The Value of Innovation: New Criteria for Library Scholarship, Part One
Eric Schnell discusses the problems that arise when innovative forms of scholarship aren't given their due.
Eric Schnell, Associate Professor, The Ohio State University Libraries, Prior Health Sciences Library -- Library Journal, 08/06/2009
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(See Part Two of this series for some ideas on how to reward faculty for non-traditional but innovative efforts)
Academic librarians are increasingly breaking away from the traditional academic mold—using social networks to create and extend existing service, blogging to share information and knowledge, and deploying a variety of emerging technologies to supplement their instructional activities.
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It’s time to embrace a new model that properly rewards academic librarians for exploring and implementing new types of services, new forms of scholarship, and alternative instructional techniques.
To do this, we need to redefine what we value. Fortunately, an excellent example of this kind of redefinition can be found at the University of Maine’s New Media Department. The department implemented a faculty rewards system based on their specific goals and needs and the unique attributes of their discipline. They offer a compelling redefinition of criteria for evaluating faculty working in new media research, and make specific recommendations for promotion and tenure committees at U.S. universities. This is the direction in which we must take academic librarianship.
Reconsidering scholarship
Tenure-track librarians aspiring to the highest academic ranks are often hesitant to explore creative and innovative modes of expression, well aware that these efforts do not carry as much weight during formal promotion reviews as traditional scholarly output. It’s a chicken and egg problem—why become more innovative and be involved in more interdisciplinary endeavors if academic librarians must continue to conform to a faculty rewards model that does not recognize innovations in our own discipline?
The reality is that of the three-part faculty model, a candidate’s scholarship activity is the deciding factor for success. So any redefinition of the criteria needs to start at how academic librarians define scholarship.
In the book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest Boyer contemplates alternative methods for assessing scholarly performance. Boyer’s work has inspired a number of academic organizations like the Modern Language Association, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to issue reports offering new definitions of scholarship. In 1996, ACRL explicitly charged a Task Force on Institutional Priorities and Faculty Rewards to discuss adapting promotion and tenure criteria to the particular needs and circumstances of librarianship.
The Task Force issued a report in March of 1998 titled "Academic Librarianship and the Redefining Scholarship Project," designed to help academic associations extend the range of activities recognized as scholarly for the purposes of tenure, promotion, merit, or reward system guidelines. The report contends that many of the daily activities of an academic librarian are scholarly, and that academic librarians engage in scholarship as they address the everyday challenges of providing library services. They combine theory and practice to meet the diverse research and learning needs of their communities, and draw upon a wide range of disciplines to inform their work.
Yet, even after more than a decade of discussion, few academic libraries have assimilated any of Boyer’s principles or the definitions contained in the ACRL report into their review criteria.
Values of a discipline
We can no longer be content reusing the values and criteria of other disciplines. Academic libraries need to create rewards systems based on the unique attributes of our field as well as individual departmental goals and needs. Recognition and achievement must be measured using criteria that both value the activities of academic librarians as they exists today and are flexible enough to adapt to future changes. After all, can we really expect to break out of the existing paradigm of how we define and assess faculty activities if we limit our thinking to fit into the existing paradigm?
In part two, I will adapt the approach taken by the University of Maine’s New Media Department to offer a new definition of how library faculty are recognized and rewarded. With some modification, this could become a new paradigm that will allow innovating academic librarians to be evaluated more broadly and fairly.
Eric Schnell (eric.schnell@osumc.edu) is Associate Professor, The Ohio State University Libraries, Prior Health Sciences Library, and also writes at The Medium is the Message.
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