Lifelong Learning or Academic Triage? Reflecting on Changes in the Information Landscape, Part III | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 7/2/2009

It's a staple of higher education mission statements: colleges and universities prepare their students for lifelong learning. Academic libraries also claim it as their raison d'être: we provide the laboratory where students learn to think critically so that they can become independent, thoughtful, and engaged citizens, able to think for themselves. But in so many ways, we unintentionally undermine our own goals by not thinking ahead to the situations students will find themselves in once they graduate.

We work hard to wean students off Google and promote the value of proprietary databases and their scholarly content – resources that will be unavailable to students as soon as they graduate. We even teach students to use proprietary versions of government-provided databases that are free on the web – ERIC, PubMed, Agricola, and the NCJRS Abstracts Database, for example.

Wouldn't it make sense for teachers in training to become familiar with the version of ERIC that they can use once they're out in the field teaching? Wouldn't it be helpful for the average graduate to be familiar with a medical database that they can consult no matter where their life takes them? But what I hear from librarians quite often is that the proprietary version is better, or more easily linked to library content, or easier for students because it's packaged with a bundle of subscription databases and has the same familiar interface.

Fine, but do you explain to your students that if they try to log on after graduation, that familiar interface will disappear, just like the other databases we try so hard to coax them to use? How, exactly, is this preparation for lifelong learning?

Print-based thinking
Academic libraries are well advanced into the transition from print journal collections to electronic access. At the same time we've championed the cause of open access, partly to redress the financial crisis caused by letting commercial publishers drive the prices of STM (science, technology, and medical) research sky-high and partly to advance knowledge by making it more universally available. But when it comes to helping students navigate the quickly-changing information landscape, we still tend to rely on tradition.

If the library pays for it, it's probably good stuff. Scholarly sources vetted by traditional publishers are better than sources aimed at a general audience. The more content and indexing we can offer to traditional scholarly sources through our databases, the better, even if it makes it harder for undergraduates to sort through their options. We're constantly adding to our walled gardens of information aggregated by commercial vendors while lamenting the fact that faculty aren't aware of what the library offers and that students are too reliant on sources they can find by themselves on the web.

We emphasize the use of traditional library resources because our efforts are tied to the curriculum and to the specific goals of assignments – and this is as it should be. Though arguments are often advanced for a separate information literacy curriculum, I have always believed that research skills are best learned in context, developmentally, and repeatedly throughout a student's career. But quite often the library's role in addressing the students' predicament as they face a particular assignment is to give them temporary survival skills. Here are some tools that will help you find relevant sources. Here are some tricks for using the tools.

We aren't in a position to help students understand why this academic activity might pay off a few years down the road, and faculty don't generally articulate it clearly to students. So in large part, the library's instructional efforts are focused on helping our students become . . . good students.

Those who go on to graduate school will find the skills they've picked up useful as they move on to another academic library, but what about the others? We rarely attempt to make connections between using an academic library and life after college, other than through shallow appeals to consumer decisions like buying a car or choosing a restaurant. And guess where students will go for that information? The same place we would: the Internet.

Thinking ahead
We've made the shift from print to electronic, but not from traditional authority vetted by commercial entities to something new. Our efforts to set research free and make it sharable through open access haven't been tied into the way we build our collections our teach their use. Dorothea Salo pointed out the extreme disconnect between the role institutional repositories are supposed to play in making scholarship more widely available and the way we actually support and promote them (or fail to do so). As she says in her marvelously-titled critique, "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel," we haven't thought this through.

Materials in institutional repositories do not fit into librarianship’s traditional quality and authority heuristics; not all content is the traditional peer-reviewed research article, and most of it is not available via the vendor-provided indexes librarians trust. The collection-development model behind a repository is foreign to librarians, who are accustomed to choosing from the already vetted book and journal lists provided by scholarly publishers. Librarians are therefore not very active in using and promoting repositories and cross-repository search engines, even to reduce their own costs by searching out open-access versions of articles for electronic reserves.

If we're serious about lifelong learning, we need to rethink our reliance on traditional publications and their emerging distribution models, which do not see sharing as anything but a threat to profits. The reason Amazon's vertically-integrated business plan doesn't include libraries isn't because they forgot to include our market segment. It's because the sharing we do is inimical to their business model.

Newspapers are scrambling to replace old revenue streams with new ones, including threatening news aggregators with lawsuits and charging micropayments to readers, a strategy that has already proven a failure. And as scholarly societies take their publications online, because that's where libraries want them, they frequently turn to commercial publishers to make the transition. Prices go up and access is locked down.

All sectors of publishing are in fluid states of change, if not crisis. Book publishing is scrambling to monetize electronic formats; newspapers are experiencing a devastating die-off. Scholarly publishing has been in crisis for decades.

We need to think about what the information landscape will look like in ten years – and what it should look like if we truly value access to information for all. And if we're serious about that "lifelong learning" line in our mission statements, if we really think information literacy matters after college, we need to think much harder about how students will find information when they no longer have access to our licensed and locked-down collections.  

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.

Read more Newswire stories:

Newswire Feature: Veteran Librarians

Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Re-Introduced in Senate

Elsevier Motion to Block Public-Records Request of Washington State University Denied

Dartmouth Opens Summon Beta to Faculty and Students

Arizona State Sued Over Kindle E-Textbook Usage

OCLC Formally Withdraws WorldCat Policy

Columns:
Community Source Makes Good Sense | From the Bell Tower

People

Best Sellers in Microbiology