Ithaka Directors' Report, 5 months later

When I saw that this year's Johannah Sherrer Memorial Lecture would be Ithaka's Roger Schonfeld discussing implications of their 2010 "Insights From U.S. Academic Library Directors" report, I knew I needed to go. I had been part of the lively online discussion of the report when it came out, especially cheering to Jenica Rogers' able dissection of it; I wanted to hear what Schonfeld and the responding panel of Lewis & Clark and Reed faculty would have to say.

I did in fact go today, and I am very happy that I did. (Not only for the tasty reception food and meeting new-to-me librarians and library staff after, either.) You know the annoying person at talks who, during the Q&A at the end, uses their time to editorialize instead of actually ask a question? Well, I was all set to be that guy, but I didn't have to, because the panelists beat me to it in their responses.

Susan Glosser pointed out that a shift towards digital resources does not necessarily imply a change in research methodology. (She also observed that "databases are like mushrooms, they are always popping up" and recommended that librarians figure out effective ways of communicating with faculty about new resources.)

Karen Gross pointed out that just because a library function is a lower priority for faculty, it doesn't mean that it isn't important to them. She used the example of going to a discipline-specific online resource first before entering the library physically or virtually: yes, she goes there first, but the very next place she always goes is the library itself. Gross also argued that electronic journals are still print resources, because how do most people read the articles? After printing out a hardcopy. In other words, access is not the same thing as consumption, an especially important consideration when it comes to looking at longer-form texts like electronic books.

Ann Delehanty pointed out that faculty research is not the same thing as student research: not only do faculty not use the library in the same way as students, they don't want their undergraduate students in particular to use the library the same way they do. She gave the example of how she uses her online syllabi as gateways (of the "gateway, buyer, archive" classification of library functions that the Ithaka report used) for student research and how she needs and wants the assistance of librarians in creating these gateways.

Brian Detweiler-Bedell spoke along similar lines, arguing that the library doesn't exist to serve faculty research needs but rather serves "the life of the mind" in all its forms. He talked about how he uses a discipline-specific online resource as a "spigot" to get his research program's information needs from, and how an important part of the library's function is to teach students how to identify which spigots they need to "turn on" for their own research. He recommended using library research case studies as an instructional tool.

Schonfeld's talk itself was interesting, balanced, and highlighted some aspects of the report's findings that I hadn't fully grasped before. I was especially glad that he explicitly noted that while directors' stated priorities were not aligned with faculty's stated priorities, their budget priorities expressed as spending choices certainly were. I had wondered if this pattern is simply a reflection of the political reality that grumpy faculty can make the lives of Deans and Provosts far more unpleasant than grumpy librarians can, and since most academic library directors report to some sort of Dean or Provost type of person, they know what their organizational constraints are.

Which gives a new poignancy to the Ithaka report's finding that only 35% of academic library directors consider themselves to have a "well-developed plan" to deal with changing user attitudes and expectations. Having observed both the theatrical tendencies of library strategic planning and the futility of expecting any kind of unified faculty opinion on anything, I can understand why some directors figure, consciously or not, that it's a poor use of time and resources to develop initiatives that will inevitably run afoul of some constituency that will end up killing them or modifying them down into triviality. I don't approve of that kind of fatalism, but I have a new sympathy for a position that previously only baffled me.

On the other hand, I could be wrong...

...about the unlikelihood of open source at the enterprise level.

Inside Higher Ed reports that Cornell and a handful of other universities have committed "to fully adopt the Kuali Financial System, an open-source application." A sign of things to come? Maybe. I don't know about Cornell's peer adopters, but the fact that Cornell switched from "homegrown financial software" seems significant to me. It suggests a pre-existing organizational culture of owning one's own headaches. Also, financial management software is only one step towards an entire open-source ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite.

So: I'm intrigued, but not yet convinced that open source is a trend.

Open source is not a trend (Library technology thoughts, pt. 8 of 8)

Back when I started this series, I noted my surprise and disappointment with the fact that I couldn't, in good faith, include open source software as a trend. Surprise, because library-vendor economics are brutal, and more and more librarians are going to decide that if we are going to have headaches with our tools no matter what, they might as well really be our headaches. Disappointment, because I have tried to move our library [shouldn't link to back-end database] tools [just in case] to open source whenever possible.

However: remember the idea that the headaches would be our headaches? It turns out it only works if there is a consistent "we." People keep leaving. In the case of the archives, positions have been eliminated after incumbents moved on. IT officially doesn't support our fringe Linux set-ups, and turnover at IT has meant that our unofficial support has mostly evaporated too. That back-end database I'm not providing a URL for? We actually haven't been able to get into it for months, because a) nobody on staff can trouble-shoot it, b) it supports services the university has largely de-funded, and c) the position responsible for getting an outside contractor to fix it was vacant from February to June. (For that position, MySQL experience was a preferred qualification. Out of roughly 60 applicants, maybe one had it. In my corner of libraryland, at least, we can't pay for the skills we need.) Maybe larger institutions can pull it off. Maybe consortia can pull it off. I'm not sure. Before they can, though, there are all kinds of organizational culture changes that need to happen first, and the few signs I have seen of that have been sloooooow. (Now is an especially good time to point at the Library Loon's post on the exodus of tech-savvy librarians.)

I am not saying the situation is necessarily so much worse than when we were using proprietary software. But it isn't better, and libraries need to get better on the tech side. That is kind of the whole point of this series of blog posts. Given the brutal library-vendor economics referenced above, and the independent incentives to merge library systems with course management and enterprise systems, I don't see long-term institutional support for the creation and maintenance of library-specific open-source tools. (Not that short-term support is so strong either; we're about a year past the point where the promised reserves module for our hosted Koha ILS was supposed to come online, entirely because of funding cuts at supporting libraries.) While open source is happening in CMS, I can't see it happening at the enterprise level, like, ever--so, yeah, not a trend. It pains me to say it, greatly. Hopefully someone has a good counterargument?

The *really* integrated library system (Library technology thoughts, pt. 7 of 8)

I'm back from a nearly two-week vacation...just in time for everyone else to go to ALA in New Orleans! Looking back on this series of posts, I notice that my estimated timeline of "a week or so" has become "over a month." This kind of thing has a way of happening.

Moving on...

(I have a list of six predictions about what I expect to see happen in academic library technology over the next 5-10 years. This is prediction #6.)

Academic libraries will move to integrate their systems with course management and enterprise systems at their host institutions.

One part of this prediction is my frustration with library systems that don't play well with others. Students update their address information and name changes with the registrar; they and we both get annoyed that they have to do it over again with us. Our EZproxy server has a very dramatic on-again, off-again relationship with the student information database, resulting in students who can't get into our online databases. (We have at least one outbreak of such incidents each semester, made worse by the fact that the IT guy who knew how to work with EZproxy left over a year ago, and IT has not prioritized recreating that skill set, not that I blame them under the circumstances.) Our electronic reserves system? My views are unprintable.

Another (related) part of this prediction is the large number of usernames and passwords library users are expected to remember. I know there are tools that allow for single "master passwords," but these tools, as I understand them, are a) third-party solutions for b) problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. It's like needing one library card to check out books, another for DVDs, and yet another just to get through the front door. Ridiculous. Actually, no, it's more like having multiple entirely separate libraries that we make people trek around to. The end result is that a lot of resources get ignored.

The third part of this prediction is, once again, assessment and administrator influence. It is a blindingly painful headache to answer questions like, "How many books purchased from the Environmental Studies departmental allocation got checked out to ENV majors who got A's in their senior capstone seminars?" Greater systems integration could reduce that pain to a dull throbbing.

MPOW is consolidating around its Jenzabar CX enterprise software (and moving to a hosted service, no less). It also has Google Apps for Education for the students. IT feels better about the library taking the Jenzabar route over the Google Apps route for things like electronic reserves, so that is what I am looking into this summer. I am hoping there will be a nice clear solution. If there isn't now, I expect there will be in the next 5-10 years. I have difficulty imagining that I'm the only library director who is frustrated with the status quo--and even if I am, I have difficulty imagining that university administrators will continue to want to spend buckets of money on potentially redundant (-ish) and definitely inefficient library systems.

Library tech: too important to leave to the librarians? (Library technology thoughts, pt. 6 of 8)

(I have a list of six predictions about what I expect to see happen in academic library technology over the next 5-10 years. This is prediction #5.)

Administrators and accreditors will drive technological change in academic libraries more than faculty will.

When I was making my list of predictions, I thought this was more distinctive than it necessarily is. It is largely a restatement of the accountability regime I talked about with user satisfaction. But it is also a statement about shared governance, and that statement is: whatever power administrators do or don't share with faculty, it will be power that they choose to share, making a system of delegated rather than shared governance. If that delegation even happens. More likely is that faculty senates and committees will continue their slow descent into advisory status.

This descent is one of the reasons I have trouble understanding the perennial libraryland debate about tenure for academic librarians. Even if tenure put us on equal footing with teaching faculty--which I'm not convinced it does or can--I am not sure why we want to be pushing for a status with diminishing rights and responsibilities. We need to stand on our own professional profile of skills and principles.

The shifting balance of governance will be especially significant when it comes to technology. Technology is expensive. It is expensive all the time. You buy it, you tweak it, you babysit it, you perform CPR on it, you replace it. Or you let it go bad and deal with the time and energy expense of really angry users. Whatever you do or don't do with technology, it is going to cost you.

Which means that administrators will pay close attention to it. There has been a lot of talk about how faculty will react if the Georgia State e-reserves case goes badly, but I am more interested in how administrators will react if they decide the library is an area of legal exposure for their institutions. In a different area, accessibility and assistive technology, what I have seen motivate policies and budgets is concern about ADA lawsuits. Very broadly speaking, from my limited experience, faculty will want their electronic reserves and won't want to divert resources for accessibility away from, say, journal subscriptions (or inflated "permission fees" to the CCC). Administrators will want the legal risk to go away. Faculty may or may not get the results they want, but if they do, it will be because administrators made a choice about how grumpy a faculty (and student body) they can afford to have. Where librarians fall on that pecking order, I don't really like to think about too much.

No smiles, no dollars (Library technology thoughts, pt. 5 of 8)

(I have a list of six predictions about what I expect to see happen in academic library technology over the next 5-10 years. This is prediction #4.)

Academic libraries' ability to use technology to mediate satisfying experiences for users will be the single most important factor in maintaining support from their host institutions.

Support for academic libraries can be financial; support can be political; support can be moral. All kinds of support, though, depend on the supporter continuing to believe that the library is doing its job--or, at the very least, that the library is capable of doing its job. And, increasingly, what is the job of the academic library?

To look good in assessment.

Looking good in assessment is not the mission or purpose or vocation or aspiration of the academic library. But it is becoming its job, the thing that pays the bills. In the corporate-influenced university, everything comes down to the bottom line, and the bottom line is reputation or money or both. Universities operate more and more under what Gaye Tuchman calls an accountability regime. (I recommend reading Tuchman's whole book on the topic.) Is your university or college accredited? It is moving in this direction. Does it hire deans and provosts and presidents from among the itinerant class of professional administrators? It is moving in this direction fast.

What administrators want in terms of library assessment results varies from institution to institution. Broadly speaking, though, they want libraries to demonstrably support the assessment goals of the institution as a whole. And the most important of these goals, in terms of money and reputation, usually are:

-1- Student satisfaction.

-2- External funding.

-3- Achievement of student learning outcomes.

Student learning outcomes are mostly a bottom-line concern for accreditation. In the aggregate, parents and students mostly want reassurance about two things: Will college be a personally rewarding experience? Will a decent job be waiting upon graduation? Student learning outcomes certainly can be a proxy for those concerns, but I do not see them becoming a major concern in and of themselves. In any case, my hunch and fear is that achievement of student learning outcomes will have no significant correlation with any library variable within a single institution.

Which leaves student satisfaction and external funding. Most of what I have seen that ties libraries to external funding is faculty singing the praises of their local library in enabling them to win grants and carry out grant-related activities. In other words: faculty satisfaction. Combine student satisfaction with faculty satisfaction, and we get the general category of user satisfaction.

Why do I see user satisfaction as a technology issue, though? Clearly, there are important non-technological aspects of a satisfactory library experience. There are skilled and friendly staff, welcoming and inspirational spaces, and useful print books and journals. However, these aspects are going to become less distinctively relevant to assessment over the next 5-10 years. Skilled and friendly staff who are facilitating, guiding, and teaching the use of networked resources--to say nothing of maintaining those resources--are a networked service. The most incredible academic library space in the world will see little use if it doesn't have wifi. And the biggest sources of external funding, the STEM fields, are moving much faster into electronic resources than the humanities and social sciences.

Further, the collection and analysis of user satisfaction data had better be a technological activity, and the more automated the better. In a zero-sum library job environment, every person-hour spent on assessment will be a person-hour taken away from some other activity. If academic libraries want to receive strong support from their host institutions, part of using technology to mediate satisfying experiences for users will need to be to capture their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with any given interaction, and to respond with positive changes in library systems and resources and services, in an iterative cycle of (sigh) continuous improvement.

Visual search (Library technology thoughts, pt. 4 of 8)

(I have a list of six predictions about what I expect to see happen in academic library technology over the next 5-10 years. This is prediction #3.)

Visual search will (at a minimum) reach parity with text-based search.

One reason I have this prediction is because of what I believe is going on with mobile devices. More stuff on mobile devices + more mobile devices with touch screens = greater questioning of why we should force people to tap-tap-tap their way through text-based interfaces. "Im in ur txt 2 say luv u 4ever" and its ilk evolved for a reason, and while a lolspeak subject thesaurus would be amusing, I'm not counting on it.

A second reason is the increasing sophistication of infographics. (Digression: in reading this post by Rob Paterson, I was struck by how one cites information from an infographic--by x and y coordinates?) Designs such as Anil Dash describes in "Pixels are the New Pies" lend themselves quite well to the size and shape of mobile device screens, too. It seems like EBSCO's visual search is working off of similar design principles. Good for them.

The third reason is things like bing's image search. This kind of technology is also on my June list to Learn What I Am Talking About. Not only because users will increasingly like these kinds of tools, but because content will more and more be born multimedia. The Journal of Visualized Experiments will have many, many fellow publications in all fields before too very long. Say, 5-10 years.