Bridging the Gap

Connecting Users to Digital Contents

Sul H. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317993445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The amount of digital information that libraries need to manage effectively for the benefit of users is constantly increasing. This book discusses in detail how library administrators can better handle this growing abundance of information, as well as effective ways to allow library users easy access. Respected leaders in the field of librarianship explore various aspects of how librarians are meeting the challenges of delivering more digital information to a changing user base, including preservation demands, licensing agreements, digitizing and making available collections unique to specific libraries, and providing more personalized digital services to library users. This book focuses on timely issues that impact how libraries are administered and viewed by both librarians and by users. This innovative book discusses practical ways to provide remote access and services to digital resources, support the preservation of digital resources, understand their library users who prefer the digital information format, and reshape the traditional library for better digital access. The book is carefully referenced and includes helpful illustrations.

The book is a valuable resource for senior and mid-level library administrators, including deans, directors, and department heads, of public, special and academic libraries.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Library Administration.

Introduction

 

The papers delivered at the University of Oklahoma Libraries' 2007 annual conference in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, addressed the challenge of connecting library users with the growing abundance of digital information now available. Libraries are now not only called upon to provide electronic resources, but increasingly are expected to deliver more services, meet new preservation demands, adhere to licensing agreements, and digitize and make available collections unique to their institutions. The ways librarians are responding to these issues are important to the library community, and we are fortunate to provide eight different approaches to the complex task of making digital resources more readily available to scholars, students, and researchers.

Carla J. Stoffle, dean of libraries and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and her associates Kim Leeder and Gabrielle Sykes-Casavant set the framework for the conference by noting that research libraries can no longer expect their patrons to come into the library proper for the information they may need. Libraries, she says, must provide their researchers with access from wherever the researcher may be, and should then be prepared to provide new services offering research access to information held by other institutions. This enhanced service approach has changed the way libraries are organized and staffed.

Preservation of library resources, paper or electronic, always has been one of the greatest challenges for research libraries. The advent and proliferation of electronic information has not lightened the burden in any way. The non-profit organization Portico has accepted the monumental task of preserving electronic scholarly journals for the future, and its executive director, Eileen Fenton, givesa history of its efforts to offer archival services to the library community for electronic scholarly journals.

Brinley Franklin, vice provost for University Libraries at the University of Connecticut, and his associate Terry Plum see the expanded availability and use of digital materials as a way to better understand the way libraries are used. He believes that evaluating user satisfaction, costs of digital resources, and identifying the users of digital information will give library administrations a perspective that was not previously available.

There is still much debate within the library community, however, on the value of digital information vis-à-vis traditional print materials. Barbara Allen, director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation examines this debate and gives her insights on where academic libraries should be placing their collection development emphasis.

Dennis Dillon, associate director, University of Texas Libraries at Austin, offers a historical overview of collection development from the growth of traditional print collections in academic libraries to the concept of a network of digital information. He speculates that continued growth of electronic information resources may lead to the “end of information,” or information so extensive that it can no longer be considered a collection.

The proliferation of digital resources also has led to a need for new environments within academic libraries. Barbara Dewey, dean of libraries at the University of Tennessee, lends her expertise on this subject by giving us an overview of what the University of Tennessee has done to make its traditional library more compatible with electronic resources and more useful and comfortable for the people who use them.

In the concluding two articles, both Heather Joseph, executive director for The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and Frank Menchaca, executive vice president of Thomson Gale explore changes that digital publishing has brought to scholarly communications, the marketing of digital information, and the evaluation of scholarly publishing in place of traditional print scholarship.

While addressing very different aspects of digital information, these eight articles offer readers interesting and authoritative insights to the benefits and problems that electronic resources have brought to academic libraries. I am pleased to have the opportunity to present the work of these library community leaders to the wider audience that traditional publication still offers.

Sul H. Lee
Editor

Bridging the Gap: Wherever you are, the Library

Carla J. Stoffle
Kim Leeder
Gabrielle Sykes-Casavant

ABSTRACTS. This paper argues that economics, not technology, is driving the need for fundamental changes in our universities and in our libraries. Success in the future will require libraries to deliberately adopt a “push out” philosophy in which the library extends outward to customers wherever they are and requires libraries to be customer-based, not place based or collection-driven. Libraries have and will continue to have a central role in higher education if we use our traditional strengths to change in ways that will fit, and add value to, our environment on campus and beyond.

KEYWORDS: Academic libraries, forecasting, change

An unspoken implication of the theme of this conference is that technology is driving libraries. Libraries must change because the technology is changing and because customers expect more, given the power of the technology they have at their desktop. Our customers enjoy the ease of searching on Google or shopping with Amazon and wonder why libraries can't deliver the same type of service. So, they turn to libraries as a second choice, a circumstance we must reverse lest we become irrelevant.

Before going on to discuss how our libraries need to change and how that change must address our approach to our work, the work itself, and how we organize ourselves to respond to our customers' expectations, it is important to emphasize the premise of this paper: that technology is not our primary driver. Google and Amazon notwithstanding, our cost structure and the nature of our cost increases—the economics of our libraries—are in fact driving the need for us to change and endangering our role on campus. Basically, our costs are increasing faster than any other sector of the higher education community, and our institutions, especially public ones, are receiving fewer funds or at least less new money than the yearly increased costs of the entire enterprise. Thus, our institutions have less money with which to support us. If we were receiving sufficient funding increases, we could maintain the library of the past (our legacy collections), operate the library of today, and create the library of the future in the mode expected by our customers. We could in fact meet almost everyone's expectations without drastic changes. However, we don't have these funds and so we must create the library of the future by a combination of actions that require a transformative vision and a transition plan.

In support of my argument that economics is driving our need for transformation in libraries, there are a variety of data and articles published about the sustainability of higher education when public funds and tuition limits conspire to reduce funding and/or ensure that funding increases are less than what is necessary to maintain the enterprise.¹ In this environment, institutions are driven by the necessity to reduce costs and increase productivity while adding value to our communities. Institutions are in fact being pushed to demonstrate their contribution to student learning and show how campus research benefits society at large. In this environment, technology, if utilized with a transformative vision, can enable the sustainability of our institutions and our libraries. In 2002, Alan Guskin and Mary Marcy, leaders of the three-year Project on the Future of Higher Education, addressed the economic problems in higher education and proposed a series of principles to be applied to transforming institutions rather than “muddling through” or cutting corners using a short-term strategy to deal with a long-term problem.² In response to this institutional view, Joseph M. Brewer, Sheril J. Hook, Janice Simmons-Welburn, and Karen Williams wrote an article applying to libraries the guidelines provided by the Project. Brewer et al. offered examples of ways libraries can move forward to transformation in a climate of constrained resources demanding greater accountability. They noted:

Libraries will accomplish this [transformation] by empowering individuals to work more independently, cooperating with each other to develop shared print repositories, working with vendors to receive shelf-ready books, increasing the amount of information available electronically, and reducing staff at service points. The transformation occurring in libraries will create new environments and resources for learning, scholarly communication, and information access.³

They also noted that libraries on the whole are already transitioning. In response to economic challenges, libraries have been streamlining processes, consolidating library units, and outsourcing work when possible; creating national networks and cooperatives to mitigate financial constraints; and reaching out to campus units to partner or cooperate on projects. For example, the University of Arizona Libraries have undertaken a number of projects to streamline work, the most recent of these was the Finding Information in a New Landscape (FINL) project, which reduced the cost of reference services.⁴ Workflow redesign, as documented in the January 2007 Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) report, has also been the recent focus of grant-funded efforts at six academic libraries.⁵ However, some of the efforts described by Brewer et al. are being done in a reactive mode without a purposeful vision of where these changes should lead us.

The purpose of this paper, based on our economic imperative and enabling technology, is to propose a context and vision for what we might be doing in the future and what we must change to achieve that vision. We propose to go beyond a description of discrete responses to economic pressures, no matter how creatively framed such responses may be. Rather, we advocate using these pressures in a manner that fundamentally changes what we do and how we function. We begin this discussion with a simple proposition, that success in the future will require libraries to deliberately adopt a “push out” philosophy—one in which the library extends outward to customers wherever they are—rather than wait for customers to come looking for the library or librarian either virtually or physically, or to even know they have an information need. A “push out” philosophy requires that we be customer-based, not place-based or collection-driven. This one change in our philosophy will transform library functions and staff roles. The resulting library might then have the following characteristics:

Librarians stimulate learning and research, not just support it when the student or scholar asks.

The library is a place for the production of knowledge.

Librarians are part of the creation process for new knowledge, new access tools, and new dissemination processes, including electronic publishing, that do not require mediation or instruction.

Librarians manage campus knowledge and information. We provide campus information services, not just access to library information, on a 24/7 basis.

We create physical and virtual learning environments for our campuses and are partners in the educational process. The library is an integral and interdependent part of the student's educational experience.

Collections are primarily in digital format. A smaller percentage of our budget is going to purchasing, processing, and managing commercial scholarly information, which reduces the cost of selecting, processing, housing and circulating print collections.

Our collection building is focused on special collections and unique resources while creating digital access to both.

All services offered by the library are available at the desktop and are customized for the individual user.

Librarians are an active part of an ongoing national system for maintaining and preserving information in all formats, through coordinated repositories, having less print on each campus.

Librarians are key players in a national system that monitors and influences national information policy, and we protect campus interests and access to information through national and local action as a basic part of what we do and are expected to do on campus.

The library organization is agile, flexible, and welcoming of change. The library is always looking to the future and expanding resources to be effective 3–5 years from now, rather than maximizing resources to support current services.

Some of our colleagues question whether our organizations, or even our profession, can make these changes and whether we have the skill or the will to do this.⁶ Many of the things that are proposed here are, in fact, very hard to do. They run counter to many years of practice. However, the authors believe that libraries and librarians can transform, and that libraries have had, and will continue to have, a central role in higher education.

TRANSFORMING LIBRARIES

Many of the qualities we described above as characteristic of transformed libraries are already reflected in some of our daily operations. However, we participate in most of these activities in addition to our business as usual, not instead of it. They are adjunct activities, not core activities. We have not made the leap to letting go of the library of the past (our legacy collections) and managing the library of the present to aggressively build the library of the future. Doing this involves:

Moving from cooperation to collaboration in our activities.

Only doing locally what must be done locally.

Focusing on the needs of our campus, which is not what libraries currently do.

Pushing all of our serv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Bridging the Gap: Wherever you are, the Library
• 3 Responding to the Preservation Challenge: Portico, an Electronic Archiving Service
• 4 Assessing the Value and Impact of Digital Content
• 5 All Hype or Real Change: Has the Digital Revolution Changed Scholarly Communication?
• 6 A World Infinite and Accessible: Digital Ubiquity, the Adaptable Library, and the End of Information
• 7 Social, Intellectual, and Cultural Spaces: Creating Compelling Library Environments for the Digital Age
• 8 A Question of Access—Evolving Policies and Practices
• 9 Funes and the Search Engine
• Index