional” student
   “Students are active in designing their own learning outcomes, and the personalized curriculum becomes the norm” (Staley and Malefant 2010, 12).
4. I see what you see
   Large touch screen tables placed beneath cameras and projectors in computing labs and libraries change the way group designing is conducted.
5. Increasing threat of cyberwar, cybercrime, and cyberterrorism
   Seen in challenges to the privacy of information versus institutional and national security.
6. Meet the new freshman class
   Involves dealing with the information technology divide among students who are “information” fluent and those who are not.
7. Right here with me
   Technology will allow students to scan information “on the fly” and work with learning group members, anywhere.
8. Scholarship stultifies
   Scholarly publishing will change dramatically, but “collegial culture continues to value tradition over anything perceived as risky” (Staley and Malefant 2010, 18).
9. This class brought to you by …
   The rise of for-profit institutions and the disaggregation of learning.

In four of these scenarios, the speed of change was thought to be especially fast:

• Increasing threat of cyberwar, cybercrime, and cyberterroism
• Meet the new freshman class
• Right here with me
• Scholarship stultifies

Because, according to the scenario builders, these fast changing scenarios are also highly likely to occur, libraries are urged to begin planning now to act on them. To make these scenarios “actionable,” Staley and Malefant urge library leaders to ask four questions:

• Do we have the resources to take advantage of this scenario, if it were to exist today?
• In what ways are we unprepared to deal with this scenario?
• If we had all the resources we needed, how could we leverage this scenario to our advantage?
• What would need to happen in the internal and external environments for the previous scenario to become real?

Two immediate observations can be made about these scenarios. One, they are heavily oriented toward technology and its implications for the library rather than providing insight into student learning. Two, although none of these scenarios concerns trivial matters, none of them goes to the core reasons why a student attends college.

In addition to the ACRL documents, a sampling of the literature in the past five years on topics related to the future of the academic library revealed much of this heightened concern for various aspects of the profession’s future, here and abroad. Much of this concern for the future of libraries expressed in the literature is largely premised on the conviction that unless one understands or can reasonably picture what lies in the future, it is difficult, if not impossible, to prepare properly for that future.

This article takes a different approach and argues that it is better to design a desirable or preferred present, based on the missions and objectives of existing institutions of higher education, than to attempt to design for an imaginary or hypothetical future and one that may never materialize in the ways predicted, if at all. We cannot know what will be “valued” in the future. We only know what is valued in the present. It seems counterproductive to have what we do in the present determined or conditioned by what we do not know will happen in the future.

Most of the scenarios and predictions in the literature rely on the sometimes heavy presence of information technology and its possible or likely impact on libraries and their services. To put it in its simplest form, the computer is always present, active, shaping, or determining library futures. It is regarded almost as a force of nature, always to be reckoned with, always indispensable. What the library may or may not do or become in the future, it seems, is always subordinate to the omnipotent presence of information technology.

In this article, I do not critique the present or expected role of computers in libraries. Needless to say, it is highly likely they will be, if not a force of nature, at least a continuing and enlarging force of technology at the intersection of academia and organized formal knowledge. However, a heavy focus on technology tends to do two things. One, it reduces our interest in what libraries might accomplish to that which can be realized only with technology. It puts limits on our imagination of what is possible or desirable. If it is not digital or streaming or expressed in pixels or discussed in terms of networks or large screens, or conversely small screens and devices, we prefer to give it second place in our thinking, or not think about it at all. Two, whatever we might imagine libraries doing, even matters such as reference service or information literacy instruction tend to be seen, frequently uncritically, through the lenses of technology, to the exclusion of other perspectives. Privileging technology makes some things possible. It also limits or eliminates other pursuits that may be equally or more desirable.

The central thesis of this article is that rather than attempting to develop a future for college and undergraduate libraries on a foundation of information technology, the teachers and especially the learners in the institutions sponsoring these libraries are best served by information organizations that are designed and developed on a foundation of service for student learning needs and student learning success, derived from the core values of the curriculum and the professional and academic commitments of teachers. “Library” and information literacy and technology serve a secondary, supporting, not necessarily unimportant, role.

Furthermore, as librarian focus changes from technology and the “collection” to the learning needs of students and the teaching requirements of their instructors (not as “information literacy”), how libraries conduct business will change. In responding to these changes, an organization will evolve, by design, bearing little resemblance to the present academic library organization. And, as I will show below, in creating services and activities at the information and learning nexus, which enfold the curriculum and teachers as their central and determining elements, a different kind of information professional may evolve, one fully engaged with student learning, broadly and at many levels, one quite different from today’s model of the academic librarian.

Why Teaching and Learning?

What, after all, is inappropriate with information and its technologies as the foundations for academic libraries? The simple answer is that these are not at the heart of student learning, which is the core purpose, the essential mission of a college.

However, librarians have maintained for decades that the library is the heart, the core of the college. Librarians are informed by a different vision, a different set of professional ethos than that which informs and animates the rest of the college. Historically, and by virtue of professional preparation, librarians owe their allegiance to the “collection,” to its enabling and supporting technology, and to activities that inform users or allow them to discover what is available in the collection, which presumably has some relevance to students’ needs for formal knowledge content in learning or to teachers for teaching or guiding learning. For librarians, in the conduct of their professional obligations, information trumps teaching and learning. For the institution, its curriculum, teachers, and students, teaching and learning are much more important than information. For the librarian, information informs learning (“information literacy”); for the teacher and student, learning informs information (“literate information”).

The content of libraries, “information,” has always been close to the professional efforts of teachers. Libraries, after all, hold much of the material, the documents, the formal substance of what is to be taught and what the teacher expects the student to learn. But librarians will need to be connected to teaching and learning, though teaching and learning presently lie outside the professional interests and preparation of librarians; as Bennett observed, “It is regrettable that library claims to support learning and teaching are so rarely backed by any formal, systematic understanding of these most fundamental activities of higher education” (2003, 22). He further noted, “In considering how library space might best facilitate student learning and faculty teaching, topics not squarely within librarians’ professional competence in the way that library operations are, the evidence is clear that librarians rarely undertake systematic assessments or seek substantive guidance from students and faculty themselves” (35).

What are Teaching and Learning?

Teaching, at its simplest, is the intentional act of creating the conditions and circumstances for learning. Learning is considerably more than the accumulation of information. It is personal and intellectual development. Learners construct models of reality, and good teachers ask how this construction occurs and how it can be improved. Good learning aims at comprehension and the use of that understanding in reasoning, and learners are changed in ways that affect their hearts and minds and their ability to continue to grow.

How are teaching and learning connected to the library? How might they shape what a library is and does—other than providing “learning support?” And, why should they, rather than information and its technologies, be the foundation for the academic library?

I have already mentioned one reason why teaching and learning should form the foundation for the library. Students come to college to learn, not to find and use information or to use information technology. Information and its technologies are subordinate to the acts of teaching and learning, and the library’s shape and structure should, accordingly, be determined by teaching and learning, the most important activities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. New Wine, New Wineskins
• 3. Other People’s Money: Adapting Entrepreneurial Techniques to Build Capital in Challenging Economic Times
• 4. Library Staff Development: How Book Clubs Can Be More Effective (and Less Expensive) than Traditional Trainings
• 5. The NYU Survey Service: Promoting Value in Undergraduate Education
• 6. Engaging the Campus Community Through New Roles and New Relationships: The McMaster University Library Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
• 7. Cool Collaborations: Designing a Better Library Experience
• 8. The Third Place: The Library as Collaborative and Community Space in a Time of Fiscal Restraint
• 9. Strategically Leveraging Learning Space to Create Partnership Opportunities
• 10. Hitching Your Wagon to the Right Star: A Case Study in Collaboration
• 11. Delivering Information Literacy Instruction for a Joint International Program: An Innovative Collaboration Between Two Libraries
• 12. Building a Shared Digital Collection: The Experience of the Cooperating Libraries in Consortium
• Index