Why Academic Libraries Matter | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 8/13/2009

Last week I posed the question: "So what exactly is it that libraries have to offer to those who are drowning in information?" What unique value do they add as information migrates online and our limited collections compete with high-quality information that is freely available - in some cases because we fought hard to make it freely available?

Totality, meaning, relationships
Steven Bell proposed three values we can provide in a post at the Designing Better Libraries blog. The first is that we can provide a total experience that works well. It's the totality of the good experience that he feels matters: the website, the face-to-face services, the catalog, the collection – all of it. We can ensure that the user's experience with the library is positive if we attend to all aspects of the user's experience.

The second is that we provide meaning – or meanings, depending on the user's goal. It may be enlightenment, it may be learning some skills and strategies to succeed as a student, it may be the pursuit of beauty or comfort or a sense of belonging to a wider world of knowledge.

"In all these ways," Bell says, "libraries bring meaning to people. What we need to do better is harness this power and integrate it into a well-designed experience." You don't want the meaning hidden behind a clunky catalog or crabby staff. You want to make sure there are multiple unhindered pathways people can take to find their own meaning.

The third is creating relationships. Designing a great environment for finding meaning isn't enough; you have to develop in users the sense that they are part of the library, that they belong, that the library is an important and valued part of the institution. As Bell says, creating relationships "requires that we understand our users and their concerns, and identify the commonalities between their issues and our own."

This reminds me of Wayne Wiegand's recommendation that we focus not on how users can be made to fit into our library but on how the library fits into the life of the user.

These are all good parts of a successful library. We want to be a place where people feel they are part of a community, where it's not too hard to find sources, and where they will find materials out of which they can build meaning. But wait – there's more!

Perceptions from students and faculty
The 2005 OCLC Perceptions report companion piece that focused on college students found that they use libraries more than any other demographic group, that they like to help themselves to information, are aware of the library's electronic resources, and that they indentify libraries with books (but don't seem to feel that's a bad thing, unlike the authors of the report who seem deeply dismayed by that finding). They supplement library resources with ones found on the web.

No surprise there; don't we all? They are largely satisfied with services and facilities and are strongly attached to the idea of libraries. However, the report suggests this attachment is a nostalgic impulse that will diminish in time.

A 2006 Ithaka report on "Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education" found that the perception of libraries as a high-profile provider of information was on the decline among faculty. Though they continue to feel librarians are important, they don't feel the library as a gateway is as key as it once was, though that varies by discipline.

Over 80% of faculty in all disciplines feel the library's role as a purchaser of information is very important, and the importance of that brokerage has grown slightly over time. It should be noted that the study focused only on collections and the impact of the shift from print to electronic formats; it did not ask how the library supported student learning.

Project Information Literacy is still in its beginning stages, but it is poised to tell us a lot about how students negotiate the steps they must go through from near-total ignorance of a topic to finding some quality sources they can use.

For these students, the library is kind of like Robert Frost's idea of home, "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." They may not want to be there, they may not have any real curiosity about the topic they are researching, but the library is a gateway to the kinds of sources they need, and for at least some students the librarians are "saviors" who help them take an assignment and locate sources that will match. This study will help us get our heads around the library in the lives of our students.

The bigger picture
Beyond general qualities of user experience, which may be just as relevant in non-library contexts, and beyond how well a library fulfills an immediate practical need for faculty and students, what is the essential value of an academic library in an age of abundant information?

The identity of the library as a cultural institution remains potent for our constituencies, something we consistently underestimate. Though abundantly available recordings have certainly changed the way people experience music, that abundance never inspired the awe that Google's library digitization project did.

Nobody talked about Apple's "moon shot" when the iPod was born, yet digitizing the books in research libraries seemed as giant a leap forward for humanity as landing on the moon. That awe comes from the sense that within libraries, among all those books, exists the whole of human knowledge, that it encompasses not just the present but the past, that libraries are a testament to human imagination and knowledge itself.

While the web may be where we go first to find information, its billions of pages do not carry the same symbolic weight as libraries. We may recognize that this impression isn't entirely accurate—no library, no matter how vast, encompasses all knowledge—but we shouldn't dismiss that symbolism as mere nostalgia or poor "branding" that needs to be updated.

Libraries are also intensely local. They are responsive to a community's needs and unique character. No two institutions are identical, even if their catalogs list many of the same courses and programs. Researchers conducting the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education who have visited many campuses report that institutions that seem very similar in terms of mission, programs, and the students they enroll have utterly unique and palpably specific identities. Libraries reflect those unique identities and provide a place where the members of a community can comfortably come together and can feel at home in the world of ideas.

Finally, libraries embody principles that go beyond collections and beyond local needs. We stand for the importance of knowledge: not just information, but what we do with information. We stand for access: not just getting stuff conveniently, but making sure that information isn't censored or suppressed or distributed selectively so that only the elite have it.

We stand for the individual's right to ask their own questions, no matter how dangerous or disruptive they may seem. And we stand for the idea that pursuing questions is a valuable human endeavor. As the Darien Statements argue, philosophical principles like these run deeper than our commitment to a single institution or community. Fortunately for academic libraries, they tend to be entirely consistent with the academic enterprise and its core beliefs.

For some students, the library may be the place where they have to go to because they have a paper due tomorrow. For some faculty, the library may be the department that pays for the books and articles they need. But in a world where information is abundant, the library—your library—also has symbolic meaning that transcends its day-to-day uses. That symbolic meaning matters because in world of abundant information, the library's role in our culture goes far beyond mere information.

For those drowning in information, the library is land, a place where you can clamber up, catch your breath, gather your wits—and drink deeply.

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.

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