New Directions
Jim Neal: Imperatives Defining the Future Relevance and Impact of the Academic Research Library
1 Nov 2007

It has taken me a few days to process what I heard from Jim Neal during his New Directions presentation on November 1st. I say what I heard, as it may not be the same as what you heard. I admit to being greatly distracted by his remarkable resemblance to my godmother, Bunny.

Mr. Neal presented 30 imperatives for academic libraries in 46 slides. His moving quickly through this content resulted in 1) my being unable to transcribe all of the content and 2) his touching only superficially on most of his points.

Mr. Neal asks, of all of the factors impacting Libraries, what should we be acting on most aggressively? Here are 30 imperatives that will increasingly define our aspirations:

#1: Build the Network
Libraries must be a part of the development of the essential infrastructure across our University and involved in decisions related to connectivity, reliability, capacity, performance security, and enabling new applications. We need to be at the table when network infrastructure decisions are made, but too often we are not.

#2: Enterprise System Development [I didn’t quite understand this one]

#3: Manage Identity and Security
Our network systems face daily attacks. Our institutions must recognize and emphasize the importance of maintaining our systems and protecting our data.

#4: Organize for Disaster Preparation and Continuity
We must prepare for disasters by developing redundancies, auditing our procedures, and assigning responsibility for who handles what during an emergency. We must ensure that in the case of a disaster we can still provide basic services and continue operations.

#5: Build the Digital Library
Quality = Content + functionality. Our content includes published/licensed content, primary content, open web content, institutional content, and multimedia. The successful digital library is an integration of services and of software tools.

For more on his vision of the Digital Library, see Neal, J. G. (1999). Chaos Breeds Life: Finding Opportunities for Library Advancement During a Period of Collection Schizophrenia. Journal of Library Administration, 28(1), 3-17.

#6: Mine the Full Potential of Original Information
[I'm afraid that I missed what he said here, but I assume that he made reference to the need for libraries to collect, organize and make accessible the rich collections of grey literature we have in our institutions and the important and significant resources contained in our archives and special collections.]

#7: Build Content Management Portals
Our goal must be the ability to find and organize information. Portals are integrators and real-time processors. [?]

#8: Preserve and Archive the Content
We hold it – we allow access through our various systems (catalog records, digital copies) – we secure it by having disaster preparedness capabilities.

#9: Search Engines [not the exact slide title]
Assess carefully the role of search engine libraries and analyze the relationship between search engine libraries and our libraries. How can we assist the resolution of copyright issues?

#10: Enable/Integrate 2.0 and 3.0

• Notion of permanent beta is difficult for libraries to deal with
• The authorship revolution - the expanding the creativity potential of the Web where one can post information to numerous potential readers on a global scale.
• OCLC released report “Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our Network World”. In this report, general public respondents and U.S. Library Directors surveyed see no role for libraries in a social network environment.
• Users are moving away from expert-based systems and are gravitating towards sites built for them and by them
• When does the social web become *the* Web?
• Where do librarians fit in here? If convenience trumps quality, it is our job to make quality convenient.

Follow up:

#11: Enhance the Student Experience

• No lines, no limited hours, build places for experimentation and fun
• Students want support where they want it
• Students know they have some limitations, but may not see us as the ones that can help them develop
• What happens to our graduates when they leave – post graduate access to resources should be of concern to us.

#12: Support the Course Management System
We must integrate the library into these systems. In some institutions there has been movement of responsibility for these new technologies into the library.

#13: Enhance the Faculty Experience
How do we define our relationships with faculty members? They have become focused more on collaboration, but do they see as potential partners?

#14: Support the Needs of Big Science
Provide data support.

#15: Enrich Research Through Text Mining
Can we develop and use tools to find new patterns and meanings in our information resources?

#16: Transform Scholarly Communication
Faculty will continue to publish for a variety of reasons. We need to develop a new economic model that doesn’t give up quality. Columbia's Library has had discussions with the Columbia faculty about their current state of thinking on scholarly communication and found that the faculty members and researchers are aware of issues:

• They are concerned about future of scholarly monograph
• They are concerned that need to get published drives their research topics and treatments
• They understand migration or coexistence of print and electronic
• They are concerned about role of Google and other search engines
• Many fields are operating pre-print and disciplinary repositories
• Faculty retention of copyright is increasingly an issue of concern for them
• They are concerned about long term archiving

[Here he mentioned Anthony Grafton’s article in the New Yorker.]

#17: Advance the Open Revolution
Need for barrier-free access. [Here he referred to Lawrence Lessig’s comments on restraints to open access. I don't have a specific citation, but you can find Lessig’s opinions at his blog.]

#18: Advance the Repository Movement
Our challenge is the array of environments in which information is being archived – in various depositories: discipline, institutional, department/school, personal web sites. In which do we find the authoritative version of a work?

#19: Information Policy Agenda
We need to take more responsibility on advocating the information policy agenda.

#20: Fight the Copyright Wars
We need to fight ongoing restrictions to use, access, etc. We need to be knowledgeable. It is difficult to stay informed about these issues but it is imperative that we know and educate others about the impact of this type of legislation. [Here he referred to his own article on copyright: James G Neal (2002, December). Copyright is dead ... long live copy right. American Libraries, 33(11), 48-51.]

#21: Participate in the Entrepreneurial Academy
Libraries must leverage their assets (as the Peabody Library rents its space for weddings, for example) and look for new customers and markets.

#22: Support the Globalization Goals of Universities
Which includes the ongoing commitment of Universities like Columbia and UC Berkeley to maintaining and developing rich repositories of non-US materials.

#23: Respond to Users’ Expectations

#24: Prepare for Accountability and Assessment
We must develop measures of user satisfaction, analyze our market penetration. How do we measure our success and impact?

#25: Establish a Research and Development Agenda
We are not, but we should be, creators of new knowledge, laboratories for experimentation, magnets for new skills.

#26: Rethink Library Space Planning and Identity
Understand library use trends: learning spaces, social spaces, collaborative spaces, flexibility and adaptability. Get the librarian out the library.

#27: Develop New Resources
Success does not equal resource allocation, rather success equals resource attraction.

• fundraising
• research grants
• technology transfer
• sense of space
• sale of products
• sale of services
• recoverables/fees
• co-investment

#28: Promote Cooperation (with everybody)
Recognize that our libraries (and we librarians) have a lot to offer.

#29: Develop the Workforce
Professional education has not kept up with needs of the Library world. Though many efforts have been made in the professional organizations there is still a gap in leadership development and successional planning. Who will be our new library leaders? [He mentioned the fact that many libraries employ non-librarians in professional positions and referred to his own article on "feral" professionals in the academic library and to Stanley Wilder’s recent article on the Chronicle.
James G Neal (2006, February). Raised by Wolves. Library Journal, 131(3), 42-44.]

#30: Build New Organizational Models
A new, more productive organizational model would include centralized planning and resource allocation systems, coupled with loose academic structures, and supported by maverick units and entrepreneurial enterprises. The latter of which would support themselves by bringing in money through grants, partnerships, etc.

“Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.”

Recapped the results of an ARL meeting from a few areas that culminated in a list of “Academic Resource Library Areas of Strategic Focus,” a list which still seems valid today:

• Distributed electronic access to content tools and services
• High quality physical spaces
• High quality electronic spaces
• Special and distinctive collections
• Archiving digital and analog content
• Global collections
• Innovative applications of technology in support of learning and research
• High quality technology infrastructure
• Staff development and professional engagement
• Leadership in information policy
• Integration in to the academic fabric of the university
• New knowledge driven by research and development

Questions and Answers:

Q: How is Columbia organizing employees to address some of these roles? Are there silos of employees who focus on particular issues or does everyone do everything?
A: A bit of both. As they recruit new employees they are looking for people who can do both their primary responsibilities and take on new roles and collaborate with others in and out of the Library.

Q: What traditional library work have they given up in order to focus on these new directions?
A: More outsourcing of some functions – shelf-ready books; eliminating half of reference desks; eliminating some branch libraries and consolidating them.

Q: Is your intention to say that each ARL Library must address all of these imperatives?
A: No one institution can address all 30 imperatives (at least, not equally) but we should define these issues across the research library community. Each Library needs to find its place in this inventory of imperatives and make choices that align with what new directions we choose to take. But we (as an intuition) are at risk if we ignore these.