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Community Forum: Research Libraries inthe Digital AgeDuane Webster a & Betty Sue Flowers ba Association of Research Libraries ,b Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library ,Published online: 13 Apr 2009.

To cite this article: Duane Webster & Betty Sue Flowers (2009) Community Forum: Research Librariesin the Digital Age, Journal of Library Administration, 49:3, 303-310, DOI: 10.1080/01930820902785405

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Journal of Library Administration, 49:303–310, 2009Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0193-0826 print / 1540-3564 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01930820902785405

Community Forum:Research Libraries in the Digital Age

DUANE WEBSTERAssociation of Research Libraries

BETTY SUE FLOWERSLyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library

ABSTRACT. This dialogue provides a summary and assessment ofissues discussed relating to research libraries and research univer-sities in a digital environment.

KEYWORDS interdependency, return-on-investment, productiv-ity, public mandate, librarianship, digital curation, open access,redundancy

DUANE WEBSTER

Betty Sue Flowers and I have been given the task of tying up the loose endsand making sure that we have charted the next steps and taken care of allthe unanswered questions. This is a community process: You must help tieup the loose ends and talk about what you have been most impressed within the course of these discussions over the past 2 days.

I’m going to suggest a way of structuring this discussion to make surethat there is, in fact, a broad-based exchange and not just one or two peopleoffering their viewpoints. I’m going to suggest that you reflect on the past2 days in terms of two aspects, or two lists. For you, what are some ofthe highlights that have come out of these discussions—comments, quotes,points of view, positions being taken, or something that has provoked you?Make a list of two or three of those items.

The other list that I’d like you to think about is what issues have wemissed. Where are the gaps in the discussions? Where do we need to continue

Address correspondence to Duane Webster, Emeritus Executive Director, Association ofResearch Libraries, 8240 Windsor View Terrace, Potomac, MD 20854, USA. E-mail: duane@arl.org

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this sort of exchange? What need to be tied up and pursued at greater length,maybe in a different setting?

This sort of relatively small-group involvement in a discussion that isstructured as this one has been structured has been enormously valuable incontributing to the process of exploring our future, sharing our experiences,raising issues, and debating points of view. The more our community cando that, I think the richer we will be. But, this is not a single exchange. Icertainly have to salute the University of Texas (UT) for putting this sympo-sium together, particularly with regard to the academic leadership in place,paying attention, and contributing to the design.

Having President Bill Powers here on the first day was terrific, as henoted his concern and interest in how we leverage the investment in ourresearch libraries as we look to the future. I think that’s a very critical pointof view that we’re all thinking about. Translating that point of view intocollective, massive, collaborative efforts is really a need that comes out ofour worlds today. It’s not going to be resolved with a single discussion atUT. We need to have additional discussions.

I’m going to ask Ann Wolpert of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy (MIT) and Brian Schottlaender of the University of California, San Diego,to comment on conversations about these same issues that have been takingplace among the Association of American Universities (AAU) provosts.

Every year, the provosts have a retreat in San Diego. It was yesterday.Whatever topics and whatever set of issues are currently bothering them areput on the agenda and discussed. This year, as has been the case for the pastfew years, libraries have come up as an important set of issues that they’rethinking about. I believe that the MIT provost came to Ann and asked forher help. Ann was the linchpin in putting this together, and I thought thatshe ought to say a little bit about the planning of this event.

Ann Wolpert

Whatever I’m going to say is under false pretenses, because the weathergods intervened and prevented my attendance. So, Brian Schottlaender didall the work. What I thought was interesting about this initiative was that theprovost at MIT is relatively new. He’s an electrical engineer. His response tobeing asked to organize a program for AAU provosts on the topic of librarieswas “we don’t have a clue.” So, he suggested that, instead of listening toourselves talking to one another about something that we don’t know verymuch about, we ought to invite people who actually know what’s going onto comment and have a conversation with us. That’s how the format of theprogram got teed up.

There were a couple of comments at this session that struck me as beingparticularly relevant to the framework that Brian and I set up for that meeting.

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One of them was Betsy Wilson quoting Jim Duderstadt to the effect that thefuture of the library may very well predict the future of the university. Thesecond was Karen Hunter’s comments about the value chain of the creationof new knowledge and how that new knowledge is created from a set ofinvestments and a research infrastructure that then produces peer-reviewedliterature that then loops back into that circle of virtue and feeds researchand education again and again and again in a dynamic cycle.

I think that many of us look at the current environment and at whatKaren described as the shifting landscape of responsibilities and wonderwhat the future of universities will be if universities lose control over thecost, terms, and conditions around our use of the intellectual content—orintellectual capital—that is created on these campuses. It was in that frame-work that Brian and I tried to queue up the conversations with the provosts,not around libraries as libraries but around libraries as the part of educationaland research institutions that manages this part of the environment for them.

Brian Schottlaender

Of the 60 provosts who could have been there, 40 were able to attend. So, itwas a good turnout. I’ll start with an anecdote. Ann had warned me that herprovost was relatively new, so I showed up for breakfast and made a smalljoke: “So, I understand that you’re relatively new.” He said, “Been there fora year; feels like 20.”

Basically, I went with the 11th-hour assignment of channeling Ann,which is never a mean feat, but I actually ended up channeling most of youwho are here today, because everything that we ended up talking aboutyesterday morning was talked about in more depth today.

I went with three messages that I wanted them to carry away. One wasrecognizing that the library is an interdependent agency. It doesn’t exist inisolation. Those interdependencies exist with other libraries. They exist withthe commercial sector. We’re responsible for the care and feeding of contentthat is increasingly interdependent. In many ways, digital content is the yinto analog content’s yang. We really can’t talk about one without the other.

The second message that I talked about was investment and all theactivities that stem from it. This is not language that librarians use. In aneconomic environment, one could very easily take the rhetoric related toresource allocation, asset allocation, and portfolio balancing and apply it tothe current library environment, all in the context of return on investment.The return-on-investment aspect was very much on the provosts’ minds.In California, when the Google deal was presented to the University ofCalifornia regents, return on investment was really their only interest andtheir only concern. The way that they articulated this concern was, how are

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you sure that the deal that you’re making today will be a good deal 30 yearsfrom now? Clearly, that concern ran through the provosts’ minds.

We also talked about the impact that we have on the productivity ofthe institution—on whether it manifests itself in the research-cycle time, asdecreases in that time, or whether it manifests itself in classroom productivity.Three things were pretty clear and would resonate with all of you with regardto what you’ve heard today and what I gather you heard yesterday. First, theirview of the evolutionary event horizon is shorter. First, there was discussionabout what the library will look like in 30 or 40 years. Within 10 minutes,it became abundantly clear that 30 or 40 years is not the event horizon thatthey think is actually going to transpire. In the provosts’ mind, the shift willtranspire much more quickly than they had expected. They think that 10 to15 years is much more realistic.

Second, they talked at some length about and agreed with AliceProchaska’s point that what will distinguish libraries in this new environ-ment is not general collections but, in fact, special collections, along withservices.

Finally—and this was really interesting—what Lorcan Dempsey, BernardFrischer, and John Unsworth talked about this morning was coming from theprovosts as well (although they did not use this language)—a focus on thefuture that, frankly, is less on the library qua institution and more onthe people who work in the libraries and the expert colleagues with whomthey work. In their minds, the focus was less on the library and more onlibrarians, which I thought was not only interesting but also heartening.

Similarly, they gave voice to three basic concerns in their conference.The first was continuing unease related to digital archives. The basic opinionwas, “Love it; give us more of it. But, we’re kind of nervous. Will it still behere 50 years from now?” They’re still nervous. They’re getting a little bit morecomfortable. It was nice to have Michael McRobbie there. He’s the provostfrom Indiana University. He’s a computer scientist, so he actually could besomewhat reassuring and could lend some credibility to my statement thatone way to avoid the medium going bad on you is to not stay with themedium too long. Keep moving it forward as quickly as you possibly can.

The second concern was the question of to what extent—and thisrelates to Lorcan’s comments regarding what constitutes the evidentiaryrecord—should libraries be responsible for facilitating access to and pre-serving information resources that are outside our typical purview. Theywere interested to hear about journals. They kind of got that. They under-stand that. They were interested to hear about books. They get that. They’reeven getting multimedia to a certain extent. They even get primary, raw datasets to a certain extent. They’re beginning to worry about blogs and wikisand things that are much more fleeting in existence.

Last, they had a real “thinking”—I don’t think “concern” is the rightword—about how to reallocate capital. It’s abundantly clear to the provosts

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that what Peter Lange from Duke University called “stack-like spaces”—notstacks but stack-like spaces—can be reallocated as the need for stacks disap-pears. I think that this notion of the reallocation of space no longer neededto handle collections has not escaped them.

I spent a considerable amount of time talking about the need for pro-ductive physical space, productive electronic space, enhancing the facultyspace, and enhancing the student experience. They were getting these issuesin a big way, but I also could see this little gleam in their eyes and notedlittle references to “we need classroom space.” All in all, I thought that theywere a very engaged group. All in all, I think they get it.

There was a little bit of fear about the 9,000-pound gorilla, the Googlegorilla, but that fear really had more to do with how is it all going to playitself out in the long term. One provost actually questioned whether Google’smotives were altruistic.

DUANE WEBSTER: The community certainly appreciates the fact thatyou’re located in San Diego and can represent the community as the As-sociation of Research Libraries (ARL) president. Of course, Ann, as pastpresident, just happened to be located at MIT and able to work with herprovost. Terrific. Thank you for that update.

It’s a good point on which to end, because I need to hand off to BettySue, but I’d like to emphasize again our appreciation to UT for puttingtogether such a useful array of perspectives in order to stimulate the sort ofthinking, reflection, and discussion that we’ve had over the past 2 days.

BETTY SUE FLOWERS

That’s right. I’m the wolf in sheep’s clothing among the lions and Daniels, Iguess, because I’m a federal bureaucrat, not an AAU person. My function isto sum up, to draw some threads together. I see seven threads that I thinkwould form the basis of a next meeting or a blog or something.

What Are We Overlooking?

First, what are we overlooking? What are the disruptive technologies thatmight create something totally unpredictable? A couple of years ago, I was ata MacArthur Foundation–funded meeting about the future of education andtechnology. We wanted to learn about Egypt, and we played with an avatarsystem. We designed what we wanted to look like. We went as a team toEgypt and learned about Egypt together. I was a different gender and verytall.

This was online, but we were collaborating. You guys are going to be in-volved in that—a gaming, online, interactive type of collaboration—becausewhat we love as human beings is to learn. We also love communication.

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We also love play, and the Starbucks in the library is an acknowledgment oflearning and play and communication together. That’s who we are as humanbeings.

So, one of the things that we might be overlooking is this behavingtogether in alternate, virtual worlds in which the whole world is the library.How do we build those?

Public Mandates

Second, are there differences between public and private universities, whichleads, I think, to the larger question: What is the public mandate for topuniversity libraries? As we get more expensive and as institutions of higherlearning get to be a bigger burden on the system as a whole, there are goingto be public mandates.

You better believe that they’re going to be unfunded. If we can think inadvance about what those possibly might be in this domain and are able toshape the conversation in advance, then it behooves us to think about thisfor the future, ahead of the unfunded public mandate that I believe is goingto come down the pike very quickly as our educational standing continuesto become lower in relation to the rest of this globalized world.

The State of Librarianship

Third is the profession of what used to be quaintly called “librarian.” Weused to think of librarians as people guarding the books. Now, both theprestige and the necessity of being informational technicians—the peoplewho know about archives—have become very interesting.

When I became the director of this presidential library, I thought that I’dget a lot of applications from people who wanted to work in the museum.Not so. It turns out that archivist is a very sexy profession. I have filingcabinet drawers that are full, and people write out of the blue to say, “I wantto be an archivist.” I actually saw someone with a T-shirt about archives.I don’t think that, when I was in college, most of us knew what the wordmeant. There’s something about content and the allure of lots of content thatis sparking a new interest in this profession.

You know how every academic would rank every department in auniversity. Physics is always at the top, and education is always at the bottom.I’d say that, in the past, the library school was right there with education, butit is rising. It is coming up in the world. Now is the time to take advantageof that curve in this profession as it comes up in the world really, reallyrapidly, so that other academics really do have a peer relationship in a waythat never was the case when the librarians were guarding the books.

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Community Forum 309

Curation of Digital Material

Fourth, in addition to what we are overlooking, public mandates, and thechanging profession, there is an issue of communication overload and cu-ration of material on the Web, both in quality and quantity, by the top-tieruniversities and their libraries. This is a key issue. We’re in the leadership ofit, and we have to articulate that to the outside world, including to students.

Open Access

Fifth, how will open access evolve? There’s a way to think about this. Myown experience is that, for $300 to $500, the New York Times sells some ofour images that could be downloaded for free off our Web site. I’m sayingthat because we’re happy for people to make money off our public domaindocuments, because the government never has enough funds to even haveserver space for the images, much less put them all on the Web.

The way to figure out how open access will evolve is to consider wherethe money is to be made. Again, this is another get-out-in-front opportunity,because there will be money made off access. Where will it be made? Maybethe next conference should have some of our business colleagues modelinghow money can be made in this world, because that’s where open accesswill go.

Redundancy

Sixth, the world of unnecessary redundancy—the model of nature—is abun-dant. So, instead of talking about redundancy, I would rather talk aboutabundance, where abundance is good, and where abundance clogs up thesystem. Nature is profligate in its play, and abundance is important, espe-cially at the edges of creativity. Wasteful excess is the hallmark of creativity.Just look at the stuff left on the cutting-room floor.

Behaviors

Seventh is a very important question about human behavior. We’re in themodel of Homer—that is, we compete to produce excellence. That’s ourmodel as academics. In the past, we did that through acquisition. Librariesand collections have the quote, “People only get excited about collections.”The strength and reputations of libraries were built on their acquisitions.Now and in the future, the power of information has to do with the capacityto access and organize. It’s not about acquisition. In the same way—and thisis a human question—collaboration is what we need.

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The poet W. H. Auden said, “We must love one another or die.” Thatapplies to libraries as well. But prestige is not in collaboration. I think thatwe’re at the forefront in the world of information, which is the forefront ofthe next evolution of humanity. I hate to be so large sounding, but I actuallydo think that this is really key.

I’m reminded of a conversation about this with my son. I went to ameeting of the Texas Philosophical Society, which Sam Houston foundedmany years ago. A speaker was trying to explain to older folks, who aremost of the people in the Texas Philosophical Society, that you soon couldhave an implant in your brain that would allow you to look up everything in,say, the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the image. I was on the panel,so I could see that everyone over 50 was looking horrified and everyoneunder 50 was looking intrigued.

I went home and said to my son, who was 10 at the time, “You know,somebody at the symposium talked about implants in the brain that youcould use to access knowledge.” He said, “Oh, cool.” So, I was thinking thatthere’s a whole cyborg phenomenon here that we haven’t even begun tothink about that is part of the evolution of humans in some profound way,of which, oddly enough, we find ourselves at the front.

So, I’m really delighted that we’ve collaborated and that you’ve takenthe time to come here to UT to share your thoughts and ideas. I’m glad thatyour two legs brought you here.

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