17Capacity

Capacity and Capability: How can Library and Information Services Make Sure They Succeed?

Derek Law

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0732-067120160000035012

ABSTRACT

Purpose : The chapter is a personal opinion piece designed to provoke thought and discussion.

Methodology/approach: It reviews the ways in which libraries have responded to technological change over the last 50 years.

Practical implications: The focus is very much on higher education libraries, however the conclusions also have general applicability. The chapter concludes that libraries have to rethink their approach to services and accept a cultural change which embeds them as part of an information flow rather than a filter for the organisation and encourages them to focus much more on integration with corporate mission. There are real implications for the practice of libraries and for a rethinking of their social value and nature.

Originality/value: The chapter synthesises many strands of thought and the practical recommendations for change are of undoubted value to the reader.

Keywords: Library; information services; higher education libraries

INTRODUCTION

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, libraries prided themselves on being early adopters of the new technology and celebrated in a somewhat self-congratulatory way their ability to transform ancient practices incrementally. In parallel there was a growing tendency to see publishers, especially journal publishers as the price-gouging enemy, rather than another element in the information chain. By the end of the century it slowly became clear that what had actually arrived was a period of disruptive technology heralded first by the World Wide Web and then by the Cloud. The question then arises of whether libraries and librarians have the capacity and the capability to change and adapt. The metaphor to be used here is that of gardening. Prior to the industrial revolution, English stately homes had spent the time following the restoration of Charles II creating gardens in the style of the French royal gardener Andre´ Le Notre. He famously built the royal gardens at Versailles where formal neat box like spaces formed beautiful patterns but in which the carefully delineated spaces did not interact and where his formal title for at least some of his life was ‘Draughtsman of Plants and Terraces’. This approach changed in the late seventeenth century when the hugely imaginative Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown literally transformed the landscape and used the disruptive new tools and power of the industrial revolution to create a new concept of gardens. His style produced vistas of smooth undulating grass, running from the horizon to the country house or stately home, filled with clumps, belts and scattering of trees and pleasingly shaped lakes which were formed by invisibly damming small rivers, and with small neat bridges crossing them. The landscape was peppered with the herds of animals which provided for the great house. Some of this was achieved by his adoption of the sunk fence or ha ha which confused the eye into believing that the individual features offered a single connected, coherent and elegant view from house to horizon rather than being the product of sophisticated use of technology.

Creating such effortless coherence is then the challenge facing libraries today. It requires us to move out of our formal boxes to work with all those in the information chain to provide elegant access to an [apparently] seamless but connected world of information. This chapter is based on the author’s personal experience in UK Higher education, but it is hoped that the views expressed will be seen as having a wider sectorial and geographic application.

BACKGROUND

From ancient times to almost the end of the last millennium, libraries remained largely unchanged. They built collections of material presumed to be of use to users, selecting, cataloguing and storing items to be used by readers. The role of the librarian was to collect, preserve and help users exploit what was in the collections. Almost without exception the entire university passed through the doors of the library. No serious researcher, scholar or undergraduate could work without the collections of the library and, later, the inter-library loan service. There was as yet no national library service and very little co-operation with other libraries beyond the local. According to the Dempsey Paradox (Dempsey, 2010), this was the time when researchers were time rich and information poor, so that local collections had to be mined exhaustively and librarians who knew the collections in detail were integral to research. International co-operation and travel existed, but remained unusual, and in any case there was no record of what other library collections might contain until some libraries began to publish their library catalogue in book form.

This began to change from the mid-twentieth century with the arrival of computers. Libraries were early adopters of this technology, and so-called library automation began. In truth what was undertaken was library mechanisation, since the technology was simply applied to existing practices to make them more efficient. Thus it was library catalogues, not library collections which were put online. Book circulation was put online not content delivery and reference services involved e-mailing the reference librarian who looked things up in books, rather than providing access to content. With hindsight, we can see that what seemed to be the perceptive and incremental use of technology to enhance library services was actually a dead-end, retreating into Le Notre style boxed terraces surrounded by impenetrable but neat hedges (Carr, 2007).

That the library world had begun to suffer disruptive change by the mid-1980s was not evident to librarians, but was evident to others. As the novelist David Lodge presciently noted in his 1984 novel of academic life Small World:

… information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo, it’s no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: jet travel, direct-dialling telephones and the Xerox machine. Scholars don’t have to work in the same institution to interact, nowadays: they call each other up, or they meet at international conferences. And they don’t have to grub about in library stacks for data: any book or article that sounds interesting they have Xeroxed and read it at home. Or on the plane going to the next conference. I work mostly at home or on planes these days. I seldom go into the university except to teach my courses. … As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters - the global campus. A young man in a hurry can see the world by conference-hopping. (Lodge, 1984)

Of course, such disruption is not unique to libraries. From the Luddites protesting over the new labour-saving technology of power textile looms to the taxi drivers currently protesting about Uber’s use of new technology, the pattern is all too predictable. The protesters are not inherently against the technology but like the Luddites afraid of losing their livelihood. And so libraries and librarians continued to mechanise their operations but began to wage war on both publishers and library users as they defended their position.

Publishers were beginning to move their output to digital format, notably in the area of scientific journals. At the same time the industry was being concentrated into a smaller number of publishers who were seen as heartless profit-driven fat cats. Libraries responded first with the use of their collective purchasing power to gain better deals, then later with the push towards open access in an effort to undermine the commercial publishers. There was also a confused approach to library users. On the one hand libraries were at the forefront of providing user access to computers, offering ready access to desktop computers when these were rare and laptops unknown. At the same time barriers were placed in the way of users. Initially Internet database searching was mediated, carried out by library staff, since the formulation of search strategies was considered beyond the grasp of users. Then when CDs arrived, there was a grudging acceptance that users could undertake such searches - but only after undertaking a training course. And there was a widely expressed view that such technologies were a transient flash in the pan which caused rather than solved problems. (Law, 1990). Library collections were still being built and user preferences were either ignored or dealt with through conventional interlibrary loan channels.

LIBRARY DODOS

A recent light-hearted book entitled 21st Century Dodos (Stack, 2014) drew attention to rapid changes in technology and society between about 1950 and 2000 and listed and described a whole series of artefacts and events which would be familiar to the reader, but after a brief flourish were already extinct and would never be known by the reader’s children and grandchildren except in museums. The list was long and varied and included: the fax machine, cassette players, Net Cord judges in tennis matches, rotary dial phones, holiday postcards, milk bottle deliveries, Concorde, handwritten letters, typewriters, countries that no longer exist (such as Yugoslavia), 80 column punch cards, etc. The list was never intended to be exhaustive but is sadly accurate. Ironically, libraries have bought and shelved the book in their collections, apparently without considering whether they themselves, or at least part of their traditional functions are not also dodos.

Libraries appear to remain besotted with formats rather than content. And yet many of those formats have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing, mainly as a result of digitisation. The large printed catalogue, such as the National Union Catalogue, which used to fill up dozens of metres of shelving has gone. The printed bibliography has almost entirely disappeared1 the printed scientific journal - or at least expensively bound backfiles - has almost entirely gone - or at least is wholly unnecessary; newspapers and newspaper reading rooms have disappeared. Even the British Library Newspaper Reading Room at Colindale closed in 2013.

Although some reference works are still published, encyclopaedias are a format of the past as users have largely migrated to the web and Wikipedia. Even the computer printout is in steep decline as apps such as Dropbox allow the sharing of documents and papers in electronic formats (Crothers, 2012). The future of the academic book itself is in serious doubt. Typically the average academic monograph sells around 250 copies priced at £80 with an average discount to booksellers of 30%. This brings in a gross £14,000. After paying for the direct costs of printing, paper, marketing, copy editing and typesetting, around £7,000 is left to go towards the editor’s salary and other overheads. Like shaving a pig it is a lot of work for a little wool (Gasson, 2004). In addition print scholarly book sales have been and are in decline. Recent research published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing finds that sales now average 200 for each title, as opposed to 2,000 in 1980 (Willinsky, 2009). And even when the books are purchased to build library collections there is strong evidence of limited use. The common estimate is that 40% of all books in academic libraries never circulate (Esposito, 2012). It is then all too easy to make the case that the decline of so-called dead tree format is inexorable and that the Canute like stance of all too many libraries is not sustainable.

Many library services also look like relics of the past. Libraries still cling to legacy services which are capable of being moved to the web and in some libraries have been. In-house binderies have almost all disappeared; cataloguing can be outsourced; the issue desk can be replaced by self-service loans and even reference can be made an interactive IT-led activity.

COLLECTION BUILDING AND COLLECTION MANAGEMENT

Collection management and collection building have often been treated as synonyms but are in truth quite different and increasingly separate activities (Law, 1991). Librarians have traditionally seen it as part of their distinctive role to select books and journals and to build specialised collections for tomorrow’s as well as today’s use. The specialised collection was and is still seen as defining the library’s role and relevance to the community. The library’s services and values then centred around these collections. This traditional academic library has been elegantly and eloquently described by Rick Anderson in a paper describing the views of young librarians taking part in an essay competition looking at library futures:

A librarian-built, just-in-case collection is at the core of the traditional library’s service model and of the value proposition it makes to its sponsoring institution. Historically, virtually all of the library’s practices and service offerings have centered on that kind of collecting and that kind of collection: reference services and bibliographic instruction focused largely (though not exclusively) on helping patrons use the collection; catalogers cataloged the collection; collection-development staff selected materials for the collection, and acquisitions and serials staff ordered and processed those materials. Interlibrary loan, special collections, even IT services were all focused either significantly or exclusively on management of the collection itself and access to it. If the young librarians who wrote these essays are correct, then library employees like me are basically feeding on a carcass. (Anderson, 2015)

USERS

Users too are changing. Prensky’s hotly debated model of digital natives and digital immigrants has been much cited and much maligned but as with climate change denial, the weight of evidence seems overwhelming. The model has itself been refined, using the less divisive terminology of digital residents and digital visitors (White & Le Cornu, 2011). The amount of time 8- to 15-year-olds spend on the Internet has more than doubled over the last decade, Ofcom’s most recent report (Ofcom, 2015) in to media attitudes among children and parents found both a steadily growing use of Internet resources, but also a growing inability to filter ‘good’ information from ‘bad’ information, to separate the true and impartial from the special pleading or the plain wrong. Some 8% of children who use the Internet believe that information from social media websites or apps is ‘all true’ doubling from 4% last year and most 12- to 15-yearolds are unaware that ‘vloggers’, or video bloggers, can be paid to endorse products. Almost a fifth of online 12- to 15-year-olds (19%) believe information returned by a search engine such as Google or Bing must be true, but only a third (31%) are able to identify paid-for adverts. The study also found that children are increasingly turning to YouTube for ‘true and accurate’ information. Some 8% of the children studied named the site as their preferred choice for current information up from 3% last year. But just half of 12- to 15-year-olds who watch YouTube (52%) are aware that advertising is the main source of funding on the site, and less than half (47%) are aware that vloggers are often paid to favourably mention products or services. Sites such as Buzzfeed, YouTube, TED lectures and even podcasts as well as social media in general have transformed the way in which digital natives gather information. In turn there is an emerging skills gap in assessing the quality of this information. The problem is not information overload but filter failure (Shirky, 2008).

The number of devices connected to the Internet is increasing dramatically. It has been estimated that by 2020 there will be 50 billion networked devices connected, up from 500 million in 2003. In other words there will be seven networked devices for every individual on the planet. This influences equally dramatically how users interact with information (Alleyne, 2015).

THE LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE

Institutional Mission

As is so often the case Lorcan Dempsey has encapsulated the dilemma facing libraries in his blog:

As regular readers know, ‘network level’ is a favourite expression of mine. This question is interesting because of the transition we are working our way through. Libraries tend to be institution-scale in reach as they were organized as a pre-network response to information management. In that context, institutionally based services make sense. For example, information materials were acquired and made available to the local population on a just-in-case basis. The institution remains the appropriate scale for many activities. However, researchers may now be drawn to newer network level approaches which aggregate supply and/or attention across the network, or across a discipline. Think for example of initiatives like ICPSR, SSRN, Repec, Arxiv or more generally of Google Scholar or Twitter. At what scale will researchers look for applications to do their work institution, collaborative group, discipline, network? Where does it make sense to let services be provided by external network level providers and where should the library provide services? There is no right answer of course, and practices are shifting. (Dempsey, 2011)

New Forms of Content

Although the majority of libraries will have to manage their legacy content and in some cases retain much of it, the need to distinguish the medium from the message will become increasingly important. Vast quantities of information are available to the user, either online, through the cloud or even in paper form faster and cheaper than off-site delivery or inter-library loan. Immediate and global access is available 24 × 7 through Internet search, e-commerce; book digitisation; one penny books on Amazon, Abebooks, print on demand, kindle instant delivery and massive digitisation projects, such as the Europeana Newspapers project offering twenty million pages of newsprint. As the references to this chapter demonstrate, the range of material used in a scholarly article has changed out of all recognition in the last decade or so. No longer do citations list only monographs and journal articles. They may include blogs, online articles, papers in repositories, powerpoint presentations on Slideshare, raw data and so on.

A significant element in this new content is the ability to add a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which identifies content uniquely. Originally developed by and for publishers and treated with great suspicion by libraries when first introduced, the DOI now allows individuals or organisations to provide a unique identifier to all forms of output, thereby making it more reliably accessible. As most libraries move from collection building to collection management, demand-driven acquisition using subscription models to deliver e-books and content will increasingly have an impact as the normal method of information delivery. This new approach to meeting reader needs has become commonplace remarkably quickly, with a rapid and continuing growth in take-up (Zeoli, 2015). Although such new content is wholly disruptive to old models of working and thinking it can be used as a challenge to relocate the library’s role to the centre of the community served (Schmidt, 2015).

Cloud-based content will have to be managed rather than collected. Huge new categories of content have become available electronically and are required by readers. Short term loan e-books and demand-driven acquisition will require libraries to focus on defining and meeting readers needs through subscriptions to such services. To this rapidly growing area of content we can now add streamed content of all sorts. Again usage is subscription based and aimed at meeting current user needs. This requires a quite different set of skills from the traditional library collection building. There are significant budget-management issues as well as a much greater focus on the needs of current users. Dempsey again neatly encapsulates the problem and its consequences.

‘One downside of this fragmented systems and collections environment is that it becomes more difficult to build services out on top of the collections. Too much effort is going into maintaining and integrating a fragmented systems infrastructure. This becomes more of an issue as the pressure on the library to be seen to be “making a difference” grows. Increasingly, the library needs to bring its services to the users within their work- or learnflow, and be seen to be adding value to the collection of resources’ (Dempsey, 2014).

Change in the Library’s Local Role

Despite this shift to web-based content, the future of the physical library remains a matter of debate. Even the need for a physical space called the library has been called into question in recent decades. In a seminal paper in 1978 Lancaster stated ‘We are already very close to the day in which a great science Library could exist in a space less than ten feet square’ (Lancaster, 1978). President Ronald Reagan made the same point in a speech to the English Speaking Union where he pointed out that the United States had the technology to put the entire information of the Library of Congress into a space the size of a telephone booth (Reagan, 1989). This debate remains alive. At the extreme end of the spectrum are those who believe that the library as a space is dead (Stachokas, 2014). The future library will exist as ‘an organizational unit, not a building or physical facility’. Technological determinism decrees that resistance to this change is futile. But most organisations still see the library as a necessary shop window for the representation of institutional mission. New libraries continue to be built at a remarkable rate in a time of economic problems.

And it is clear that users wish to have and value that space, including the presence of physical books if not the use of books (Smith, 2014). But the function of space in the library has to change to meet user needs. A study at the University of Manchester (Wilkinson, 2013) found that students want spacious group areas to support new ways of learning and social spaces such as cafes and relaxation areas that allow them to spend extended periods of time in the building. And so the concept of ‘rightsizing’ (Ward, 2015) has emerged. Libraries need to scale back dramatically the size of their legacy collections, move to digital acquisition and be seen as places for knowledge creation, collaboration and interactive learning.

Institutional Role

But the library also has the opportunity to move much further in its local role in delivering the institutional mission. It can become the collector and authoritative source for institutional output (Lynch et al., 2015). Institutional repositories have moved in this direction, but there is a clear space to become the collector, manager and disseminator of research output, of institutional papers and publications and their data, recording and preserving everything from lectures, to podcasts, to graduations or even local events and to take on a long-term preservation role for this material. But this can be taken much further through the use of social media. Everything from managing Wikipedia entries about the institution and its staff to ensuring publications are posted on Researchgate or Academia.edu and even using social media such as Twitter or LinkedIn to promote institutional output all help to meet institutional mission (Thomson, 2016).

The allocation of DOIs will help to make non-traditional output more accessible. And if the information managers do not take on this role at an institutional level, who will? Universities have become obsessed with their position on league tables both for research and for student recruitment. Libraries can help to ensure that institutional output is given prominence and by extension is more read and more cited through the use of social media.

As users’ habits change it is also becoming clear that the unfortunately named activity of user instruction can become a central focus. The ability to select, evaluate, use and cite reliable information is not innate and it is clear that academic skills training will be crucial in supporting users to as they try to navigate the increasingly complex world of information, make judgements about relevance and most importantly quality, and correctly to cite their sources.

Staffing

All of this poses huge challenges for library staff and the skills they require. Amongst those who recognise the need for a significant reappraisal of the role and function of library staff, the phrase ‘New Era Librarian’ has emerged (Hashim & Mokhtar, 2012). It is also the case that these are generic

professional issues relevant to all sectors of the profession and not just to universities or the public sector. For example, the LAC Group, self-described as a ‘boutique agency for temporary personnel serving the law library community in Los Angeles’ makes it clear that this development and refashioning of the skills of the librarian is not unique to universities and public sector bodies. Their Chief Operating Officer (COO) identifies the five critical skills as: information curation; in-depth, high value research; digital preservation; mobile environment; collaboration, coaching and facilitation (Corrao, 2013).

A similar list can be developed for public sector organisations, but a list which will be valid for all libraries, albeit with emphases being varied by local circumstances. Collection management requires new budgetary approaches and much closer interaction with users. Quality assurance of sources becomes a much greater issue. Offering training to users on how to navigate the jumbled web of information becomes a central role. Constantly refreshing physical space to match it to changing user expectations is essential. Staff must be technically proficient both in the support of technology from apps to tablets and in quality assurance of sources from Buzzfeed to Twitter as well as the output of publishers and public sector bodies. They need to manage and preserve local output, often in repositories (Simons & Richardson, 2012). They need increasingly to see their role as part of a globalised information chain and not the destination for those who seek information.

There is perhaps a certain irony in the fact that much of the burden of making this change and in developing staff will fall on the present generation of library managers. Universities (and by extension library schools) tend to have detailed, arcane and slow procedures for changing curricula. And yet it is in the nature of disruptive technology that change is rapid and abrupt. Quite apart from the detailed skills required to do everything from create and manage a website or implement changing digital preservation standards, there is a need to change the philosophical approach to the nature and role of the library within the organisation. Staff training whether on formal courses or conference attendance should be a key and expensive element of the annual budget.

CONCLUSION

Capability Brown developed his skills at a time of disruptive technologies and changing aspirations. Libraries have the capacity and the capability to do the same. Many of the activities mentioned in this chapter already happen in the best and most progressive libraries. The library itself remains an iconic element in the thinking of most organisations. The challenge then facing the profession is to develop the capacity to make such thinking universal and then to implement change, creating and supporting broad global vistas of information, while ensuring the relevance of information skills to supporting institutional mission. Perhaps the most challenging element is to create the Capability Brownlike sweeping vistas towards information horizons. This involves working much more closely with everything from publishers to archivists, from ICT staff to organisational PR departments. It means recognising that all of these are components of the same broad picture and not antithetical elements to be avoided as we occupy our own little box gardens and requires both a change in our understanding and a leap of faith.

NOTE

1. The author has personal experience of this. His exemplary and authoritative (sic) bibliography The Royal Navy in World War II (Scarecrow Press, 2002) went through two editions. No publisher would contemplate publishing a third edition of a book which would sell only a few hundred copies. The bibliography is now online at the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies at the University of Essex, where it is widely used and much more current than a printed volume published every decade. https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/maritime/resources/dlaw/

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