ACRL 2011: Programs Stress Outcomes To Show Impact, Financial Value of Academic Libraries
By Michael Kelley Apr 4, 2011The ACRL 2011 conference held in Philadelphia, March 30 to April 2, had as its motto "a declaration of interdependence," which frequently spurred the more than 3000 attendees from 24 countries to discuss the flexible thinking and agile politics crucial to the future value of academic research libraries. (UPDATE: There were 3,533 face-to-face and virtual attendees, and if exhibitors, speakers, and guests are included the figure is more than 5,300, the highest combined registrant participation ever, according to ACRL.)
From Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget), the computer scientist who exhorted academic librarians "to invent a new form of ritual inconvenience," to Mary Ellen Davis, the executive director of ACRL, who prescribed an ever more stringent accountability, the host of panels, papers, and presentations---more than 300 in all---confronted the conference-goers with a multitude of angles from which to contemplate interdependence and value.
Demonstrating research libraries make a difference
"I think the relevance and usefulness and effectiveness of libraries are questioned more than ever," said Davis at a March 31 panel session, the "Value of Academic Libraries," that drew an audience of about 400. "The library as the heart of the institution is no longer acknowledged," she said. "The library has gone from being a core value to a cost center, and the university has sent us the bill. That's a big change and we have to get ready for that change."
The political atmosphere and the concomitant fiscal constraints have generated "many calls for external accountability" and compelled librarians to participate in conversations about their value, Davis said. (Even as Davis spoke, the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education was circulating at the conference, compliments of Gale Cengage, which contained a backpage commentary about Pell grants with the headline "$44-Billion Ought to Buy Some Accountability on Campuses.")
"We have to demonstrate what we are doing is making a difference, how it is making a difference, and what it is making a difference to," Davis said. "We really have to align ourselves with the overall mission of the institution and demonstrate that we're contributing to that being successful."
Earlier the same day, James Neal, VP for information services and university librarian at Columbia University, delivered a paper or, in his words, a "polemic" against "the insanity" of return on investment and other qualitative measures of academic success, calling ROI "a relentless and in many ways foolish effort to quantify impact in the face of budget challenges and the questioning of our continuing relevance to the academy in an all-digital information world."
Nevertheless, he said the 2010 ACRL report on the value of academic libraries (the subject of Davis's panel) was a positive development, because it demonstrated in a model way the complexity and rigor of value research, and the need to focus "our attention on two areas: financial value and impact value. It also emphasizes the critical migration away from [collections] to services supported by staff expertise that results in value for users."
Or, in the words of Megan Oakleaf of Syracuse University's iSchool who authored the report and sat on the same panel as Davis, "[Library] use is not enough .... The mantra is focus on outcome, not the dirt but the plant that grows from it."
A defense of elitism?
Lanier was one of four keynote speakers, and he told an audience at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on April 2 that, to maintain their value, books and librarians have to be romanticized; that the notion of the library as a special place of reverence and elitism—despite its democratizing history—must be reanimated; and that the library should not maximize convenience in the name of access.
| Jaron Lanier says librarians have a "precious role." |
"To the degree you make access too automatic, too bloodless, too scentless, too lacking in commitment, you will commit the same kind of suicide that the music world did by destroying the specialness of the very thing we care the most about. So the thing to do, I mean, to put it bluntly, is to invent a new form of ritual inconvenience. You have to do that or you won't survive," he said.
But Lanier looked further into the future, and he saw academic research libraries surviving in new ways.
"My sense is that the future of the academic research library has to concentrate around two opposite poles...." Lanier said. "One of them has to do with becoming ever more personal, more human, as the world is more and more aggregated by the giant [computer] servers.... The other point has to do with... an enormous number of data collection tasks that nobody is going to do that it seems to me become part of the long-term...function of the research libraries in the coming decades."
As an example, Lanier cited the "heterogeneous simulations" that tsunami and earthquake researchers did before the recent disaster in Japan. The hydrologists and the geologists did not share the data from their simulations, with fatal results.
"I think this notion of combining heterogeneous data is not going to come out of the individual academic disciplines because they are bullheaded," Lanier said. "That's the job of your descendents."
Lanier also pointed to data "that can't be correlated legally outside of a special place." For example, suppose a medical researcher wishes to have access to data inside a server that is controlled by Google or Facebook.
"At some point, if these computers continue to exist at all, there will be crucial moments when somebody other than the proprietor has to have not just access to some specific part of it with a subpoena because of a crime but rather generalized access in order to understand things like public health issues and that sort of thing," he said.
Research libraries may be able to obtain a special legal status that allows them to open up and correlate data between the various capsule servers.
"Twenty years from now somebody's going to have to do it and who else would it be? It is a natural thing to consider."
He also lauded librarians "as folklorists of human knowledge" whose insights are invaluable and necessary since they encompass areas that search engines, with their dependence on keywords and links, miss.
"The notion of a profession and individuals who care enough about knowledge to fill those blind spots...there's no way to automate that, there's no way artificial intelligence is going to grow to fill that. That's a precious role," he said.
An opportunity in digital textbooks
Other presenters at the conference such as Eric Frank, the CEO and cofounder of Flat World Knowledge, saw more immediate, concrete opportunities where, if libraries prove agile and flexible enough, they can demonstrate their value. Frank was part of a panel on April 2 dealing with opportunities for academic libraries in the exploding field of digital textbook sales, where a new business model is being sought to militate against the prohibitive costs of textbooks.
"I think libraries have a huge role to play.... [A]s an entity on campus you are the one institution who has lived through a shift from print to digital, who does actually understand licensing, who actually understands subscription purchasing, and I think that there's an opportunity to 'overstep' the traditional bounds of the library in a scholarly research role.... [T]this is a perfectly appropriate role for the library to play in helping to aggregate and distribute digital learning materials to the campus community...."
Frank described a scenario he recently discussed with officials from a large university, which he did not name.
"The school would do an institutional licensing agreement to license a bunch of digital textbooks in a whole range of formats," he said. "The library would be the host entity...so the student could come into a class, be validated, and log into the library's system and have access to that textbook in a bunch of different digital formats." He said that the instructional technology organization would have an API into the library's database, and the campus bookstore would offer print-on-demand services via the library interface.
"It's a fantastic model. It's not easy because it doesn't generally exist but it works and I think there's a real opportunity [for libraries]," he said.
A report from the assessment frontline
Many librarians at the conference were not just speculating about things to come. They were reporting on what they have already done to demonstrate their value-in areas such as student retention, graduation rates, or student and faculty success-and how this had redounded to their credit in negotiations for needed resources.
Carolyn Gutierrez and her colleagues at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey detailed in a poster session how they initiated an assessment process using their LibQUAL+ results.
"The administration was very impressed that the librarians, who have no particular expertise in this, formed, without prodding from above, an assessment committee that looked at our LibQUAL results from 2005 and 2008 and analyzed it in great depth," she said. They presented their report to the council of deans, the provost, and the president.
"We were able to extract things that we wouldn't have been able to just by complaining," Gutierrez said.
She cited money for new carpeting and better lighting, as well as the reclamation of study rooms that had been overtaken by faculty offices.
"The data from the assessment helped make the argument in a way that they are much more receptive to than if we had just said 'Look, we need this,'" she said. "And also it helped that they were impressed with us for doing this."
The conference also offered a virtual conference with podcasts, live Webcasts, and slidecasts that allowed people from all over the world to participate. By one count, the conference generated about 8600 Tweets (#acrl2011), which ACRL has assembled with widgets here.
