The Research Library in the 21st Century

Douglas Barnett, Fred M. Heath

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317987536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The essays presented in this book reflect revised papers delivered at the Research Library in the 21st Century Symposium, held at The University of Texas at Austin, September 2006. Internationally known library, museum, information agency, and higher education administrators have contributed their views, concerns, and optimism in developing this book. In an effort to begin shaping a strategy for the future of academic research libraries, some of the best minds in the field and representatives from leading institutions have been chosen to explore these issues. These essays investigate the evolving nature of scholarly communications, the many challenges facing higher education generally, and the obligations of research libraries to promote teaching, learning, and research in a time of rapid change. Readers will find the perspectives offered here are as incisive and as fresh now as when they were presented.

This book was based on a special issue of Journal of Library Administration.

Welcoming Remarks

WILLIAM POWERS, Jr.
University of Texas at Austin

We had the idea of bringing eminent figures in research libraries and digital scholarship to our campus to talk about common issues, and we succeeded. We succeeded because all of you are here today. We have a truly tremendous group. I know that you’re very busy in your areas and on your campuses. I very much appreciate the time that you’ve taken to be here. I want to extend a special thanks to Jim Duderstadt, who probably is the only president emeritus here. That has a nice ring to it.

Again, thank you all for coming to Austin. I hope that this conference is a tremendous benefit to you. We’re being a little bit selfish about it. We’re facing these issues on our campus, and we thought, what better way to get advice than to bring leaders on these issues from all around the country? On behalf of myself and our campus, we’re very grateful for the help that you’re going to give us during this time, which will point us in the right direction.

The common challenge that we all have is how we can best leverage our investments—the investments we make in our libraries and in digital research—to advance research and teaching and learning. In this day and age, we simply can’t recruit faculty or develop academic programs—we could not have done it on our campus, and I know that this is true on your campuses—without investing tremendous resources in our libraries and collections. We’re very proud of what we’ve done here at the University of Texas (UT). I think we’ve made those investments.

Since 1963, according to the Association of Research Libraries, we’ve spent more than $650 million on our campus, and that doesn’t include the bricks and the mortar; $650 million—that’s a tremendous investment.

I know that, on your campuses, you’ve had similar investments. We need to think carefully about how to leverage those investments as we go into the future, to make sure that we’re using them in a way that develops our faculty, develops our students, and advances our academic programs and our research.

We take great pride at UT—as I know you do at your campuses—in what we’ve accomplished. Our collections rank in the top dozen in America in terms of volume count. They have tremendous richness, uniqueness, and diversity. We find that these collections help us attract the very best faculty and, in many cases, the very best students. Let me give just two examples of which we’re proud of on our campus.

David Oshinsky is a faculty member in our history department. He won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History. J. M. Coetzee, an alumnus of UT, was the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. They are examples of people who have been able to use our collections to advance their work, as a student in one case and as a faculty member in the other.

Coetzee wrote an essay titled "How I Learned about America and Africa in Texas." Writing about his time on this campus in the 1980s, he said, "I’d had the run of a great library, where I stumbled on books whose existence I might not otherwise ever had guessed.” Coetzee credits the UT library as a tremendous resource of insight into the history, culture, and languages of southwest Africa. He used our libraries. As I’ve said, we’re all proud of those libraries and those collections.

I hope that, while you’re here on our campus, you’ll have a chance to visit and see some of the richness of our collections. I do hope that you will be able to explore them. We’ve had very acquisitive directors and great leadership in our libraries. Let me give just some examples of what we’ve been able to acquire in the last few years alone.

At the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, we’ve acquired the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as well as the archives of film legend Robert De Niro, renowned portrait photographer Arnold Newman, and American icon and ironic iconoclast Norman Mailer.

The Center for American History just received 17 tractor-trailer trucks full of Exxon Mobile historical archives. These go back to the Standard Oil Trust in the 1860s. We actually have the documents and the letters that formed the Standard Oil Trust. What a great bit of reading—if you get a chance—about the thinking that went into forming the Standard Oil Trust during that very early, formative period of our business and corporate life.

The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection is one of the leading collections and a collection of record for an entire continent and, indeed, beyond that continent.

Of course, no history of the cold war or of the formative years of the civil rights movement would be complete without consultation of the richness of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library on our campus. I hope that many of you who have not seen it will have a chance while you’re here.

We know what libraries and collections can do. There are similar stories from your campuses. For those of you who come from campuses, you know what great collections and great libraries can do for an institution of higher learning.

But we have challenges. What does the future hold for great universities and great research universities that face the challenges of advancing these libraries in the 21st century?

Will we be able to respond to the increasing and steadily rising costs of books, journals, and databases and to the demands that our faculty and our students put on us? The costs of our scholarly and commercial publications here at UT are increasing by almost $1 million as we renew them for the calendar year.

Digital scholarship brings additional challenges and opportunities. How will our universities respond to make sure that we’re getting information and not just data? How will we organize this information? How will we preserve information and carry digital data across the millennia and make sure that people in future generations can access and use it?

All our great university research libraries face these issues together. So, I hope that this symposium will help us better understand these issues, the needs for scholarship in a digital age, and the paths that we should take. I hope that, in your discussions, you will emphasize the paths that we all should take on our campuses as we move into the years ahead. So, I look forward to seeing how these discussions come out.

Again, I want to thank you for being here, for being on our campus, and especially for giving us wisdom and insight regarding how—at least on our campus—we should be confronting these important and challenging issues as we move ahead. I hope that you’ll take back some wisdom to your campuses or your firms or your organizations as well. So, I welcome you, and I hope that you enjoy your time here.

It’s now my great pleasure to introduce a dear friend of mine and—for me at least—a colleague of 29 years at the Law School. Roy Mersky has been a professor and chair holder at our Law School and director of legal research and our librarian for many more than 29 years.

I do hope that you’ll get over to see the law library. I was the dean of the Law School for 5 ½ years, and I was on the faculty for 29 years. It has one of the truly premier law libraries in the country—a wonderful, rare book collection. Like so many of our libraries and institutions, it owes its stature to great leadership over a long period of time. Roy, you’ve given us that leadership. Thank you for what you’ve done, and welcome to the conference.

Thank you very much.

Possible Futures for the Research Library in the 21st Century

JAMES J. DUDERSTADT
The University of Michigan

ABSTRACT. We live in a time of great change, an increasingly global society, knitted together by pervasive communications and transportation technologies and driven by the exponential growth of new knowledge. It is a time of challenge and contradiction, as an ever-increasing human population threatens global sustainability; a global, knowledge-driven economy places a new premium on workforce skills through phenomena such as off-shoring; governments place increasing confidence in market forces to reflect public priorities even as new paradigms such as open-source technologies challenge conventional free-market philosophies; shifting geopolitical tensions driven by the great disparity in wealth and power about the globe, national security, and terrorism. (Friedman, 2005) Yet it is also a time of unusual opportunity and reason for optimism as these same technologies enable the formation of new communities and social institutions, better able to address the needs of our society.

The information and communications technologies enabling the global knowledge economy–so-called cyberinfrastructure, the current term used to describe hardware, software, people, organizations, and policies–evolve exponentially, doubling in power for a given cost every year or so, amounting to a staggering increase in capacity of 100 to 1,000 fold every decade (Atkins, 2003). It is becoming increasingly clear that we are approaching an inflection point in the potential of these technologies to radically transform knowledge work. To quote Arden Bement, Director of the National Science Foundation, “We are entering a second revolution in information technology, one that may well usher in a new technological age that will dwarf, in sheer transformational scope and power, anything we have yet experienced in the current information age” (Bement, 2007).

Rapidly evolving information technology has played a particularly important role both in expanding our capacity to generate, distribute, and apply knowledge. This technology is evolving very rapidly, linking people, knowledge, and tools in new and profound ways. It is driving rapid, unpredictable, and frequently disruptive change in existing social institutions. But since information technology can be used to enhance learning, creativity and innovation, intellectual span, and collaboration, it also presents extraordinary opportunities as well as challenges to an increasingly knowledge-driven society. And it is dramatically transforming the character and role of the research library and its host institution, the research university.

The National Academies Studies

It was just such concerns that stimulated the National Academies to launch a major project to understand better how this technology was likely to affect the research university (Duderstadt, 2003). The premise of the study was a simple one: The rapid evolution of digital technology will present many challenges and opportunities to higher education in general and the research university in particular. Yet there was a sense that many of the most significant issues are neither well recognized nor understood either by leaders of our universities or those who support and depend upon their activities. The first phase of the study was aimed at identifying those technologies likely to evolve in the near term (a decade or less) that might have a major impact on the research university and examining the possible implications of these technology scenarios for the research university.

The first finding was that the extraordinary pace of information-technology evolution is likely not only to continue for the next several decades, but possibly even accelerate. Hence, in thinking about changes to the university, one must think about the technology that will be available in 10 or 20 years, technology that will be thousands of times more powerful as well as thousands of times cheaper. The second finding was that the impact of IT on the university is likely to be profound, rapid, and disruptive, affecting all of its activities (teaching, research, service), its organization (academic structure, faculty culture, financing, and management), and the broader higher education enterprise as it evolves toward a global knowledge and learning industry. If change is gradual, there will be time to adapt gracefully, but that is not the history of disruptive technologies. As Clayton Christensen explains in The Innovators Dilemma (Christenson, 1997), new technologies are at first inadequate to displace existing technology in existing applications, but they later explosively displace the application as they enable a new way of satisfying the underlying need.

While it may be difficult to imagine today’s digital technology replacing human teachers, as the power of this technology continues to evolve 100-to 1000-fold each decade, the capacity to reproduce all aspects of human interactions at a distance with arbitrarily high fidelity could well eliminate the classroom and perhaps even the campus as the location of learning. Access to the accumulated knowledge of our civilization through digital libraries and networks, not to mention massive repositories of scientific data from remote instruments such as astronomical observatories or high energy physics accelerators, is changing the nature of scholarship and collaboration in very fundamental ways.

The third finding stressed that although information technology will present many complex challenges and opportunities to universities, procrastination and inaction are the most dangerous courses to follow all during a time of rapid technological change. Attempting to cling to the status quo is a decision in itself, perhaps of momentous consequence.

More recently, the National Academies have extended this effort to involve directly a large number of research universities by creating a National Academy roundtable on information technology and research universities (“the IT-Forum”) to track the technology, identify the key issues, and raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities. The IT Forum has also conducted a series of workshops for university presidents and chief academic officers in an effort to help them understand better the transformational nature of these technologies and the importance of developing strategic visions for the future of their institutions.

The Library as the Poster Child of the it Revolution

To make these discussions less abstract, the impact of information technology on university planning for libraries was introduced in several workshops. In a sense the library has become the poster child for the impact of IT on higher education. Beyond the use of digital technology for organizing, cataloguing, and distributing library holdings, the increasing availability of digitally-created materials and the massive digitization of existing holdings (e.g, the Google project to digitize and put online in searchable format the entire holdings of major research libraries) is driving massive change in the library strategies of universities. While most of the universities in our workshops were continuing to build libraries, many were no longer planning them as repositories (since books were increasingly placed in off-campus retrievable high-density storage facilities) but rather as a “knowledge commons” where users accessed digital knowledge on remote servers. When pressed, it turned out that the most common characteristic of these new libraries was a coffee shop. They were being designed as a community center where students came to study and learn together, but where books were largely absent. The library was becoming a people place, providing the tools to support learning and scholarship and the environment for social interaction.

What is the university library in the digital age? Is it built around stacks or Starbucks? Is it a repository of knowledge or a “student union” for learning? In fact, perhaps this discussion was not really about libraries at all, but rather the types of physical spaces universities require for learning communities. Just as today every library has a Starbucks, perhaps with massive digitization and distribution of library holdings, soon every Starbucks will have a library–indeed, access to the holdings of the world’s libraries through wireless connectivity.

In a sense, the library may be the most important observation post for studying how students really learn. If the core competency of the university is the capacity to build collaborative spaces, both real and intellectual, then the changing nature of the library may be a paradigm for the changing nature of the university itself.

Yet the participants in our workshops also raised the very serious issue concerning the preservation of digital knowledge, now increasing at a rate an order of magnitude larger than written materials. Without a more concerted effort for the standardization of curation, archiving, and preservation of digital materials, we may be creating a hole in our intellectual history. Traditionally this has been a major role of the research university through its libraries. There was a general agreement that research universities need to collaborate more on their responsibilities for the stewardship of knowledge in the digital age.

The Future of the Library

Librarians have developed over thousands of years valuable methods for acquiring, organizing, archiving, and distributing knowledge in many forms–from clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, and illuminated manuscripts to books, recordings, films, and today’s multimedia digital assets. Much of this wisdom, many of these fundamental concepts and principles, continue to be valued as they are applied to a digital world. The academic library has become a knowledge commons for collective learning. Beyond holding rare and unique records, today’s research library is increasingly viewed as a data repository where data acquisition, curation, organization, maintenance, and distribution have become equally important missions.

Yet not only will the knowledge assets of libraries rapidly m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Welcoming Remarks
• 2 Possible Futures for the Research Library in the 21st Century
• 3 Lecture: Impact of Digital Scholarship on Research Libraries
• 4 Panel 1: Continuity and Change in University Scholarship
• 5 Panel 2: The Implications of Digital Scholarship for Research Libraries: Challenges of Access and Preservation
• 6 Panel 3: Into the Glass Darkly: Future Directions in the 21st Century
• 7 Community Forum: Research Libraries in the Digital Age
• 8 The University of Texas: Looking Forward: Research Libraries in the 21st Century
• Index