Library and Information Technology at Ursinus College: A Vision for the Future
Several strands come together that make it timely to re-imagine the future for the library and information technology at Ursinus College. The College is in the second year of a new presidency and the first year of implementing a new strategic plan. The maturation of linked information technologies is redefining how we interact with the world around us. How should we think about the world of libraries and information? What role are these entities playing in teaching, learning, and research? How will students, faculty, and staff interact with one another? How can the College seize the moment and position itself to make the best possible use of its assets to move boldly into the future? What follows is a framework for community conversation that is informed by the strategic plan.
In re-imagining the future of the library and information technology at Ursinus, there are strengths upon which the College can build:
There are also opportunities to exploit:
The vision has at its heart two goals for the information future of Ursinus:
It assumes that when making choices about that future, it will privilege solutions that are:
The vision builds on national trends in which libraries are becoming community learning spaces for students and that they increasingly bring various digital devices with them to study, do research, and work.
One question is the extent to which circulation of library materials, library support services, computer technical support, and hosting of digital computing devices can be merged together. Organizationally, can Catalogue Librarians, Library Technical Services, and Information Technology be merged into one unit, or should some functions be moved into another administrative or academic unit?
The answers to these questions will grow out of the conversations that this report may inspire in the Library and Information Technology Department and in the larger Ursinus community. Ursinus will learn what is possible through discussions that keep the user experience central. Merged organizational structures take time to mature and evolve: each institution will follow a different pattern. What follows is an aspirational vision, one that might put Ursinus at the leading edge of organizational change.
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Students walking into Myrin Library would encounter a world designed to facilitate their learning. A unified center would provide research help and technological support. It would lend both print materials and technological devices. It would hold workshops on demand for faculty and students, working collectively with them to redesign courses and to develop technology-rich assignments and research projects. New staff would be in hybrid positions, with each individual possessing deep subject expertise in an academic field.
The floor above would be reimagined to provide other student-facing services, including a writing center and a quantitative skills center. There will be group study spaces that are technology rich that can be booked online. The highest floor of the library would be quiet study space whose centerpiece would be a special collections department and reading room for the archives of the college and its unique print collections. The lowest level would house the engine room of the operation: the repair of machines, the technical aspects of the remaining analog library collection.
The digital life of the College would be refreshed through a reappraisal of the laptop program. Ursinus will choose and implement new administrative software solutions that inter-operate and make data available to the community through a central data warehouse. Faculty, students and staff would partner to utilize emerging technologies to co-create their learning goals and to produce new knowledge.
The College would present itself on the web as embodying knowledge production through the work of its faculty, students and alumni. The data in its various systems would feed into a robust web presence that draws upon its inter-operable systems to refresh itself from all areas of the College’s operations.
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The Organization
The merged organization should be re-imagined into one entity, utilizing the skills of the current staff in ways that matches their talents with the tasks and challenges of the present and the future. It should be led by a Chief Information Officer. The emphasis should be in following areas:
A group that partners with faculty and students to meet their research, teaching, and learning needs. Information technologists and reference librarians will provide access to digital and analog materials, lend hardware devices, and offer classroom and computer support. This group would engage faculty in re-imagining the use of the course management system and the College collection of digital and analog materials.
A group that facilitates the technological needs of the administration and the technological infrastructure of the community. Enterprise software specialists, systems administrators, and network administrators will coordinate the purchase, upgrade, and maintenance of hardware and software to support the operating systems of the College.
A group that collects and maintains the archives and records of the College and develops its special collections. An archivist and special collections librarian will work with faculty and student research projects that use the collections as well as mounting regular exhibitions.
The Building and its Collections
One floor of books should be relocated to a storage facility to make possible the re-use of space for student- and faculty-facing services. Institutional collaborations might make it possible to have access to more materials: for example, the College could place its relocated books into a depository owned by a major research university and develop a reciprocal regional borrowing relationship.
The purchase of new analog materials should be closely monitored, as should the cataloguing of gifts that have accumulated over the years. A collection development policy should be created that reflects the evolving proportion of analog to digital materials and their attendant costs.
Books remaining in the library should be those in active use by classes at Ursinus -- they could be grouped around interdisciplinary areas of study or by division. Spaces freed up by reclaiming space in the library building should be developed into group study and meeting areas. The library building could use as a principle that the higher the floor, the quieter the areas would become.
The Software and Hardware
The College should rethink its entire portfolio of administrative software and look for ways to build a coherent set of choices that can function as an enterprise system. The choices should emphasize user-friendly interfaces and supple inter-operability. The administration of the web should be rationalized as a partnership between the merged organization and college communications.
The Process
A set of conversations akin to those in which the College’s strategic plan came into being should be the engine for the realization of this vision.
Respectfully submitted,
Elliott Shore
September, 2012
i This page maintained by EDUCAUSE has a number of presentations on the various aspects of merged organizations. Much of the serious writing about this phenomenon was done about five to ten years ago: here is a dissertation that summarizes some of the findings from 2007. See also my article “Embracing Hybridity: The Merged Organization, Alt/Ac and Higher Education,” Journal of Library Administration 52/2 March, 2012 for a view from one liberal arts college.
Notes from Elliott Shore’s visit, 11/15:
Shore met with the Working Group on the Library of the Future and the Myrin Library staff; later, he held an open Salon for the entire faculty. Some additional notes from his visit follow (some of which may reiterate his statements in the report).
Working Group Members:
Meredith Goldsmith, John King, and Terry Winegar – co-chairs
Akshaye Dhawan (Comp Sci)
Roger Dawley (Bio)
Philippa Townsend (Religious Studies)
Dallett Hemphill (History)
Jon Clark (Sociology)
Gerard Fitzpatrick (Politics)
Missy Bryant (Director of First-Year Programs)
Andy Feick (Facilities)
Jenn Beigel (UC ’13; English [plans career in librarianship]
Julia Glauberman (UC ’14, History major/English minor, Library employee)
The goal of envisioning the Library of the Future: to keep the library a central intellectual hub of the campus, where students, meet, study, and learn together; to give them up-to-date resources and maximize possible resources; to give students an active stake in defining their spatial and intellectual resources.
* A number of SLACs have begun the process of moving some books to off-site locations and buying space remotely. Books are brought to the campus within one day’s time; students have access to the entire “host” sources. Occidental College has developed a relationship with UCLA, which our working group will research, and Bryn Mawr is embarking on a similar relationship with Penn.
*Goucher and Dickinson have reclaimed and revitalized their libraries in interesting ways. The committee will undertake site visits to these schools next semester.
Meeting with Library Staff:
Questions to consider: What needs to be in book form? What needs to be in digital form? What needs to be in book form here? What needs to be in analogue form here? (Practical approach: survey depts.—what are the 2,000 books you need the most?)
Ways in which Myrin is primed for physical renovation: no bearings walls; some asbestos, to which college would have to respond.
Myrin staff have desirable “soft skills” – they may need reskilling in technical areas
Economic challenges for libraries: cost of journals (STEM field journals are very expensive)
Favorite environment for Fair Use: Hathey Trust case, Orphaned Works Case.
Library could consider CLIR Fellows, who can teach in the academic curriculum but also perform functions essential to the Library (digital projects, for example). At BMC, projects are going on re the sesquicentennial of the school (Digital Collection of History of Women’s Ed, Special Collections Project). Such projects could be envisioned at UC for the upcoming 150th (2019).
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Notes from Salon:
Prior to 20th century, librarians were scholars. Librarians need to be connected to faculty, educational mission. Shore envisions a more synergistic relationship between library/resources and education than what typically exists today.
LAC library can be more connected to students than a research library is. Students need to go to the library, ask for help, physically access resources. For LAC library staff, connecting with students is part of their mission.
Convergence of library world: digital and analogue
* increasingly friendly US legal environment for fair us
*growing strength of alt/ac movement (CLIR Fellows), growing talent pool for 21st century librarianship (BMC parallel: Mellon funding fellows in digital curation [Medieval])
*increasing desire of larger institutions to partner with smaller ones (BMC + Penn, Occidental + UCLA)
*shifting nature of library work:
Things we should think about:
*Do we care about books? Digital things?
*Does print legitimate? Do monographs make a library? Is it legit if it’s not peer-reviewed?
*Is collaboration a dirty word?
UC is well-positioned: our strengths:
*Merged organization—lib and IT report to CIO
*good physical space that can be easily refreshed
*talented and dedicated staff
*strategic plan
*changing digital environment
*some aging software
*uniformity in hardware
For faculty, library is a place that provides materials; for students, it’s a place to gather as a community
How many books do we need on site? Each dept might consider the 2000 books they need the most. (20% of books circulate 80% of time.) Books that are bibliographically rich are especially valuable: instead of “shelf-diving,” why not think about “bibliography diving”?
Classroom implications:
Partnering, modeling—spending time in class doing more active info seeking, info literacy training
Florka’s New Jim Crow assignment—on-line annotations
HEAD Survey—information literacy: first-years and seniors could take, we could chart
Scholarly implications:
Thinking seriously about open-access, Public Library of Science, First Book Project (AAU Librarians,Provost, and Presidents group): first book of faculty member, accepted by an academic press, will be paid for by the college—on condition that it’s digitally available and free to entire world