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Digital Libraries and Librariansof the 21st CenturyNancy Davenport aa Council on Library and Information Resources ,1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Suite 500,Washington, DC, 20036, USA E-mail:Published online: 05 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Nancy Davenport (2007) Digital Libraries and Librarians of the21st Century, Journal of Library Administration, 46:1, 89-97

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J111v46n01_07

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Digital Libraries and Librariansof the 21st Century

Nancy Davenport

SUMMARY. New forms of scholarship and publishing are radicallyand rapidly changing the relationships among those who create, store,distribute, and use information. This paper will focus on the changes inlibrary collections and library information technology organizations, theresulting advancements in scholarly research, and will discuss the attri-butes, attitudes, and skills needed by the librarians of tomorrow to developthe strong connections between the academic disciplines and research li-braries that are essential for library development in the 21st century.doi:10.1300/J111v46n01_07 [Article copies available for a fee from TheHaworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>© 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Digital libraries, digital government, management ofdigital information, librarianship and digital information, staffing in thedigital library

Nancy Davenport is President, Council on Library and Information Resources,1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Suite 500, Washington, DC 20036 (E-mail:ndavenport@dir.org).

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Digital Libraries and Librarians of the 21st Century.” Davenport,Nancy. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Library Administration (The Haworth Information Press,an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 46, No. 1, 2007, pp. 89-97; and: Digital Information and Knowl-edge Management: New Opportunities for Research Libraries (ed: Sul H. Lee) The Haworth InformationPress, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2007, pp. 89-97. Single or multiple copies of this article areavailable for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.(EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].

Available online at http://jla.haworthpress.com© 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1300/J111v46n01_07 89

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Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this conference. Iwholeheartedly believe that these are some of the most exciting andchallenging times for libraries and librarians and almost wish I wereable to start a career all over again.

Some of you in the audience may know that I spent much of my ca-reer working with political bodies: the U.S. Congress, the National Leg-islatures of most of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe and withthe United Nations. Thus it should be no surprise that I might look to theliterature of political science for a framework for looking at digital li-braries and the staff who design and operate them. I also decided that Ishould do the research for this paper online. I have two reasons to sup-port that decision: (1) it’s about digital libraries, let’s see if it works; and(2) in some ways I operate in a fashion similar to any independentscholar or an information-seeking citizen. Unlike most of my col-leagues who have spoken at this conference, I do not work in a library. Idon’t have a vast array of subscription databases at my fingertips. Forsomeone whose most recent previous responsibilities were as the direc-tor of acquisitions for the world’s largest library, I feel a bit like the cob-bler’s child.

In 2001, Sidney Verba of Harvard University was invited to deliverthe Eckstein Lecture at the Center for the Study of Democracy on theIrvine campus of the University of California. His talk was titled: “Cul-ture, Calculation, and Being a Pretty Good Citizen: Alternative Inter-pretations of Civil Engagement.”1 In his talk he posits that citizenparticipation in politics is a crucial component of democracy, and study-ing how citizens do participate has become a mainstay of political sci-ence analysis of democratic politics. He argues that the theoriessurrounding individuals as rational actors and cultural explanations ofparticipatory behavior are insufficient to wholly explain citizen behav-iors. I’m neither going to reargue or refute his position here today, but Iwant to apply some of his analytic framework to our focus, digital li-braries. As Verba and his colleagues studied citizen participation theyidentified three sets of factors that foster participation: (1) being moti-vated to participate; (2) resources to invest in participation; and (3) mo-bilization. Now I’ll try not to harm his research by distilling his scholarlyand entertaining paper into a paragraph. Citizens participate in demo-cratic life when they are generally interested in politics or when they be-lieve their actions will have an effect and they want to influencegovernment. In determining the resources required for the activity, theybelieved they had sufficient knowledge and time to participate and theywere motivated to do so because someone asked them.

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My second set of framing issues is drawn from the report by JaneFountain to the National Science Foundation, “Information, Institutionsand Governance: Advancing a Basic Social Science Research Programfor Digital Government.”2 This report is the outgrowth of a 2-day work-shop of more than 30 experts gathered at Harvard’s Kennedy School ofGovernment in 2002 to participate in the development of an agenda fordigital government that was broadly based and multidisciplinary in na-ture. They started from the premise that though there were significantinnovations in information and communications technology, digitalgovernment was at a very early stage of implementation and further thatthe implications of IT for the future of government were only dimly per-ceived in spite a “stream” of commentary, some informed, some specu-lative, and some suspicious.

To turn to libraries, the digital era has been evolving in libraries overthe last 20 years. Librarians took the lead in much of the academic com-munity when they converted card catalogs into searchable databases.Then adding electronic journals to their paper subscriptions, and replac-ing bibliographic instruction with information literacy training and nowconverting unique holdings to digital formats so others can have accessfor scholarly purposes. We have been present and persistent in analyz-ing the myriad issues in developing systems to support access and pres-ervation. We have recognized the benefits that digital technology bringsto academic inquiry and policy analysis, and we have incorporated themat every possible point.

How would this be explained in Verba’s terms? Where are the moti-vation, the resources, and the mobilization? In looking at our professionthe motivation comes from multiple hallmarks: to be active partnerswith the scholars on our campuses, to ensure that students have the bestresources at their disposal and the skills to engage them for lifelonglearning, and our innate predisposition to simply push information atpeople. The resources to participate in digital library efforts could belooked at in two classic definitions of supply and demand. For supply,we have financial resources to purchase or lease new informationsources, but more important to my mind are the collections of uniquecultural materials that already exist and we have the staff that want towork in this new exciting field and curate converted collections. For de-mand, we have to look no farther than the typical college freshman whohas grown up with a mouse or a joy stick always at hand and who mergethe typical definitions of work and play as they swirl through cyber-space doing both.

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But I think the most interesting of the factors to explore is mobiliza-tion. Another perhaps innate characteristic of librarians is collaborationor cooperation. We belong to the same associations and societies andmany librarians have long lasting personal friendships that grew out ofprofessional meetings. When we decide to accomplish a task as enor-mous as creating digital libraries, there are colleagues to consult, thereare associations or organizational umbrellas to shelter the project and ifthere are not the right ones, we’ll create them. And admittedly, anothermobilizing factor has been the ability to secure funding for particularprojects from federal agencies or foundations.

Now let me return to the social science research program for digitalgovernment and see how it relates to our digital libraries. The workshopparticipants at the Kennedy School presented a research agenda that fo-cused on the intersection of IT, organization, and governance. They de-veloped four strategic areas for research: (1) Information Technologies,Governance and Organization; (2) Digital Government and Its Stake-holders; (3) Change, Transformation, and Co-evolution; and (4) Sys-tematic Research Design. Allow me to give you a couple of examples ofthe research questions they posed for digital government. How does ITinteract with the structure and processes of government organizations?How are government managers and policy makers using IT to developnew organizational forms or to modify existing forms?

Now let me translate those and other provocative ideas they posed:

• How does IT interact with the structure and processes of higher ed-ucation? Of my university? Of my library?

• How are university managers and policy makers using IT to de-velop new organizational forms or to modify forms?

• What are the impacts of IT on inter-institutional coordination andcollaboration?

• What policy and processes influence data integration and stan-dards? How do they do it?

• How do students actually use online information and services?• How are interest groups, scholarly societies, and student groups

using the Web?• What are the key emergent changes that might be empirically iden-

tified and described in scholarly engagement?• What is the impact of increasing use of information-based, net-

worked forms of organization on the institutional structures–forexample, oversight, budgeting, and accountability systems–thatregulate university life?

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Applied to digital libraries in the academic world, these questionscould be a compelling research agenda.

I think we have an opportunity at hand to begin to look at a part of thisagenda, to rethink professional education and continuing education,where I believe we have placed obstacles in the path of change and howwe define a librarian. And we need to create more points of entry intothe profession.

The Institute for Museum and Library Services has commissioned astudy that will help inform the curriculum of what the librarian in the21st century ought to have as competencies upon completion of theMaster’s degree. The principal investigator for the student is Dr. Jose-Marie Griffith, dean of the Graduate School of Information Studies atthe University of North Carolina. Dr. Griffiths has formed a national ad-visory panel to guide the study and CLIR is respresented by SusanPerry. We were especially happy to see this study be announced.

It is my proposition that graduate education has not kept pace withthe needs of the scholarly community. Or to say it in a more collegialway, the educational needs of librarians in order to be expert practitio-ners in their field have changed multiple times and the rate of change isincreasing. And the schools that educate librarians have not kept pace.Or to restate that in a more collegial way, we are expecting the graduateschool program to prepare both entry level librarians and senior manag-ers at the same time and through the same course work.

My second point is that we need to create other entry points into theprofession. Much of the work we do, particularly in academic librariesand in digital curation, requires much more in-depth discipline specificknowledge than we have needed in the past. I would make a third point:I would challenge us to realize that the entire profession has to be openand welcoming of colleagues with other competencies or we have to re-dress what constitutes library and information science.

We’ll explore this idea by examining a series of library settings thatrequire very different skills than are being taught in many graduateschool programs. And begin by looking at the paradox of libraries to-day.

A small liberal arts school in Ohio doesn’t have any staff in a librar-ian position. They hire librarians but the positions are described as li-brary-technology consultants. An LTC, as they are called, could beworking with a professor to set up the electronic reserves for next se-mester’s classes, or teaching a class in Dreamweaver or reconfiguringthe college’s firewall. This college has combined the library, academiccomputing and administrative computing and assigned all the manage-

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rial responsibility to the college librarian, now the Chief InformationOfficer. All technology used in the college’s teaching and learning pro-grams, and even the telephone system are the library’s responsibility.One could ask why the assignment went to the library instead of to theformer heads of academic computing or administrative services. Theanswer is that the library understood information management for thecollege-wide perspective and combined that intellectual frameworkwith the service attitude that is a hallmark of the library professional.The librarians were able to think holistically regarding the automationneeds of the campus.

To give another example, after attending a conference sponsored bythe Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) on managingdigital assets, one of the participants returned to his college and createda new position. The new position, the Digital Initiatives Librarian, willhave responsibility for managing the college’s digital assets. So, ratherthan filling an existing open position and hoping for the right skills to beattracted to the job, he acquired new insight on what expertise wasneeded in his institution and the vocabulary needed to describe the posi-tion so that the position can attract the candidates with the right skills fora job they can be excited about.

Another example: Several scholars at the University of Virginia havecreated a remarkable piece of digital scholarship entitled the Valley ofthe Shadow, a study of two towns in the Shenandoah Valley during theCivil War. One town was located at the northern end of the Valley anddid not hold slaves. The other town was at the South end, in a slave hold-ing state. Their scholarship brings together every scrap of evidence thatdocuments the social, demographic, and economic conditions of thetwo towns before, during, and after the Civil War. The working rela-tionship has been a trusted one among the scholars, their department,and the university library. But now one of the scholars is moving to an-other university. He has announced that he intends to create the samekind of digitally based scholarly work that will focus on the settling ofOmaha, NE. But the new site will have to draw on some of the underly-ing programming on the Virginia site. The Omaha site will parallel theShenandoah site. This scholar has just crystallized the dilemma: he istotally reliant upon the two libraries to keep his work alive, in parallelform. What kind of guarantee might he ask for? What kind of guaranteecould the librarians offer to him?

Another example: One of the most powerful uses of digital technol-ogy is to share scarce resources. Libraries have been digitizing their spe-cial collections. They have done this individually, in joint operations,

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and as a group created to do exactly that. But as the digital surrogates arecreated and exhibited, a new need arises: the need for curatorial skillsand subject knowledge. The collection created has to hang together. Ithas to tell a story. It has to exhibit scholarship in sufficient depth thatcollection development and curation, collection description and metadata,and collection use have to work seamlessly. It has to reveal itself to theuser who stumbles into the Web site more directly than to the scholarwho seeks the item or the entire site.

What do these few examples tell us about the kind of knowledge andthe kind of skills that librarians have to have in today’s academic li-brary?

At the liberal arts college in Ohio, we see the need for a director withvision to guide the integration of major programs within the college,ones which in some settings have been strong competitors for resources.In addition to vision, the director has to see how the pieces can make aprogrammatic whole and have the management skills to fashion the neworganization that is stronger than the contributing slices. The librariansworking in the merged organization need several equally strong sets ofcompetencies: a fluency in technology and its applications to the worldof teaching and learning, teaching skills to create and deliver a course toa classroom full of students, research skills to work with and supportfaculty in their research and teaching initiatives.

The librarian creating online collections has a different set of needs:many of the attributes of a museum curator are called for including deepknowledge of the underlying subject matter, contextual history, andpreservation talents.

The libraries charged with keeping digital scholarship of its facultymembers available for research not only have to have the technologyand the staff to do so, they have to have the will and the knack of collab-oration.

None of the examples I’ve given are out of the ordinary. Each institu-tion I’ve described is a real place and all people are talented colleagues.

We see plainly that new forms of scholarship and publishing are radi-cally and rapidly changing the relationships among those who create,store, distribute, and use information, and that change is happening firstin the academic community.

Libraries that have had large serial collections now have licenses touse or to use and archive large numbers of electronic serials. Multipleissues are solved by delivering e-content: all the cumbersome steps ofmanaging paper collections from check-in to tracing missing issues,reshelving materials after use, protecting them from mutilation and theft

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and preservation binding. The very supports of the building should besighing with relief that the enormous weight of serials collections is notbeing added to.

In a 2004 study published by CLIR that researched the nonsub-scription side of periodicals, changes in library operations and attendantcosts were compared between print and electronic formats. They alsonote that on campuses across the country digital technology is changingthe behaviors of both students and faculty as they seek information,even in disciplines rich in the world of print such as history and litera-ture. In the 10 or so years that libraries have been making the shift toelectronic resources, there have been conservative and exaggerated pre-dictions about the cost impact of such a change in format and in ser-vices. Some promised it would save oodles of money; others foresawthe possibility that business would be done as usual and that while costmight be higher, the benefits to the user combined with the streamlinedprocessing made the change worth it at almost any cost. Librarians alsosaw new ways of cooperating in purchasing or at least in negotiatingand the consortiums that came to life during the same period are theequivalent of professional buying clubs. But often when faced with abig deal purchasing option, we opted to buy in e-format titles we wouldnot have included previously and would have refused.

What have been some of the staffing changes? For one, few manuallabor tasks for which library technicians would be the appropriate level.Professional librarians still most often do even the cataloging of e-seri-als. The additional tasks that were added were the management oflicenses. Technology specialists were added to assure that the machineswere configured to comport with the terms of the license, and to runtests that reassured us that data was not corrupted. Lawyers were addedto the mix in ways never seen in the old model of pay a subscription andget 12 issues. Suddenly we were all worried about who or what was au-thenticated or indemnified.

Scholars and librarians are forming new intellectual partnerships.Creators and publishers of scholarly resources are seeing how theirbusiness decisions–not just those of libraries and archives–can influ-ence or impede access to information resources in the future. Librariesoffer vastly different content, research methodologies and services fortheir faculty members and students than they did 15 or even 10 yearsago. They are organized and operate differently and frequently morecollaboratively than in the past.

Today’s information professionals require new skills and expertise towork effectively in an environment characterized by rapidly evolving

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technologies and organizational structures to cope with the diverse de-mands of information seekers.

The Council on Library and Information Resources is actively study-ing, publishing, and testing assumptions about the Librarian of the 21stcentury. We believe our role is to be a catalyst–to move the scholarlycommunications process forward, to identify needed linkages betweenacademic disciplines and research libraries and the traditional and digi-tal information resources that support them, to help prepare informationspecialist with the tools they’ll need. We are particularly interested inworking with faculty and information technologists who collaborate inbuilding digital resources for scholarly research in teaching. In additionto the research, we are prototyping a program that proposes a differentroute to academic librarianship. This model requires deep knowledge ofa subject area in the humanities, an intensive orientation program in aseminar setting, and close supportive mentoring by a librarian well es-tablished in an academic setting.

In conclusion, I’ve been very excited by the developments in aca-demic libraries as I traveled to campuses over the last six months. Whenwe think broadly about the libraries we are developing today for the newcrop of students and scholars, and about the developments announcedby Google for the digitization of 19th century materials, it appears thatwe will distinguish our institutions one from the other by the serviceswe can deliver applying academic inquiry tools to digital collections.It’s not too soon to decide that we don’t all have to study cataloging ormemorize 200 reference sources.

Thank you for the invitation to participate.

NOTES

1. Sidney Verba, “Culture, Calculation, and Being a Pretty Good Citizen: Alterna-tive Interpretations of Civil Engagement.” (2001). Center for the Study of Democracy.Paper 01-01. http://repositories.cdlib.org/csd/01-01.

2. Jane E. Fountain. Information, Institutions and Governance: Advancing a BasicSocial Science Research Program for Digital Government. Harvard University. RWP03-004https://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP03-004/$File/rwp03_004_fountain.pdf.

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