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If it didn’t exist, what would cause it to be created?
If it didn’t exist, what would cause it to be created?
This first work week in January, I was asked to initiate a discussion at a meeting of the Common Solutions Group (CSG, aka, "Stonesoup") on the challenges facing libraries. Explicitly requested to be provocative by the organizers of the day-long session, I tried to address some of the ways that libraries might re-position themselves, or re-define themselves [online ppt], to be instrumental in a rapidly changing world where information access was increasingly distributed, and often commercialized.
One aspect of our discussion inevitably addressed issues relating to the organizational challenges facing libraries and IT, and the difficulties of establishing and sustaining collaboration among higher-ed units within the campus, as well as inter-institutionally. We also held discussion on the difficulties in re-orienting funding and strategic priorities within libraries, and the desirability of having provostial-level support and encouragement in potentially significant re-evaluations of mission and purpose. [Video of the talk, and the immediate Q&A].
CSG’s membership and attendance (not a complete list) are high level IT administrators, both CIOs and their senior lieutenants, and the dialogue and interactions are important and revealing. CSG meetings, like most technology gatherings, are full of people engaging in active back channel discussion (in this case, via chat) as discussions air simultaneously in exposed verbal communication. Since the talk and the topic are both vital and increasingly relevant in economic times that offer to “reset” our HE institutions as much as they do commercial enterprise, it seemed useful to pull out and paraphrase (sans attribution) some of the best comments from the forum for more general sharing.
These comments get to some of the most critical aspects of libraries and their relationship to campus IT, and our ability to address them in hard and public debate will tell on our ability to craft futures for our institutions that establish relevance for the next generation of learners and scholars.
Chat comments from CSG attendees:
One of the most troubling aspects of libraries isn't the move from print to electronic media. Rather, it's that the preservation- oriented and risk- averse culture of the library is incompatible with technology advancement and the risks native to the churn in technology. The result seems to be a virtual standoff in discussions on how we (technologists and librarians) work together on the next generation of solutions.
Many of today’s decisions makers (i.e., Provosts and Chancellors) have not yet asked the hard questions about what the financial and service delivery model for libraries should be going forward.
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The library still approaches IT as a novelty. Librarians come from a background where their previous information storage technology has lasted hundreds of years (paper), and nothing that IT currently wields demonstrates a similar proven track record. The fast evolution of storage media, standards and other technology infrastructure doesn't instill them with enough confidence that what we're doing today will be around 5-10 years from now, let alone 100.
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A clear vision of scholarly and societal communications may be more useful than a re-visioning of the Library. The library and IT are largely reacting to the co-evolution of social, professional, and institutional habits amidst on- going technology development. A significant shift in opening up scholarly communications from the current fractured and increasingly monopolized model might be a strong step.
This transformation is occurring on the edge, but slow development will consume lots of money and spin issues for a decade whereas a bolder vision and a more drastic displacement might get us there faster (after the resulting war). The vision needs to encompass scholarly information all the way from care of the papyrus through discovery and knowledge sharing, into research using the massive data stores owned by universities.
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That libraries, among themselves, have largely the same content is a critically important point. In the past, the size of collection was a metric the made sense. Today, content and service replication is a questionable use of resources.
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As was asked of central IT here a few months back, if the library didn't exist, what would cause it to be created at our institutions?
As one of my friends noted, this last statement is really the operative question. What issues would cause this institution – the Library – to be created today?
Another, and perhaps even more important iteration of this concern is: In the hypothetical absence of the contemporary library, what organization would higher education create to accomplish otherwise unmet needs, to advance scholarship and education?
The economic and social crisis facing our global society, and this nation's institutions, provide a marvelous opportunity to open up this critical debate and help us all discover a better future, through whatever difficult striving is mandated by our efforts to obtain clarity.
2 comments
I had the opportunity to do a short presentation on the DASe project at CSG in fall 2007 (as an invited guest of our CIO, as part of a Shared Media & Data Repositories workshop). I was surprised by the lack of library "presence" in the discussion -- not in terms of attendance at CSG, but as a component in IT vision on campuses. In asking some attendees about that, the responses were quite like those you heard, esp. the first you cited. I would note two things: first, there was no lack of interest on the part of IT leaders in what the library had to say -- the problem (I was told) stemmed more from a lack of interest/initiative on the part of libraries. Second, there seemed a genuine openness to new ideas or willingness to incur some risk in following new ideas on the part of IT leaders. It was noted, as you said, that the risk-aversion was on the side of the library.
I cannot help but think that librarians must position themselves as thought leaders in a broadening vision of scholarly communication in Higher Ed (well, in the public sphere as well, since these lines are all blurring). It is a (perhaps) tricky cultural shift, but utterly necessary. There is simply no important distinction whatsoever between the explosion of information access & social networking happening outside the library walls and that sort of communication traditionally viewed as the role of the library. There is certainly a role here for libraries (actually, I'd say a huge need) to give vision and direction -- to connect the dots between an "institutional repository" and the Flickr Commons (for example) and to begin building services that are less about tightly coordinating/orchestrating/restricting access and more about connections and "composability." Lines are blurring all over -- the idea of a library "owning" something that a user "borrows" are simply passed. It's just a series of nodes: individuals & institutions have stuff and each would like to share, repurpose, preserve, organize, etc., in predictable and unpredictable ways. Amazon, Google, etc. have emerged as the key "nodes" in the graph, but libraries have a huge opportunity, since margins of "success" need not be so thin -- we simply need to figure out cost-effective ways to add value to the graph in a way that makes users think "I'll use the library for that," instead of "I'll use Google for that...". Services could include secure & simple identity management, social networking, ubiquitous digital storage, and (perhaps most importantly) a vision for managing and organizing this stuff. A firt step (I think) would be for libraries to join in the conversation going on outside the walls: in the W3C, IETF, OpenSocial, etc. The protocols and standards are being created in these arenas that will impact every aspect of library work in the coming years -- it would behoove us to begin positing our own vision as part of that process.
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