Stuck in Neutral, Part I | From the Bell Tower

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA -- Library Journal, 07/23/2009

Despite a few interesting newcomers to the exhibits, the recent ALA conference left me feeling that the library world is just running in place. With uncertain budgets, hiring freezes, and no sense of what the immediate future promises, the conference programs seem to cover the same old territory: Technology gadgets. Web 2.0. How to get published. Information literacy. Assessment. Privacy.

I even stopped in on a presentation about how to make better presentations. The mood was not pessimistic, but neither was there an atmosphere charged by things new and exciting. It was more about what we stand to lose and how to preserve it rather than what we have of value and how to benefit from it. In other words, we librarians, like our parent institutions, appear to be stuck in neutral.

Industry in trouble 
Staving off stagnation isn’t a problem faced just by libraries, either. A recent column discussed the importance of paying attention to trends in business and being savvier about identifying the practices that might work best in an academic library. Another reason to monitor what’s happening in the world of business is to recognize those industries confronting challenges similar to our own and learn lessons from their trials and tribulations.

Quite some time ago I described the parallels between libraries and newspapers as information mediators challenged by the Internet’s ability to put the middleman out of the news retrieval equation. Since then the newspaper industry fades even further into the quagmire of impending obsolescence. But there are other industries from which librarians might learn.

In a holding pattern 
My keeping-up routine includes a number of business publications, such as Business Week, Fortune, Inc., Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal (if you can do only one try the New York Times business feed, as The WSJ may overwhelm the casual reader). Looking through some of these on the last day of the ALA conference, I read about the latest airline industry problems in an NYT article that outlined issues that sounded all too familiar: Too many competitors. Empty seats. Out of control costs for wages and supplies. Tense employee relations. Limits on fee-driven revenue. Cost cutting. Storm clouds of industry consolidation.

Is it just me, or does this sound like a description of the higher education industry? Despite all their efforts to achieve profitability—or avoid extinction—air carriers are not sure what their next steps will be as they operate in an environment of uncertainty. Fuel prices are in flux, as are both consumer and corporate spending habits, all of which makes retreat to the tried-and-true look all the more appealing to industry leadership.

Similarly, higher education institutions face many uncertainties and are showing signs of bunkering down. Some higher education experts believe that the entire industry is one big bubble waiting to burst, and I can only imagine that when college and university adminstrators see what is happening to newspapers, airlines, and health care providers, they are focusing their energy on keeping the bubble intact. Institutions are simply trying to keep their tuition increases as low as possible, and doing everything they can to make sure their freshmen class actually shows up. But there may still be time to shake higher education and academic libraries from their torpor before they slip into stasis.

One revelation is that in our current budget-cutting environment, the time may finally be right for faculty to accept open access and new scholarly publishing models because it will save our institutions money, and the less spent on the library for all those publications, well, that’s more in the cookie jar for someone else.

Getting back in gear 
Don’t expect a prediction about when our current period of economic stagnation may end. You can follow your favorite economist or library pundit for those prognostications. I prefer to focus on what we can do to get ourselves back in gear and take steps to reengineer our current service practices so we engage in continuous improvement—economic recovery or no. In Part II of this column I’ll share some thoughts on how we can do better in tough times. 

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