What a Provost Could Do | Peer to Peer Review
To make the most of our investment in knowledge, it takes a village—and a village leader Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Feb 17, 2011| Photo by Debora Miller |
I was talking with some higher education researchers yesterday about what provosts should be thinking about when it comes to libraries. Last year, when I gave chief academic officers a chance to vent in an anonymous survey, I was surprised at how positively they viewed what has to be a huge money drain on their stretched budgets. (A survey of chief financial officers would probably have produced less complimentary results.) But though it's good news that provosts think libraries are valuable and will retain their significance in a digital age and that librarians are largely doing a good job of managing their resources and providing responsive environments geared toward student needs, they did point out that we could do a better job of letting them know what's going on in our world. We might even try a spot of advocacy.
Librarians are so busy stretching a dollar and bridging budget gaps with stopgaps and workarounds that we don't spend as much time as we should documenting our needs, developing coalitions of supporters, or designing long-term solutions. Those things take time, and too many libraries that are coping with hiring freezes or staff cuts don't have it. Besides, they are issues that we can't solve by ourselves.
So, here's a memo to provosts everywhere: thanks for your faith in us, but things are not okay at the library. We need your help, and these are three places where you need to provide leadership.
First, we need to make sure that our investments in promoting student learning actually promote student learning
Too many libraries find it impossible to forge effective alliances with faculty to use the library's resources to their best advantage. We invest huge amounts of our instructional time in entry-level orientation because the low-status composition faculty are really focused on student success and are more amenable to inviting librarians in to conduct Library 101 than faculty who teach more advanced research courses. Most first year students think library sessions are lame, and between you and me, they have a point. Students are more likely to engage in higher order research skills in their junior and senior years—and thus to care about the things we talk about when we talk about information literacy.
We also know that students are much more likely to learn information literacy skills from instructors in their major than from librarians. Wouldn't our time be better spent working with faculty to help them help students rather than in trying to create information literacy programs by ourselves? Librarians are the first to admit that the faculty generally aren't jazzed up about librarian-led information literacy programs. That's where you come in. We need a provost to bring us together and provide support so that faculty learning can lead to student learning, not just in the first year but in every program on campus.
And heck, while we're at it, let's talk about the A word. Librarians are doing their best to figure out ways to assess learning, but it's not something we can do well by ourselves. Initiatives like Project Information Literacy are providing us with enormously useful insights, but even such well-designed studies can't dig into pressing questions such as "can students actually demonstrate that they know how to choose high quality sources?" Or "can students find and use evidence effectively in an argument?" Or "do students have the skill to assemble information from a variety of sources and draw accurate conclusions?" The kind of learning that we spend money on libraries for (which is deep and not easily measured with trivia like "can you correctly identify the Boolean operator that should be used in this search expression?") is too inextricable from classroom learning experiences for the library by itself to measure what actually matters, or to act on whatever such measurements might yield. We need our institutional research folks to work across boundaries to develop effective and affordable assessments that can inform both faculty and librarian teaching practices.
Second, we need to focus on learning when we invest in facilities
We've seen a dramatic change in the way libraries have positioned themselves on campus as physical hubs for students and as inviting spaces since Scott Carlson's story on "deserted" libraries was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education ten years ago. But are we really making decisions about our facilities that lead to learning, or are we just participating in the amenities race that has led to overpriced tuition bills, crippling amounts of student debt, and a growing perception that college is an overpriced consumer good? Are we investing in social spaces that lead to learning or just to more socializing? Obviously these are not separate categories. Learning is social. But just as faculty are better able to access the library from their desks, so rarely enter the building, the library space itself is trending toward becoming an attractive and pricey student center with an academically-themed decor.
We need provosts to get us all thinking more intentionally about how best to use the library's resources—in terms of space, as well as collections and people—in a way that will bridge the students' experience of libraries as a comfortable place to study and the faculty's growing belief that we exist mainly to pay the bills for the information they need. Which leads me to my third issue.
We have to radically reform publishing
You knew I'd say that, didn't you? But we are so close to going over the cliff. I am not exaggerating. It's not enough for libraries to conduct scholarly communications workshops and build repositories (in their spare time, with duct tape and string) or for daring faculty members to scrape together author fees to pay their way into openly accessible publications. These are well-meant, but they haven't achieved critical mass. We need institutional commitment. We need to get the creators of the research (faculty) into the same room with the people who provide them with the resources they use to create the knowledge (librarians) and not let them out until they have hashed out the issues, which include the following big questions.
- How can we reclaim the way authority is defined from commercial publishers? We count on publishers to decide what research is worth paying attention to even though researchers do almost all of the labor of vetting and filtering manuscripts for free—or rather (what am I saying?) as part of the work you, the provost, is funding with the ginormous-but-never-big-enough salary pool. Yes, there are administrative costs in publishing and yes, large-scale distribution of information isn't something you can do responsibly on the cheap. But how much of what we pay goes to erecting tollgates and policing the borders while conducting marketing campaigns? How much could we save if we didn't have to do that? How much goes into a hefty profit margin that does not return to the academy that created it? Are there some fields where we could start in which high-quality publishing can be done for a fraction of the cost and have a much higher impact than our current publishing practices can provide? I keep pointing out Open Folklore as Exhibit A, but hey, I can't help it. It's a really fine example of how the money we already invest in publishing can be leveraged for the common good rather than for profit without losing credibility or quality. It's time for us to question authority, the authority we have blindly vested in publishers' brands.
- What can we do to recalibrate our evaluation process for tenure and promotion to pay more attention to quality and less to quantity, to pose the question "so what?" more intentionally? Nobody should publish something they don't believe will matter just in order to promote themselves (quite literally). We can't afford it. If we poured more significance into one publication rather than finely slicing it into twenty, your budget would thank you. We'd save not only the cost of publishing and purchasing 19 articles, but we'd save the time it takes to comb through the research that grew 2000 per cent for no good reason, not to mention the time spent writing up, submitting, and reviewing the same results over and over. We need to stop this mindless CV inflation, and that takes leadership from the provost's office.
- How can we stop using publishing as a revenue stream that sustains scholarly societies? Guess what, people: the stream has almost run dry. If you aren't figuring out a new way to sustain yourselves other than through overpriced subscriptions and massive annual conferences that faculty can no longer afford to attend, you're plugging your ears and chanting "lalala" while your obituary is being written. Okay, this is a problem provosts can't fix, but you're the ones who get to balance the budget that covers publications and faculty travel. Collectively you provosts have clout. Use it.
- How can libraries continue to support their users' need for information while strategically reallocating resources from purchasing information to producing it? How can we retool our libraries' organizational structures and staffing to embrace functions that haven't been in our portfolio until now? How will libraries negotiate this new mission with the people who need our deep pockets to get the stuff they need right now and are going to complain loudly if we say no? We need a provost with vision to help us all manage this transformation.
I realize provosts already have a lot on their plates, and these are incredibly complex problems. No wonder it's easier to think your library director who isn't haunting your office is doing a pretty good job, that there's one direct report you can ignore as you wrangle assessment plans, stamp out fires in dysfunctional departments, and field complaints from helicopter parents. But if you want to strategically realign resources to improve both your institution's efficiency and to give it a higher national profile, investing more of your creative energy into the library will be worth it.
I almost forgot the best part. Remember why you got into higher education in the first place? It's hard to recall when there's an accreditation team breathing down your neck and 15 calls from agitated parents to return, but you took this job for a reason, and if you take my advice, you'll remember why. You wanted to transform the processes that advance learning. You wanted to make a difference, and here's your chance.
It won't be easy to tackle these issues, but someday you'll thank me.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
