An Aesthetic Philosophy of Librarianship

An Aesthetic Philosophy of Librarianship:
Reflections on Library Goodness in the Digital Age

The role of the academic librarian is to create content-rich learning environments (“libraries”) that stimulate scholarship, cultivate knowledge and inspire creativity.


Prologue. Many years ago, I went for a job interview for a Technical Services / Systems Librarian position at a community college library 10 minutes from my home in suburb on the far southeast side of Houston.

I thought I had a good chance at it. I have an ALA-accredited Master’s degree in Library and Information Science (commonly abbreviated MLS or MLIS) from a top-ranked school and years of professional experience in libraries. I knew basic programming (C++, VB, Perl, SQL, JavaScript, CSS and HTML) and a flavor of Unix (Solaris) upon which many library systems run—or used to run, at least. I have installed and configured proxy servers, web servers, mail servers, cataloging records, patron records and the library’s website. 

At that time, I had more than a few years of experience as a Technical Services Librarian, Digital Services Librarian, Head Cataloger and Automation Librarian for a large school district, Collection Development Manager and technical consultant for a commercial digital library (the first large-scale online subscription undergraduate library, Questia), Library Director of a new Art Institute campus, “Data Standards Manager” for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and “Client Relationship Manager” for a popular and powerful federated search / discovery application whose technology was used by EBSCO and Gale (among the largest academic content aggregators and database vendors in the world). I had been a Systems and Digital Services Librarian for a Graduate Theological Seminary with five campuses. I was a Certified Information Professional (CIP) through AIIM. In addition to all that, I had many hours of post-graduate work in English Literature, Philosophy, History, Art History, and Latin, along with courses in Computer Science, Business and MIS. (Admittedly, the combination of things often confused people, but to me it all made perfect sense.)

Having worked for the last 18 months as a “Project Manager / Corporate Librarian” for a telecommunications billing software and engineering company two hours commute from home (the beltway was undergoing widening), on an automation project that was rapidly coming to an end—and seeing no new projects on the horizon because the Houston office was being converted to a Data/Network Operations Center—I was eager for the chance at a stable position nearby where I could put my technical, academic and library skills to some productive use.

The day of the library job interview at the community college arrived. To my surprise, especially since I was interviewing for a technical position in the library, I was asked to share with the search committee my “Philosophy of Librarianship.” This was one of just a few questions asked during the interview, none of which had to do with anything technical or systems-related (“technical services” in libraries entails the management of cataloging and patron records, the library automation system, collection analysis, reporting services, the proxy server, discovery tools, electronic resources and the website) or the duties of the job.

Hmm. Ask me about my experience with library systems or digital libraries or discovery tools, metadata or web services, MARC records or metadata, and I might have something to say. Ask me about my experience creating websites. Ask me to define “responsive web design” or explain what a proxy server does. Ask me a cataloging question.

But my “Philosophy of Librarianship”?

I had nothing, and whatever I thought to say in that moment I feared would come across as disingenuous, or else not related to the duties of the job I was interviewing for. I was having a hard time even relating a “philosophy” to the job description for a Technical Services Librarian. What were the possible correct responses? I feared I had simply missed something, some known personage in the library profession, having worked outside of libraries for a few years.

The Public Services Librarian who posed the question indignantly poked me. “What, are we librarians just circling the drain?” 

As far as I was concerned, I would be there to fill a specific role involving access to electronic resources, systems, the website, servers, records and reporting. I was offering my skills to solve their problems. I didn’t see how my personal librarian philosophy, whatever that might be, mattered, or even related to the job. 

Since that time, I have discovered that the question is not such an unusual one in the library world. Academic librarians of all types, both in public and technical services, are being asked to provide a philosophy of library practice in job interviews or as part of their performance review process. These days, they may even need to provide one to keep their jobs. 

By Googling “philosophy of librarianship,” as I did when I got home that afternoon, you can pull up this page from the USC Library,1 for example, which states that one’s philosophy of librarianship can give one an advantage over others in terms of hiring and promotion:

At academic research institutions (such as ours at USC) librarians are being held accountable, more than ever before, to provide solid evidence of the quality of their work, and of their impact on the mission of both their institution and their library.

Though, in many cases, our annual reviews are summative and evaluative, at time of promotion and continuing appointment (or tenure) the expectation . . . is that we present for their review our reflective (formative) assessment of our work . . . as well as our understanding of the value and purpose of our essential role as academic librarians in a research university.

Such an assessment can be first formulated in our Statement of Philosophy of Academic Librarianship. This is a relatively new concept in the field of librarianship and it has, as its precedent, the Teaching Philosophy Statement which is a “personal mission statement” for those committed to teaching. That Statement demonstrates one’s reflective thinking about teaching. It helps communicate one’s goals as a teacher, and one’s commitment to students’ learning outcomes based on their corresponding actions and activities, in and out of the classroom (See Seldin et al., 2010).

A Statement of Philosophy of Academic Librarianship presents a capsule summary of your understanding of the value and purpose of your role as an academic librarian in a research university. . . It gains an advantage over others for promotion or for a new position.

Whenever one is asked to justify one’s value in some sort of formalized statement, it is never a good thing. It means that your value to the organization is not obvious.

And whenever this happens, no philosophy or explanation, no matter how carefully crafted, is likely to change anyone’s mind:

neverexplain

Nonetheless, this trend of self-justification in academic librarianship has become so pervasive, that librarians are even posting them on their personal websites. 

Toward a New Philosophy of Academic Librarianship. 

Now that I work in an academic library again, and have for many years now, I find myself thinking about philosophies of librarianship at this uncertain time when many both outside and within the library profession are proclaiming libraries, librarians, or print books (“pbooks”) to be obsolete.2  

Many college and academic libraries are getting rid of print altogether 3 4 5 6 7 while erecting new libraries, 21st century architectural wonders consisting of collaborative and innovative work spaces, video conference rooms, meeting rooms, and high-tech classrooms, sometimes resembling more a modern open office space than a library.

Across the country, colleges and universities are spending millions to create modern spaces, variously called “new libraries” or “learning centers,” or “library learning centers,” for students to study, socialize, drink coffee and learn in a more collaborative, interactive and personalized fashion. In a library setting, collaborative learning, where students work together as a team to solve problems, or come together to share their knowledge with each other—emulating some idealized vision of the project-driven, team-oriented business world8is fostered at the expense of collections when it comes to the allocation of space and funding for these new facilities. 

New libraries are popping up everywhere. Should librarians be cheering?

Within these new libraries, such as this feature photo from the Jan/Feb. 2020 issue of American Libraries, “Show Us Your Beautiful New Library,”9 one might imagine that it would be difficult for librarians who work there to place value on reading or publications in any format.

Despite being heralded as a new 21st century learning environment, it might be harder for librarians to encourage the sort of learning we have always encouraged through user engagement with our resources, which may or may not have had anything to do with assignment completion or “success” as defined by the business objective measures of the institution. 

Even though the building may have been designed to utilize the most up-to-date building technologies for sustainability and the principles of “universal design,” it may be more challenging within these vacuous, streamlined, efficient spaces to effectively deploy new technologies for librarians to put new titles in front of users, or place titles into a disciplinary context to enhance their relevance to users, or to convey their cultural and scholarly significance. The library may seem to have nothing to do with culture or human intellectual achievement. It may be harder to encourage awareness, engagement, and therefore, to encourage learning outside of class assignment, always the point of the library attached to a university.

And despite their bright colors and modern, airy designs, the new library facility might also seem less inspiring to students, even as a place to study, when compared to a more intimate library with visible contents.10 11 It is unclear how we can create or even contribute much to a culture of learning on our campuses in such vacuous facilities. 

Despite the explosion of the new libraries, and the rapid transformation of libraries into learning centers, none of the ALA Round Tables12 or ACRL surveys pertain to library design, facilities or user interfaces. There are Round Tables for government documents, for intellectual freedom, for graphic novels, library instruction, library history, but nothing about new library design or even library futures.

Therefore, as it has happened, design by outsiders to our profession, by architects wanting to “reinvent the library” or by our vendors who regard us only as the tail-end of their supply chains13 are what is defining us, for the most part; we librarians are not so much anymore defining what our future will be. As Shlipft points out in Constructing Library Buildings That Work, when it comes to libraries built in the last few years, the librarians may not be actively involved in writing the “building program,” i.e., defining the business requirements for the new space.14 Excluding librarians from new library designs in higher education has been a fairly well documented trend, mentioned as early as 2009 in Stewart’s The Academic Library Building in the Digital Age.15

According to one architectural firm, at the time new designs are proposed, there may be effort by architects to discredit the librarians as having “dated design thinking.”16 Librarians often have no seat on new library planning committees, which necessarily restricts planning to the most mundane aspects of the building’s design so that nothing innovative as a library is achieved. Designs may be, or pretend to be, architecturally interesting as a building, but they are not intellectually interesting or functional as a modern library, because there is no emphasis on scholarly content, ideas, collections,  knowledge, publications or scholarly activity. The space is dead, intellectually speaking. Through this modern library, which may or may not even be a library by library professional standards, I cannot make inferences about what is going on in contemporary culture or in my areas of professional interest. I cannot visualize my discipline nor the scholarly communication occurring within it. I don’t see anything new when I walk through it or go to the library’s website. It is stagnant, invisible, like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Is this soaring empty space really a new 50 million dollar (etc.) library? I just think we can do better and expect more.

New academic libraries generally fail to do what a modern library ought to do, which, among other things, I think is to stimulate intellectual inquiry, often the first stage of research. New libraries should provide an immersive experience of an organized, visible collection of disciplinary and cultural knowledge which is presented as a collection and is maintained by subject specialists in anticipation of use and need. 

It is often only within the broader context of a collection that academic titles, which are often exceedingly narrow, are perceived to be significant in the first place. An academic title outside of a collection is of limited scholarly significance. Context is important. The academic library should be designed to enhance appreciation for culture, human intellectual achievement and disciplinary knowledge, but it can only do this successfully though a conceptual knowledge framework known as a collection. It cannot do this by being just an empty space and a search engine on third-party commercial content. If we say we maintain collections, or that collections are fundamental to the library experience, we must have a way to express current electronic and hybrid collections, both online and in our physical spaces.

Even if print is obsolete, a belief which has been described as self-fulfilling among those in my profession, why should a library ever be “just a building”? Why should it be “just a search engine”? Am I alone in my feelings of dissatisfaction with the modern library’s being just a static web page and a vendor concession, and in my desire that the library strive to be more than it currently is? I do not think so. In 2015, Sasaki Associates, a Boston-based architectural design and engineering firm specializing in higher education, surveyed academic librarians across the country whose buildings had been renovated in recent years. They discovered extremely high levels of dissatisfaction with new library building designs, with the priorities of librarians going into the design and those of the resulting facility not correlating well.16 The problem? These new modern spaces are uninteresting as libraries, failing to deliver an intellectually stimulating user experience many once prided ourselves on delivering.

Many people I talk to today assume that modern libraries are either study halls or obsolete. There is no belief that innovation can draw people in (I believe it can), or that the library should play an active role in promoting titles, stimulating demand for their own content, and educating users. The modern library is automated and commoditized. From library to library, our systems are the same (Ex Libris dominates 80% of the academic library market), the UI is pretty much the same (a search box embedded in a university CMS), and our databases also pretty much the same (if the institution offers this degree program, it is expected that the library will subscribe to x, y, x databases), with titles not visible, nor organized nor presented to users as a coherent collection, or as anyone anyone is investing much into. This all has nothing to do with librarianship.

If titles selection is going on behind the scenes, this work is invisible through our user interfaces. 

In addition, what was once open and accessible to everyone has been co-opted by vendors who have successfully campaigned to restrict access to only those with current institutional affiliation, making public access inside of the library most inconvenient, the exception to the rule, rather than normative.

Restricted access policies by libraries, especially at four year institutions, has further limited the role of the academic library and research librarian in the community and society.

This has made the library less competitive for grant funding and less effective as a recruitment tool.

Restricted access to resources was never before the policy for State-supported university libraries in Texas, but it is a change brought about by our commodification, being comprised of vendor product. We gave up intellectual property rights when we abandoned print. Where before anyone on a campus computer could access the electronic resources of the library, increasingly access is granted only to students, staff or faculty members, individuals with university-issued credentials.

In the academic library space, librarians have abandoned cataloging, title selection, bibliographic control and browsing.

The resulting academic library is now completely sunk from view.18

Academic librarianship was never just about access to resources.

It was about broad scholarly access to visible, organized collections of titles representing bodies of disciplinary knowledge and scholarly communication in the disciplines. Visible collections developed in anticipation of use and need were once believed to be what attracted educated people into the library and to the university, and was thought important for sustaining user engagement with a larger community. But collections are now gone from libraries except for historic collections, replaced with discovery services and e-resource management (that is, acquisition of packages through license agreements). 

Obviously, there are great efficiencies of scale for web-scale discovery services. Digital resources are easier to search through, cite and quote from. Research is easier. Students are much more efficient, able to write papers faster and better manage their time.

And yet, even despite these fantastic benefits, I cannot help but wonder if we in the library field have not contributed to our demise in the academic by embracing unambitious, commercial models and abnegating responsibility for managing and displaying content. For many reasons, I am not satisfied with discovery solutions, no matter how efficient they may be. 

I am not suggesting a return to print formats. But there is something to be said for our former ambitions of preserving knowledge, making knowledge known, and promoting the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of society or “humanity,” as Michael Gorman asserted in his Five New Laws of Librarianship.19

There is something to be said for emphasizing culture and intellectual life in the academic space and encouraging independent learning.

If we want students and scholars to engage with the content we acquire on their behalf, we certainly must have content strategies and designs which enhance the visibility and perceived value of resources, of titles, with the library’s physical environment and website capable of creating the right perspective and mood.

Today, many of us present nothing to users but a search box and list of databases, placing the onus on users to come along and know what to search for in order to become educated people. It is on them to discover what they might like. I think we should strongly consider alternative modalities for user engagement, presenting digital collections, rather than perpetually resigning ourselves to being a search box on an index of third-party subscription content. 

We may be encouraged to think that collections and content curatorship no longer matter in this digital age, both because of limited outlets, and because of advances in search technology, that most people can find whatever they want with relative ease. As Calhoun points out, “Web-based discovery and access methods generally use fully automated processing and low-barrier standards,” which indeed, “calls into question benefits of library cataloging and bibliographic control.”20 With discovery, users need only type words into a search box and relevant items appear. And what if it doesn’t? Metadata is increasingly “none of our business” but the business of our vendors. It is their content, not ours. We just lease it from them, and when we can no longer pay for it or no longer need it, it is gone. Nothing is preserved for the future, nothing is organized. Vendors now manage the electronic resource lifecycle for us, they manage metadata, they do it all. We do not need to concern ourselves with selection or cataloging or collection development anymore, or collection use, or keeping up with publishing, or ensuring that we possess core titles, or even giving much thought to our content strategy to ensure the visibility of the resources we acquire (LibGuides really isn’t much of a content strategy).

Despite our continuing to offer so much, the academic library and its website are no longer destinations for scholars, nor are they intended to be.

But they could be. 

  • Imagine if the modern library had evolved in the same direction as modern museums to using technology to express and create value around intellectual and cultural objects, with displays like what you see at the website of Gallagher & Associates21 and other entities who provide design services to museums and trade show exhibit halls. Imagine if the library were more visual. 
  • Imagine if your library could provide you or your users with your own a “week in review” recap of what is happening, in terms of publications and conference highlights, calls for papers, and forthcoming titles. 
  • Imagine if the library and its website were primarily designed to showcase content or be “about” current research, books and scholarly publications, not what it is today, affording users passive access to databases through a web service.
  • Imagine if your library could offer life-sized browsing the covers (contents) of current e-journals, a newsstand through interactive projection technology, an interactive display where you might collectively browse the covers and contents, then tap to download the item to your mobile device.
  • Imagine if your library featured new books and podcasts with authors and many viewing rooms in which content was programmed and advertised.
  • Imagine if it provided programming: lectures from around the world, documentaries, independent films, etc., as well as content. I imagine a library which perpetually streams content with viewing rooms. I imagine a library with active programming and dynamic websites. 
  • Imagine a library which allowed you to browse the largest online collection in the world.
  • Imagine if the academic library were experiential.

Instead, we have abandoned bibliographic approaches and set our sites low by just offering users a generic search experience.

Where does the new dim conception of a library voided of content and programming, as a search engine embedded on a static website and study space, leave us in terms of control over the user experience, our capacity for display, placing content where it will likely be seen and the ability to enact a content strategy to encourage user engagement?

Is our only purpose now to provide passive access to commercial products hosted on remote platforms?

It would seem so. 

The modern academic library is no longer an intellectual or creative space, a space which honors learning or scholarship. 

With such vacuous designs far removed from scholarly content, we are not striving to be good as libraries, taking seriously our academic mission to convey academic knowledge, in a space not designed to be libraries, through a website that is likely not under our administration, and using tools that are intended primarily to drive users to commercial platforms.

We cannot help knowledge to become known without both collections and content strategy which displays intellectual and cultural objects in a scholarly framework.

Thinking Outside of the Search Box.

must reiterate that I am not against “discovery.” Far from it. I have implemented and managed discovery solutions at quite a few institutions over the last ten or more years. In 2007, I even worked for a developer of library discovery services which was light years ahead of anything on the market today. It was based on Lucene, the Carrot2 search clustering engine22 and a patented zoomable interface. I use discovery services at my current library and at other libraries, but there is nothing like my former product on the market today. I have maintained multiple discovery services and offered them a choice because every search solution uses different algorithms.

I think we should appreciate the limitations of our current discovery solutions as the exclusive user interface for an academic research library (aside from LibGuides). Instead of imagining alternatives to discovery, we keep trying to make discovery services more appealing to users through configuration changes which, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter much; rearranging the facets, changing the default labels, reprioritizing the service links, or turning snippets on or off, isn’t going to make a tremendous impact. BrowZine integration is very nice, allowing for thumbnails of scholarly journals to come into our systems. But discovery itself is a limited foundation on which to build the academic library. A library needs collections, including digital collections. The organization of titles into collections supports a browse experience which is currently lacking from our user interfaces. Collections are the foundation of the user experience of a library.

Libraries ought to be experiential and authoritative, provocative and engaging. Without a collections framework, we cannot present bibliographic content in meaningful arrangements to users. A walk though the library and/or a visit to its website should be a stimulating, mind-expanding, immersive and educational experience where people can efficiently learn about publications in their chosen field of study or of interest to them, and not just “about” its spaces or online commercial database products, or the ability for users to find information should they need to do so. 

A museum expresses value around objects and facilitates discovery through selection, arrangement, description and display. It engages users through its collections. The art museum does not strive to meet “demand for art,” or to view individual pieces of art (few would go to a museum just to see one or two pieces) fulfilling a need, so much as providing an intellectual and aesthetic experience which helps to stimulate appreciation and awareness, cultivating a deeper appreciation for human intellectual and creative experience. An academic library should be similarly designed to around fostering an intellectual and aesthetic experience, to encourage appreciation for human intellectual achievement and culture, to promote the acquisition of new knowledge, and stimulate engagement and use of resources through selection, arrangement, description and display. The facility and user interfaces should be designed for that immersive and shared cultural experience.

I still believe that the library collection (even in digital form), maintained and assessed as a collection, is our main service and responsibility as librarians to the academic community, and also to the public. We must have new websites, new systems and technologies to create a more vibrant user experience than the opportunity for users to retrieve content. That is no longer a compelling model.

Academic librarians continue to envision new roles for themselves as old jobs have gone away. I’m sorry, but our functioning as “Digital Retrievalists” or “Collaboration Facilitators”23 have little to do with academic library’s core mission to be an academic library.

It is time for the academic library to take stock and decide what its business requirements must be to be successful and good as a library. Everything else–building design, software design, web design and staffing–should proceed from these requirements, just as with any other modern business or organization.

One such requirement might be, for example, that the library be able to stimulate demand for its own resources by making them visible and placing them into an academic context so that knowledge can become known. Another might be that the library be able to display new titles.

We should have discovery and subscription content in abundance, but if we want students and faculty to remain competitive in their chosen fields, to reach their intellectual and creative potential, and if we want to support intellectual life on our campuses, the library must remain a visible library, capable of supporting intellectual inquiry. It must be a content-rich learning environment.

We must explore ways to put the library back into the library, or at least considered a content strategy which puts library collections online, not just provides students with the opportunity to discover relevant resources for themselves. 

The End of the Visible Library.

n 1996, Nicholson Baker, a wonderful writer of novels and essays (including a few essays and a book on libraries), fervently took up the cause of defending the traditional library with historical collections, delving so deep into the inner workings and technologies then employed by academic libraries that it is astonishing to me that he himself is not one.

Few lay people (non-librarians) know or care about OCLC or the intricacies of the old card catalog (which in 1996 was disappearing or already gone) and certainly few librarians can write about these things as masterfully and authentically as Baker does. Fewer still would care about the books and historic newspapers he tries to save from destruction at the hands of unscrupulous librarians in his book-length expose Double Fold (2001), but his campaign to save them made for a fascinating cautionary tale about the power of salesmen, commercial interests, and some librarians seeking to advance their own careers by embracing “progress.” 

Baker, an author, library user, keen observer of life and historian who is not, to my knowledge, in possession of any academic credentials beyond a B.A. in English—although no one would deny that he is an intellectual—witnessed what he aptly describes as the library’s “pretense toward the visionary” which “removed the concrete world of books from the library’s statement of purpose” and “allowed misguided administrators to work out their hostility toward printed history while the rest of us sleep.24 Because I was then six years into my library career, I witnessed it too, the exact same disturbing trend, first the widespread panic over the deterioration of paper which justified its elimination (“They’re just going to deteriorate in the next 30 years anyway”), followed a few years later, something Baker does not write about, by grossly exaggerated claims about the annual cost of “maintaining print on the shelves,” whose source was a vendor of ebooks.25

While it is hard to overlook Baker’s enthusiasm for historic newspapers and other documents and the labor-intensive processes which went into their production—in stark contrast to the cheap and destructive machinery used to destroy and digitize them back in the 1990s, which Baker also describes—he truly also gets the detrimental impact on library users of closed, unbrowsable stacks (whether in the form of microfilm, remote storage or even digital access), a trajectory which has continued today to the point where, in 2020, it is evident to me and to many other academic librarians that even large and well-funded university libraries may now possess no physical collections and present users with no collections in any format, even electronic. We also seem to think that encouraging reading is antithetical to encouraging research. 

In a second wave of digitization, many libraries leapfrogged from booklessness to collectionlessness, meaning they “acquired” (licensed) whatever select vendors who license content to academic libraries provide. Title by title collection development went away. As collections themselves are not longer supported, we have seen the concomitant devaluation of knowledge, which the collection once represented, and the improved ability for publishers to monetize their content as libraries no longer do title selection. 

Most academic libraries have abandoned their historic missions of maintaining collections to support scholarship to focus more on “business objectives,” meeting just-in-time needs, a trend which has been spurred on by institutional assessment plans that are themselves the product of the outcomes assessment movement in higher education. Within the library learning center there are competing “collection development” objectives: are we to provide needed resources, or are we to maintain collections which support research? Some libraries are even changing the name of the department charged with acquisitions from “Collection Management” to “Resource Management,” signifying not so much a change in format, but a new philosophy of librarianship that is no longer imbued with academic purpose beyond satisfying business objective needs. This trend has coincided with the de-professionalization of academic library staff. 

Resource Management really means increased vendor control over content, more restricted public access, lack of academic rigor and a more limited user experience than ever previously offered by the academic library when libraries were about collection management. Resource Management as a practice, when it becomes synonymous with library acquisitions, means that the library is no longer selecting titles, cataloging titles, or keeping up with scholarly publishing. 

Resource management represents a commodification and commoditization of the academic library. Intellectually, there is a world of difference between “managing collections,” even digital ones, and managing electronic resources, and a profound difference in the user experience they support. 

At most academic libraries today, visible and actively maintained library collections have been replaced by discoverable resources which live in the moment, and whose relevance to a query is based on search algorithms whose resulting citations are also subjective and arbitrary. (When my library offered two discovery services, Primo and EDS, it was interesting to see the different results on the same content.) 

Collections are gone and nothing of interest meets the eye in these desolate, hollowed-out places.

Librarians are incentivized to suspend all title selection activity, cataloging and the examination of metadata. We may still refer to our online resources as “online collections,” but we know full well that there is no online library collection there, just product inventory, incapable of arrangement or assessment (and why assess what we cannot control?), standing in stark contrast to what best practices for an academic library collection dictate and what the library profession actually dictates for academic libraries. None of what we acquire through these extraordinarily passive means is very visible or visibly organized, arranged to represent coherent bodies of knowledge in the academic disciplines. If we were a store needing to sell the items we license, we would be in trouble: lack of collection visibility and context for the academic resources we acquire would surely be regarded as shortcomings.

To be effective, the library must be “about” titles, and creating value around them, not be just “about” commercial database products.

All libraries are different, and some do continue to do title-by-title acquisition and cataloging for a certain miniscule percent of their budgets. But the apparatus of discovery and acquisition through big deals has also led to an erosion of quality of academic library holdings and services resulting from the lack of faculty participation in the selection process (once called “collaborative collection development”) and limited transparency for what is being acquired; a reduction in the quality of metadata resulting from outsourcing to vendors; and more restrictive access policies as libraries have relinquished intellectual property rights and lending privileges. Because the library does not acquire intellectual property rights to the electronic content it licenses, this necessarily limits the flow from academic to public libraries and from larger academic libraries to smaller ones and to the public. 

There are a whole host of problems which have resulted from going fully digital without a hosting platform of our own, with the biggest being a lack of resource visibility (items cannot be seen), and second being a lack of contextualization, to the extent that items cannot be properly arranged and displayed (browsed) according to the academic disciplines, something years ago I would have absolutely expected a modern library automation system geared to academic libraries to be able to do. It has also led to an erosion of quality as better titles are routinely held out of aggregator packages, but no one in the library has the responsibility for doing collection development and keeping up with what “ought to be there” in a collection rather than just what is in a package which has been licensed.

Currently, if we license an aggregation, it remains an aggregation, a package, rather than being transformed, prism-like, into a visible library collection.

A list-ranked view of some relevant resources returned in response to a query is not a sufficient user interface for the millions of dollars of digital content we license each year and it isn’t well suited to education. Our interfaces must emphasize academically rigorous collections of titles, not just potentially accessible resources. I would love to see a new system (OCLC could pull this off!) which would take all ebooks and ejournals and form them into virtual stacks. It will be interesting to see what Ex Libris comes up with, now that it has announced the development of a new Primo UI.26 

E-resource management has created issues and challenges for librarians working in predominantly digital environments, mainly that nothing we acquire is visible or arranged, which causes decline in perceived value and demand for our resources. Lack of resource and collection visibility on hosted platforms decreases the likelihood of user engagement with the resources we have licensed on their behalf.

As IT Departments have assumed control over library user interfaces and vendors now control our metadata (as the MARC bibliographic record has become just their “discovery record” in a non-bibliographic interface), the odds are that items will ever be seen by anyone. Because our resources are now invisible to users as part of a coherent collection, incapable of being assembled into virtual collections, we no longer adhere (or find it necessary to adhere) to an academic standard. The titles we acquire cannot be mapped to the disciplines. Because there is no collection there, there is now disincentive for librarians to do title-by-title acquisition or to keep up with the disciplines they support, bringing us closer to being just like an academic content aggregator who will undoubtedly replace the academic library, making the library “ex libris” with some one-stop customizable academic complete research solution which will be licensed directly to the university in a couple years.

We continue to say that we are committed to life-long learning, but even against our own library professional code of ethics, the ALA’s Bill of Rights, we do not resist measures to restrict access to library resources to anyone not currently enrolled in our schools, including other students attending State-supported colleges and universities. Four out of seven planks of the ALA’s Bill of Rights27 address intellectual freedom and combatting censorship. What has happened to us?  We treat our acquisitions as vendor entitlements, not as our titles, and abandon library-centric metadata for the convenience of accepting whatever the vendor provides. It is their property now, their responsibility, their product. New titles come in on the back end of our systems, no one sees or concerns themselves with them. They remain invisible in discovery systems until someone discovers them.

What impact is this resource discovery model in libraries having on users? 

  • The invisible library is an ineffective library because it doesn’t support intellectual inquiry or make people aware of new things. It also doesn’t provide scholarly context, outside of which academic titles have reduced perceived value.
  • The collectionless library is a library disconnected from the past as well as the future.
  • Academic libraries which succumb to resource management lack academic rigor and academic commitment, scholarly values an academic library represent.
  • Collectionlessness expresses an ambivalent attitude towards knowledge and higher education itself. Rather than respecting academic achievement, it diminishes it. A search box does nothing to sustain a culture of continuous learning on a college campus. It isn’t just about books or content, but how this content is presented to users.
  • De-emphasizing collections is devaluing and de-emphasizing knowledge.

While in the public library world, it seems a common understanding that moving books off the floor and into a storeroom or placing them out of view is potentially a form of censorship, there is no analogous concept of this in the academic library world. In academic libraries, we don’t have to engage users or do anything other than provide passive access to an invisible repository of potentially relevant content.

Libraries are not just about “access to,” the resources themselves, but “about” titles and publications themselves in a particular organization mapped to the academic disciplines, and about knowledge of key authors, topics, sources and concepts.

They are about scholarly activity in the academic disciplines. They are not about relevant content so much as the best content.

If libraries are good, they operate on a “meta” level to let people know what they do not know and about things they might be interested in.

These are reasons why a search box, discovery alone, cannot be completely effective as a library, and why the library needs visible collections of titles (books, ebooks, ejournals), visibly arranged and presented, even if this is done digitally. We must reclaim our bibliographic framework to be fully functional, to communicate with scholars, and also to operate with integrity. A library must be “about” titles and publications, not just about commercial products. We must have collections, or at least their visual virtual representation, to operate with academic rigor and support academically rigorous curricula at our institutions so users will have some visual clues of what is new and trending.

I realize that certain fields need or benefit from collections more than others. There is a common consensus now that STEM fields and medical libraries require only access to databases or packages of peer reviewed content, and therefore most have eliminated collection management in favor of a resource management model. 

What if one desires to present in an organized manner all of the content relevant to a topic or discipline? A resource management/ discovery system cannot do it.

These sorts of conspectus reports were common years ago when we all used biblio-centric systems. Shown below is an excerpt of a “collection” of Bioinformatics & Genomics resources in Primo’s Collection Discovery application from a medical library. Once someone has captured relevant resources to add to a named collection, Alma /Primo cannot arrange items in logical order by classification. I think this collection has 200 titles, both ebooks and journals, which then must be manually updated.

Why would a librarian ever want to present titles in random order users? Why do we embrace systems which do nothing to stimulate demand?

This is the grid view of collection discovery in Ex Libris’ Primo. With this little known feature, selected items appear in “collections” through Collection Manager, but there is no organization by classification of ebooks and journals placed into them. This illustrates an important distinction between e-resource discovery and traditional bibliographic systems. Without classification, a part of the bibliographic record now “optional,” there can be no collections in the academic library sense.

The metadata which ought to be in the 050 of the bibliographic record could be used to arrange bibliographic resources, but the metadata is not always there nowadays, and increasingly, as I discovered working on this particular project, it is not there because vendors now believe it isn’t needed for discovery. Discovery is eroding our MARC bibliographic standard for the description and display of bibliographic resources. 

This is a small illustration of a larger problem resulting from the elimination of bibliographic standards in library systems for the sake of, let’s be honest, achieving tighter integration with vendor platforms. To achieve integration, we have had to make compromises. Vendor concessions really are concessions. The industry decided that providing classification, along with other library-centric fields of the MARC bibliographic record, is no longer needed, leaving the academic library unable to ever support even the illusion of a collection online on its side. The only purpose for metadata, vendors believe, is to drive our users to their platforms.

We will never be able to offer a robust experience on the library side if we do not have good metadata and systems which are designed not just for discovery, but for the display of bibliographic content in anticipation of use and need. We must have systems which raise awareness and stimulate demand.

Library standards still currently dictate that titles in academic libraries must be organized by an appropriate classification scheme corresponding to disciplinary knowledge, and there are good reasons for this stipulation even though search and display by classification is not supported. LCC is not just a book filing system as many think, but an important part of an intellectual framework for displaying, managing, preserving and assessing collections. The collection itself is a form of scholarly communication. It is, in itself, a key access point which supports browsing. LCC enables resources to be mapped to the academic disciplines to form bodies of knowledge of different scopes.

Classification is necessary for the organization and representation of knowledge, which is what libraries and librarians do.

I am not saying we should not subscribe to research databases or promote them, for that would be absurd.

I am saying, however, that collections of titles should always be the overarching framework for the academic library and even guide acquisitions activity, for this is what gives the library integrity and credibility as a library.

The display and management of collections and its bibliographic systems are absolutely fundamental to aesthetic and intellectual experience of the academic library and to higher education. Without it, the library lacks academic rigor.

Other than a return to print, not likely to happen, what would be some solutions to amplify content, to make content visible, and users more aware of resources? Social media can only do so much.

Display to a larger community of readers, and potential readers, needs to be an important design consideration, especially on the library’s ground floor or heavily trafficked areas and library landing pages.

I also believe libraries must become research and publishing centers where we serve the larger community and help faculty to conduct and publish research. The Office of Institutional Research should be housed in the library. I also believe, bucking web design trends, that the research library should offer a separate app with limited functionality for mobile phone users and design predominantly for laptop screens (PC and Laptop first designs). Our users are not coming to the library on their cell phones, and mobile-first designs do not make effective use of screen space.

In terms of technology, I think museums and trade shows have something to offer libraries create flexible environments which are capable of showcasing the new and noteworthy in publishing and create a more engaging and unique experience while being grounded in library practice. Instead of our being so tightly integrated with commercial product inventory, library service platforms might also provide integration with collection development resources and tools to allow for better marketing of new titles to our users. 

On a college campus, interactive projection technology in the library space and/or around campus could be part of the solution to help achieve greater resource visibility for the digital content we acquire.  Through interactive projection technology, racks of current journals and bookshelves of ebooks could appear, for example, not only in the library, but in the departments and even projected on the sides of campus buildings at night. Walk up, tap a display, and a private browser window opens to explore the contents. (With Browzine, we have similar capability now for browsable journals by discipline, only viewing current contents require a click.) The library could do once a month immersive events, always keeping the space fresh and new. Take a take a tour through the leading articles on x, y, x. We should make the academic library a place for scholarly exploration and discovery. 

It would require some additional coding and configuring (it is my idea, so I cite nothing), but it could be used to let people know of new things and to create a culture of learning and reading on college campuses, which is currently not being well served by empty spaces which now offer no clues as to what the library has to offer.

It could also be part of an urban street scene, where there is a projected pop up newsstand and ebook display. Books can open, allow for browsing and download (with requisite permission). All that would be needed is an empty wall.

Interactive projection technology is used in art and museum exhibitions, and raves, but it has never been applied in the academic library environment. Through this new technology, it might be possible to offer a public browsing experience of a larger library, having dynamic virtualized journal and new book displays, even in pop up locations around campus.

The BrowZine app allows browsing of scholarly journals by cover, and combined with interactive projection technology, could be used to create browsing locations by subject discipline in the library and in the departments. Below are some journals in English literature displayed through BrowZine, but ideally the table of contents should appear with a mouse over:

Interactivity might be further encouraged by allowing students to share quotes from texts they like and place them on a projected wall on the side of the library at night, or on the soaring glass walls on the inside, much like sticky-note walls which people always enjoy. The one floor of the library can be a collection of immersive rooms with virtual stacks of all of our e-content, an immersive space which encourages browsing and engagement, because if collections are properly managed, browsing is learning

The fact that browsing an expertly maintained collection is an important form of academic learning, information gathering and knowledge acquisition in the academic library should guide good library design. A library should never be just an empty space, and a library website should not be just a search box or lists of links to other websites. There is no excuse for that.

We should strive to create content-rich (and media rich) learning environments and intellectual spaces users would want to explore. We should be primarily “about” our content, or exceptional content from an academic perspective, not “about” our spaces or “about” vendor-branded products.

Over the last 30 years, museums have evolved to become increasingly more experiential, while academic libraries, even more than public libraries, are failing to offer users (readers and scholars) a unique and compelling intellectual and aesthetic experience. In this digital age, it is imperative that we have some kind of store front to promote broader user engagement. Such an arrangement would better conform to library best practices for access and display in academic library environments than discovery alone.

At the same time that collections have vanished from our websites and from our spaces, architectural designers have decided that a modern library must simply be a light-filled empty space, a sustainably designed building, with a generic staircase one can sit on and various study rooms capable of being rented by the hour. There may be no place to display books, especially new titles. Architects knock these buildings out in record time without giving much more thought to the interior other than what I have described. What they call a “new” academic library is an empty space with tables and chairs and windows, something which they already know how to build.  

These conceptions are dull and unimaginative libraries, troubling also from an ethical standpoint (a new library is not just a new building called a library), and not all that useful to scholars, who are bypassing the library and the library’s website both, because the library is no longer offering scholars even the semblance of browsable, authoritative collections.

Even though we offer a world of content online, it feels very much like the emperor’s new clothes.

Browsing is learning, and the browse experience, our keeping users informed of new things and new trends, is what people liked about the library of old. That made us useful to scholars. The fundamental experience of the academic library is a collection of good things, things worth knowing about. 

In this book, I will provide some ideas, solutions and alternatives against the dim conception of the academic library as an empty space, student center or an atrial building for people to congregate, because, quite simply, these library designs do not encourage literacy, intellectual inquiry, or the stated goals and objectives of librarianship or higher educationWe should stop letting architects perpetuate the myth that a modern library is merely or even primarily about “collaboration” (empty spaces for students to congregate and share their knowledge with each other) and space, rather than about literacy (literacy means acquiring disciplinary and cultural knowledge, not just being able to find and cite information), the transmission of disciplinary and cultural knowledge to the student and scholar

Let’s create a library which believes in itself and its scholarly mission. 

The academic library should provide for a unique intellectual and aesthetic experience valuable to scholars, including (of course) scholars who also happen to be students.

Just as a planetarium provides knowledge about the stars and planets and the cosmos, the academic library should provide knowledge about books and scholarly publications, especially what is current. It should be an intellectually stimulating place to be. To be effective, to stimulate intellectual inquiry, libraries must strive to be content-rich learning environments, both in the designs of their physical spaces and in their user interfaces. The library should not be the same experience each time a visitor comes to it, but should have its pulse on the new, the significant and the good to know, changing to reflect innovation and communication in the fields they support. This is all common sense.

Our designs, websites, systems, practices, our technology and our workflows should all be intended to facilitate public awareness and engagement with our content, because librarianship is curatorship.

From Browsable Collections to Socially-Oriented Spaces:
Libraries to Learning Centers.

am willing to concede that the traditional academic library, our old library service model, may no longer be viable in the Digital Age. Just as many are rethinking higher education, and how technology should play into it, so too, libraries and librarians have been the subject of reinvention, renovation, experimentation. commodification and elimination over the last thirty years.  

Today, new facilities comprised mainly of tall window walls, empty spaces, assortments of tables and chairs, variously called “learning centers,” or “library learning centers,” are not helping our causeneither the cause of the library nor that of higher education. They are not helping our cause of creating meaning, communicating knowledge, or reinforcing the academic commitments of students. They are, on the other hand, contributing to reduced control over library acquisitions budgets, fostering more restrictive user access by scholars and the public, preventing resource sharing with other institutions, limiting the agency of librarians, undermining our commitment to independent and life-long learning, and supporting an impoverished user experience on the library-side seemingly to drive users to commercial platforms.

While it might be easy to blame the digital revolution for the sorry state many academic libraries are in today, libraries have also been complicit in their own marginalization and commodification in the name of greater efficiencies of scale. We ought to have focused less on access to vendor products and more on user engagement; we already knew that scholarly titles possess little value outside of a collection of similarly scoped titles, and that bibliographic context is meaningful to scholars. It is not too late to demand that bibliographic standards be maintained for ebooks and ejournals, for this metadata is fundamental to any sort of content strategy that the library might undertake to promote its resources. We must be able to present our collections as collections.

We also allowed ourselves to be hosted as a service in the cloud, but without insisting upon server space of our own which could compensate for the loss of our local servers and the relative autonomy we enjoyed.  Therefore, many libraries use a CMS provided by the university, in addition to paying hosting for our library services platform (LSP), hosting for ebooks and archives to several entities (EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, OCLC), hosting for our institutional digital repository (another CMS), hosting for LibGuides (yet another CMS), and it may seem after a time as if there is no there “there” to the library anymore. It is a bunch of websites  cobbled together. The people who administer our websites in the academic space typically have no interest or knowledge of our content or our purpose, so the library website remains static, some Pexel image and slides which remain unchanged for years.

No organization in the real world would allow its web presence to be so neglected and disjointed, with multiple index pages.

The modern academic library today consists of three CMSs, one being maintained by the university, another maintained by a system vendor and other being hosted by another vendor.

If the modern library is “online,” we might want to consider in what this experience rightly consists. Can we fulfill our educational mission by just being a search box with some research guides? Do we offer good services by being collectionless? Are we really still a library?

A modern library has also been equated with a “building,” and librarians have become building custodians and facility managers. Many new libraries are little more than empty architectural spaces, seemingly intended to remain empty and stagnant by design, a hard echoing shell with winding stairs. 

I can still imagine a very different sort of space which offers the busting atmosphere of a convention, with new and interesting presentations going on in its rooms and tables of new titles, a real hub of learning, a town hall and a Times Square. We can have Generative AI one night and Studio Ghibli the next. Books can be set out on tables for browsing with download now QR codes on them to encourage “virtual fulfillment.”

While in the public library space, there is active discussion (and experimentation) about renewal, efforts to turn the library into a vibrant “third space,” there is really no comparable dialog around the “renewal” of the academic library other than to be a secondary student center on campus (by this, a place to sit and study usually outside of normal working hours), which doesn’t hold much appeal or value to scholars or the intellectual community which the academic library once served and attracted. Scholars are bypassing the library and going directly to publisher platforms because libraries are not providing scholars with the unique and valuable experience on its websites. While we may be a 501 (c)(3), we are increasingly “about” commercial vendor products and not titles. 

This trend of the library becoming nothing more than searchable subscription commercial content, the same content available on publisher platforms, might be aptly described as the commodification of libraries. Because we are digital, or at least our content is, we are also becoming less capable of forming partnerships with businesses and the surrounding community, the consequences of which are that researchers in a field of study may have limited access to the scholarly literature once they graduate from school, further restricting innovation and entrepreneurship in the community as well as the success of alumni and the profile of the university in the community. Another consequence is that we cannot remain competitive for grant funding, because the public no longer benefits from the library, thus limiting the grants for which we might otherwise be eligible. 

While lack of access to a scholarly library potentially impacts many scholarly and creative endeavors, including Journalism, Teaching,  Design, English, Architecture and Engineering, nowhere is it more poignantly illustrated than in the Health Sciences. Clinicians, researchers, doctors and specialists need continuous access to a library of clinical medical research to stay up-to-date throughout the span of their careers; and yet, shockingly, the medical school libraries which once served them may no longer feel any obligation or commitment to provide access to alumni once they graduate. 

This is unacceptable to me, and let it be noted that it does reflect a huge shift in thinking from when the academic library and medical libraries in Texas maintained business centers and made themselves available to all scholars throughout the life-time, a commitment which was often incorporated into library mission statements. This trend of restricting scholarly access in universities to only those with current institutional credentials is part of the commoditization of academic libraries. 

Despite the abundance of Open Access content on the web, the need for access to proprietary content is still very great. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the leading medical publishers and platforms (Elsevier and many others) permitted unrestricted access to COVID-related articles in order to do their part to contribute to knowledge about the disease and hasten the discovery of effective treatments.

The use of these materials dramatically increased once they became Open Access.

While this was wonderful, of coursemy library then, a large medical library unofficially affiliated with The University of Texas, probably already offered access to all that was made available to researchersit was also disheartening to me, knowing that the more specialized literature pertaining to rare diseases and genetic disorders, some of which affect the children of people I know (because I am involved in the disability community in Houston, and my own son suffers from some poorly understood genetic condition), continue to sit behind steep paywalls. 

  • Why not make all autism-related materials Open Access during the first week of April, for Autism Awareness month?
  • Why not pick other diseases throughout the year to help expedite cures and treatments for them, just as they did with COVID?
  • At a public research institution, why not provide free remote access one day/month, or try to negotiate temporary remote public access in our license agreements? 
  • Why not advocate for more library-friendly access policies in the academic space?

Increasingly, hospitals are not providing access to scholarly databases to doctors, and most hospitals have eliminated medical research libraries. If this literature were made more widely available and accessible to everyone, would this make a difference? (Yes, doctors use PubMed, but PubMed provides access to a small percentage of the clinical medical literature, which is why Elsevier and other vendors can charge academic libraries so much to license their proprietary content each year.)

Previously, all resources licensed by a State supported and even sometimes private academic library were available inside of the library.

Restricted scholarly access to clinical medical literature, and to all scholarly literature through university libraries, is a recent occurrence because of a shift in thinking that academic libraries exist only to serve those with current institutional affiliation, and that is all, rather than serving the scholarly community.

Where we once saw the State-supported academic research library as a community asset belonging to the citizens of the State, now not so much anymore. In fact, there is a State Mandate that all academic and medical libraries who receive any form of public funding make these resources accessible to the public.28 

What would happen if this mandate were actually enforced?

The Fate of Collections (and Knowledge in General) in the Age of Discovery. 

dmittedly, the problem of access may be overstated.

Maybe people are finding whatever they want or need by Googling. Maybe PubMed and Open Access resources are good enough for practitioners in health sciences who do not have access to a medical library through their employers. 

Maybe people out there in the real world do not have unmet information needs which the academic library might try to fulfill.

Truly, I have often wondered, if we flouted our license agreements and offered unrestricted online access to our scholarly databases for just one month, how many would bother to use our resources? On the other hand, what good might come from it? Would more cures be found?

What innovations might be fostered by free access to academic library resources? Is there demand beyond the institution?

I cannot help but feel that if only the academic library were better positioned to be a community resource, it would foster innovation, knowledge flow, new developments and job creation. The library would be great again. The library should have an important role to play in knowledge preservation and  transmission in the community, not just help students “get through” a degree program. This former role was a very important part of our self-conception years ago when academic libraries maintained collections which were accessible to the public and often established partnerships with businesses.

Because we owned collections, we were able to share them. Because we displayed collections, we organized and displayed titles so that users knew what we had or could see the extent of it, and whether it was maintained, without even having to perform searches to see what we have. Now that we have gone online, we have been forced by license agreements to restrict access as we never did before. For a long time, those who came inside the library where afforded access through IP authentication, but now SSO has replaced that.

Now, we do not encourage public access and we do not really do much to encourage resource use.

We teach instructional classes and do what we can to add value.

Content curation and display have traditionally been perceived of being of vital importance to the user experience of a good library and quality service and to the student experience of a library. I believe that digital library software should be able to display actual collections, current titles of interest to that audience and to the discipline, not just resources deemed relevant to a query. Even Spotify has playlists to turn people on to new things. 

Our capacity for display, arrangement and promotion, for engendering interest, for scholarly communication, for supporting intellectual inquiry, for the representation and transmission of academic knowledge, and the ability to expose people to new things in their fields, even through our own online platforms, depends on good metadata and display, but both have been drastically curtailed in recent years through the designs of our spaces and new systems, through our limited user interfaces, and through substandard metadata we obtain from vendors who are told by our system vendor that the purpose of good metadata in simply to drive students and faculty to their platforms.

Even on the vendor side, the browse experience of academic ebook titles is poor by library standards, because there, on the vendor side, titles are not logically organized into an academic library collections for browsing and display. For years, EBSCO, our main academic ebook vendor, which calls itself a “collection,” has maintained the same very strange broad categories (Children & Young Adult Fiction; Body, Mind & Spirit; Cooking, etc.) which, while fine for a bookstore, have absolutely nothing to do with the organization or categories of the academic library.

Random titles appear in random order their book carousels because they lack an appropriate classification scheme to organize them:

The EBSCO ebook Academic Collection. Most academic libraries subscribe to EBSCO’s academic ebook collection. Without the application of appropriate metadata, it is impossible to design robust interfaces for ebooks to support a meaningful browse experience. EBSCO Academic eBooks organizes titles in broad categories shown left (and random order within these), subjects which have absolutely nothing to do with the academic disciplines or how a scholar would approach academic titles.

With the application of a classification scheme like LCC, ebooks and journal titles would be capable of being browsed online just like in a traditional library. It is not a hard problem to solve. Libraries have solved the problem. Library bibliographic metadata for books should contain an 050 field. LC Classification would permit the creation of a much browse experience for ebooks and ejournals.

There could also be an industry standard for a physical representation of an ebook which could by interfiled with physical books, and have a QR code for easy download and information about the book on it, much like the way people once communally browsed video boxes. Displays of physical books could support “virtual fulfillment” (books stay in place to be browsed in the library, but digital versions can be downloaded or accessed online to be checked out) would allow for the creation of new book displays in the library which encourage browsing.

All academic libraries should have a new books section and digital feed organized by LCC both online and positioned near the entrance or in high traffic areas. There is opportunity for new library interfaces to be developed which might even be projected into our physical spaces to encourage user engagement and resource visibility of digital content: a virtual stacks.

Modern interactive digital display technology is now widely used in museum and interactive art exhibits. Ebooks could be projected on the walls in large format modern interactive digital display technology to form a virtual stacks, with a way to tap the wall and have a browsing window open at eye level. No, I do not expect people to stand there and read a book or journal article, some kind of digital newsstand, but the visual display of at least a subset of the thousands of books and journals to which the library subscribes creates a compelling infographic, and the browsing wall (or walls) promotes user engagement.

I don’t think I am being unreasonable to expect that modern academic libraries serve to inform students and scholars as to what is new and authoritative in their respective fields and specialties. To me, that is a core function of libraries that was once met by our spaces, our systems and workflows, but which is rapidly going extinct. Inside of the library, we do know (through collection development tools) or have the capacity to know, should we bother, what new titles are coming out, and faculty are often very happy to receive this information. Few librarians are doing this anymore, as title-by-title acquisition is itself in decline.

  • How can we be an intellectual or cultural space with nothing but window walls (nothing of interest to meet the eye) and seating?
  • How are we a fully digital library if we cannot control our own websites and user interfaces, and have no store front of our own?
  • How are we now effectively encouraging literacy without ourselves being invested in literature?
  • How does the library support student education if what it licenses is practically invisible to students? 
  • How are we about scholarly communication if we cannot communicate with our users even what is new in their field in a way that is intuitive and intelligible to them?

The selection of resources in the library, an activity formerly known as “collection development,” has been replaced by blanket subscriptions to large packages of aggregated digital content which no one inside of the library may be familiar with or know much about.

They know about the products to be sure, but not the sources or titles inside of the packages, which remain largely invisible to everyone, including scholars. We have gone from being about titles to being about entitlements. Scholarship, however, is about the titles themselves, not about vendor products. 

The library experience should be about titles, about works, about human intellectual achievement in the disciplines the library supports, not about commercial products.

As Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Public Archive put it, “Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books.”29 At least, they should be more than that, and have always been able to achieve that independence from vendors to create an experience and learning environment unique to them.

Inside the modern library, invisible content now comes and goes, slipping in and out of our invisible inventories as it meets our vendors’ objectives, and even as it does so, it doesn’t affect us or our license agreements much.

Invisibility and disorganization are barriers to literacy and engagement, and antithetical to good library practices.

Our content exists on the other side of the library’s search portal, and no one, not even those who work there, is much aware of new content acquired by the library through these passive means, which depend on a highly motivated, educated user to discover for himself what is relevant to become and remain educated is a field. There is no sense of personal or intellectual investment or care (curatorship) by librarians or anyone else in the content that the library provides, not just in our selecting it, but in our organizing it, describing it, arranging it, preserving it and presenting it, because for the most part librarians are not, we are not, at least not anymore. Our user interfaces lack any emphasis on publications. Think about it: all ecommerce sites categorize and classify their content to allow for browsing. This is not about some unreasonable attachment to print, but to librarianship

We in the library field, with our well-developed classification systems, have no reliable mechanism for encouraging browsing of ebooks.

Many of our library systems, even those with highly sophisticated reporting features and analytics, cannot handle a simple “shelf list,” the organized view of our entitlements arranged as a library collection. I want to be able to view all of my books, ebooks and ejournals–which we in the field call “titles”–by classification. This should be easy, a no-brainer, a canned report. Our user interfaces should encourage browsing according to library standards, by LCC (it would be so easy to create one based on LCC). Unfortunately, our system vendors, those for academic libraries, say: “Browsing is not important for academic libraries. Researchers do not browse.” There is no evidence to back that up, but if you do not offer it, they won’t.

There is no way for users to experience the collection as a collection, as a meaningful whole, as knowledge, as an entity which was believed by most librarians to be fundamental to the user experience of the academic library and sustaining scholarly value. Most of us provide federated access to vendor-branded products to be consulted in case someone might have a need to know something or write something, but that is all. Vendors now control our resources, determine our access and lending policies, and increasingly seek to define the very standards of “our” metadata.13 

Much has changed in academic librarianship, leading some in our field to proclaim that due to the digital revolution, academic librarianship is itself dead.31 Inside the library, there may be few who remember what was good and exciting about the experience of the old library or the ideals that the profession once stood for.

The modern academic library, what passes for some new kind of library, does not make any effort to represent titles, relate them to other titles, place them into broader scholarly or social context, raise awareness of new publications, or create community and value around reading or scholarship. It doesn’t do strategic marketing or CRM or content curation or personalization—some public library software does—although these would be great additions to our system software, which continues only to enhance analytics rather than tools to enhance user engagement.

Finally, the modern academic library, especially as it is conceived by many architectural firms and content providers, does not represent intellectual culture or the culture of educated people, so that culture can be preserved and perpetuated to future scholars. Culture and knowledge are collectives of human intellectual achievement, not something people can easily retrieve or experience through a search box. 

  • By design, the new academic library does not encourage resource use.
  • It doesn’t encourage browsing or awareness of new titles, even online.
  • It does not aspire to raise literacy levels or promote independent learning, which had previously defined the nature of a good library experience.
  • In fact, it discourages it, but ensuring that people who enter and exit the library will rarely see anything other than tables and chairs; people who go to the library online are also likely to be exposed to nothing new. Library websites remain static for years. 

The modern library learning center is a search application on a static website inside of a CMS which for the most part librarians do not administer (we used to manage our own servers and websites) and an assortment of subscription database products.

Our architecture, the designs of our spaces and systems, reinforce this dull conception of library when it appears as an inflated box with nothing inside of it, “soaring structures of glass with little inside but dramatic staircases.”32 

Perhaps it is time we strategize ways to put the library back into the library before it is too late.

The Innovative Academic Library is not a Student Center.

here seems to be a misunderstanding as to what libraries are about today, with architects assuming that the primary value of a library is in providing students with access to space, light, seating, tables and to other students. That is all. This architect, for example, seems to believe that the traditional college library has been “forever changed,” as he puts it, by new approaches which emphasize content creation and collaboration; but from my perspective this isn’t really the case. Students may study together, as they always have, but colleges and universities are still more competitive than cooperative environments, and they have always emphasized content creation in the form of scholarly publication.

This design looks sad to me, but the architect seems proud of it. 

This image is from an article written by the architect who proclaims that the architecture of college and university libraries has been forever transformed into a hub of student collaboration and learning.33 By what measure should we be evaluating there new libraries as successful?

I am not sure if ALA, ACRL or IFLA members would necessarily approve of library designs which place no real emphasis on titles, but this is an important position for them to take up at this time, when so many bookless new libraries are being built. IFLA does issue library building guidelines, but has not done so lately.34

I believe that the definition of a library is needed for public accountability. Some definitions and business requirements are needed. 

When State legislatures in Texas approve millions in appropriations for a new library, I don’t think an empty building (I mean a building meant to be empty) is what State legislators quite had in mind, because this is not what the public has in mind when they hear that a new library is being built. But that is what is being built, all across the country, with or without the blessing of ALA or ACRL or IFLA or the State Legislature, in the name of a new librarianship. I also believe that State-supported libraries must be designed with public parking and a recommitment to resource sharing, at least with other State-supported colleges and universities. 

With the digital revolution, the library more than anything needs digital solutions, not furniture on wheels. A library is by definition a content-rich learning environment, immersive and experiential, and not an empty space full of designer furniture.

The library’s main objective, broadly defined, is literacy, which would entail not just providing access to content, but raising awareness of new publications and trends in the field. Publication is still the basis for scholarly communication. In order to have necessary academic rigor, a library is a collection of intellectual and cultural objects, usually texts (but it can be art and music, any human creation) deliberately selected, described, systematically organized and displayed in relation to each other with respect to a field or discipline and to a user community.

It is intended for others to experience as a collective; it is intentional and it fundamentally experiential.

Academic librarianship is about the preservation, perpetuation, representation, organization and communication of cultural, disciplinary or professional knowledge. It is a content-rich learning environment whose content reflects standards for organization and well as its community.

An empty space is not a library, and a search engine is not a digital library.

No one believes, for example, that Google Scholar is a library or a digital library. No one believes an empty public building is a modern or innovative kind of library. 

Providing access to managed collections are what libraries are about, not access to resources. Libraries are not about “access to” this or that title, to this or that resource, or providing “adequate number resources,” but rather consistently, predictably, reliably and publicly presenting to our respective communities the best resources, what is thought significant and good by those in the disciplines and other educated people.

Libraries and librarianship are also about broader social and intellectual context in which an item appears, its significance and relevance not to the individual doing the query, but to scholars in the field. That perspective is now lacking from our UIs. Academic librarianship is about publishing, ideas, movements, trends, what is significant and influential to others, a big picture view. I believe that the ability to organize library titles into collections, that objective academic structure, is vital not just to the library profession, but to scholarship at the university, to the education of students, to good management, and to the perpetuation of knowledge in society.

The organization or framework of a collection is a very significant value add of the academic library. Resource visibility is another value or value add of a library, since visibility stimulates resource use and contributes to knowledge. Designs which do not add value to the intellectual experience of a library, which do not contribute to a knowledgeable community, are dysfunctional. 

It isn’t that we failed to evolve, it is that they did not grasp the intellectual and aesthetic experience of a library, what makes it good and valuable to its users and to the academic community at large.

Librarianship is/as a Discursive Practice.

n a philosophical level, the practice of librarianship involves what some have described as “discursive formations” of knowledge, a term coined by Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge.35 Positioning a work into a location, a locus, within an appropriate classification scheme and within a discipline allows for sense-making to occur and for a work to be perceived as relevant to a field, and also interpreted in a particular fashion as belonging to a certain body of thought. The art of librarianship is not just access, put enhancing perceived value of the thing within a scholarly context.

Radford aptly describes this in terms of traditional librarianship’s attachment to positioning a book in a physical location on a library shelf:

. . . imagine yourself standing in front of a library bookshelf. Just by looking at the titles on the spines, you see how the books cluster together. You can see which books belong together and which do not. You can identify those books that seem to form the heart of the discursive formation and those books which reside on the margins. Moving along the shelves, you see the books that tend to bleed over. Moving along the shelves, you see those books that tend to bleed over into other classifications and that straddle multiple discursive formulations. You can physically and sensually experience the domain of discursive formulations by literally having your fingers trail along the spines as you scan the call numbers, feeling the depth and complexity of the collection by the number of volumes and the variety of the titles, reaching those points that feel like state boarders or national boundaries, those points where one subject ends and another begins, or those magical places where one subject has morphed into another, and you did not even notice. Such is the life of a discursive formation; the arrangement of real books on real library shelves giving rise to real experiences.36

Maybe because of my years of Greek and Latin and my interest in medieval scholasticism, my conception of a library pivots around classification as its conceptual knowledge framework, a kind of tree with clusters of topics (topoi) or places (loci), a schema which has a long history in Western thought, with categories and arrangement seen as fundamental to knowledge. A library must possesses structure which represents knowledge, and knowledge in the academic realm is based on what the discipline defines as a priority. Knowledge itself is a construct based on categorization, classification, logic, organization and a metaphorical tree structure and consensus. This tree, which predates library bookshelves for centuries, has been referred to as the most important data visualization tool in history.37

According to the way many of us were trained as librarians, academic or disciplinary knowledge cannot exist (the “library” itself cannot exist) without an objective structure and shared conceptual scheme, namely, adherence to appropriate classification schemas, metadata, curatorship, rules and display appropriate to that content. LC Classification, the classification scheme used by most academic libraries, is a universal classification framework which corresponds to the academic disciplines and the topics which define it. 

For a library to be an academic library to be an academic library is to be invested in and committed to certain discursive practices like LC Classification and LC Subject Headings, AACR2, etc., and name authority files, because this is what gives our content body, structure, visibility, legitimacy (authoritativeness) and meaning as a collection. It is bibliography, knowing about publications and how to describe them using a formal language and sets of rules for description. The arrangement of intellectual objects forms a web or tree which as a whole represents knowledge. Our job function, philosophically and professionally speaking, is to care for and maintain “bodies of knowledge” which correspond to the disciplines. 

The collection, experienced as a collection, is our most valuable resource, our most valuable curricular resource, our main contribution, and there are valid reasons to defend it beyond our own job security.

I believe a visible collection is absolutely necessary to create a culture of continuous learning on our campuses.

A good academic library collection represents our common cultural and intellectual inheritance and our hope for the future, as well as the community it serves. It also projects the conception that knowledge is permanent, human achievement is worth pursuing, preserving and sharing, and that there is a common history and humanity which underlies all scholarly endeavors.

For what good is scholarship, what is the point of it, if there is no permanence to any of it, no organization, no visibility to it, no way to make that leap from hypothesis to accepted fact? Without that structure, that overarching framework of collections, all scholarly pursuits are no more than vanity, for nothing can build or grow, nothing is permanent, and its impact may be short-lived. 

The good library represents as a value human intellectual and creative achievement as well as what is new and significant and authoritative in a field of study. A good library honors “works.” At a university, faculty and students can count on a library to keep them informed of trends in their field. It cannot do this through discovery (a search engine) alone. To be clear, I am certainly not opposed to discovery, but opposed to the mentality that thinks collections are unnecessary now because we have discovery, and the consequences this has on our users. I am opposed to thinking that it is everything to the point where the library becomes so complacent that it is not concerned with acquiring anything that is not part of its annual license agreement. I am concerned when a major public research institution denies access to unaffiliated scholars because doing so might possibly violate a license agreement. I am concerned when the library no longer in anyway supports life-long learning because of agreements it has made with vendors or how it has deployed technology.

Whether one is a conservative librarian, believing that large institutions should maintain a commitment to the preservation of intellectual and cultural knowledgebecause realistically, there is no other institution in society devoted to thator more of a progressive librarian, who believes in promoting democratic ideals and values through broad access to informationthe rapid conversion over the last few years of the public academic library into a sort of privatized commercial business center whose resources are accessible only to those who have paid tuition (even despite the university library’s being commonly subsidized by public funds), either way, is not in keeping with our business requirements as librarians nor our library professional ideals. The library really is the heart and soul of the university. Without it, the institution cannot lay claim to knowledge.

The tree is the most compelling visual metaphor for knowledge, and for good reason. Without collections organized into scopes, without classification, bodies of disciplinary knowledge cease to exist.

The New Library Gothic.

dmittedly, the image of the librarian and our unshakeable association with the book format have long been perceived by many in our profession as albatrosses around our necks. 

Thirty years ago, many ALA-accredited Library science programs began removing the word “library” from the names of their courses and degrees, often simply substituting the word library with “information.” Library school students today graduate with “MSIS” degrees to give them maximum advantage on the job market. I studied many programming languages, web design, database management and SQL along with the arcana of cataloging and bibliographic description. Web programming is still a fairly universal requirement of the library school curriculum today, but no one in the real world knows this or associates librarians with web or technical skills, which is the “IS” in the MLIS. Much of what a librarian does in any capacity (other than staffing a help desk) is not understood by the public either, even the educated public, probably in the same fashion as accountants/CPAs are confused with bookkeepers or even accounts receivable clerks. 

Librarians across the blogosphere were horrified when in 2021 Bill Maher made cracks along the lines of “Oh, pleasewhy does anyone need a master’s degree to shelve books?”38 He even suggested the MLS (now the MLIS, sometimes an MSIS) is a form of “grift” by universities. Librarians do not manage books, or manage inventory; they manage collections and budgets.

If he thinks the entry-level requirements for “wannabe librarians” are absurdfrom what I gleaned viewing older videos which mentioned librarians, he also thinks public libraries are a waste of moneyhe might be surprised to learn that the requirements to become a School Librarian in most states, including my own state of Texas, are far in excess of the MLIS degree.39 He might also be surprised at immense new libraries being built at fantastic public expense but with nothing inside of them but tables and chairs as far as the eye can see.

He might apply another, less innocuous-sounding word than “grift” to the multi-million dollar buildings built at public universities and community colleges which are called “libraries,” but with no library in them or even any more for them online, at least, nothing more than what had been there before. The library may be fully online now, but its user interface is exactly the same as before. While Maher denigrates both libraries and the ignorance of young people, how does he think young people might educate themselves to come to know about the books written by his guest panelists if their books are not placed on the shelves of college and university libraries or featured in some prominent way inside of them? Who is going to put them there, if not the librarians like me who regularly watch his show, in part to learn about new books? He is trying to expose people to new authors and intellectuals, and so are we.

Public opinion and Bill Maher aside, it would appear that academic librarianship has recently hit a new low, ironically at a time when new academic libraries without any visible collections are being built at college campuses everywhere, structures ranging from 50 to 200 million dollars or more. Now that we have gotten rid of the books in order to become a kind of dedicated social study space, what architects call a more “student-centered” library, how is that working out for us (and our students and faculty) in practice?

What is the impact empty libraries and invisible repositories are having on students in terms of educational outcomes?

Indeed, some librarians have proposed that libraries are now “about” their facilities,40 being a work or meeting space, a venue, or student support/tutoring center. Of course, we are about databases too, our costly subscription content, which is completely irrelevant unless someone has a need to access them and fairly useless for acquiring knowledge of a field or academic discipline.

Therefore, couches and study spaces have become the main attraction. I promise you, we had plenty of seating and light and seating before renovation, no one ever complained about not having a place to sit. It’s just that no one ever thought to advertise tables and chairs on the academic library’s homepage before the new building came along. (Do you really want to stay in a hotel that advertises that it is air-conditioned? Don’t people assume we have tables and chairs and couches and light? Must we announce that we have “staplers”?)

The many new college and university libraries constructed around this ideal in recent years, some which are pictured in this book, exemplify a trend which I call the “new library Gothic.” The new academic library is a modern soaring glass building, hollow inside.

In the “new library Gothic,” glass walls and open concept buildings with various centralized seating arrangements and controlled natural light are the defining characteristics of the space, which is constructed around the ideal of collaboration (a popular trend in education) and technology for technology’s sake, and not so much “raising literacy levels” or communicating shared knowledge, our former library educational objectives. The sacred artifacts and relics of the past have been destroyed. We have been force to apostatize, to renounce the old faith, to embrace this new progressive embrace of space and natural light as contributing to education. The new library Gothic postures itself as being an architectural or design movement, defined by voluminous glass spaces which serve absolutely no purpose but to represent a deliberate break from the past, but it is very much like a new religion. One librarian, the author of  Constructing Library Buildings That Work, wisely advises:

If your building program doesn’t call for something that belongs in a soaring glass space, you really don’t want one.14

What is illuminated is an empty atrium, a cavernous space with nothing inside of it but staircases and corridors, taking space away from meeting spaces or program rooms on every floor.

Sustainable design may have dominated the discussion so that today, computer controls in a server room measure out precise light, energy and temperature levels to keep everything at operating at an unwavering constant.

New library funding is allocated to sustainable building technology, nothing to innovative library technology. At very large institutions, robots may be employed to retrieve and store books in underground bunkers. It is kind of fascinating, like the pneumatic tube systems at banks, but I am not sure that this is a great use of technology and public funding. Most of the time with new library designs, print books and journals are simply removed to some remote storage facility. Other times, they have been weeded moved into the periphery, the upper floors and farthest reaches of the space, where they are the least likely to accost passers by and distract them from their studies. In the meantime, the first floor remains bookless. No one is going to see new books or pass anything of intellectual interest.

It is unclear to anyone if the library is even acquiring new things, even if it is.

What I call “the new library Gothic” is a trend promoted by architectural design firms to replace libraries with tall glass structures in the name of a new academic librarianship. With this, there is no concern about the user experience of an academic library, only how the space functions as a study hall.

How well these new bookless and collectionless designs work for a college campus library is really an unknown, since libraries have no measurable learning outcomes of their own, a stumbling block when it comes to assessment and demonstrating value in educational settings; yet, this vacuous space ripe for repurposing has become the standard model for new libraries constructed since 2010. 

Why do I label these often grossly inflated, soaring glass structures with nothing inside of them “Gothic”?

“Gothic” is one of those peculiar terms in the English language (like “sanction”) which can mean one thing (e.g., light, unornamented, streamlined and modern) and its exact opposite (dark, ornate, heavily decorated and detailed) depending on its context. In the Middle Ages, the Gothic movement—which was only called that in the hindsight of the Renaissance—sought to apply new building technologies to engineer towering, streamlined open spaces full of glass and light, in contrast to the heavy, thick-walled, dimly-lit, ornate Romanesque-styled public buildings full of marble statuary, stained glass, narrative forms, candle light, relics and painted icons. It was dark in a romantic way, a sanctuary which many associate with ritual, intimacy, spirituality and otherworldliness. Compared to what preceded it, Gothic architecture was “modern,” clearing out the clutter, dissolving the thick stone support walls and opaque stained glass into clear white glass and letting in light; and while it flourished toward the end of the High Middle Ages, the iconoclasm of the Reformation, countered by the Classical revival of the Italian Renaissance, gave the style a whole new meaning. During the Renaissance, this perpendicular, light-filled, glass-walled, smooth and relatively plain style without statuary or art in it became “Gothic,” a pejorative term alluding to the ignorant Germanic barbarians (“Goths”), the invaders blamed both for the fall of Rome and the decline of learning in the West. Many Catholics still see things from that perspective. Even today, there is a cultural preference for darker, ceremonial spaces and a dim religious light (and candles) over a brightly lit modern spaces. 

In typography, “Gothic” is used in a similar fashion, a font signifying a break with the past to be bold and modern. Gothic fonts are unornamented (sans-serif), of unvaried widths (strokes), used to convey minimalism, modernity, efficiency and progress over more decorative serif-fonts.

Example of a “gothic” (sans-serif) type font related to Helvetica, which is probably the most popular in the 20th century.

What is going on in many libraries today is seemingly driven by a similar minimalist design aesthetic, which also helps designers maximize their profit to keep costs down. A minimalist design often equates to maximal profit for the architect and builder.

The Gothic is an iconoclastic impulse to deliberately eliminate the darkness and clutter of the stacks, to break from culture and tradition, and from the past, to construct large monumental spaces emphasizing light, height, space, glass, openness, modernity, transparency and collaboration, with the user experience unimpeded by the distraction and clutter of books or print. It is ideological, a new Reformation, a whitewashing with whiteboards and engineered surfaces, with some rushing in to destroy the sacred relics of the traditional library, and others rushing to save the relics from destruction. 

  • Print and paper have been eliminated, and despite our profession’s commitment to free speech and fighting censorship, censorship has been imposed by an impervious blanket of invisibility.
  • Students enter a library and see nothing but places to sit, sometimes for several floors.
  • Students come to our websites and see nothing but a search box.
  • We place unreasonable expectations on uneducated people, students, to discover items needed to become educated people; or perhaps, we really have no expectations of them to become educated.
  • The new librarianship emphasizes amenities, efficiency of access, technology, modernity and collaboration (peer learning and orality), over and against traditional educational objectives, including raising literacy and conveying shared cultural knowledge.
  • The new librarianship appears to want to replace culture with technology. 

Large architectural firms like Gensler and Moody Nolan claim expertise in new academic library designs and building libraries of the future, even publishing research papers on new academic libraries to show off their projects and their prowess.42 43 In these designs, the library is conceived as a place for studying and collaboration, but not for becoming more literate, better educated, more knowledgeable or culturally aware, advancing the goals of librarianship.

Many architectural firms choose to work around the librarians, even making outrageous statements should object to their proposed designs, that the librarians remain captive to outdated design thinking:

“The purpose of this survey was to facilitate a productive and proactive discussion on the physical landscape of academic librarians’ workspaces,” says Bryan Irwin, AIA, LEED-AP, principal of Watertown, MA-based Sasaki Associates, the architectural firm that conducted the survey. ‘Architects are being incredibly innovative in library collection and study areas, yet one of the most critical components — the librarians — remain captive to outdated design thinking.’44

From the outset, this architect associates librarians with “dated design thinking,” and as a result, plans to ignore what librarians might have to say about how to innovate the new library.

The building programming, the library’s functional requirements for the new building, must be provided to the architects during the initial planning stages or it will be too costly to go back and make changes down the road. Shlipft makes the point in Constructing Library Buildings That Work that the building programming (I call these “business requirements,” but he is correct in terms of how architects refer to these documents) must be done by a librarian who understands the needs of the library:

Writing a building program is a job for experienced librarians with extensive management experience, not for architects, designers, or other people who have neither worked in libraries on a daily basis nor had to cope personally with library space problems.

Programming is not a job for administrators who are not librarians—it is not for school administrators, city administrative staff, or university administrators. 45

They must be written by a librarian who is familiar not only with the community and how the current space is being used, but also with how the existing space is not currently meeting the needs of those who do not use the library.

Stewart also notes in a study which goes back to 2009 that librarians are often excluded from the design process for new libraries.15 Architectural surveys show that librarians often feel that they are on the receiving end of these new designs which they must somehow make work once the project is completed:

Sasaki’s library survey uncovered a lot of information about why many academic library renovations miss the mark. For example, when renovations are made, librarians are often on the end of receiving changes they considered low priority: they saw cafés introduced 11 percent of the time, when they prioritize this change just three percent of the time. Meanwhile, shelving was removed 18 percent of the time when only one percent of librarians said the removal was important. These changes have major impacts on librarians, forcing them to try to fit their roles into the physical spaces that exist.

Another example is librarian access to patrons. Currently, regardless of workspace type, 59 percent of librarians stated that their workspace is hidden from the public eye, making it difficult for patrons to know where they can get help and forcing them to rely on technology-aided access. Further compounding the problem, 25 percent of librarians stated that, through organizational restructuring, their access to patrons has further decreased.47

The trend is actually quite well documented. And yes, it is true, Public Service Librarians do not want to be behind opaque swipe card entry doors. They would rather work in semi-public offices where they are visible and accessible to students and faculty, but can also get their work done and consult with people in a comfortable office space.

The administration should be accessible to the public as well, through double glass doors, not hidden behind painted utility doors.

Architectural designers typically begin with an observational analysis of existing spaces and how present they are currently being used,  rather than coming from a perspective of what a good academic library is or what it ought to do, the user experience it is supposed to deliver, from the top down. Bottom up designs are never innovative. One firm did a study of our old library to see how it was being used, they also didn’t consider the ways that the old library was not being used, the fact that most of the publishing faculty and our better students were using other libraries in the city because the old library was no longer serving their needs. (I knew where our students were going because I issued TexShare cards and taught graduate Research Methods classes.) They didn’t need just a place to sit or more comfortable furniture. Designers also didn’t consider exciting ways in which the library could be used to increase engagement with digital media or view lectures going on at other universities, even conferences. There was no news / media viewing room. 

Prior to the discussion about a new library, in the years following changes to our acquisitions policies where it was decided that the library would no longer acquire print, foot traffic had already dropped off. The institution had undergraduate and some graduate programs in the visual and performing arts, music, English, history, humanities, social sciences, communications and journalism, science and engineering, psychology, sociology and social work.

Because we were not acquiring much print, the new space was built without browsable spaces or the visibility of titles to help students and faculty keep up with new things. 

Architects also didn’t consider incorporating technology in new and original ways for display in the space. They did not consider using interactive projection display technology, for example.

They do not consider placing new resources where they were likely to be seen, by the entrance on the first floor (A “browsing book bistro” on the ground floor, where there was foot traffic, which was my suggestion). They also put some low shelving units in areas on the upper floors on the far side of a grand staircase where they would not likely be easily seen by anyone and whose shelf location could not be referenced in a catalog; the rest of the stacks were placed into a irregular layout to accommodate an irregular (triangular) floorplan, staggered across the floor like grocery store aisles (library stacks run perpendicular to the direction of traffic) and not filling out the space. The end result wasn’t the cultural, intellectual or social experience the architects had promised.

It proclaims that books are unimportant, rather than amplifying their value and appeal.

It should be considered in the planning stages how we can deliver a better academic library experience for students, rather than asking why students are currently using a space. For example, resource use or awareness of new titles is often not considered a design priority for new libraries today, but this should be a design requirement and priority for new libraries because it is a core function of a library to be a library.

In addition, there must be tighter coordination between the design of the physical library and the user experience of the library online, rather than these each being treated as two entirely distinct things. Today, many libraries have hybrid collections. The functionality of the building and the software should be interconnected. What is available online should be represented in the space. Browsing and display should be built into new academic libraries. Improving awareness of resources and trends in scholarship and publishing should be a primary focus of the user experience. There are many technologies used in trade show and museum exhibitions which could be readily adapted to the modern academic library to create a more immersive, educational experience. 

While there are many renderings by architectural firms showing off idealized designs being enjoyed by a Photoshop mirage of smiling images of students, there are almost no published post occupancy assessments of these new libraries in library literature, or at least none I have been able to locate in my library’s databases or online. 

How successful are they, and by what educational standard are we to measure their success? In general:

  • These are not content-rich spaces which raise awareness of publications or titles students might want to read or know about.
  • These are not places which present targeted collections of interest to users. These are not spaces which seek to stimulate intellectual inquiry.
  • These are not facilities which present users with shared bodies of knowledge corresponding to academic degrees.
  • They do not provide the experience of what other educated people are reading (or viewing) to support and sustain a community of readers, writers, scholars or intellectuals.
  • These are not spaces which encourage reading, writing, self-directedness or creativity.
  • These are not places where educated people, or those seeking to become educated, might want to spend time to recharge and keep their research interests from fizzling out.

Librarians want their spaces to be a metaphorical window onto the world, not literally a “window.”

Astonishingly, encouraging resource use—turning people on to new things—is not even a design priority for the architecture of most new library buildings, new library websites, or of new library system software. In fact, each of the three components which collectively defines the modern library—our facilities, our websites and our systems—may no longer be controlled by the library, whose lack of autonomy in turn contributes to a diminished ability for the library and its librarians to have significant impact on our communities. 

Academic librarians do not educate students merely by answering questions or by “providing access to resources,” but just like any teacher or educator, we educate by selecting, organizing, describing and presenting scholarly content so it can become known and valued in its disciplinary context. It is our mighty graphic organizer, our tree of knowledge.

In this way, students and faculty at our institutions are made aware of what others in their respective fields know and value.

This is part of the dark magic of what librarians actually do, how they add value, which most people do not know or think about. Like any professional educator, we are responsible for ferreting through, evaluating and then presenting content, specifically cultural and intellectual content, with the objective that knowledge (of titles and publications) can be known and valued by a larger public. We keep faculty and regular library users informed of things that might interest them. We are responsible for what is referred to in the world of retail as merchandising and within the art world as curatorship.

The organization, metadata and display of the traditional library was oriented toward both resource discovery through a catalog and also browsing the shelves, with the latter regarded an important form of information gathering and research activity. Cataloging and classification were ways of organizing and packaging content so it can be taught and communicated, known and evaluated within a common intellectual framework. How do we support scholarly communication in this new environment which has no collections, nor visible titles organized according to the priorities of the academic disciplines we support? The academic library has been undermined by systems designed to accommodate the needs of commercial vendors and not to provide engaging user interfaces or support the framework of collections, which is about selectivity, not bulk acquisitions or indexing aggregator content. 

At large institutions, librarians function also to preserve knowledge for future scholars. Our educational function as librarians is intimately tied up with maintaining collections. (Collections represent bodies of knowledge, and knowledge represents the academic disciplines. Academic degrees are a measure of one’s degree of knowledge in a field.)

I believe that the lack of focus on collections in libraries, and on content in general, presents significant challenges to many academic librarians, students and higher education, and represents an unrecognized intellectual barrier, especially in college, where students are expected to function as independent learners, assuming greater responsibility for teaching themselves the material provided by their professors and familiarizing themselves with what is considered authoritative in their disciplines. 

Looking at their boring library designs, it is hard to believe Gensler is the same design firm who designed the rich interiors for the House of Blues.

Now that’s a collaborative space!

 

Invisibility is/as a Barrier to Learning.

ompared to what came before, e-resource discovery systems provide unparalleled access to large amounts of content, which is certainly advantageous for experienced researchers and established scholars. 

Nonetheless, this model for a library does constitute a major barrier to our students, who once derived benefit from the organizational structure and visibility, browsability, and authoritativeness of a library collection optimized for learning about a discipline and also for presenting things of topical interest to undergraduates. While the system efficiently retrieves, students cannot educate themselves effectively or efficiently through a search engine alone, just by Googling topics, or by discovering stuff in discovery, for there is no representation of the discipline or what it is they are expected to know. There is no structure or organization, which we used to believe necessary. Moreover, the content of the library is invisible until someone comes along and searches for something. Apart from that, we are like those old Yahoo! directory trees from 2000-something, lists of links to Internet resources we once compiled and which no one paid attention to then. Today, we offer LibGuides database A-Z lists.

With discovery, there is no manifestation of a body of knowledge corresponding to academic degrees maintained in anticipation of use. We previously maintained a framework for communicating and preserving knowledge, a visible arrangement, our tree of knowledge of important bibliographic titles arranged according the LCC. Now, there is no packaging of content to form a coherent overview of a topic, field or discipline (that organization of resources into a coherent whole, knowledge formation). Without LCC, without collections, there is no overview of the scholarly communication of a field. 

By collections, I do not mean ownership, but curatorship, the deliberate selection, organization and public display of intellectual and cultural objects in their respective contexts (topics), mirroring the disciplines. That is what the library and the library profession is all about, contextualization and formalized description, synthesis and representation of intellectual and cultural objects so that knowledge can be communicated (seen), assessed, evaluated, appreciated, preserved and known, so that people can become more broadly educated. 

For some academic library users and librarians, the new idea of the academic research library as a kind of unambitious hollow monument to learning, a cavernous light-filled space, may be inspiring, even liberating, in a sort of Nietzschean waythrowing off the crushing weight of history, culture, tradition, books and publicationsand with it, any sense of obligation for anyone to read books or to know anything about them. I have observed that the people in the library with the least amount of education are the ones who advocate the strongest for eliminating paper. Finally, a leveled playing field! The librarian doesn’t need well educated people to work in them because no one expects us to know anything about our own content, since we are not actually selecting it.

The atrial design of many new libraries, where light shines in on oversized staircases, might symbolize illumination in a Neo-Platonic sense of ascending into light through passing though levels, like growing in knowledge or academic degrees, but that is all. It is a metaphor, a literary allusion, which most people do not get anyway; to most people, it is just a gigantic staircase you can sit on, despite what the architect might say about the “learning staircase.” The design does not encourage education nor resource use. Human achievement, and the shared value placed upon it, inspires human achievement, not staircases.

Unbelievably, we in the academic world are placing emphasis on space itself, sunlight and staircases, designer furniture, comfy couches, community puzzles, board games from the 70s, coloring books and furniture on wheels, not on publishing, culture or intellectual works, and by doing so, we trivialize academic pursuits and intellectual achievement. The library looks like some kind of adult day hab. No wonder scholars don’t want to go in there.

What does the library have to offer them?

Everyone knows the university library should spotlight human intellectual achievement, knowledge, and things of interest to educated people and to the academic community. It has an obligation to raise awareness and to educate, not just to provide passive “access to.” The extent to which a library is capable of exposing users to content and knowledge which they would not otherwise know about or think to search for is how it should measure its success. 

For those who got though high school without having read the assigned readings, for those who avoided learning at all costs, for those who think students don’t need to read, they just need to get their degrees, will likely welcome the change as a breath of fresh air.

But for others, the gloomy specter of the new multi-million dollar university library without books or even the local newspaper inside (no paper allowed!) might be horrifying, a wasteland, the Emperor’s new clothes, an attack on Western culture, a sign of decay, cultural genocide, a fraud, pointless and purposeless, grift, graft, an existential crisis, or even on assault on higher education itself.

From this librarian’s perspective, is unclear if the new academic library is a library or something else. Trust me, there are no library professional standards for “this,” whatever “this” facility might be. Library as “eco-friendly building” and library as a collaboration space are the latest design trends, with centralized seating arrangements and furniture on wheels being confused with student-centeredness simply because students are encouraged to sit in the middle of the empty space.

And while there have been increasing calls for accountability (especially in my State of Texas) for what is purchased by school librarians with funds from property taxes,48 the large-scale elimination of all books from academic libraries and the subsequent abandonment of librarian-selected and maintained collections in favor of “e-resource discovery,” a vendor solution comprised of vendor product which has been around now for at least thirteen years, is seemingly of little concern to anyone in this digital age, including my fellow librarians, who have been compelled to believe that a search engine populated by vendors is a modern academic library; that collections and catalogers are no longer needed; and moreover, that resisting what seems to be our inevitable commodification and elimination is a sign of an unwillingness to embrace new technology or adapt to change. 

Why should booklessness, or going “fully digital,” be at all concerning to any of us in this digital age, or to anyone else for that matter? 

Apart from old timers clinging to the old ways, insisting that vinyl sounds better, incandescent produces a truer and warmer light, or that people read more deeply when they hold a physical book in their handsno one disputes that any of these are true, by the way—admittedly nothing collapsed with the migration from one medium to another; we’ve been through all of this before, many times over, and with each new media, there have been critics and fearmongers and hand-wringers about what is not being preserved for tomorrow. Why defend books or print? That is so twentieth century. Indeed, the only remaining source for physical books for miles around many communities today may be the local library; the bookstores have all closed. Barnes and Noble is relatively scarce, and while Amazon briefly flirted with the revival of mall bookstores, they came and went like mayflies. Instead of books and magazines, people read online, on their phones and tablets, if they are reading at all outside of social media.

And yet, influencers, scholars and journalists are still writing books—I know this, unfortunately, because I watch TV and listen to NPR, and not because I work in a library. Books and print are no longer visibly woven into the the fabric of our culture as they were in the 70s and 80s, and throughout most of the latter half of the 20th century. They are not woven into the modern library either, its “modern” acquisitions workflows. They are not built into our library system designs. The problem is that we are confusing print with titles. We used to keep up with new titles through Choice and other collection development tools. Now, it may be nobody’s job in the modern library to keep up with new titles or to know about them, because we can opt out, subscribe to a package and be done, putting confidence in the vendor brand.

The function of the library and good library design, however, is to create and nourish creative and intellectual culture, that desire to read, that desire to engage, the desire to create, the desire to know, but it works only if the library is good and provides the right atmosphere, display, sense of community and resources. Intellectual and creative life is a fragile thing but worth defending, against commercialism and materialism. The library should be an important part of an ecosystem which feeds and nurtures the academic community, sustaining it with new titles and ideas and publications.

If it does this no longer, or is prevented from doing so by dysfunctional designs, we need to rethink our designs, rather than the validity of the concept. To serve as an “hub of learning” for educated people might take more imagination and better designed spaces than what architects are building in the name of a new academic librarianship.

Library as a “Space” (with or without a Gnostic Staircase).

What architects commonly call “learning staircases” in the new academic library are a stand in for knowledge, the knowledge that was previously contained in the hierarchically arranged stacks. 

Learning staircases are typically the centerpieces of new libraries built around an open plan, an atrium, where controlled light comes in and the library looks out into the world through glass window walls. One British architect called this design of a library a “voided panopticon” after Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison (1791). Learning staircases positioned within a souring glass space are supposed to transform the library into a collaborative space, breaking down information silos to facilitate the exchange of information. But do they?

Obviously, staircases do not facilitate learning any more than, say, a ride in the library’s elevators do, which are often crowded and slow, presenting users with similar opportunities for socializing and information exchange, at least as well as the non-ADA compliant learning staircase might. Neither elevators nor staircases have anything to do with librarianship or learning, yet they have often become the centerpieces of the library which has replaced collections.  

A similar rhetoric found in media releases for new libraries is that seating students in the middle of the room is being more “student-centered,” or that empty spaces in the library are functioning like primordial caves, campfires and watering-holes49great places of learning, I suppose, if one is a primordial cave man. It should be determined precisely how we can make what we have in the library, our resources, more more visible and meaningful to academic library users in order to encourage user engagement with them and facilitate the education and development of students, which is what the library is about. Not its staircases, tables, glass, space or light.

Architects often propose that people will be drawn to the new library as “a space,” especially a social space, but the librarian in me wonders why architects do not know how to design a modern library that people, especially educated people and people who want to become educated, would be drawn to as a library, a place emphasizing knowledge, culture and ideas.

I suppose they do not know how to create that. Which means that there is opportunity for improvement.

The modern library could be a multimedia extravaganza, a times square, a public forum, rooms with simulcasts of lectures universities around the world for public viewing, a virtual stacks, physical display with “virtual fulfillment” (that is people can can physical browse books, but download copies to check them out), a new book browse bistro, a gigantic video display of what users are engaging with and clicking on at any given time, something other than just tables and chairs and staircases and catwalks. It should have at least three rooms with different media: a conference or class lecture; a news channel; streaming documentaries. It can be Gertrude Stein’s living room or a variety of spaces. Certainly, it would function even better as a social place if people had a reason to be there other than the fact that they wanted absolute privacy or a quiet place to study. Most students don’t want that anyway, but want bustle and movement around them, a place where they are more likely to run into other people, combining the intellectual with the social. 

Can’t we agree that a new library building being created today in the name of a new librarianship, a hollow glass building with large staircases and seating in the middle, is just a dull space, and not a library at all, not even a good student center, if it does not actively seek to raise awareness of new publications, stimulate intellectual inquiry, encourage literacy, or promote resource use?

Can’t we agree that in the 21st century, academic libraries still have some business and organizational requirements, and some learning objectives of their own?

I realize all libraries are different, but shouldn’t academic libraries, their systems and their websites, have some functional requirements flowing from a singular set of objectives, to educate students and make them more aware of publications, communication and innovations in their field

Here is a functional requirement I will propose: the library must have efficient and effective ways to make users aware of new publications in their disciplines.

I do not care how this happens, whether it does this in print or online, whether the experience is mediated or unmediated, but I care that it happens. It should be a fundamental service the library provides to academic library users, and something our facilities and our systems should help us to accomplish.

I should be able to easily discern what new academic titles are coming out of the library, and what people in my field are reading and discussing. The academic library should offer that user experience of new publications.

The academic library should help the institution to create educated people. It should help create conversations around books and ideas. To achieve this, it needs resource visibility and collection visibility.

In what is described as “the new academic library,” books and print are now almost completely banished, deliberately stowed out of view, placed into out of the way locations, tucked away into the shadowy recesses of low shelving units (so as not interrupt one’s gaze out the window or the others in the room), or else entombed in remote storage, further compounding the inconvenience of their already inconvenient formats, and increasing the odds that no one will ever engage with them in their lifetimes. (Just like with grocery stores, putting books in low shelving not at eye-level is bad merchandising.) In new libraries, there are no displays of new publications students might want to read or know about. Librarians, who might know something about the collection, now also are often tucked away just like the books, removed from the floor (the Reference Desk is gone in most libraries), ensconced in offices behind card-swipe entry doors, discouraging drop-in consults and interaction with library users.

Collections and those who know about them have been replaced by light-infused spaces, staircases, windows and seating.

The Mansueto Library at the heart of the University of Chicago campus. Browsing books are a thing of the past. The elliptical space is designed to have no particular focal point. This is one notable example of the new library Gothic, whose goals and values are different from the libraries which came before them.

 

Another view of “The Blister,” as it is called by The University of Chicago students. The Mansueto Library, constructed in 2010 and financed by NewsBank mogul Joe Mansueto, gave other university libraries permission to go bookless. Below the dome are closed, robotic high density bookstacks. The library is designed to be a social study space, an architectural initiative which occurred without analysis of how this might limit scholarly access.

New roles in empty spaces. While some new roles, such as “Collaboration Facilitator,”23 have been proposed for public service librarians who work in fully digital environments, most librarians, if they do not justify themselves by managing other librarians and staff members, have two options for demonstrating value to their parent organizations: one through teaching (library instruction) and the other through library technical services. 

The Technical Services Librarian, formerly called a “Systems Librarian” (the title used when we managed our own systems and servers, usually on some flavor of Unix) or the Digital and Technical Services Librarian, once had responsibility for maintaining the library system and servers (proxy server, web server, system server, and mail server), the library’s website, the cataloging records (or responsibility for the integrity of the cataloging records), patron records, collection analysis, usage reporting, the link resolver, and often collection development along with responsibility for instruction for digital resources. This was my bread and butter at one time.

Systems Librarians managed the locally installed systems, servers, records, the catalog and website. This role or function in the library has been pretty much eliminated because vendors maintain our cloud-based systems for us, our content,and our metadata. All we must do is activate the correct packages (the ones we have licensed) and the titles in that package become available. With autoload holdings, new titles are added and other titles are removed by the vendor.

Other library technical services functions related to access services (authentication) and the library’s website may have been reassigned to IT Departments. Many universities have adopted centrally managed content management systems (Cascade, Omni Update, etc.) with a centralized style sheet and approval workflows to establish uniformity and top-down control over published content. Within the framework of a CMS, users who are not administrators are only able to add text, links and images; a library’s pages are fairly static by design, rather than functioning to present dynamic and personalized content which would encourage engagement with new resources when users come to it. We should be the latter in this digital age, at least presenting new books to users.

We should be able to leverage new technologies to encourage user engagement with content. 

The role of the Technical Services Librarian, if the role still exists, loosely corresponds to what our system vendor calls an “Electronic Inventory Operator.” It sounds like one of those white gloved elevator operators one sees in old movies. Because library technical services is now equated exclusively with e-resource discovery management, the role is that of supporting acquisitions and troubleshooting vendor products through a vendor solution rather than being defined more broadly about improving the user experience of the library online. E-resource management is vendor management, not so much content management.

While part of the library has “gone online,” there is really no role inside the library to promote content, for putting the digital content that the library licenses where it will be seen (of course it can be retrieved should someone come looking for it) and arranged into a meaningful disciplinary framework according to our former academic library best practices. Many libraries do nothing to promote resource use except to activate databases in discovery. Hierarchical lists of relevance-ranked citations have replaced browsing authoritative collections mapped to the disciplines. I believe that scholars should be able to come to an academic library website and view new publications and new acquisitions in their field of interest, as well as a sidebar featuring personalized content (say, the journals they are following). We can do this, achieve this level of personalization, provided we have good metadata and can manage our own web presence. There is no reason this could not be done, provided we have the necessary metadata and server access to 

The proper organization of bibliographic content in an academic library is by LC Classification, a unique classification scheme mapped to the academic disciplines, so it forms bibliographic content into a meaningful and pleasing arrangement for scholars. It is a special alchemy which turns content into knowledge. Now all we have left in our toolbox are discovery services along with LibGuides (another vendor product).

Realistically, there are only so many LibGuides we can create, and it seems after a short while the act of creating them is merely compensatory for the lack of visible collections and a good digital storefront. 

Titles vs. Entitlements:
Why E-Resource Management / Discovery is not an Online Academic Library.

rom a requirements and user experience standpoint, e-resource discovery is not the same thing as an online library. The discovery model—the library fashioned entirely as a kind of federated search application—is a limited conception of an academic research library in which “collections” (if they exist at all) are comprised of indexed subscription content that is indistinguishable from vendor inventory. There is a profound difference in the user experience between curated titles (what the discipline and educated people think significant and good) and vendor entitlements, what a vendor offers because it is profitable.

Library collection or commercial resources, people have posed, what difference does it make? Many librarians today use “collections” and “resources” interchangeably, as in: “Our collections are online.” But are they?

I realize there is ambiguity around the word “collection.” I know this, because I often ask colleagues, “Is your library maintaining collections?” and then must immediately explain what I mean by that. Some libraries like to call their holdings “collections” for accreditation and reporting purposes, but refer to these same assets as “resources” when it comes to resource sharing, as in: “We are required to share collections with the public according to our TexShare membership agreement, but we do not have collections anymore, only electronic resources.” 

To some, collections are synonymous with, or limited to, print resources, since print was cataloged and displayed by classification, as a collection. To others, it is synonymous with collection development and an acquisitions workflow of selecting title-by-title, considering individual titles based on merit, because this methodology is emphasized in library “collection development” courses. It may be also associated with bibliographic control and display, since collections were always organized and mapped to the disciplines according to academic library standard. To others, it has to do with the licensing model. Did we buy it in perpetuity or just for a limited time period? For others still, collections may be synonymous with vendor entitlements, all the resources that users are entitled to access at that moment in time, and there is nothing idealized outside of that, nothing those who do acquisitions are moving toward. Whatever we have acquired, even by completely passive means, “is” the collection, an existential fact, regardless of its quality, relevance to users, capacity for arrangement or impermanence, that we neither own it nor possess intellectual property rights to it. 

There was once an idea, which I believed was fundamental to traditional academic librarianship, that the successful library plays a vital role in educating students and scholars by stimulating demand for its own resources and encouraging the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge through the management and presentation of quality collections. The collections were what created a context for learning. Collections were educational, a pre-eminent service we provided, and fundamental to good library experience.

Browsing them was a means of communicating and acquiring knowledge. Display and organization were very important for providing a certain intellectual and aesthetic experience which the library supported and academic library users valued. It allowed us to maintain academic rigor.

Our library metadata standard, the MARC record, was developed around the concept of information retrieval and display in a catalog, in a collection, where works are intellectually related to each other. A library is not a search engine and a search engine is not a library, but the new librarianship based exclusively on e-resource discovery, a search box, does not differentiate between the two.

The library has come one with our vendors tight integration facilitated by APIs. Because all we offer is a derivative search experience, researchers would just as soon go directly to the source. We have encouraged highly efficient, just-in-time models for acquiring e-resources in bulk and making them immediately discoverable through a search engine, but at this point, we lack effective ways to put resources where they will be seen or valued, appreciated in context by students and scholars. 

Our educational function has been diminished in a weird zero-sum game with publishers and aggregators, whose primary goal, as they see it, is to drive our users to their own platforms and cultivate loyalties which might translate into their business revenues after students graduate, once students enter the workforce and find themselves unable to access scholarly or professional resources through the libraries of alma maters. For most academic libraries, their library system vendor is also an academic content aggregator who also sells content to libraries, and although this is not regarded as a conflict of interest, academic publishers can only hope to sell their content to libraries through making their platforms compatible with this e-resource discovery system and becoming business partners with the system vendor, resulting in a consolidation in a tightly vertical market. 

Ultimately, I believe that the empty facilities and empty websites create empty minds, and this is top of mind to me as a librarian, a professor and a library user.

The empty library, the library that lacks collection and resource visibility, also instills ambivalence about the institution in students, and also in certain contexts makes students question their own academic commitments. I can pretty much guarantee a correlation between a poor library and high student attrition. An unkempt library and empty library are demoralizing to students, even those who have no intention of using a library. 

  • At the college, collectionlessness discourages literacy—which in higher education includes familiarity with knowledge of the published literature in the field—knowledge acquisition, and scholarship; and therefore, it encourages ignorance by not doing what it is supposed to be doing and shortchanges those students who would otherwise benefit from a good library.
  • At the university, collectionlessness stifles innovation, because no one sees or is kept apprised of what is new, causing faculty research to fizzle out and the curriculum to become ossified. 

In place of physical libraries, we are erecting vacuous spaces which signify nothing, teach nothing, stand for nothing, communicate nothing, and are not aspiring and hopeful places where students, scholars or intellectuals want to congregate or spend time. The deathly quiet of the library spooks people, because like horses, cows and dogs, humans are also social animals. (A walk around campus will reveal what kinds of spaces students enjoy.)

Although they may not know why, students feel uncomfortable and insecure sitting in the middle of an empty expanse, a “voided panopticon” as one architect referred to new libraries; students prefer more intimate, semi-private spaces.

This is why stores play music, restaurants try to be noisy, and why students are studying in cafes, campus food courts and student centers. A modern library needs its first floor to have some “bustle” as well as books to encourage browsing and engagement. Let the college radio station be heard, let new books be displayed, let student art and videos be seen, let cool things be playing in media viewing rooms, encourage discussion and intellectual exchange. Let there be a place for poster sessions to showcase all of the good work done by the students and faculty at that school. Showcase works and the thoughts of others. That is how you turn the campus library into a hub of learning. 

To be sure, discovery is an invaluable research tool today. But discovery should be balanced with library collections, not replace them. The library’s recent transformation into some kind of a institutional student center or work space is certainly not indicative of progress in the library field, especially when we do not have a compelling virtual storefront which has demonstrated the capacity to attract readers and scholars to it.

It is not progress in academic librarianship if we have eliminated classification and browse and our content is to remain invisible until a search is performed; and even then, only a few relevant records out of thousands can be displayed at a time. Nor is it more of a social space than what preceded it, because there is nothing there which speaks to people, and we have given people nothing to talk about.

We appear to lack a commitment to the preservation or perpetuation of knowledge, so how can we begin to inspire others to invest in it?

Our Profession’s Faustian Bargain with Discovery.

n the Elizabethan play Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Faustus—”Faust” for short—is a frustrated university professor, tired of all of the usual forms and categories of knowledge. He has already mastered medicine, law, religion, theology and natural science, and now he has nowhere else to go.

Through dabbling in magic, Faust accidentally conjures a demon named Mephistopheles, who promises to give him answers to the questions he is seeking in exchange for his soul. The agreement allows Faust to have a 24 year run before having to pay his debt. While power was not his original motivation, it gets attributed to him during the course of the play, perhaps since Marlow couldn’t very well write the answers to the mysteries of life. Knowledge was the main thing Faust was after, the cause of his downfall, the reason this professor sold his soul. Predictably, in the end, none of the knowledge Faust gains is meaningful or valuable to him; the devil really didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. Information comes in bits and pieces, and there is no context for any of it. Over time, Faust realizes his folly, that the knowledge and power he obtained are worthless, even though he has paid the ultimate price to obtain them.

Discovery, the totality of the library experienced through a search engine of indexed third-party content, may be the library’s own Faustian bargain which we have made with our vendors. We are coming up to the end of our 24 year run.

Discovery emerged over 20 years ago, originally as a federated search tool which distributed out a search query across numerous platforms and which harvested, aggregated, normalized, and ranked the results. It was the library’s answer to Google. Through discovery solutions, the library provided users with convenient access to a world of information and content, but, unfortunately, no framework in which the content is perceived to be meaningful or valuable to students to get them to engage with it in the first place. Today, by our own accounts, scholars are not using discovery, but preferring instead to go directly to the publisher platforms, rather than relying on this third-party search app which, unfortunately, now has come to completely define the totality of the online experience of the academic library. Therefore, in this digital age, we have become defined by a tool scholars do not like and few are using, which is not a good thing. We don’t seem to think there is a problem with that, either. It retrieves scholarly content, what more can people want and expect from a library? 

Universities spend millions on institutional access to content and usually over 150K each year just for the e-resource discovery system, which used to be an add-on product until it became bundled with our ILS, much like the way windows came with IE. To me, this discovery model underestimates the importance of visible collections of shared knowledge to motivate user engagement. 

To be clear, I am not defending physical books and print formats, or saying we should not offer discovery services, but merely stating the obvious: we should not be promoting the exact same UI or search paradigm in a bookless environment that we used previously when we maintained visible collections. Also, if all we are needing is a metasearch tool for electronic databases, Google Scholar can do the job. At minimum, we need a store front of our own and metadata to support a robust browsing experience of a library collection as a collection, because a collections framework is an important model for expressing scholarly value. Providing remote access to resources should not be how a library defines itself.

Regrettably, librarians have embraced a passive model where our “collections” are vendor products, and we ourselves do not need to know anything except for what databases to license or renew each year. I don’t mean to dismiss the “e-resource lifecycle management,” but most of the time we are large renewing packages, not individual titles. We study usage patterns, but have nothing against which to benchmark usage, especially for more specialized resources. Most of us are acquiring in bulk, where we license everything on a vendor platform without thinking too much about it. 

This “aggregator” model of a digital library was at one time heavily criticized by the academic library community when librarians tried to put their finger on why Questia, the first online academic library whose content was determined by license agreements with publishers, was not a real academic library. Questia was thought to be “fake,” a McLibrary, not because it was online, but because it didn’t offer collections.

It is no secret among librarians, at least those of of my generation, that Questia, the first commercial subscription-based online academic library, did not hire librarians to manage its collections. Well, they did for a very short time, and I was the first.

I was officially Questia’s first librarian, even though to be honest, the company did not think it needed to hire any librarians even at the time it hired me (first on contract, then permanently) in the year prior to launch in 2001.

The MBAs who comprised the management team thought they could get by just fine without us. The system developer and Chief Technology Officer, who was developing an online academic digital library from scratch, also thought he didn’t need librarians to advise him on system development. What could an academic librarian possibly tell him about creating an online academic library?

Armed with Library Technology Reports which I copied from Rice University over the weekend and left stacked in his chair, I changed his mind and persuaded him that managing bibliographic content required systems designed to support bibliographic metadata. At last, he could appreciate the complexity, functionality and interoperability of library systems and library metadata. From my own life experiences, many people do underestimate the complexities of managing bibliographic data. I wrote an RFP so Questia could partner with an existing system vendor to speed time to launch. 

Unfortunately, when it launched, what was in Questia’s inventory, its “collection,” struck educated people, including my fellow academic librarians, as random and oddball stuff, which it was, especially in the early years of Questia’s existence. Why this was, was that the company took what it could get that was in public domain or through publisher license agreements.

Questia’s Marketing department was aware that only educated people might know or care about the difference between an academically rigorous collection of titles and random digitized scholarly content in a searchable repository.

Only educated people might know that what was being called an online library were just aggregations, not a collection of the best resources, which is what academic libraries provide. Only an educated person could tell if an academic collection was good or not good. Only an educated person would know, notice or care about what titles were missing from Questia’s “collection,” which was in no way a collection.

Therefore, Questia famously decided not to market its library to educated people, to academic librarians and to scholars, who would likely see the glass as half empty, but to uneducated people, students, who would not notice or care if they used the best resources to write their research papers.

Questia sold convenience at a fair price. Their marketing—a sweaty, glassy-eyed student pulling an all-nighter in a library with books stacked around him—said it all. Subscribe to our service and we will make cranking out papers a breeze, no more nights in the library. 

Strong reactions to Questia in the academic library community raised interesting ethical questions.

What is the difference, in terms of the user experience and educational outcomes, between an academic research library maintained by librarians and scholars, and a search engine essentially maintained by our vendors, aggregator and publishers, an application capable of indexing aggregated third-party scholarly content on publisher platforms? What impact does varying degrees of commodification have on a library’s service model and perception by the rest of the institution? What might the most appropriate balance between resources and collections be, and how might this balance be achieved when our software really only supports the user experience of resource discovery? Are collections able to be eliminated without damage to library services?

When we previously purchased books for collections, we were supposed to evaluate each title based on its own merit, but relative to what we had in the collection and to the needs of our communities, guided by the criteria established by our Collection Development policies. It is a misconception that a librarian buys what he or she likes, but one hopes that the librarian likes some of what he or she buys because the acquisitions librarian is also a reader and has sufficient education to appreciate the significance of what he is acquiring for the collection.

Today, most of us acquire resources in bulk based on the fact that titles are part of a vendor package we have licensed.

This acquisitions strategy was once thought almost sacrilegious, at least as far as scholarly monographs were concerned. One should never include in a collection items which do not meet the criteria established in library’s collection development polices. And the idea that the academic library might buy only from this or that publisher—we acquire titles because we have a business relationship with the former—would have been regarded also as unprofessional and a conflict of interest. Business relationships should never influence acquisitions. The academic library was committed to vendor neutrality, selecting the best resources regardless of the publisher or the item’s format. 

Moreover, through our current publisher-driven systems, these resources cannot be presented in a disciplinary context, arranged by classification and browsed. This makes it impossible even to arrange or display resources as collections.

These are deeply philosophical topics in librarianship today which center around the continued relevance and definition of library collections by those who are, at least for the time being, still responsible for managing content, and the consequences on users of our no longer doing so. We already know the likely consequences on us as a profession, but what (if anything) is the impact on the user?

Eliminating collections as a framework, our conceptual knowledge framework, which many large academic libraries have already done, has had profound consequences on scholarly access, on scholarly communication and on the user experience of the academic library. It has also resulted in our erecting unrecognized barriers to scholarly access which impacts our ability to remain innovative and competitive.

Never before in my professional career has the public academic library, which is the academic library attached to a State-supported university, been so incentivized to create barriers to public access to scholarly resources. The only thing that dampens my sense of outrage is the gloomier thought that so few people in the real world want to access scholarly resources anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. Somewhere along the way, it was decided that the public is no longer entitled to access the resources at a public university library licensed with taxpayer funds, even despite our continuing to say that we support life-long learning. Realistically, the only thing we support is life-long enrollment in classes.

Vendors have reached out to us and then to our IT Departments to implement greater security protocols to protect their content from “unauthorized” access. SSO was part of a larger plan to help large vendors license various educational software packages directly to the university while at the same time restricting public or unaffiliated access to the library’s electronic resources inside of the library (which IP authentication through the proxy server previously supported) so people without institutional affiliation would be forced to pay for access. It was also a way for vendors to do direct marketing to our students and faculty. 

SSO is a more restrictive access model which permits only those with active institutional credentials to access library resources even inside of the library. We must now go to IT to request test or guest credentials so someone without institutional affiliation can access our resources, resources which at State-supported universities have always been an entitlement because resources were acquired at public expense. Public access to library resources of a public university should be vigorously defended.

Rather than being a resource for the scholarly community, the university library even at public institutions of higher education, is now perceived merely as a kind of commodity licensed only for their own institutionally-affiliated students and faculty, not something educated people would ever want, need or should be able to continue to access after graduation.

SSO is a much more restrictive access model than we have ever had before, where previously all content was accessible inside of the library on a campus computer and also through ILL (Interlibrary Loan). We always encouraged life-long learning and supported access to library resources inside of the library, even after students graduated. The public academic university library has always seen itself as having an obligation to provide public access to its resources. Now, at some State-supported university libraries, what is in the library is not the business of anyone not currently enrolled there. The library at Sam Houston State University, a publicly-supported four year university, puts its catalog behind a firewall. 

Sam Houston State University is a publicly-supported institution and its library is a TexShare member, but it does not make its online public access catalog publicly accessible. Prospective students really should be able to evaluate the quality of the library at a college or university before electing to go there. I imagine that restricting access to the catalog only to those with current institutional affiliation is something their IT Department decided, for it goes against library principles and values to deny access to knowledge of what is in the collection.

Closed Access, Diminished Impact. My belief is that the collectionless library encourages barriers to access on a number of levels, both real and intellectual, first and foremost, because vendors, not US Copyright Law or Fair Use, determine who is entitled to access library content.

A point I feel strongly about is that all publicly-funded universities, at least in my State, continue to make resources available to the wider public. This also allows for greater institutional accountability. People in the outside world can easily see what the library is acquiring through online public access catalogs, and the public should be able to come into the library to actually access these resources.

Where am I getting this idea from that public academic libraries (and medical libraries, too) are not just for the students and faculty at that school, but belong to all the citizens in the State of Texans? 

Here is some history behind the State mandate of The Higher Education Coordinating Board:

Texas academic library directors first proposed an academic statewide resource-sharing project in 1988. Dubbed TexShare, the project was first funded in FY94 under the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB). Texas’ 53 publicly supported four-year academic and medical libraries were the original TexShare members. . . .

Today, TexShare is an impressive cooperative program designed to improve service to Texans. Currently $1.5 million is spent annually for database subscriptions. Members include public libraries belonging to the ten Texas library systems, academic libraries, and libraries of clinical medicine. TexShare enables libraries to offer a broader range of materials and services than any single library can provide for its constituents. With the influx of an extra $7 million in funding from a Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund Board (TIF) grant in 2001, the opportunity to build a premier, consolidated database presents itself. A major goal is to deliver full text information to all the citizens of Texas. TexShare programs contribute to the intellectual productivity of Texans at the participating institutions by emphasizing access to, rather than ownership of, documents and other information sources.51

While many states have established similar resource sharing mandates and infrastructure, librarians from outside of Texas may not know that TexShare membership requires resource sharing for the benefit of all Texas citizens, even though vendor license agreements may try to restrict lending and borrowing activity of their subscription content only to those with current institutional affiliation. Indeed, the original members of TexShare were academic and medical libraries, and the idea was to provide for the continuing education of citizens.  You cannot be a publicly-supported library and deny public access to your collections acquired with public funds.

Vendor control coupled with SSO threatens all unaffiliated access to resources, which in turn also shifts perception that the library is merely about assignment completion. This threatens scholarly access by undermining our larger commitment to resource sharing and to the preservation of knowledge, and limits the quality of education at the school.

At least one Serials Librarian suggests that it is up to librarians to resist these trends when negotiating license agreements with vendors.52 However, if library directors and collection managers do not embrace library resource sharing and scholarly access as a legitimate function of their library, public access will not be made a priority, because it might not be for their parent organization unless it is tied to community outreach and increased enrollment. 

A second barrier to access is due to the design of our user interfaces, their being limited to resource discovery (document retrieval). Because the content we license is invisible until a search is performed, few may see important publications. Invisibility constitutes an intellectual barrier to access. Academic library users cannot browse by call number or their areas of interest, as they were once accustomed to doing in a traditional library. Classification, a major access point for collections, has been eliminated, along with other library-centric metadata publishers do not want to provide. Lack of metadata means new displays of bibliographic information, of knowledge, are not supported. The academic library must be fully online, and this means it supports all library standards for the display and organization of bibliographic content. Many academic departments (those who were heavy library users) are not supported will by e-resource discovery solutions. Digital humanities needs collections. 

Third, there is no systematic way to display new books in a field of study. Many of us over the years have been tasked with creating LibGuides, first for subject areas, then delving down to create LibGuides for particular courses. As anyone who has done this knows, the process of putting in ebooks is a chore and the impact often minimal, also prone to break, as older editions are retired and replaced with new ones. Our library automation system should be allowing us to create, display and promote collections online.

Fourth, ILL and TexShare in Texas are becoming unsustainable, because few libraries are buying print anymore and ebooks cannot be shared with other institutions. 

Now that librarians are being systematically removed from the title selection process, there is no one left in the library to advocate for broad access, for title selection (collection development), for maintaining library collections, or for raising awareness of good things in collections as librarians were trained to do, rather than being a remedial tutoring center/study hall.

Because of the design of our systems, which encourage collectionlessness, no one is expected to be personally familiar with any of the titles we acquire because we didn’t put them there. Last, even at large research institutions, there is a lack of commitment for collecting for future scholarship, which is also a form of restricting access. 

These changes are all constitutive of physical and intellectual barriers to scholarly access, and if there is one thing academic librarianship is about as a profession, it is about breaking down barriers to scholarly access.

Breaking down barriers to access also sometimes entails our sending our students to the libraries at other schools (other area libraries) if other schools offer better resources for the type of research the student is doing, and occasionally receiving their students at our library, not hassling them about their enrollment status or making them feel unwelcome in our libraries. For example, anyone doing medical research might consider going to a medical library, or legal research a law library, where there are specialized subject specific databases and librarians who know about them.

It means showing students WorldCat (a database of the holdings of all of the libraries in the world), which is only meaningful if we can obtain those materials for students through ILL, if other libraries will share their resources with us. It also means, to be fair, making sure that our resources remain accessible inside of the library to those without institutional credentials to the fullest extend permitted by license agreements, and even renegotiating licenses to include access inside of the library or choosing another vendor.

It means ensuring our online public access catalogs remain publicly accessible, so others can see what we offer, especially at publicly-funded university libraries. 

It means we define student success as success defined by the individual student and scholar, not strictly in terms of the business objectives of the university. Before librarians put in for an ILL request, we do not interrogate the student, “Is this related to your class? Is this book or article you need related to your degree?” Of course not. We want to encourage independent learning, learning outside of a class assignment, even if it doesn’t meet some pre-defined learning objective or ELO of the classroom. We want the faculty to continue learning as well, and they benefit from collections too, because it helps them to grow and keep up with their field rather than stagnating at the point when they earned their degrees. As libraries, we must be able to set our own course and clearly express our business requirements to IT, the administration and to our vendors.

We support the intellectual life on a college campus to the extent that our budgets allow, and this means being able to effectively present the digital content that the library licenses as library collections, as good things educated people are likely to want to know about arranged according to the priorities of the discipline, not just as discoverable third-party product inventory potentially useful to for assignment completion. 

While many TexShare members are not honoring their commitments to share resources, commitment to public access of resources is a requirement of all TexShare member libraries (most libraries in Texas are members). The promise to share in exchange for subsidized access to databases is misinterpreted by TexShare members to refer only to their print resources. This is not the case, as I discuss below (see The Academic Library as a Community Resource). TexShare and The Higher Education Coordinating Board want public academic libraries to share their resources with each other and with public libraries. Independent learning, learning outside of the classroom, and life-long learning, are our professional core values. We should be living up this and to our consortial agreements to share. 

We cannot claim to be all about Open Access but then stop people at the doorsteps of our own libraries. Nor can we in good faith claim to be about “life-long learning” yet deny our own ABD students and alumni some reasonable access to their academic research library to help them be successful.

Doctors and researchers who graduate from Texas medical schools must not be told that, because they are no longer enrolled in a medical school, they must use the public library to do research.

The State of Texas believes that the academic library at a university has an important role to play in ongoing the education of citizens. If we want the citizens of our city, state and country to remain competitive in a global marketplace, we must encourage continuous learning through academic research libraries. The academic research library should stand for that and resist becoming a commodity only for those enrolled in school. We always maintained public and community access before. 

Breaking down barriers to access also means designing interfaces which allow for effective browsing and display in order to support a very important information seeking behavior by scholars and those learning about a field. Browsing is fundamental for all types of libraries, not just public libraries. Browsing is a form of learning, an activity we want to encourage among academic library users, and browsing a well-maintained, well-organized collection is an important form of access. My belief is that e-resource discovery combined with the elimination of print has led to reduced resource visibility, reduced collection visibility, and reduced library visibility in the academy and society. None of these are good for our students, our libraries, or our institutions.

The problem is not with our being fully digital or being online, but with the limitation of our current software, metadata and user interfaces, and with the now prevalent notion that our purpose is to provide “access to publisher resources,” an aggregator model, rather than access to authoritative collections (academic library model).

Through the widespread adoption of e-resource discovery platforms as the exclusive way users are to engage with resources, the library and its resources have become less visible, commodified and devalued, offering access to content that no one in the library or at the institution appears to be invested in.

Through discovery solutions, an item might be “discovered,” but there is no social, scholarly or intellectual context for it. In the physical space, which is now empty, and the online space, also devoid of scholarly content, academic libraries are not stimulating intellectual inquiry, the first stage of research. We are not selecting, organizing and presenting resources to enhance scholarly value or knowledge in the discipline, which in turn impedes new disciplinary knowledge. We are not encouraging reading or resource use, the acquisition of professional knowledge in the disciplines, or supporting intellectual life on campus, despite that some of libraries may be making vast quantities of information available through its search box. 

In the new collectionless environment, instruction is the chief way most librarians would claim to add value. We show students to their databases and how to cite sources using the tools we provide. It is an awkward role, not because we are uncomfortable in a classroom, but because it feels a little superfluous. Professors, who at a university hold advanced degrees in their field, and are expected to do ongoing research and writing for publication, should certainly be able to show their own students how to search the databases used to conduct research in their own respective fields of study and how to cite source correctly. Most of them do not need a librarian to come to their classroom semester after semester, but some often invite us anyway.

Others think libraries are primarily about providing access to resources and assistance to complete assignments, write research papers or provide curricular support. This is what we call the “learning center” model.

Never before was this model thought suitable for higher education.

I believe academic libraries are really not “about” instruction, nor about “access to learning resources,” for these things do not make the library effective or good as a library, which should be our goal. I believe librarianship is about creating and managing good libraries, and libraries are about instilling a passion for learning in academic library users through the active presentation of good library collections, showcasing what others appreciate and value. It is about turning people onto things and new ideas they might not know about to search for. It is about preserving knowledge for the future. Libraries are about scholarly culture, current academic titles, meaningfully organized and displayed to users, along with the core titles of their disciplines, so these can be experienced by them.

Even in this digital age, collections must remain the main focus of the academic library, not being a study space or community venue, or a learning resource center for students to learn “how to” do research in the event they might some day need to do so; or an information center, or just a search box for aggregated scholarly content with relevant resources awaiting discovery should someone wish to discover them. 

Academic librarianship as a profession is about the active presentation of scholarly resources in scholarly collections. It is about collection development, collection management, collection assessment, collection display, descriptive cataloging and providing users with access to collections as collections, which in turn reflects the boundaries of the knowledge that is known within the scope of a budget and intended audience. It is about supporting the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and perpetuating knowledge.

This may be is a hard value proposition in this digital age, but the distinction between resources and collections, and between information and knowledge, must be made.

If a library doesn’t have a library collection which librarians maintain in anticipation of use,
if it doesn’t raise awareness of new things,
if appears to devalue collection use by putting publications out of view in invisible repositories,
if it cannot or is unwilling to acquire new things consistently throughout the year,
if it doesn’t keep up with publishing in the fields it presumably supports,
if it doesn’t define or defend student success as success or learning defined by the student and scholar,
it either isn’t an academic library, or isn’t a very good one.

A library is not a library because it “has books, or print,” provides access to information, or access to online resources, but because it offers professionally maintained library collections, eminently visible to the communities it serves, and which are cataloged, organized and displayed according to academic library standards.

Library collections are a form of scholarly communication about scholarly communication which is vital to education and the creation of educated people, no matter what field of study and no matter what the format or media. Collections and communities of readers, literary culture, are what sustains scholarly discourse at a university. We cannot be successful as a social space without being an intellectual space.  

The Fully Commodified Library:
The Academic Library as the Tail-End of the Publisher-Aggregator Supply Chain.

“Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books.” Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Public Archive and advocate for the universal access to knowledge.

he elimination of collections in libraries in 2020 is the biggest trend in librarianship since the elimination of the card catalog in the mid 1990s, and yet no one in my field is really discussing this much. 

If they are, they are mischaracterizing this trend in glowing progressive terms as “going bookless,” or “going fully digital,” and not understanding what it actually is, becoming commodified by vendors. Spending millions, as many academic libraries do, on third-party content that is visible only through a search box, with no way to present new titles to users, or to display academic content in the context of the disciplines we support, and no way to identify what is missing from it, seems not ideal from an educational or even a business standpoint. 

It isn’t ideal from a marketing standpoint, either.

Is it inevitable that a digital library is a fully commodified library? I fear that because the academic library’s system vendors are also content aggregators (ProQuest bought Ex Libris, EBSCO is investing in Folio), we have simply become more like an aggregator and less like a library.

For me, the issue is not about print vs. digital formats, but what business model and user interfaces are the most effective for a library to encourage a culture of learning. Library software is perpetually stuck in “discovery mode,” being just a search engine, an app, a central index maintained by a vendor, and it is failing to evolve beyond discovery. Its stuckness may be intractable because resource invisibility and lack of transparency along with bulk purchasing greatly benefit our vendors, including our own system vendor, who is also a “content aggregator.” As it is, nobody really sees what the library acquires—even librarians do not see what comes and goes—because purchases are often done on a very large scale, and because the only items that are ever seen are those retrieved by a query, while all of that irrelevant stuff remains invisible. 

Now millions are spent on invisible, largely ephemeral resources, for an invisible library supporting nonexistent collections which no one has intellectually invested in or appears to care about.

It is more efficient for us, granted that.

E-resource discovery has contributed to the library’s becoming increasingly commodified, a process in which vendor/supplier inventory becomes indistinguishable from the library’s collection, or synonymous with it. There is no intellectual space, no curatorship, no organization, no librarianship. There is nothing but a space and a search box.

Is this progress for a library? Are students learning more? Are more scholars benefitting from library services?

We have in inventory the titles of this “brand” (say ProQuest), but not that competitor “brand” (say EBSCO). The metadata for it comes from publishers and aggregators, rather than from catalogers who understand cataloging and our communities, how a work fits into a broader intellectual or scholarly tradition, and how it might be meaningfully accessed by scholars at that particular institution. 

Because works are seen as ephemeral and something leased for a short time, not owned by the institution, cataloging items is perceived a waste of time. Lack of cataloging in turn means our user interfaces are limited and what we acquire is less likely to be seen. From the vendor point of view, the library’s sole purpose is to drive potential customers to their websites. 

Even if we are going to adopt a commercial model for managing our inventory, where vendors supply all of out titles for a negotiated fee, shouldn’t we have at least have a store front, just like any other online store?

Where is our virtual library reflecting our users’ interests and priorities? 

We have no browsable, virtual stacks. We have no ability to create displays of new ebooks. We have no CRM tools to do marketing.

Not maintaining visible, well-defined collections corresponding to what students and scholars should know, or might want to know about—not even displaying what is current that users might like—seems setting the bar too low for an institution of higher education.

We pay many, many times above list price to provide institutional access to academic publisher and aggregator inventories, and yet we have no user interfaces to raise awareness of these resources. 

Very large academic libraries and very small libraries (those who just subscribe to a few databases), have both moved toward a fully automated, publisher-driven, e-resources management model, a model in which the entirety of the library’s content is determined by institutional license agreements with third-parties. These agreements permit institutionally-affiliated users to access publisher / aggregator content on publisher / aggregator platforms. These agreements, along with newer authentication protocols (SSO), restrict access to only who are institutionally-affiliated, meaning that the academic library, even at publicly-funded universities, are cutting off access to outside students, to non-affiliated scholars and other researchers, even though its librarians may continue to claim, as we did when we owned our content, to be committed to life-long learning.

Invisibility is/as Censorship.

he biggest disadvantage of the “new librarianship” as defined by architects and system designers is that it is ineffective from an educational standpoint. The library should have a larger objective than just “resource discoverability.” 

Content must be searched to be seen, and yet without visible content arranged by discipline and topic, we cannot provide a context in which any of it appears meaningful or important to know. There is no disciplinary framework, no imperative that this is important to know. New titles, core titles, are not displayed as such. They are not displayed at all. Resources are accessible, but not presented as part of coherent bodies of knowledge. There is no sense of shared community value or common experience. Without “bibliographic control,” we have a limited ability to assess quality, and we cannot present our content in logically ordered collections to users to enhance value or meaning.

Rather than seeing licensing through big deals as a sort of conflict of interest, we have embraced our commodification as progress and outsourced collection development to those companies who specialize in licensing content to libraries and schools for a profit, and in the process, done away with the underlying structures, workflows and metadata which provided safeguards and standards for an optimal user experience of a library as a library.

Collection development was a kind of guardrail against indiscriminate buying and waste. Now, many libraries just subscribe to aggregator packages which do not have current or in demand titles in them at all. Aggregator packages of academic titles often consist of backlist titles, obscure titles which a publisher cannot monetize so he sells them to an aggregator who licenses them to a library as a way of generating revenues. Of course, good things can be found in them, but it lacks academic rigor. This approach may be excused because it is so convenient, and because students are merely using these packages for class assignments anyway, to complete academic exercises, to acquire basic research and writing skills, should they ever need to use these skills in the real world or down the road. They aren’t actually going to read. The whole of the library is a tool like a textbook to help students complete assignments and nothing more. 

Incentivized to acquire in packages, libraries often inadvertently pay many times over to provide institutional access for the exact same content with the same vendor and different vendors, like some elaborate shell game, but no one wants to read the Washington Post or New York Times or The Chronicle of Higher Education through an aggregator anyway. It  isn’t the same experience as going directly to the publisher platform.

The Shell Game

Duplication and overlap is just the cost of doing business today. Because academic libraries license digital content in large packages, they are incentivized to acquire the same content residing in different packages, paying for  a title many times over. Here, The Washington Post is shown to be available through this library through various service platforms. Note that direct access to The Washington Post is not provided by this library, and most of these platforms in which the newspaper appears does not provide access to the current issue.

What librarians now provide in place of a authoritative collections is “access to” third-party content. For those with institutional credentials, the same content is often available directly on publisher platforms and through Google / Google Scholar, which is what our users prefer to use. Because of the limitations of the metadata provided by publishers to us through this supply chain model, our own systems no longer organize titles into collections, according to library standards, so they can by experienced by users by systematically browsing a virtual shelves as a library collection:

  • The content we license cannot be pulled together and experienced in the common disciplinary framework, LCC, which academic libraries believe is the best for the organization for academic library content, reflecting knowledge in the academic disciplines. LCC is “currently one of the most widely used library classification systems in the world.”53 Through our current systems, we cannot display book, ebook and journal titles by LCC, which is necessary for a library collection to support scholarly communication in the disciplines.
  • Content (and metadata) is controlled by publishers or aggregators. Things pop in and out of inventory without impacting our license agreements with publishers and aggregators. 
  • We have no way to systematic way to display new titles. Indeed, all that is accessible to the user community is invisible unless people think to come along and search for something, the exact same criticism as our old “print warehouse” model, only at least the warehouse could be browsed by LCC.
  • We are not supporting life-long learning as we once did through providing access to collections because vendors are seeking to restrict access of their content to only those currently enrolled in school. How is this affecting attitudes about the library and its mission?

We tend to think of discovery as tool which makes content discoverable and therefore visible, but on the flip side, libraries acquire access to large quantities of digital content, for which they pay many times above list price, but giving users no reason to explore them and like a grab bag, we do not know what we are buying.

Significant titles, mixed up with insignificant ones, are practically invisible on our websites and, as a result, are not likely to ever seen or discovered by users (unless a professor tells the student to use a particular resource). While we can provide convenient access to more information than ever before through discovery, we fail to provide that unique organizing principle, that disciplinary context, that academic framework, that intellectual approach, the golden thread of narrative of items formed into collections, which helped to turn information into knowledge, and knowledge into an education. A search box provides limited educational or scholarly value and little incentive to learn and to know. 

Discovery or e-resource management systems have eliminated the framework of authoritative collections, the careful presentation of the knowledge that is known, and what is widely accepted as true and authoritative.

It has systematically eliminated our ability to manage our collections, promote new titles and put new content in front of users. It has made us efficient at buying access to large amounts of electronic content, yes, but ineffective at encouraging engagement with it.

I am not defending the old library full of print, but I am defending the value of collections as a scholarly and intellectual framework which provides for a unique experience of a library. 

Previously, with our old service model, books and journal titles were selected by librarians for their communities, cataloged and arranged by LC Classification, organized by discipline, subclass, topic, and other factors depending on the subject area.

LC Classification, while certainly not a perfect system, generally reflects the organization and structure of knowledge in the disciplines. This system provides a scholarly interpretive framework, a backdrop against which new publications can be evaluated, assessed presented to the scholarly community in context. Our MARC records and cataloging standards were not designed merely for discovery, but also for display in a catalog and on a book shelf within the context of a collection of scholarly materials.

Without collections, the impact and functionality of the library from a scholarly standpoint is mitigated, because intellectual works cannot be systematically presented in their most appropriate intellectual and scholarly context. The lack of collection visibility makes the resources in the library less valuable from a scholarly perspective because there is no intellectual context or framework to give them meaning. If electronic resources were presented by classification, as browsable collections representing objective knowledge on a subject, rather than presented to users as some “relevant resources” users “might find useful,” it would create a more meaningful context for user engagement. 

Where scholarly content is the product of publishers, scholarly collections are the rightful creative and intellectual work of academic librarians. Collections are what guarantees a good user experience of a library as a library, what guarantees integrity, academic rigor and good stewardship over our budgets, even if the library is comprised entirely of licensed content. Visible collections are necessary for a library to be and function properly as a library.

The e-resource discovery and management systems most libraries have adopted in the name of greater efficiency has helped large publishers and aggregators monetize their content at the expense of library collections, librarians, and the user experience of a library.

A search engine that searches publisher inventories is a commodification of the academic library, and despite its making large quantities of content easily available to users, this model is neither efficient nor effective for educating students, especially undergraduates, who benefit from overview, organization, structure and content that is geared for their level. The vast amounts of very expensive scholarly content which often gets thrown at them through discovery is not meaningful to them because it isn’t geared toward undergraduates. A library needs both collections and discovery.

In many instances, libraries are simply relying exclusively on aggregator packages for all ebooks, packages which typically exclude better and current titles. While in the case of serial content, this method of acquisitions is advantageous, since serial content is indexed in discovery at the article level, but it is not ideal for scholarly monographs (books and ebooks). This method of acquisitions is not only reducing the resource visibility, but it is also impacting the quality of our content and our services to the half of the university which relies upon scholarly monographs as the primary mode of scholarly communication. We are also compromising the general education of students.

In the physical space as well, the model of a library typically promoted by architects today makes no effort to prioritize the intellectual, educational and cultural aspects of an academic library, but seeks to transform the library into a bland learning center consisting of vacuous work spaces, easy for them to pitch to presidents and easy to design (architects know how to design well-lit, energy efficient buildings). What architects do not know how to do very well is build a modern library facility that stimulates awareness, instills a passion for learning and engagement with library resources which are available digitally, or in a hybrid environment. The result is that with print gone, academic libraries have become collectionless entities in both their physical spaces and online, and this is occurring without any evidence or assessment of the impact collectionlessness is having on education or the user experience of the library. The concept that there are core titles in a discipline, that titles and authors comprise a discipline, is being lost, and new libraries are built without atmosphere. 

Without a doubt, college and academic libraries are disappearing, or being transformed into something called a “new library,” or library learning center. In this learning center, new titles are not being selected, cataloged, preserved, perpetuated or emphasized.

There is no mechanism for stimulating intellectual inquiry, providing users with the shared knowledge of a discipline through visible collections. There is no way for students to obtain an overview of the published literature in a field of study to even begin to learn about it (although many librarians create topical research guides). The knowledge which was reflected in our former collections, titles which students and generally educated people should want to know about, has become nothing more than discoverable content should someone have a need. Most shockingly to me is idea that physical books and reading materials in the library are potential distractions and obstacles to a student’s success, rather than being regarded as an essential part of it. 

A new focus on work and productivity, on “doing” and not “having,” on information literacy skills rather than knowledge, is redefining academic libraries as remedial tutoring / learning centers, where collections and knowledge are deemed irrelevant to the library experience.

Academic library budgets are increasingly tied to student productivity and success defined by measurable outcomes: higher GPAs, mastering the ELOs of the classroom (including finding credible information and citing sources), and degree completion. While providing students with good collections was once seen as fundamental to the work of the librarian and the mission of the library, now library collections even at large universities may be seen as needless distractions and largely irrelevant to mission of the the school. The library learning center might provide access to relevant resources to complete assignments or support instruction, but offering anything beyond this might be seen as extraneous. 

Libraries of all types, public and academic, are being made over into ambiguous public work spaces. This model really has nothing at all to do with librarianship, with the exception that new libraries are now being designed around contradictory goals and objectives. State legislatures are allocating funds to build new libraries, but it is not clear that what is being built in the name of librarianship is really a library at all. It is an empty building:

  • Are we still about literacy? 
  • Are we still about resources and resource use?
  • Are we still about intellectual inquiry and learning?
  • Are we about collections or knowledge?

If so, how do we support these through our designs and assessment measures?

College and academic libraries today are seemingly more “about” their own modern architecture and innovative work spaces than the resources they provide, even online. If books are retained, they have been moved off the floors and placed out of view in the name of “student success,” as if the presence of books created an obstacle to learning.

There may be nothing in the library to stimulate engagement with resources or encourage intellectual inquiry or growth. Apart from students quietly studying, it is lifeless—far from the social spaces it may have been intended to be for the reason that (even without the presence of shushing librarians, coming and going through empty floors like ghosts), it is assumed that people in a library are there presumably because they do not wish to be disturbed. Everyone else is hanging out where there is noise, people and movement around them: cafes, the student center, their departmental lounges. 

Online, the library may or may not offer fantastic content through their license agreements with publishers, but even if there is good content there, there is no way to present this as our product. It is just discoverable content provided by vendors, not by librarians, and it is the same vendors each year. Much of it is of low interest to college students. 

Large academic libraries have always been about the creation, perpetuation and preservation of disciplinary and cultural knowledge, and through library collections, promoting resource awareness and use.  They are about helping people acquire and create new knowledge to allow them to reach their creative and intellectual potential. Collections provided a intellectual roadmap to the knowledge in a field. What we have now, this e-resources discovery approach, provides abundant access to information and resources, but it provides no framework in which any of it is related to anything else, or anyone else, who is present at the university. It is a Faustian bargain we have made.

The mission of librarians at a university should not be just to provide “access to information,” or access to relevant resources to complete assignments, but presenting and preserving knowledge in the academic disciplines and helping the knowledge which exists become known. Our scholarly mission is to create educated people. My belief is that existing only as a search engine on third-party content without visible collections doesn’t support this learning objective very well.  

The idea of a library is to encourage a passion for learning, to represent academic and intellectual achievement in the disciplines we support, and encourage life-long learners. At the college level, the library should be a content-rich learning environment which helps the student achieve his or her creative and intellectual potential by exposing him to ideas, concepts, authors and knowledge so that the student can achieve success not just in the classroom, but in life.

The Elephant in the Room.

s an academic librarian, the question I am most frequently asked is to account for my profession, “Why do we need libraries if we have Google?”

With each passing year, the question is becoming harder to answer, and not just because Google, Google Scholar and Google Books are indexing more scholarly content, with more peer-reviewed Open Access content added to them every day (both by publishers and authors), but because academic libraries have become more like Google, just a search engine of popular, scholarly and Open Access content. 

Furthermore, independent learning (outside of class assignment or grade), reading and library “collection use” (usage stats) may no longer be looked upon by university administrators as evidence of our value, or evidence of our contributing significantly to the learning objectives of the university.

Why? For one thing, it doesn’t really seem to have much to do with us or our efforts, even if we are teaching students about their subject databases in instructional sessions. Second, administrators care about enrollment, retention, and completion, not library circulation or usage stats.

The widespread adoption and acceptance of “outcomes assessment,” accountability as defined by institutional business objectives, means that increasingly the institution wants the library to acquire only what is guaranteed to be used for class, what supports the pre-defined learning outcomes of the classroom, or else what is needed for accreditation. These approaches to assessment change the library in the same way that standardized testing changed education. Once we embrace that model, the core values of the field and our own library-centric values, what we need to be good and successful as a library, our scholarly mission and quality are compromised.

The question about why libraries or librarians are needed has become harder to answer for the reason that we are seemingly not committed to maintaining libraries. 

Through the foggy oracle of discovery, I can no longer “see” my disciplines, my fields of study, my Renaissance and Medieval scholars placed into a neat wall of fame as I could with the stacks. I cannot see English and American Literature anymore. I need collections, logically arranged, so I can “see” History, Literature, Philosophy, Art, Architecture, the Social Sciences, the Sciences too, spanning before me, and the scholarly activity that is occurring in them through publications. I believe our users do, too. I need a bird’s eye view, a roadmap where others have gone as a culture and a practice, as a discipline, and where that discipline is heading. 

Library collections are our past and our future. I need to see new books, visibly displayed, with their pub dates, in context, under the wide umbrella of an authoritative collection, which, like the moon hanging in the sky, everyone who is part of that academic community can see and share. Someone who was on the opposite side of this argument who reportedly wrote that “the value, in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been established,”54 does not understand that librarians create and perpetuate intellectual value as part of our job function, and visibility, especially in context, makes an item more likely to be discovered. Residing in a visible collection also creates intellectual value. Making visible important titles is what we do better than Google or a search engine.

Unfortunately, at this time, there may be no rational as to what is in the modern library’s inventory other than the fact that a publisher sold the content to an aggregator who licensed access to the library in a package where it is unlikely to be seen or discovered in its lifetime. ProQuest Ex Libris doesn’t want the library to maintain collections. Aggregators benefit from collectionlessness. 

Sure, sure, there are still more than adequate resources in them for a student to write a paper. But are they the best resources? In terms of organization and user experience, the modern library is much more a repository of scholarly resources than a scholarly collection of scholarly resources, which is not to say there aren’t good things in them, but it is not actually a library collection. 

Because librarians have been increasingly absolved from title selection, and nameless content is loaded by vendors on the back end, librarians are not likely to know about new titles. New books are often excluded from aggregator packages anyway. Resources are part of an inventory management system not capable of arrangement as a collection. They have no classification numbers. If librarians do not know about what new books are coming out, chances are, they do not know what is not coming in. I say this package of academic ebooks in literature doesn’t have x, y, z. There are no books by Stephen Greenblatt or Harold Bloom. There is no Barbara Lewalski. There are no critical editions of major works. The rocks stars of the disciplines are invisible an they may not even be in there at all. It is not an academic library collection, just some resources. EBSCO’s Academic Search Complete is neither all academic nor is it complete and EBSCO Academic ebooks hardly contains Choice outstanding titles. It is not a library ebook collection, just aggregated academic content.

When I began my career over 30 years ago, long before Google, university libraries used subject specialists, often people with doctorates, to select titles for them. These were sometimes called “Bibliographers” or Collection Development librarians. Then, title selection fell to Subject Liaisons, librarians who often possessed a second master’s degree or graduate work an academic field, people who were expected to work collaboratively as peers with faculty to do collection development and provide “bibliographic instruction.” They themselves often had faculty status, not because of their MLIS, but because of their academic subject degree. 

Now, it may be no one’s job in the library to keep up with new publications and order titles. 

In fact, the acquisition of individual titles in a collectionless environment may be a rare occurrence, thought to be of little consequence, precisely because the collection is invisible; devoting time to processing these books that no one is likely to see is an act of futility or humility, like monks spending their days making rice mandalas only for them to be blown away in the wind. We are not building anything permanent for future scholars. Libraries now license digital content in bulk from aggregators and publishers, and there are no collections to maintain. Online, there are no collections. Our new role is not to promote our collections, or titles people might want to read, but in a sense, to glorify commercial vendor packages. We offer product lines, but without any attention given to our own customer experience.

Our mostly invisible content is not organized for display online as an authoritative library collection.

I may want a list of the titles we have in a certain subject area. I now have to get at these titles though subject headings and text search, often a combination or these and using various synonyms, which is certainly not a reliable or professional way of doing things; where before I could easily extract and present title lists from our systems, neatly arranged by topic using call number ranges, a shelf-list. What we have now cannot be assessed professionally or experienced as a collection of titles, only as result sets of linked citations doled out in response to queries.

There is no way to get an overview of what is in our inventories, as we could with our traditional OPACs.

In the modern collectionless library, there is no need for title selectors, catalogers, or circulation staff. Most institutions renew the same digital packages year after year. The website never changes, year after year after year. We have no way of actively or systematically promoting intellectual inquiry or user engagement with our content as we could previously though display.

Through the great efficiency of the workflows of the e-resource discovery systems many of us have embraced, we have become publisher-driven, a commodity.

We appear to have made a Faustian bargain with our vendor, and quite literally sold our souls to them. Although the library provides access to more content than ever before with less need for human intervention, the library user interface is an opaque black box which does not inspire, encourage reading, promote intellectual inquiry or independent learning any more than Google. We have not made content relevant to the user because we have not presented it in the form of visible collections of worthy things, things we stand behind. Rather than adding value and respect to the scholarly enterprise through careful selection, context, arrangement, preservation and display, what we offer now diminishes value, our own value, and the value of the resources we license.

While the distinction between a repository for commercially-licensed content and an actual library collection may be an exceedingly subtle one, I believe academic libraries should be committed to acquiring and presenting scholarly collections of titles, and not just committed to making third-party aggregated content “discoverable.” Access to collections are what make a library a good library.

Collections of books and journals are what give the library integrity and meaning, what brings it to life, and what makes it an educational and enjoyable experience for students and scholars. Current books and periodicals, displayed by classification so they can be seen and shared by the community, give it importance and provide users with insight into what is happening in their field and in the world.  

Better user interfaces online could be designed if titles could be browsed by classification, as academic library collections, according to academic library standards, even if “the collection” might no longer be being managed on the title level. This would also allow libraries do what they used to do, generate and distribute new title lists to faculty and to stakeholders. Content curation and display of selective book and journal titles by LC Classification should be an essential feature of all academic library user interfaces.

We must recognize that library as “a search engine” (or library as a repository for vendor entitlements), like library as a “book warehouse,” is just another reified model of the library, one which offers efficiency, but lacks of efficacy and interest. If we want to encourage user engagement, reading, research, self-discovery and learning, if we want to create educated people and encourage academic achievement, the face of the library should be curated collections of outstanding titles reflecting what is significant and good, not just a search box.

Browsing a good collection is itself an important form of learning for students and scholars.

Having said this about the necessity of collections, I must acknowledge that our subscription content, often referred to as “resources,” also have a significant place in the modern library, but the titles we obtain through license agreement must still be subordinate to an overarching framework of collections (even if we are not buying title-by-title), in part because collections are an academically rigorous approach, where providing access to aggregated commercial resources is not. I don’t care if we can get 100 nursing titles in this package, I care that we can identify, acquire and present to users the 10 most important ones (collections approach); and if we have all 110, that we should be able to present these also in a logical arrangement to the nursing faculty and students using a classification scheme. Through our most advanced online systems, this is no longer possible, and this is not acceptable to me. 

We should be able to efficiently pull all titles together and arranged in a meaningful way so they can be seen, browsed, and evaluated. Discovery does not do this at the current time. 

The University Library as a “Learning Center.”

any years ago, I was sitting in Faculty Senate with someone who had been the Interim Assistant to the Provost (a “Provost” is over academic affairs at a university). Partially under her watch, the library had been transformed from a facility maintaining comprehensive and historical research collections in a wide range of subject areas into a new spare facility called a “library learning center.” At lunch, before the proceedings began, when everyone was chit-chatting and sharing the news of the day, the question was put to me: “Emily, can you explain this new learning center concept to the faculty? What is the difference between a library and a learning center?

The room fell quiet. The Humanities faculty knew me well, and knew I was not thrilled with the state of the new five-story study hall with multi-million dollar programmable window panes, smart gates and self-check out machines, but nothing set aside for new books or any suitable place to display them. There apparently had been funds for building technology, but nothing set aside for books, which had not been purchased in over eight years or more, with the excuse for the last four being that we “are getting a new library.” Most of the new facility was oversized stairwells, oversized restrooms, and unusable space. Even as a place to study, the lighting and acoustics in the new library were not ideal. It was a strange artificial environment, an overly chilled space with cool LED light bars. Exposed conduits and plumbing in the ceiling, hard surfaces and open airport-style restrooms in the middle of each stacked floor made flushing, running water and other sounds echo across the empty floors. The HVAC sounded like a combination of pinging bbs and roaring river. The blue gray window tint and LEDs seemed to drain color out of things and was slightly disorienting, like parking garage lighting. Librarians were eclipsed in the space. There was no place to display books or paper. 

To me, it did seem a little late for someone in the Provost’s office to be asking this particular question, since we were already having lunch in the new building. Many were already sharing with me, secretly, that they liked the old library better. No one would dare say that publicly, of course. 

I was cognizant of the fact that my role on the committee was only to represent the library and not my own opinions, or those of my academic department (English), but I was also aware that this new space did nothing to benefit my students in English nor enhance their knowledge of literature. We offered graduate degrees in English and History. Faculty in History, another liaison area, felt similarly about the new space, and even its location on campus, far away from the Arts, Communications, English, Journalism, Music, made a statement. The Chair of History had refused to participate in the weeding process. Just as some librarians assume that throwing away books is progress, some faculty believe throwing away books is “throwing away history.” At the end of the day, we offered nothing more in print or online that we hadn’t previously through the many lean years. The only difference was that most of the collection was gone, along with our parking lot and large exhibit / presentation room.

I responded diplomatically, that it would be best to invite the Library Director to speak at the next Faculty Senate meeting so she could answer all of their questions about the new library learning center. Faculty Senate moved away from the topic of the library to discuss their usual grievances about lack of parking on campus, adjuncts taking their jobs, and the ever-impending threat of post-tenure review. 

Had I responded to the Interim Assistant to the Provost that day, what might I have said? It is valid question which deserves a thoughtful response.

While a library and a learning center are both ostensibly about learning, their goals and objectives are not entirely complementary.

An academic library can be a good learning center, but a learning center cannot be a good academic library. 

Learning centers are about providing some adequate resources, libraries are about providing the best resources within certain scopes. They have entirely different commitments and goals. 

Academic libraries are about intellectual inquiry, disciplinary knowledge and academic research, while learning centers are about assignment and task completion leading to a degree. I get the impetus for this change, motivated by the need to provide greater accountability for expenditures, and the perception that a learning center is actively helping students to learn, while a library may appear to “do” nothing. It is just a warehouse or repository providing no measurable learning outcomes, right? In actuality, however, libraries are far more ambitious and accountable than learning centers, and are more academically rigorous: they strive to represent knowledge in the disciplines, the body of knowledge which corresponds to academic degrees so that students might become educated and faculty remain educated. A library has professional standards for collection development and makes a commitment to “collecting,” a learning center does not make any such commitments. Learning centers are not places to explore; libraries are.

Learning centers may adopt a business objectives model whose KPIs are pre-defined measurable learning outcomes. You know what are not measurable learning outcomes? Collection use (these are measurable, but considered “outputs,” not “outcomes”). Independent learning. Research. Knowledge. Self-discovery. Entrepreneurship. Insight. Personal growth. Literacy. Education. Improved reading skills. Innovation. Creativity. Self-actualization. Awareness of new trends that might fall outside of the established curriculum. Use by the public or alumni. Greater academic commitment from students feeling nurtured and supported by a library which reflects their interests, issues, aspirations and values. High school students who visit the university for a research project and have such a great library experience that they decide that this is where they want to go to college. We helped them complete a research assignment rather than telling them to go use a public library, or informing them that access to institutional resources is only for our students.

Libraries and learning centers in opposition: the library values independent learning, reading and intellectual inquiry as objectives (and regards “collection use” as indicators of learning); the latter regards all objectives not tied to the ELOs of the classroom as a waste of time and institutional resources.

Good stewardship of a library as a library means maintaining collections in anticipation of use and presenting what is thought significant and good by experts to scholarly audiences. 

Just to clear up misconceptions readers may have, when librarians select titles for their institutions, they rely upon specialized collection development tools which allow them to make good choices based on many factors, including expert reviews, knowledge of the field, familiarity with programs and curriculum at the school, Knowledge of the existing collection and the interests of students and faculty. We rely on bibliographies and publications which have reviews by experts often before the book comes out. But what we buy is always balanced against what the library already has and its history of usage as well as where the institution wants to go.

Collaborative collection development, where we share with faculty the new titles coming out in their field, is beneficial to the library and to faculty. We send them notification of new titles in their field and we tell them when new books come in. This helps keep faculty informed and up-to-date. 

If we are doing our jobs, we do not buy just what we like, but what experts in the field like, what educated people like, what we think others will like or appreciate, and what is most suitable for our target audiences (undergraduate, graduate). We weigh the needs of one department against another. 

However, I would hope that some of what a librarian buys, a librarian also likes, and can personally recommend. Librarians should be readers and intellectually curious people, for it provides them with a significant occupational advantage over the many non-readers who have joined our ranks.

I would also hope a radio DJ likes music, a museum curator likes art, and priests believe in God. Librarians should be enthusiastic about books, reading, culture, knowledge and ideas, in order to encourage students to creatively explore content they might like or find beneficial to them.

If we truly want students to benefit from the library experience, and for the library to become a vibrant learning hub (and a social space), we need visible library collections, knowledgeable staff familiar with the collection, and library systems which foster content-rich learning environments. We must stop heaping undeserved praise on ineffective modern library designs and focus on designs suited to the objective of engaging students in hybrid (print and digital) content logically organized into browsable collections, actively presenting new interesting things to them while accurately representing scholarly activity in the disciplines. 

From Library Collection Management to Content (E-Resource Discovery) Management

xactly how a library balances collection development with resource management today will no doubt vary by institution, mission, audience and budget size. There is no right or wrong answer here—I’m just saying that, I do believe there is a right—and all libraries are different; many are deciding no collections are the way to go. Without a doubt, publishers and aggregators, like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, have been in cahoots to move both library systems and the profession deliberately toward an automated e-resource management model which, of course, helps libraries efficiently acquire in bulk (many titles at once, no need to select them or catalog them), and helps publishers and aggregators to better monetize their digital content. We routinely acquire items we never would have acquired in the past simply because 1. they are part of a package, 2. in theory, people “see” only content that is relevant to them, making wasteful acquisition invisible in discovery, and 3. it is no endorsement to be included among e-resources as it was when it lived on our shelves. Aside from OCLC, a not for profit vendor, the providers of large academic library services platforms are themselves content aggregators, and the discovery model is better for their business. We have been remade in their image, a content aggregator, not a library. We do not cherry pick. Systems and workflows have been designed to make bulk acquisitions easy (in the form of big deals) and to make licensed content discoverable, not to support collection development and create an online library which abides by more stringent standards for inclusion and display in a selective collection of bibliographic content. 

A drawback of this system is that it doesn’t help the library to present this content in meaningful ways to users. Our content is largely invisible unless someone comes along and searches for something. Furthermore, even librarians do not know what is coming in or what has been loaded into our systems. If we do not know, why should anyone else?

This is not to say that the traditional academic library full of print resources had nothing comparable to this system to help it keep up with publications, for it most certainly had standing orders and approval plans before, as well as bulk downloads and uploads of MARC records. It has been a long, long time since anyone was cataloging all those books from scratch, or even copy cataloging them. The main difference now, apart from the fact that content and metadata is delivered digitally at the time of acquisition, is that what we acquire is invisible to both us and our users, and furthermore, it cannot be organized, presented or evaluated as a library collection, as knowledge, or as scholarly communication in a discipline. What we have now is not a library collection management system built around titles in collections, but an e-resource management system based on commercial packages.

What we have now is not a library collection management system built around titles in collections, but a resource management system based on commercial packages.

Another difference with modern library systems and workflows is that in the name of greater efficiency, subject librarians and faculty, those presumably with knowledge of the discipline, have become completely removed from the title selection process.

Librarians have been systematically excluded from the title selection process of what is going into the library. 

In this new fully automated environment, what is coming into the library isn’t seen by anyone or capable of being placed into any kind of disciplinary framework so our inventory can be assessed, viewed or evaluated by anyone as a library collection. 

The new model of a library does not promote awareness of titles to encourage resource use or provide for collection visibility.

There is no view of print resources integrated with digital resources or even just digital content mapped to the disciplines, as a whole collection.

Furthermore, we are told that this “collections framework” we once thought so important is not even the correct way to evaluate and assess our subscribed content, of course, because we no longer offer collections, only resources relevant to users. The department in the library responsible for acquisitions may be called the Department of Resource Management or Collection Management, or some combination, with resources often signifying subscribed content and collections being owned content; or else what is acquired in packages (e-resources) vs. title-by-title (collection development). Many academic libraries do not see themselves, their institutions and/or their workflows as supporting collections or supporting traditional library collection development anymore, and have eliminated the word “collection” from their organizational chart.

Collection management means a commitment to keeping up with new publications in subject areas and acquiring titles which are capable of being presented and viewed as a whole, as a collection. Newer systems and modern libraries tend to be organized around an resource management and discovery model, the library as a search engine, rather than collections.

Previously, the academic library was expected to provide users with authoritative collections reflecting what experts in the field or the community of scholars and educated people believed significant and good, organized by topic and discipline, and not just vendor packages of commercial content. Because we do not offer visible collections online, what we might buy individually is practically invisible and not capable of being browsed or organized according to classification, as a library collection.

The User Experience of the “New Academic Library.”

ny philosophy of librarianship must address the ideal user experience of the library as a library, which means, unless we are going to just talk about the furniture or the space, entering into the realm of aesthetic and intellectual experience, especially the student’s and scholar’s intellectual responses to a content-rich environment we ideally create for their benefit. (And if we are not creating content-rich environments, we cannot be effective as librarians or educators.) Whether the library consists of digital content or actual collections, there still needs to be ways to encourage engagement with resources, because isn’t that what it is all about?

Why acquire or license content if no one is going to see it? 

With cataloged collections, I could always extract a report of new books and journals in call number ranges, sorted by call number, and send this list to faculty or create a JavaScript feed to a web page.

It is a simple task, a basic function I thought all systems should be able to do. I could also create new book feeds organized by call number. With cataloged collections, I could identify collection strengths and gaps, and evaluate usage by granular subject areas and call number ranges. I cannot do this now, since e-resources are not cataloged. I believe the intellectual framework of collections provide for a better and more engaging user experience, and is also of greater scholarly and intellectual value, than “resources” or “facilities.”

Collections and a collections framework provide a higher level of service to academic library users because the content is visible and capable of being browsed and evaluated, each item in context according to the discipline in which it is deemed authoritative. It is a conceptual knowledge framework. It gives a topical overview of the publications in a field, which is a “library.” Visibility and context are important determiners of use, and lack of collections constitutes a barrier to access.

Indeed, academic librarianship as a profession is all about this intellectual and aesthetic environment so that titles can be seen and be presented in their most scholarly, disciplinary context, where they are perceived to be visible and valued by a scholarly community of readers and relevant to the discipline.

Our collections should constitute a very important part of this environment, if we want users to associate the resources we acquire with community value, a body of knowledge of things they might want to be familiar with. Resource and collection visibility are important design objectives for a library and a its website. When items are put into public view, it shows respect for them (the Latin root of “respect” means “to look at or consider again and again”). The assumption is that they must be of interest to others or important. Setting out new things in traffic areas is a way of stimulating interest. The user experiences we want to cultivate through our collections and facilities is intellectual curiosity, desire to learn, academic intimacy, sense of connection, possibility, creativity, community, regard for scholarship, shared experience and personal growth, brought about through the consistent delivery and presentation of interesting, important and current publications formed into visible collections and placed into public view for community use and appraisal. That is a library.

Academic libraries today are failing to deliver a good user experience of a library because they are no longer striving to be content-rich learning environments.

Libraries have abandoned their commitment to collections or scholarly communication is the disciplines. They are not supporting browsing or the display of new books. While today new spaces called “new libraries,” or library learning centers, are being built “to house people, and not books,” to be modern work spaces with moving walls and walkways and staircases to fill the large empty space up, there is seemingly little attention being paid to the user experience of the academic library as a library, either in the physical space or online, apart from being a public space and search application for accessing “relevant resources” for getting assigned coursework done. 

“Innovative spaces” being built in the name of a new librarianship are hollow glass boxes with little of interest inside of them to draw students and scholars into the space aside from a cup of coffee and a place to be.

These spaces are said by architects to be vibrant hubs of learning, but they are large vacuous spaces with nothing in them. Grandiose as they are, these human habitrails, with their breezeways and exposed conduits, staircases and reliance on architectural features to fill up the space, form a poor impression of a library to a scholar’s eye. They do not project cultural or intellectual value. It isn’t that the architecture is bad, but that these facilities make no effort to educate students, stimulate them or inform them, or present them with new things.

Architect’s vision for the Sawyer Library at William’s College. The space is given greater prominence by being empty but with aerial breezeways. It reminds me a bit of the old Red Roof Inns with indoor golf courses in the middle of them.

New libraries are said to promote collaboration through the simple gesture of making study rooms available and making other people more visible in the space.

I personally love the idea of creating intimate art-filled spaces, salons to stimulate discussion and creativity. My ideal library has art studios and writers workshops, a viewing room, poster sessions, art gallery, fireplaces, a waterfall, an art studio, music room, theater, and a way to post covers of new ebooks with QR codes for their instant download. It would have digital billboards which would feature Choice Outstanding Academic titles and podcasts about books. It would feature the best of the best in publishing, and the greatest hits of the academic disciplines we support. I would make available the local paper, The New York Times, The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and others in the library coffee shop for community reading between classes. It might have viewing rooms of lectures at the university and conference presentations going on in other cities. Poster sessions and billboards, a marketplace of ideas. Entire rooms can become immersive interactive displays. That is a modern library.

Building empty glass boxes with oversized staircases and empty space taking up most of the building, a human habitrail, is not “progress.” What is being constructed today in the name of a new librarianship is nothing more than a building with tables, chairs, vacuous and some private conference rooms inside of them. It disgusts me, not the lack of emphasis on print, but the lack of emphasis on scholarship and ideas, the opportunity frittered away to create something really great and innovative. 

Libraries need texts, works, books and collections to make them interesting and good as learning spaces, especially if they offer graduate programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We may need fewer books and better displays, with the ability to tap to download books from the item or a book cover. We may need author podcasts to promote engagement, and have book-tastings where people can come to the library to hear about new publications from the subject librarian who acquired them, or the faculty who wrote them. We must be more about content than modern design.

Public libraries are beginning to move in the same direction as academic libraries, clearing out the books, and grappling with some of the same questions of how libraries in this Digital Age might support marketing, browsing and greater community engagement and learning in an environment where the whole of the library is designed as a search box and a space to be.

If we want to create a sense of value and community around books, reading, literacy and scholarship, we are moving in the wrong direction by putting content out of view and not developing digital marketing strategies which create interest and value around publications.  

Good Libraries are Content-Rich Learning Environments.

cademic librarianship is about creating and managing content-rich learning environments which encourage intellectual inquiry, personal growth and the acquisition of knowledge (for the creation of new knowledge), which means to be interesting, good and beneficial to users, libraries must be fundamentally “about” their collections, about publications, about books and other resources. Most importantly, though, they are about cultural knowledge.

Librarians and their systems ought to be “about” titles in collection, and facilitate collection management and development, collection presentation, content curation and display, bibliography, and of course, encouraging resource use to facilitate learning and to help students and scholars reach their potential.

Academic libraries should be focused on presenting and preserving outstanding academic titles in collections, exposing students to good and significant things, not just providing them with passive “access to” aggregated third-party content.

I believe collections and collection management, the bibliographic aspects of the library, provide an additional layer of scholarly value above and beyond access to subscription content. Library collections, displayed, organized and maintained by people familiar with them, their users, and the scholarship in the field, are not online today. Good collections, displayed and maintained as collections, are the basis for the unique intellectual and aesthetic experience of the academic library, and not what Google, our publishers and our library system vendor offer. Imagine the academic library’s website as a place scholars could reliably visit to see what new books are coming out in their field of study and a way from them to be ordered. This is very achievable right now through Choice.

Organized collections of titles capable of being presented in context provide an additional layer of information, accessibility, immediacy, meaning, scholarly value, accountability (people know what titles we have at any time in a subject area without having to fish for them) and interest to users, especially for those just learning about a discipline. Visual, browsable collections suggest to users titles, topics, artists and authors students might not have thought or known about to search for. We need this and a visual store front which puts content where it will be seen by all who come to our websites. 

Of course, when it comes to libraries today, there is the undeniable reality that everything that is perceived to be of any intellectual value, influence or importance is available online, and of course, online is the preferred modality for user access due to its immediacy and convenience for academic library users and researchers. 

In theory, this should present new impetus and opportunity for the development of new academic library interfaces to support the presentation of online collections. It should also provide mechanisms for bringing online collections into the physical space, and these might be replicated beyond the walls of the library. One example of this are displays of book covers with blurbs and QR codes which can be posted in classrooms or academic buildings for easy download. Another is virtual fulfilment, where the book remains in the library where it can be displayed and browsed, but downloaded rather than being checked out. The physical copy of a new book remains on display to stimulate engagement. The main thing we need, however, is a digital store front which supports collection visibility and browsing. In theory, we could now provide the largest digital library in the world, experienced virtually. 

In the digital environment, to be effective, we should be able to deliver searchable, browsable collections, as collections, to academic library users, maintained as collections, the best of the best, and arranged according LC Classification (that is, as a collection), our own academic library professional standard for arranging collections of bibliographic content, and not just offer just discoverable resources reflecting third-party vendor entitlements which happen to be in inventory at any given time. We can offer that too, of course. We must be able to put content where users will see it in a way that will be valued, and where it will be likely be seen again, next to titles that it relates to, if we are to make others believe resources are worthwhile and of value.

We must provide a more valuable and engaging experience to academic library users than a search box.

Our systems must provide a mechanism for visible, curated collections, especially the presentation of what is new and significant in a field. Collections can be online or physical, or both, but they must meet library standards for arrangement, inclusion, display and metadata.

Collections are comprised of what experts and influencers believe to be good and important to know, a body of common knowledge, arranged according to the priorities of the disciplines we support. Curated collections are fundamental to our discipline and library best practices. They are fundamental to encouraging literacy and a student’s education. They are, or ought to be, fundamental to library assessment and accreditation, for how can we claim to be supporting students without providing them access to good collections? 

Given that library resources are available online, and so many modern academic libraries are both bookless and collectionless, my colleagues at ACRL have proposed a “collaborative learning model” for a library, with librarians acting as “Collaboration Facilitators.”23

This new pre-eminent role for 21st century librarians in a bookless learning center parallels trends in K-12 education and in the college classroom. In the modern classroom, teachers now serve not as authorities who know something about a discipline, but as instructional coaches to facilitate student peer group interaction (usually with students facing a screen in front of them and peers) and discovery to get students to solve predefined problems or reach a conclusion based on evidence gleaned from a variety of resources. “Activities” are assigned to students facilitate active learning; which attending to lectures or reading books are not, at least according interpretations of Bloom’s Taxonomy. (An important aspect of Bloom which is often overlooked is that knowledge was postulated by Bloom to be a prerequisite for all of it, a precondition for the putting skills and abilities in Bloom’s hierarchy into practice. Skills do not replace knowledge, but demonstrate it.56

Given the transformation of the modern classroom into a kind of collaborative learning lab about shared discovery and collaboration, it was proposed that librarians presiding over new bookless, collectionless facilities might also function as a kind of peer collaboration facilitator, although how we might get people to collaborate with each other or the measurable learning outcomes from this is not clear. It also seems, at least from a library traditionalist standpoint, that the goals and values of a learning center are on some fundamental philosophical level at odds with the goals and the values of the academic library in its efforts to create knowledgeable, educated people. 

From a traditional standpoint, the “library” learning center is a form of library that places little or no emphasis on the user experience of collections or resource use.

  • It is a library which places no value on knowledge, publications, ideas, or the display of new books. It is a library which does not in any overt way promote awareness of titles, demonstrate respect for scholarship, or encourage user engagement with resources.
  • It is a library which does not encourage intellectual inquiry beyond providing users with passive access to some “relevant resources,” that is, should they have a need to search for something in the first place.
  • It is a library which places no value on literacy (at the college level, “literacy” means knowledge of professional and scholarly literature in the disciplines, as well as cultural literacy, familiarity with leading influencers and ideas), inquiry or scholarship, or learning outside of required coursework. It may offer an efficient mechanism for searching an inventory of online entitlements, but by default, neither great collections nor resource use are the focus of the library or learning, in terms of either the architectural design of the facility or the design of its interfaces online.
  • It is a library that may make claim to offer advanced technology, but its user interfaces are incapable of leveraging SSO to offer personalization or putting meaningful content where users are likely to see it. It is a library which seemingly makes no intellectual investment or commitment to its own content other than to make it accessible. 
  • It seems the new academic learning center represents a contradictory value system from that of an academic library, which previously aimed at raising literacy levels (not just information literacy, but actual literacy), educating students through the presentation of scholarly resources in collections, and perpetuating knowledge. As I will discuss below, the empty library sends an ambiguous message which might impact students’ academic commitment to the university. 

While usage statistics of the academic library’s electronic resources may provide important metrics for justifying library acquisitions budgets, and librarians are still expected to teach instructional classes explaining to students how access the library’s resources, the locus of learning in the library learning center has perceptibly shifted away from encouraging user engagement with significant titles organized into visible collections toward “facilities use” on the one hand, and demonstrable learning outcomes on the other—with “usage” shockingly dismissed out of hand as an “output” or indicator, and not constituting evidence of student learning outcomes. 

Of course, today an abundance of materials is available online, both through the library’s license agreements and through open access repositories. Students have access to more online than ever before, both through their library and the Internet. But there is nothing either in the physical space nor online to encourage resource awareness or use, and in many libraries, even the librarians have been moved off the floor. In the new academic library, seating and people quietly studying may be the only features of the new learning environment. Even online, resources are not particularly visible or promoted, and collections might be said to not exist at all, even if invisible librarians are still doing a small percent of title-by-title acquisitions to place invisible titles into invisible collections which arguably do not even exist at all.

At a university, the academic library’s focus is disciplinary and cultural knowledge, a construct that is satisfied only by the presentation and preservation of visible collections of titles in the disciplines; this is what the university stands for, for it makes claim to bodies of knowledge which comprise the academic subject areas it teaches.

After all, academic degrees are measures of one’s degree of knowledge by the estimation of peers, and collections constitute these bodies of knowledge. In a sense, the very legitimacy of the university stems from the academic library. Collections in this digital age need not be physical or owned, but they must be visible, formed into collections, and placed where they will be seen by the community. Collections not only support research, they actively influence and shape it. Without organized collections, the library lacks sufficient impact, credibility, purpose and reach. 

At the college level, the collections should be geared toward undergraduates, current authors, influencers, ideas, and possibilities for success in life. They should also reflect the unique character of the institution, the interests of its students and the research interests of the faculty. Above all, a good library demonstrates care for students.

Academic libraries are or ought to be intellectual and cultural places emphasizing outstanding collections, ideas, authoritative sources, “literacy,” knowledge, independent learning (open-ended, not pre-defined), new and influential titles, and the creation of new knowledge and conversations around scholarly publications. Libraries can be social places too, but if this is the objective for the new library, it helps to give people a reason to be there and something to talk about. 

Beyond Discovery:
Thinking Outside of the Search Box to Create a CRLE.

he challenge of making academic libraries more relevant and valuable to users at this time when so much is available online is not capable of being remedied simply by making all of the library’s resources available through a search box, the strategy most academic libraries have already taken, including leveraging the convenience of our web-scale library systems to populate them. Even if a library’s licensed content is fantastic, with budgets in the millions, the online library is still just a search box, a “black box,” opaque to its users and, because content is invisible and not organized by discipline, also very easy for people to simply ignore. 

A search box does not incentivize use or attract scholars to it. We know this from years of studying the behaviors of our users.

They do not care for discovery.

Everybody in our profession knows this. There is no debate about it. In the library world, we have known this for a really, really long time. We all know that, if given the choice, scholars prefer going directly to the publisher’s platform to do research, or else, for a first dive into a topic, utilizing what appears to them to be a more comprehensive search tool, Google Scholar. Mainly, they go to subject specific databases to do research. In the Humanities, many prefer to jump into Amazon before jumping into discovery, EBSCO or ProQuest ebooks. Discovery to scholars seems neither here not there, neither revealing what is super current nor possessing the ability to do comprehensive research. Therefore, if we are to appeal to students and scholars, we cannot “get away with” being just a search box. We must return to the organizing principle and the academically rigorous and pleasurable user experience of curated collections.

Despite the vast entitlements of the large university library, for all of the millions of items it counts as its holdings, the user interface provides no aesthetic experience comparable to browsing the awe-inspiring large library collection with millions of holdings. Instead, the user experiences the most immense collection with thousands of relevant results per query through a disappointingly narrow window, often ten or twenty citations at a time with each record often appearing unreasonably large on a laptop. That’s no way to experience a vast collection.

By the same token, smaller libraries lack the charm, personalization and aesthetic appeal they once afforded to students and scholars through display, an aesthetic called “academic intimacy.” We have neither the sublime nor the intimacy which characterized the former library experience. Libraries are spending far more per title than list price for licensing academic ebooks and costly journals, but these titles lack visibility in our systems.57 There is no visual clue that other people value them, either. This is a shortcoming of our user interfaces, and of the mentality which thinks that making third-party resources “accessible” through search is sufficient as a service model for an online library.

Academic libraries are about, and have always been about, providing access to carefully-developed collections of scholarly titles arranged according to the academic disciplines, reflecting what scholars and educated people believe to be important, authoritative, significant, interesting and good, so that students and scholars can more effectively acquire knowledge, and through this, become literate, educated people who can make contributions to their field and to society as a whole.

Good service as a library means that we show care for the student and the titles we acquire for them by organizing them, publicly displaying them, preserving them, providing broad access to them and knowing about them. In an academic environment, we should model literacy and reading. Libraries are not about knowing how to find information, they are about the the acquisition of knowledge. 

Given the limitations of our current facilities and e-resource discovery model, what might be done to enhance the user experience and remake the library into the content-rich learning environment a library is? Here are my recommendations:

  1. Break out of the university CMS. Experiment with ecommerce/woo commerce tools in WordPress to better market resources. Make better use of screen real estate than to be a search box. The library website should function as a store front and a destination for scholars, with search being a small part of the layout. They academic library website might consider new books displays, documentaries in the library, poster sessions, and putting outstanding student work in its digital repository.
  2. Make a concerted effort to promote titles and publications, not just vendor products. Give people something to talk and think about.
  3. Stop advertising tables, chairs, staplers and couches on the library’s website. It is like a motel advertising it has AC or color TV.
  4. Return to bibliocentric systems which emphasize titles and sources, not vender entitlements and resources. The latter isn’t scholarly. Work with vendors to design systems which can generate, for example, an integrated shelf list of all titles and ensure the 050 field for ebooks is populated and capable of being used to sort records. With that capability, the library can create browse tools and new books lists for display, as we used to do with our older systems.
  5. Academic librarians should collaborate with faculty on collection development. Librarians should have access to collection development tools like Choice which let them know all of the new and recommended academic titles coming out each month.
  6. The point of collaboration is not just to ensure that the library collection is good and useful to scholars, but that the faculty are kept apprised on new and forthcoming titles in their own areas of interest. This supports inquiry and inquiry supports research and publishing. All faculty (not just one or two appointed to serve on a library committee) should have the opportunity to receive forthcoming title lists and review acquisitions.
  7. If the library is attached to a State-supported institution, new acquisitions should be posted publicly to ensure accountability and to let the community know what new things are available to them. 
  8. The library OPAC should always be publicly accessible, not reside behind a firewall. The public, including tuition-paying students and parents, are entitled to know what the library has to be able to assess for themselves if the library offers quality collections. (Libraries who do not make their library catalog public should face fines and risk losing accreditation.) 
  9. TexShare member libraries should be required to post on the homepages of their websites that their collections are accessible to the public according to TGC 441.223.
  10. All materials purchased with public funds must be publicly available inside of the library. Librarians who manage acquisitions much make sure that license agreements remain library friendly, allowing resource sharing and public access inside the library. 
  11. Inside of the library, there should be attractive new book displays placed by the entrance (traffic areas). These books do not necessarily physically circulate, but can be checked out online (virtual fulfillment). Their purpose is to encourage browsing and raise awareness.
  12. The library as a quality learning resource can only be effective if it is capable of presenting content.
  13. There must be a way to display ebooks and ejournals in the physical space of the library. Titles should be arranged by classification. They can be displayed in the physical library through interactive projection display technology. All that is needed is an empty wall and some modification of existing software. Immersive, interactive projection display software might transform an empty room into a virtual library with digital books and journals that can be clicked on and browsed. Through immersive display technology,  any windowless room or a collection of rooms can be turned into a pop-up library.
  14. Glass-walled viewing rooms stimulate conversation and engagement. People should walk by and look in to see documentaries or conferences or lectures going on in other classrooms and be encouraged to drop in and learn. Most libraries have abundant access to educational streaming video. They pay for display rights as part of their licensing agreement, but are doing nothing with it. The library should leverage this, even posting a schedule of what is being shown. The library should also telecast important conferences.
  15. Display student and faculty work in the library. This nurtures a scholarly community.
  16. Use the institutional repository to showcase outstanding student work. It makes parents proud to be able to Google the name of their child and see a paper he has written. It helps that child transition into a professional career.
  17. Career services should be housed in the library. The library should display sources for financial aid, scholarships and grants. The library might display calls for papers as well. The library should be a place for aspiration and inspiration, ideas and potential opportunity.
  18. Stop building empty atrial buildings where the centerpiece is a staircase. This edifies no one and is a waste of space.
  19. Insist that academic library systems fully support collection development and browsing by classification.
  20. Browsing is a vital function of the academic library, and this should be part of our system software. Engaging with a good collection is important for learning about a discipline and the creation of educated people.

The academic library must have efficient and effective ways to make users aware of new publications in their disciplines. This should be a design priority which is codified into academic library standards, frameworks and assessment measures.

Do Collections Still Matter to Academic Libraries?

iven the universal adoption of discovery services as the academic library’s user interface, and the fact that for many libraries, collection development has less to do with the selection and acquisition of titles and more with the licensing of large packages of publisher and aggregator content, we might ask if and how collections still matter to libraries in this Digital Age. What is the perceived value of a resource in a collection (presented as part of a collection), as opposed to being experienced by the user merely as some discoverable resource in a third-party package? Can this value be quantified? 

The presentation of a work, surrounded by works on the same or similar topics, and being able to easily navigate from the abstract to the specific and getting an overview of the organization of the discipline, would seem to me to add value and meaning to the user experience. It is the professional way to organize a collection, like good merchandising. The fact that academic libraries all use the same classification scheme is also beneficial for comparing one collection with another, and it certainly would make marketing easier.

By a “collection,” I do not necessarily mean print formats, but titles placed into an an intellectual, aesthetic and academically-rigorous framework for selection, description, assessment and display, arranged according to the priorities (topics) of the discipline. Just because we deliver our content digitally is no excuse to abandon library standards for bibliographic description, arrangement, display and the user experience of titles in collections. 

Some have asked this question about the need for collections in other ways, for example, exploring the impact of library acquisition patterns on use58 or how the presence of physical bookshelves influences student behavior and choice of study location (I review these studies later in this book). There are many independent variables associated with collections. Obviously, subject specialists may spend time selecting title-by-title to augment aggregator packages, but if the only interface is resource discovery, as opposed to collection browse, this would seem to present an obstacle to collection management over time; and of course, there is the loss of the user experience of the collection as a collection if it is represented as a repository and not as a collection. 

There is also the obvious problem of semantics, for if I were to survey a group of librarians, “Do you still maintain collections?” as I have in the past, some would say, “Yes, we have a small leisure reading collection,” or “Yes, we maintain a special collection of x, y and z,” with the respondents thinking that I am asking them only about the nature and extent of their print holdings, which were always managed as a collection. It isn’t just a matter relevant only to monographs (books), for scholarly journal titles were also assigned classification numbers so current issues could be effectively browsed by discipline. People loved that ability to browse the current periodicals rack and current newspapers. It was the only reason some faculty ever came into the library. This was part of the experience of collections too, for periodicals were also organized by classification in the grand scheme of the library’s collections. 

Others would say yes, we have collections; but it quite is likely they do not differentiate “collections” from aggregator or publisher entitlement packages of e-resources, as in the way the Alma Primo documentation defines “electronic collections.” These are not collections, but bundles of content for licensing purposes.

In an environment where the library is just licensing electronic content anyway, most perceive little difference between providing digital collections and providing access to discoverable resources.

Others might say yes, because they believe I am asking if they still do any title-by-title selection, keeping up with forthcoming publications and following methods and workflows optimized for good collection management, as librarians were taught to do, and is still recommended as a best practice for all libraries.

However, most academic librarians with only digital holdings would say “no,” that even though we have a collection development policy as is required by SACS and other accreditation agencies, we no longer do much collection management or collection development, or do much title-by-title acquisition, or very often collaborate with faculty on acquisitions, or let them know of new titles published in their areas of interest or specialty, or let faculty know of new titles we purchased for them or their students, or catalog our resources (or pay much attention to the cataloging records which slip into our systems when electronic resources are activated in discovery), or keep up with new publications in the disciplines we support so that we know with reasonable assurance that what we offer (given the size of the budget, student body and other considerations) is best given our constraints. No, they do not consult Choice or any book review sources. 

Many of my colleagues would assert with confidence that the future of the library is not “a collection.”59

They would argue that libraries consist of discoverable resources, with everything conveniently accessible through a search box. According to this popular conception, the whole of the library can be outsourced to select vendors, publishers and aggregators, from whom we license digital content. It is for this reason that the modern academic library has now been aptly described by vendors, publishers and aggregators as the “tail-end of the publisher-aggregator supply chain.” Records of resources licensed in bulk come into our systems already cataloged, where they remain invisible, camouflaged, until someone performs a query, retrieves the citation and goes to the publisher’s platform to access the item. 

As evidence for why collections are no longer needed by libraries, some would say that for the most part, with this current arrangement of acquisitions through licensing large packages of subscription content from publishers and aggregators, users have no difficulty searching the library’s inventory to find “whatever” they are looking for; and also, for the most part, no one is complaining about what the library offers. The library is therefore doing its job by making so much content available. There is a STEM bias, a belief that books, or more accurately, scholarly monographs, are not important to STEM fields except as reference sources, which are usually serial titles. Therefore, we have settled on discovery as the library’s pre-eminent research solution, despite the fact that it has never been popular with researchers.

Many of us have stopped even  imagining an alternative to it, since most of our technical library conferences, often vendor sponsored, seem to be organized around applying existing products and solutions to solve problems that have application to only a few institutions. 

Discovery, the mechanism through which we conveniently make our resources available to users, is especially advantageous for libraries with large and/or specialized acquisitions budgets. Realistically, if one already knows that the library is going to license everything from Oxford, Cambridge, Springer, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Wiley, EBSCO, ProQuest and Gale, JSTOR, McGraw Hill, thousands of videos from Alexander Street and JOVE, and Elsevier, why not just pay the invoices, activate them in the library’s discovery system with a check of some boxes. and be done with it for the year? It’s a no-brainer. The library was going to acquire all these titles anyway.

Only now, the work of one person, the Electronic Resources Librarian—which luckily happens to be me!—has replaced Catalogers, Collection Development Librarians, Subject Specialists, Acquisitions and Serials Librarians. Circulation staff may also be gone. With this design, one person can easily manage acquisitions, discovery and technical services for a large academic library and have time left over to teach classes and do many other things. A very large library now needs how many professional librarians? And yet, despite the relative ease by which I can make the whole world of academic content available through a search box, I feel that the library is failing to have the impact it might otherwise have if it continued to offer visible collections. 

I can activate 130,000 ebook titles in seconds in discovery, tens of thousands of dollars worth at a time, and there is seemingly nothing to show for it but an empty search box. The titles are loaded and accessible if someone wants to come along and search for something. I remember what 130,000 titles looked like on shelves like it was yesterday. No one wants to check out books, people say, and I would concur. My belief is that people still want to see them, know about them, browse through them, and then, in the end, download a copy to their tablets or laptops to check them out and read them at their leisure. But they want to know about them, and the library should be helping to bridge that widening gap. 

Despite its advantages, its fantastic efficiencies of scale, the search box seems almost like a black hole through which there is no effective way to make our content visible or valued by those standing on the other side of it. For libraries to add value as libraries, it must be able to put content where it will be seen by users. We have to put content on the other side of the search box, a store front of our own.

The Library of the Future vs. “the Future of the Library.”

In recent years, the decision for academic libraries to go fully digital has often been little more than a decision made by administrators to remove books from libraries, renovate the building, and repurpose the space into a kind of student support / study center with much of the old library re-allocated to nonlibrary purposes (administrative offices for tenants), more so than some carefully thought out vision or plan—developed in collaboration with librarians of faculty, consulting library literature and library best practices, and after reviewing post-occupancy assessments and studying what worked and what didn’t at other schools—for how to bring the academic library fully and successfully into the digital age. Some Directors decide to eliminate all the books, and those who follow them often bring them back. Neither approach is fully satisfying. 

Inside the library, upon the announcement of a new library, librarians may be considering exciting new possibilities for how we might deploy innovative technologies to create an immersive multimedia library experience in the physical space, with or without the presence of physical books; experimenting with virtual fulfillment or even virtual reality labs; creating “book bistros” on the ground floor of the library, with music playing around them to encourage browsing and conversation, while upper floors are for study and collaboration with librarians; or how to improve the online experience so people enjoy coming to our websites to learn about new titles and explore the latest publications in their academic discipline or specialty, perhaps developed in collaboration with Choice or Books in Print.

We are thinking about how to promote independent learning (learning outside of a classroom assignment or task) and resource use. 

However, we must admit that none of these library-centric goals and objectives, including “independent learning,” “increased usage,” “improved literacy” and even scholarly research may be high priorities for our parent organizations, who understandably care more about enrollment, retention and graduation rates (the business aspects of running a university). 

Therefore, when the stars align and library renovation projects arise, we inside the library may have sugarplums in our heads envisioning the library of the future, while administrators and college presidents are thinking about the future of the library, and might not even have the library as a design priority, at least not in the same way librarians do. 

The State funds a new library, and media releases use the term “library,” but what is created is arguably not a library by anyone’s standards, but is more a design about its own design, a space about a space, a post-modern monument, a symbol or gesture to learning more than a functional library. The steps of the library may represent knowledge or ascension into greater degrees of learning, symbolized by the oversized staircase which runs up the middle of it; but in the light of day, it is just a staircase. The glass windows may represent greater connection to the world, but they are just windows. Indeed, it has become all too common today for architects claiming special insight into building what they call “next generation” or “new academic libraries” to create prominent, atrial, multistory iconic glass buildings called new libraries, with nothing inside of them but wide central staircases, walkways, an assortment of meeting rooms, a snack bar, and highly secure office spaces without clear purpose and librarians removed from the floors.

So not to interrupt the view of other students, or views out the window, whatever books remain are moved into low shelving units where they sit in the murky shadows of glaring LED light bars, draining everything of color underneath them (LEDs have poor color reflective value, or CRV). Books are also put away into closed stacks, into remote storage, into ugly basements, stuck in compact shelving, shellacked into wall decorations, and tossed into dumpsters, because they do not fit into the new modern design. There is no place to display books in the library, even new books which students could conceivably browse in the library but scan a QR code to download (physical browse, virtual fulfillment). Glass walls prohibit anything of interest from being placed at eye-level against the walls. These libraries often feel cold, impersonal and pointless.

There is no thought at all given to visual display or encouraging intellectual life. Why would an educated person wish to spend time there?The space is stagnant, lifeless and unchanging, with every floor looking the same and the experience always the same whenever people come to the library. Library-as-building never changes.

This bookless and mostly librarianless space is dubbed a “modern” library, and they are now ubiquitous on college campuses.

Despite its stated intentions to be a hub of learning, the campus bookstore (often a branch of Barnes and Noble) and student center may be a more inviting, intellectually stimulating and interesting space for people to congregate and explore new ideas and trends.

Architectural design firms may fail to fully consider the function of the library much beyond its being a meeting and work space for study and assignment completion. It is a place of last resort for those who have no other place to go, rather than for people whose time is valuable and valued. What architects often do is conduct an observational analysis as to how the old library is currently being used and build to suit that, rather than designing something truly innovative which no one has ever seen before that would serve scholars and the goals of the library. 

And why not a movie theatre or viewing room in the library? Why not several? I’m more than ready for multimedia presentations of highlights in book publishing, author interviews, art house / indie films and documentaries. Many of us license streaming video via Kanopy, so why not stream indie films in our own in house movie theaters? I am ready to create intellectually stimulating experiences and programming. 

What is most troubling to me about new academic library designs, the new student centers, is that there is no commitment to literacy, learning, education, knowledge, media, the scholarly community, culture or collections.

Finally, by following some sad outcomes assessment model recommended by ACRL,60 we can be transformed into pretty much anything which adds value to our parent institution, including an empty space ripe for repurposing, which suggests that quite possibly our empty spaces are our most valuable commodity. ACRL, my professional association (College and Research Librarians), has not pushed back, but proposed silly new roles for us in these empty spaces, like “Collaboration Facilitator.”

There are no prescriptive standards of excellence for the design of new library buildings, for library spaces, for library collections, or for library websites to ensure an optimal user experience of the academic library, to guarantee optimal library learning outcomes, as there once were.

Therefore, not knowing what a library is for, it is easy to confuse an attractive space, something architects know how to create, with good library design, which should be a content-rich learning environment that encourages resource awareness and use of a collection (not use of a building). Part of the problem is that we lack definition or prescriptive standards for what the user experience of a library should be in the 21st century.

Some of the issues confronting the modern library online are not unique to libraries, of course. Consider that traditional brick and mortar stores face some similar challenges as to how to make their products visible and compelling online, how to create a sense of value around that which cannot be seen, touched or placed side-by-side with related items which would complement them or enhance perceived value.

However, it just so happens that books, art and other unique cultural objects typically require even greater social and intellectual contextualization to create a sense of value and community around them, which is what the library environment, catalogs, website and its librarians should be striving to achieve. Visible collections, organized as collections by classification, are important for good library marketing, analysis, good service, good decision-making/budgeting, maximizing value, scholarly communication, and supporting a preferred mode of information-seeking among many scholars.

When libraries go fully digital today, there is typically no planning for an improved library experience online, for better marketing of library resources to encourage resource use in the absence of physical collections, or establishing a better instructional experience for the academic library online for students and scholars. We are using the same interfaces we have used for years and years, even when we had physical books. Most of the focus is directed to the aesthetics of the library building as a space, on the light and seating, and not on improving library user interfaces or the educational experience it is to deliver. There is no emphasis in the design of these new spaces on literacy or on scholarly communication or scholarly engagement. Our spaces and websites are stagnant. There is often no dynamic content in the library or on its website to promote user engagement.

In fact, even as the library claims to be fully online, the IT Department has in all likelihood assumed control over the library’s website (which the librarians like me once developed, managed and ran on our own servers) and authentication protocols.

Now the system vendor controls the discovery interface, which, apart from minor customizations, is the same across all subscribing institutions, leaving little room for development, creativity and innovation online by library professionals. The library’s inability to manage its online presence and its lack of autonomy in the digital realm further restricts the possibility for more sophisticated user experience, marketing efforts, personalization, and the creation of websites that are much more of a destination for scholars than they currently are.

What are “Collections”?

ost librarians are required to spend an entire semester in library school in a course entitled “Collection Development.” It is a core requirement for the ALA Master’s in Library and Information Science.

In this class, students learn how to develop collections of titles that are balanced, current, consistent in scope and fall within a certain budget. They learn evaluation techniques like “conspectus analysis,” peer comparison, cost per use, evaluating turnover, budgeting, usage reporting and assessment. The course often covers community standards (for obscenity, for example), defending free speech against censorship, different acquisition models (approval plans, demand-driven, other), various access models, book jobbers, subscription agents and some legal aspects of librarianship pertaining to collections, especially gifts and donations.

All libraries have a document called a Collection Development Policy (it is needed for accreditation), even though today, ironically, they may lack collections. More than ever, the CDP is just a document, not a tool or instrument to ensure quality through operational discipline. The CDP cannot be just pie in the sky, but should state how it plans to support particular programs, degrees, and special research interests of the school. Some can be quite granular. The CDP is like a business document explaining what the library plans to do for a collection and how it plans to do it. It sometimes it includes how the collection will be assessed.

Sound collection development practice in an academic library typically necessitates that the library acquires continuously throughout the year so it acquires new things at the time titles are released and so the collection does not incur gaps.

It means understanding that some disciplines are higher users of books and ebooks than others, and if a university is offering graduate degrees, it must allocate funds to the program to support collections appropriate for graduate research. Graduate classes are small and few classes are offered, but they are higher consumers of resources, and their resources are more expensive.

It means avoiding ad hoc spending, excessive duplication (libraries often the same content many times over because we acquire in packages, so overlap is often unavoidable), dated collections, as well as working effectively with stakeholders and community representatives.

Many years ago, academic libraries were informally defined as a collections of research which inspire research. And yet, despite all of the emphasis on collection management and development, and the attributes of a good collection, a definition of a library collection is actually very hard to come by in library literature.

Given that we can make so much content easily accessible through a text search interface on third-party content, how important is an actual collection for supporting research and instruction today? Does passive access to research online through a search engine inspire research or intellectual inquiry in the same way that visible collections do or did, or was presumed to? In the same vein as “a collection of research which inspires research,” large academic collections might be regarded an important type of scholarly communication about scholarly communication, and an important service the library provides to the academic community. How does a collection communicate to scholars if scholars cannot “see” what is in the collection?

There are considerable intellectual and aesthetic differences between the user experience of searchable aggregations of content and the experience of actual library collections, even if the entirely of the library is online, and even if anything anyone might want can be found through the search box. Our user interfaces, while allowing a mechanism for discoverability through a search engine known as a discovery layer, also cloaks library resources in a layer of invisibility

Authoritative collections, not aggregated resources, represent the weight of scholarly opinion of the academic community as to what is significant and good to know. They reflect a community. Visible collections encourage intellectual inquiry and intellectual life on campus. If librarians do not know what collections are for, or why collections are still valuable and worth preserving, we cannot very well demonstrate why the library itself is a valuable asset to the university. 

For a library collection to be a collection, the items in it must be described and arranged in a way that allows others, especially educated people and scholars, to perceive it as a “collection.”

A collection is organized, arranged, consistent and logical. They can be in any format.

Good collections are experienced as intentional, possessing the quality of intentionality. This means that people can tell it is an actual collection, managed and organized around the priorities of the discipline. A collection is a form of scholarly communication maintained by scholars for scholarly audiences.

There is a logic to collections. They reflect consistent scopes, and they often tell a story (the history of an idea or thought); they possess a quality know as narrative value. Large collections could convey both synchrony (what the discipline looks like now) and diachrony (how the discipline has evolved over time). The organization of resources into collections is in itself very valuable for encouraging literacy and engagement with the items in them.

They reveal what others in that field think significant and good. What is authoritative in Theology might not be authoritative in History, for example, although each may appear “scholarly” with footnotes. The collection is also an extremely important part of a student’s education because it exposes them to what they ought to know to become educated.

You would not expect students to have to “fish out” what they are supposed to learn from a class, so why expect that a library experience based on text search alone, providing library users with a search box, would be effective at encouraging engagement with scholarly resources? Collections reveal the structure, organization, authorities and priorities of an academic discipline, and that is the context in which resources have value.

Through discovery solutions alone, the front-end of the modern academic library system, academic libraries possess no ability to present library collections online, even if we are continuing to maintain them through our acquisitions practices.

The solution is not to abandon collections, to declare them irrelevant and focus exclusively on our work spaces or collaboration or teaching people how to use the discovery tool, but to establish business requirements for our websites, software and spaces which support the user experience of an academic library, which means support for the maintenance and display of academic library collections online. 

As the majority of the academic library is now subscribed content provided by aggregators and publishers, organized conceptually not around intellectual works and titles in collections, but more around “e-resource discoverability,” the relevance of library cataloging and collection management practices have been questioned:

  • Why waste time cataloging objects or enhancing the records of objects which do not belong to us?
  • Why bother managing a collection, or keeping up with current publications (doing title-by-title selection), if our vendors can manage the collection for us?
  • Why acquire individual titles if no one can see or browse them (the titles we actively buy are not distinguishable from those we passively acquire)?
  • Why waste money acquiring for the future rather than just for the here and now?
  • If we can provide instant digital access to requested items, why bother to attempt to anticipate need, rather than simply waiting for users to request items before we buy them?

The traditional academic library and its catalog were full of items that were curated and cataloged by the library and the librarians, items thought to be significant and good by those working in the disciplines we supported. 

It wasn’t a perfect system, of course, and we sometimes guessed wrong and no one checked the book out, as some have aptly pointed out; sometimes mistakes were made and we wasted money. But we were never previously compelled to buy unwanted titles in order to acquire a single desired title from a publisher, and we were not paying many times above list price for items never seen in their lifetime. A waste of a $20-40 for a print book becomes a bigger waste of $200-400 for an ebook. Without the organization of resources by LC Classification, we do not even know what we have, and duplication of content is unavoidable with bulk purchasing from publishers and aggregators. 

The psychology of collectionlessness and the lack of academic rigor it conveys is something which should be of concern to a university. The collection represented care over time by the college or university library naturally made students believe that their education was something lasting and also worth investing in, increasing what education administrators call “academic commitment.” The visibility of collections in a community space, where it could be seen by many, endowed it with respect (literally, the Latinate meaning of “respect” is to put something into view where it can be seen and considered again and again). While it might be far-fetched to link library collections to academic commitment, I cannot help but think there is something to this. Without collections to ground instruction, the institution may appear to be adrift. How to you teach English literature or art history without collections?

The collection’s arrangement by LCC made it possible to obtain a big picture view of a field, and for knowledge to be conserved and preserved over time. A well-maintained collection full of a mix of old and new was also a pleasure for educated people to browse, and formerly a source of institutional pride. Arrangement by LCC made it easy for newcomers to a field to learn what publications and authorities comprised their disciplines, and to hopefully see some of their own interests and aspirations reflected back to them. 

At the time of this writing in 2022, collections are almost gone from the academic library space, and if they remain, they are treated as vestigial. I do not mean just the physical book or print collections.

Neither the modern library design nor its online equivalent places any emphasis or value on collections of book or journal titles, on the organization of titles by discipline and topic so they can be effectively browsed. Our user interfaces do not encourage user engagement with publications or promote independent learning beyond providing passive access to content through a search box. 

Also, today, it is common for whatever content libraries license forms their “collections” since we often refer to them that way, especially for accreditation purposes (e.g., “The library’s collections include over 600,000 ebooks, 70,000 journals, 360 databases and 200,000 print books. . . “) but in all likelihood there are no actual collections there, just aggregations of subscription content. This is not to say that there are not good things in them, or that they are not useful for completing essays and writing research papers; but that no matter how much the library offers in terms of databases, these are not collections in the library sense, in the bibliographic sense, of representing what is representative of scholarly activity in a discipline. 

When scholars at a university object to their library’s going bookless, their response is sometimes imagined to be due to anxiety stemming from a lack of experience with discovery tools, fear of new technology, resistance to change, or a personal preference for antiquated reading formats, rather than legitimate objections to the loss of a valuable library service and information-rich learning environment for which there currently exists no online equivalent.61

As McKay points out, going bookless means the loss of browsing: 

The loss of the option to browse means those seeking ebooks must rely on search, which is notoriously poor for supporting imprecisely defined information needs (Belkin, Oddy, & Brooks, 1982; Borgman, 1996; Kuhlthau, 1991; Marchionini, 1997) and supports serendipity poorly (Foster & Ford, 2003). Given the importance of serendipity and browsing to information work, they are information-seeking strategies we lose at our peril (Cooksey, 2004; Foster & Ford, 2003; Makri & Blandford, 2012a, 2012b).62

but the loss of browsing in libraries means a loss of access to collections and a loss of learning. 

The Empirical Typology of Browsing Behavior (Scholars like to Browse, and Browsing is Scholarly Activity)

Librarians have all seen the memes satirizing patrons’ extreme reactions to the library’s routine weeding of books, reactions which many of us have experienced and dreaded throughout our library careers.

Therefore, when it comes to reactions to the academic library’s going fully bookless, either by the library’s deaccessioning all of the books, or else by attrition, failing to continue to maintain collections (so that the library’s decision to not buy books is not as obvious or noticeable to the casual visitor), it is easy to misunderstand their responses as having to do with an irrational, emotional and backwards attachment to print in this digital age, when it actually has to do with something else, the loss of information about publications, the loss of visible and visibly maintained collections, and with academic library users’ legitimate needs for a supportive learning environment to which the college and university library and its librarians were formerly ardently committed.

They are upset, legitimately so, about lack of access stemming from lack of visibility of resources in visible collections.

As a former subject liaison for Humanities and Social Sciences for a medium-sized academic research library which went bookless (and therefore, also collectionless), I can attest to the fact that the issue in my disciplinary areas (English, History, Art, Communications and the Social Sciences) was certainly not a predilection for obsolete reading formats or ignorance of search techniques on the part of the faculty, but the library’s seeming lack of commitment to maintaining quality collections in their disciplines. They were correct.

Especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, without the library’s commitment to visible collections, there is no real commitment to the general education of students or supporting many academic library users’ preferred information-seeking behaviors.62 The newcomer to the field wants to browse and all scholars want to keep up with new publications.

They want to see what new books are coming in and what we are buying that they might want to know about. Good collections are an important source of scholarly information and supportive of an experience for which there is as of yet no online equivalent in 2022.

Along with the new academic librarianship’s lack of support for browsing—which McKay points out in her wonderful “Empirical Typology of Browsing Behavior” is actually a complex of often misunderstood behaviors—equally concerning to me, and something no one is really talking about in the library field, is the increasing commodification of the academic library, often at the encouragement of library system vendors who stand to benefit from the library’s bulk purchasing practices.

There is little recognition from within our own ranks that the transition from being about “collections” to being about “resources,” while convenient for many of us who still work in libraries, is not necessarily indicative of progress when measured against educational outcomes or cost effectiveness, even if it drastically cuts down on staffing requirements inside of the library. Title selection has become a thing of the past in many libraries, or relegated to nonprofessionals to give them something to do if there is any money left over at the end of the year. 

Like de ja vu, I experienced the same thing twenty years ago, at a library called Questia, the first online academic library, funded with 161 million dollars in venture capital.

At the time of its launch and for many years after, Questia was lambasted by academic librarians for not being a real library, but a kind of “McLibrary,” despite its providing convenient, low-cost access to an abundance of searchable scholarly content, books and (later) journals, along with citation tools to help students write papers quickly and from the convenience of their dorm rooms.

By the definition of a library at that time, Questia was thought not to be a real library, not because it was online, but because its business model was that of an content aggregator, a business which makes its money by licensing access to packages of digitized publisher content for a fee.

It was thought by many of my colleagues to be vaguely unethical or acting in bad faith because, while it called itself an academic library, it indiscriminately added content to an online platform which it licensed to unsuspecting students who could not differentiate between a quality library and an aggregator package. It lacked impartial, knowledgeable “title selectors” (librarians and subject specialists) who acted with autonomy, impartiality and integrity to place worthy publications into collections motivated by the knowledge that those titles were considered best by the standards of the academic discipline. Now, indeed, everything added to the Questia platform was “scholarly,” or might be construed as having some potential interest to scholars, but it wasn’t necessarily good scholarly. The service didn’t offer authoritative collections, or attempt to do so, and therefore the fact that is called itself an academic library was offensive to many academic librarians, my own colleagues.

It wasn’t just that Questia “didn’t hire librarians to manage their collections,” which was the common complaint that reverberated throughout the library community at the time. Why would anyone care about the company’s hiring practices? Misunderstanding the nature of the complaint, the Marketing Department at Questia took it upon themselves to do damage control and boost credibility by hiring librarians to be there, even giving them important-sounding titles, but it didn’t change the fact that the resources it provided was more an attempt to monetize publisher content rather than to be good as a library

Questia’s founder, President and CEO, Troy Williams, began with a dream of providing universal access to a quality library like Harvard’s Lamont Library. He had wanted to replicate Lamont, title-by-title. When I was hired, the company, then called TLG, was very small (about 20 people) and it was almost hard to believe what they wanted to accomplish. I explained to Troy that big libraries often keep a lot of stuff on their shelves that wouldn’t be cost effective to try to replicate. He realized that the library which had developed collections over many decades, the work of many dedicated librarians and scholars, could not be profitably recreated online in a short time (the slated time to launch was one year), especially with the existing scanning technology, and worse, having no at-hand source for out of print books in Houston, where the company was located.

In 1999-2000, the digitization of publications was extremely labor intensive and destructive to the book. Sources for books had to be first identified, the books acquired, shipped to the Houston office, and then boxed up and sent overseas to be scanned where labor was cheaper. Books were unbound and destroyed in the scanning process. Metadata had to be manually created for the parts inside of the book. Even five years later, in 2005, with more capital, the benefit of non-destructive high speed book scanners, advances in search technology, and partnerships with large university libraries to supply books—Harvard’s library was the first to partner with Google—Google was also not successful at creating an online academic library. The mighty Google failed at that. Google Books was the resulting service, and it is not a library.

An even greater obstacle than technology, which Google later discovered, was that copyright or license agreements had to be negotiated for each book, as well as for each illustration inside of them. Publishers put a stop to Google’s efforts to create the world’s largest library online, just as they are now attacking the Internet Public Library. Questia had been beset with the exact same obstacles years before, forcing it to negotiate with publishers early on to license their back-stock, or whatever publishers would ultimately agree to putting on Questia’s platform, which in those days, often wasn’t their better content.

Many art, architecture and art history books when online without images due to copyright restrictions. The image which appears in a printed book cannot be reproduced online without securing permission from the artist or the creator of that image. It was daunting.

Around 2000, Questia’s two main rivals (NetLibrary, which became EBSCO ebooks, and ebrary, founded by Adobe heir and letterpress enthusiast Christopher Warnock, whose contents later became the core of ProQuest eBook Central) also called themselves “libraries,” until these companies determined that the librarians they wanted to sell to objected to the comparison between their aggregated offerings and an actual academic library collection. To placate librarians, their main customers, they removed “library” from the name of their platforms, and sold to their content to libraries to supplement their collections, not “to be” the collection and replace the library.

In 2000, there was widespread agreement that a real library employed knowledgeable librarians to select titles and form them into collections for the benefit of their users. A real library did not allow publishers to dictate its contents, for this was a clear conflict of interest. Questia was scorned, but ebrary was embraced.

Few librarians noticed when Questia closed in December 2021 after a 20-year run.

The second mouse gets the cheese. As much as librarians bitterly complained (between 2000 and 2005) about Questia for trying to pass itself off as an online academic library, Questia became the prototype for the modern, collectionless academic library, which is exactly where we are today. 

Academic libraries have themselves become more like content aggregators fed by commercial aggregators and their publisher partners, remade in the image of our library system vendor (Clarivate ProQuest Ex Libris); only rather then selling low cost individual licenses to subscribers, we provide access to individuals who have paid tuition.

Arguably, if publishers are determining our content, our access points and our display, we are moving closer to becoming a commercial product, to being fully commodified. What we have in “inventory” is there because of a license agreement with the publisher and not because we have selected the title.

Large academic libraries have gone collectionless, and now very small college libraries are deciding that library collections are a luxury that they cannot afford.  The model works best for the largest libraries who can afford to subscribe to everything. Small libraries do not fair as well. Many are opting to subscribe to a few online aggregator (EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale) databases, whatever they believe SACS or their accrediting agency will allow them to get away with. In the State of Texas, TexShare makes it easy for libraries to subscribe to a few low cost databases and be done for the year. What began as a way simply to supplement library collections has now become the whole of the library. I am anticipating that ProQuest Ex Libris, now Clarivate ProQuest Ex Libris, the largest academic library system vendor and also the largest content aggregator in the world, will attempt to make the library “ex libris” in a few years, replacing it with their fully customizable comprehensive research solution licensed directly to the university.

Most academic libraries rely upon Ex Libris’ LSP, its flagship product Alma and its discovery platform, Primo. Clarivate ProQuest Ex Libris has acquired just about all academic library systems. ProQuest’s main content rival EBSCO, the second largest academic content aggregator, is launching their own Library Services Platform which will serve as the backbone for their comprehensive research solution and which will likewise be positioned to replace the academic library in the future.

With library collection management, it was assumed that librarians inside of the library were keeping up with scholarly publications and were selecting titles for inclusion in a collection based on a number of considerations, including currency, superior quality, the reputation of the scholar, relevance to the curriculum, target audience, cost, how it complements the existing collection and potential interest to the library’s users. Collection Management and cataloging often go hand in hand, for both are concerned with the scholarly value of bibliographic resources and enhancing value of items in a collection. At many academic libraries, however, Collection Management has already come under Resource Management, or been eliminated, along with Cataloging and most title-by-title selection workflows. In this new environment, librarians may no longer be professionally committed to the ideal of maintaining strong collections in the disciplines, for as long as the user experience is just a search box, so long as there is no way to present browsable collections to users, there is no real incentive to maintain them. It is very easy to give in to commodification (for example, letting ebook Central or EBSCO ebooks comprise the totality of the library’s ebook resources), if library professional practice does not address it, and if those around you and above are saying, “This is progress.” 

The acquisitions model where libraries license annual subscriptions for content that is autoloaded into its “service platforms” offers many advantages and efficiencies of scale to the modern library. Even before LSPs, large academics relied on approval plans and blanket orders. I get that, but it was balanced against collection development activity of librarians. Today, large retail stores use a similar acquisitions model as modern libraries, in that “the product” comes in based on license agreements with the manufacturers. The store agrees to license all that the vendor produces in advance, regardless of product quality. I think it is important to ask what degree of commodification is acceptable for an academic library? 

In theory, library collections are not online, only vendor products, titles which cannot be presented or experienced as collections because they lack needed metadata and systems that support browsing. Library booklessness precedes collectionlessness, if only because we have no way of presenting browsable collections online to academic library users. Subscription resources can be searched, but they cannot be browsed or visibly displayed as a collection, and as quite a few researchers (including McKay) have pointed out, browsing the shelves is a motivator to read (therefore, is conducive to support for literacy) and a valuable form of information-seeking behavior among academic library users

What is the impact, if any, of library collectionlessness?

One obstacle that I encountered in attempting to answer this question is that the old library with collections has already become almost a straw man, its shortcomings exaggerated to justify its replacement by newer bookless library facilities.

According to these fictionalized accounts, the old library was “cramped and dark,” even lacking sufficient light to read and comfortable places to sit down; but this has never been documented in any actual library that I know of. Most older libraries had ample light and adequate seating, and many were retrofitted with cafes, concessions and vending machines years ago; relaxed food and drink policies are nothing new, nor are individual study rooms. There have always been lectures, commons areas, places to study and meeting spaces in college libraries, so the emphasis on the social aspect of libraries is also not new or innovative. All of these changes, including relaxed food and drink policies, occurred at twenty to thirty years ago. Discovery tools in libraries are also not new. Academic libraries have offered discovery solutions since about 2010.

The only truly new aspect of the new academic library and the “new academic librarianship,” a common thread or theme which is new to librarianship is a de-emphasis on collections, collection development, reading, knowledge and literacy. Ease of access has replaced the necessity to know. 

In new library construction projects, bookless designs are defended, not with the argument that “everything is online now” or that “books are obsolete,” or by a cost benefit analysis which conclusively demonstrates how ebooks save money, but rather by stressing the educational benefits of the interior architecture itself; plus an equally dubious emphasis on the random people occupying the space. The rhetoric of the new librarianship, especially its claim to “put people first” by seating them in the middle of the room, or to be all about “collaboration” because it offers a few group study rooms, is absurd.

Seating students in the middle of an open room  or on central “seating staircases” is not “putting students first,” but rather depriving students of the learning opportunities that they might have otherwise had from experiencing good collections. I’m all for great architecture, but it is foolish to believe that staircases possess magical powers to help students learn. 

According to the ideology of the new librarianship, buildings and people have replaced books as intellectual resources and our pre-eminent role as librarians in the 21st century is to be a “Collaboration Facilitator.”23

The open office design of the new library, architects explain, is meant to break down information silos; but I do not see how this model applies to students who should be able to depend on the library and its design to learn about a discipline, or for scholars who want to learn what is new in their fields of study. Even if we could get people to collaborate with each other, why is it assumed that a student or peers will give better information than published, authoritative resources? And while these new innovative facilities called “new libraries” continue to be built often at great public expense, published post-occupancy assessments of these facilities are lacking.  

Therefore, we do not even know how successful these new collectionless academic libraries are, by what measure we should count them successful or not as a library. Beyond the need to update old facilities to improve their aesthetic appeal, there are unclear educational and library learning objectives for the redesign of new libraries, for example, that they should in some way promote learning, encourage resource use, advance knowledge of the disciplines, and provide a better user experience of the academic library as an academic library. 

The New Digital Dark Ages?

ven my personal Narnia, the idyllic Catholic liberal arts college library existing almost outside of time with its unbroken intellectual tradition extending back to ancient times, has largely determined to go bookless and collectionless,65 even though, as we all know, it was the libraries in their monasteries, universities and cathedral schools which preserved knowledge and literacy through the last Dark Ages. Few people know that there had been several impressive renaissances before the Renaissance, but these earlier revivals in literacy, art, culture and learning, including “the High Middle Ages” (a.k.a., the Renaissance of the 12th century), were localized to universities and courts, and therefore short-lived.

Printing, coupled by an explosion in literacy (the latter spurred on by the availability of Bibles in the vernacular and a new religious imperative for people to read them for themselves), is often thought to have brought about a kind of permanent Renaissance, the renaissance that finally lasted and could build on what came before. Science could build and knowledge would spread across space and time, with one scientist’s published observations confirmed by another in another country in the common language of educated people and scientists, Latin. As a result of mass production of books and rising literacy rates brought about by the Protestant charge of sola scriptura, and the availability of Bibles in the vernacular (It would be stupid to urge Christians read scripture for themselves if it were not widely available, or available only to the very wealthy), knowledge would never again be lost, or so the theory went, because a copies of books would always exist in some library somewhere, and mass distribution allowed for wider readership. This idea of a permanent Renaissance brought about by printing and books seemed perfectly plausible to everyone in 1979, when Eisenstein first published her famous book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.66 

Digitization has been seen as furthering this democratizing trend and boosting literacy and education around the globe. But inside academic libraries, digitization has also meant the elimination of both print and online collections, increasing restrictions placed on access to scholarly resources by publishers, restrictions on scholarly publishing (the author pays manuscript processing fees often in the thousands to get published), the commodification and homogenization of library content, failure to collect for future scholarship (even failing to acquire in anticipation of need or use, sometimes in favor of “just-in-time” models), the destruction of print titles and historical collections, the systematic removal of librarians and subject matter experts from the acquisitions process, turning control of content and metadata over to publishers, and in turn, increased capacity for vendors to exercise monopolistic control over library content, systems (one vendor controls 80% of the library systems market), pricing structures and access.

Inside of libraries, digitization has meant abandoning collection development and disciplinary approaches in favor of ones which make it more convenient and efficient for publishers to supply libraries with their content (for publishers to “monetize” their content), and conversely, yes, for libraries to be efficiently supplied by them. It has meant librarians divorcing themselves from their former professional commitments to the evaluation, presentation and preservation of scholarly content in the disciplines, with many in the library field now assuming that the reliance on a handful of commercial entities to supply institutional access, content and metadata through “big deals” is what a modern library is. It has actually meant denying access to outsiders, those without institutional affiliation, even where we never did so before. 

In librarianship, as well as in the art world, a collection is an intellectual and an aesthetic construct implying curatorship, quality and selection based on a number of factors. A museum which exhibits the art from commercial art galleries, for example, runs the risk of losing its credibility as a museum, and potentially even jeopardizes its 501(c)3 status if it is trying to make money off the sale of exhibited works. In the same way, the academic library should not be reduced to a vendor commodity or commercial entity. We should be a scholarly product and not a commercial one. 

However, our current systems and workflows seem to all be tilting heavily in this direction toward greater and greater commodification. Under ideal circumstances, the library should not be compelled to acquire titles in digital format that it never would have acquired in print format; and yet libraries do not apply the same standards to content they license digitally, for even though they may pay more for it, they do not “own it,” and most importantly, the stuff no one finds of little interest or relevance to the institution, no one needs to see. The garbage, the waste, is not visible to anyone. The face that $300 went towards some ebook  along the lines of “The Body Rituals of the Naciremas” is not considered a problem only because 1. no one is likely to know that these titles are in the repository unless they specifically go looking for them, and 2. only an educated person is going to know or care about what is missing. In some cases, to obtain access to a few desired publications, the library must acquire the whole package, no harm done. The irrelevant and low demand titles are not considered a problem. They do not constitute clutter or waste or cause embarrassment in the same way as if they had been acquired in print, sitting on a shelf in plain view in a collection, because no one knows they are there, no one sees them, and anyway, they were part of a package of resources, a collection.

But no one sees the good things, either. 

Many fully digital libraries and librarians now see themselves as no longer “about” books or scholarly publications in any format, or about knowledge or raising literacy levels, but are about simply providing access to commercially-branded third-party products, or else about “facilitating collaboration” in their architecturally-designed work spaces.

When compared to the content-rich learning environments which preceded them, places which represented sustained commitment to scholarship over time, the life of the mind, creativity, campus culture, a rich tapestry of human achievement and experience—at least presenting what is thought significant and good in the disciplines by the larger community of educated people—the space of the modern academic library is a wasteland, the very antithesis of a learning environment and what a good library should be.

Where before we presented to users what was thought significant and good by experts in the field and the user community, what now? Walk through the doors of the campus “library learning center” and you will likely see nothing but perhaps some other people sitting there.

Online, there is just a search box on the library’s landing page and sometimes pages with links to research guides. It is unclear by what measure we are to count the new library as successful. Again, I’m not speaking about one library, or my library, but a paradigm shift which has occurred throughout the entire State of Texas, the country and the developed world.

The library space is no more educational, unique or recognizable than any other space in the 21st century. 

Browsing and the Student-Centered Library.

he physical library may now be full of natural light and technology and modern architecture, its formerly opaque walls replaced by glass and whiteboards, but despite its brightened appearances, it is a place of darkness.

No, I am not crazy, although I may be for saying so. Offering users an empty space and calling it a “library” just may well be, like the Emperor’s New Clothes. If there is such a thing as a sin for librarians, this has to be it. There is nothing in the library to experience—views out windows? A central staircase? Rooms? Other people sitting around studying? This is not exactly what I would call a vibrant library experience or an intellectual hub of learning.

I recently visited many libraries in the Houston area, towing my eldest child around to various campuses to get him excited about college. Naturally, as a librarian, perhaps also as a concerned parent, I evaluate the school by its library, not because I expect my own kid to use it, necessarily, but because it is the only visible part of academics I can see. I do not know how other parents feel, but if I don’t see books and journals on display in the library, I’m not happy. From the library without books, I make an assumption that the school is not focused on academics nor sufficiently student-centered. I don’t mind seeing lots of extracurricular stuff. But current titles must be on display. They can even be covers of ebooks with a “download now” sign, but I want to see some titles, a concerted effort to encourage engagement.

Why do I feel this way about the presence of books in the library, even if it might be true that most students today do not want to read them? I have no doubt that the majority of students who attend college do not want to read, but the 5 to 10 percent who do are the ones who often go on to do great things in life, and to me, these students are definitely worth the investment, which really isn’t all that much compared to the exorbitant cost for institutional licenses for ebooks that libraries pay for and no one is likely to read, either.

Please do not talk to me about the “cost of warehousing a print book on the shelf.”

People often do not understand that academic ebooks are priced many times higher than the print version to begin with, and we often have to license it over and over again each year, often paying for the same content many times over. We may be paying hundreds each year for a $20 to $40 book, which we get at a tremendous discount when we buy in print through our book jobber.

The library, even its modern incarnation as a kind of open office space, should still provide for a unique user experience which is fundamentally “about” its own content, about what is significant and good, about culture, knowledge, and ideas, and not resign itself to being “about” the user’s responses to space, light, or worse, else “about” the other random people who happen to be in there. (That is just gross; but this concept of others in the library as a potential collaborative resource has been misappropriated by architects and applied to students as if they were high tech office workers.) Increasingly, the design aesthetic of the new library promoted by architects and library designers is really no different from what I experience when I am sitting in the waiting area of a dealership waiting for my car to be serviced; I might as well be sitting in AutoNation Toyota, and there they give me free coffee.

I know, the academic library is online now.

Therefore, the logic goes, there is no need for books, cataloging and collection development. Should an information need arise, users can search for whatever they want using Google Scholar or subject-specific databases, and if that fails, resort to the library’s discovery tool. It has been explained to me, as if I am oblivious to the what this self-styled modern library has to offer to the digital-age student and scholar. I have in managed the electronic resources, the proxy server, and website for several libraries, along with doing cataloging, collection development and instruction. 

I even consider myself a fortunate beneficiary of my own library’s bounty, my life-line to scholarly content preserved after all these years, even as those more deserving individuals who have graduated with credentials far exceeding my own have become ex communicado, cut off from scholarly literature, their credentials immediately revoked even after years of graduate tuition unless they somehow managed to land a teaching position right out of graduate school. 

Doctors cannot use their medical school library, teachers cannot use the education resources at their alma maters, journalists cannot fact check using the library’s resources, and the community can no longer regard the academic library as being their for them. 

Faculty (and librarians) at community colleges or small institutions seeking to do research and publish to advance their careers or keep their knowledge current might be surprised that they now need institutional credentials to access the scholarly resources inside of the library at public academic universities or their former alma maters.67

Schools are raising their drawbridges to the community, with some public academic libraries (Sam Houston State University, for example) not even allowing the public to search their catalogs unless they have current institutional credentials. Consortial sharing through TexShare and ILL is becoming unsustainable because ebooks cannot be loaned, and few are buying print. 

Despite my own library’s largesse, I cannot help but feel the library as a institution is falling far short of the sort of educational experiences the library ought to be providing to students and scholars, and even the educated public (who should be entitled to use the public academic university, since it is taxpayer supported), despite our being able to facilitate convenient access to so much content, especially journal content.

There is a sense in which the library, as a library, should also be creating demand for their resources and keeping their communities up-to-date by presenting overviews of the current scholarly literature and publishing activity in their fields. Our systems, our spaces, our websites and policies should be helping us to accomplish these objectives, but all we seem to be doing effectively is driving our users to publisher websites to do research.

The digital academic library has become to a great extent an invisible, searchable repository of vendor entitlements, a search box. There are no collections in the physical space anymore, and none in the virtual space, either, for our systems cannot display items as collections. There is only access to licensed content. It doesn’t get any duller than that. The ideal of bodies of knowledge, a consensus or common framework of what educated people are expected to know to have mastered a discipline, is also gone, at least from the academic library space. 

Without the framework of collections, a body of knowledge, are we not just an aggregator like many of our vendors, and not actually a library?

How do we balance collection development with resource management? Is this even a worthwhile goal? The lack of differentiation between searchable aggregations of publisher entitlements with actual library collections seems not ideal from a scholarly or ethical standpoint. In addition, the library as a repository where content is passively acquired but not necessarily seen by anyone, a black box of a search box, creates a disconnect where few people know what titles are in the library in the first place, which further reduces the library’s efficacy.

Libraries pay many times above list for digital content, but it is practically invisible unless the user comes along and performs a search where the item shows up in a results set. Why or how would students even know about a title, concept or idea to search for it in the first place? The library conceived of as a search box places a burden for users who are unfamiliar with their disciplines to come to it with prior knowledge in order for the library to be useful to them.

The user interface which goes hand-in-hand with this publisher-driven system is not particularly modern either, in the sense that discovery has been around for a long time, commercially available to libraries since about 2006, and of course, search engines have been around for much longer. Discovery is an invaluable tool for scholarship where collections are large and comprised of a large percent of hosted serial content, but the search experience alone should not constitute the totality of the user experience of the library, which it now does.

I would also think that a “modern” user interface for a library would involve some form of personalization.

Give me (because I am me) the links to current articles in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The Chronicle of Higher Education, etc., and maybe Library Trends (whatever library publications I want to follow) in a sidebar when I go to the library’s website and sign in.

Better yet, show me the forthcoming and new books (from Books in Print, or perhaps Choice Reviews) related to my interests in Art, Literature, History, Philosophy and Librarianship in order by classification, just as I used to be able to visit my favorite spots in the stacks, or visit a new books area, to see what is new. Feed my head.

Through library system software, let me create my own personalized dashboard of content and publications with reviews, and let me be able to click a link to let my library know I am interested in their providing access for me, if they do not already.

Let me use the library’s software to create my own virtual library online which others can visit and explore to create a community of readers.

If this level of personalization is too ambitious, let’s support something which is more fundamental to academic libraries and traditional academic library systems: collection browse by LC classification, to give students and scholars an overview of the library’s “collection,” as a collection, so they and faculty can readily see what is in it, and so it can be objectively and qualitatively assessed and evaluated as a collection. 

Many small college libraries in Texas have opted to go collectionless. They offer the bare minimum to get through SACS accreditation, which for small college libraries in Texas is a page with links to TexShare databases,68 while others, some large university libraries, often aim to subscribe to everything under the sun. Either way, small or large, there may be no library collection development activity going on inside of the library, and even if there is embellishment of vendor packages, these hand-picked titles often go unnoticed by users. SACS has made collections optional.

Being “student centered” for an academic library has never had anything to do with our centralized seating arrangements, putting students out into the middle of a room, or seating them on a “learning” staircase—which is like something out of Scientology; and certainly not with orality—modelling our spaces on prehistoric time periods, as primordial “campfires, caves and watering-holes,”69 the way pre-literate people had to transmit knowledge—but always with literacy, providing a collection of literature that was fine-tuned to the needs and interests of students, scholars, and other presumably literate people. It meant librarians being familiar with what was in the collection in order to encourage user engagement with the titles in it. It meant letting users know of new and forthcoming titles and things of interest which might appeal to them. It meant creating a content-rich learning environment.

That was being student-centered for a library.

To my knowledge, it still is.

Architectural rendering of a staircase in a library. Staircases have become a central architectural design feature of new libraries and other public buildings, often endowed with special symbolic meaning as a space for collaboration, sharing and a place to be seen. New designs are concerned with making students visible, not so much making library resources visible to students to encourage literacy and engagement.

The Library Reimagined as a Library.

bviously, I’ve thought deeply about the question of what difference does it make, not just to me personally or to my fellow librarians, but to the user experience, the quality of education, to the school, to the community, and the rest of the world, if academic libraries are not only fully digital, “bookless,” but also collectionless

Who is capturing the Spirit of the Ages, the Zeitgeist of the 70s, 80s, 90s, of 2021, and on into the future, if library collections no longer exist, even at the largest of universities? Is there now no collective memory?

Even now, what knowledge (the latter half of the twentieth century, for example) is being lost by failing to collect for the needs of future scholars, or even for present ones, or by our not being able to present to the public or our communities with what is significant, good and noteworthy in academic publishing or contemporary culture?

What knowledge is being lost by libraries not being able to acquire in anticipation of use or present content to users in a way that is engaging and relevant to them?

It used to be that smaller libraries could depend on bigger libraries to supply them with ILL books and articles. But large academic libraries have stopped collecting, leaving content and rules for lending up to the vendors from whom we license content; even without rendering any sort of judgement on the quality of this content (most of which we would never have acquired under normal circumstances), a more pressing issue to me is that the content we obtain through this route it is not visible in any immediate way to users, or even to us inside the library, nor is it shareable with other libraries since it is not ours to share. We didn’t select it, we do not catalog it, we do not own it, and it is only seen if someone performs a search or goes looking for it. When a resource is seen, or “discovered,” it is not presented in an intellectual context beyond relevance ranking.

There is no illusion of a library collection there, no effort to keep up appearances of an actual collection. The library is largely an illusion, which wouldn’t be quite so bad if it were good, we could provide for a more vibrant, stimulating and unique user experience in the physical space and online. It provides convenient access, yes, but it does not in any way encourage scholarly value, literacy, intellectual inquiry or user engagement with content. Library “collections” signify what is good by community standards, where “resources” are just what might (or might not) be useful to complete a task. I used to be able to browse the covers of journals in my field to know what other people are doing. Why can’t I do that in a virtual library space?

An old definition of the academic library was a “collection of research which inspired research.” What is it now?

I’m not confident that aggregations of resources residing on the dark side of a search box have the same impact on the user as those with eminent community visibility as a collection which represents a body of knowledge.

Regardless, our vendors and our accrediting agencies have each in their own way encouraged this trend toward greater commodification, ad hoc (or no) collection development, and reduced collection visibility, as if “access to” content has ever been sufficient to get students to engage with it.

As any educator will explain, the premise is fundamentally incorrect. In a classroom, students benefit from what educators call “graphic organizers” and “scaffolding”—from visuals, context, and giving students what is just beyond their reach to help them grow, and personalization. They need intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Classrooms today must be content- and media rich, customized to students needs and interests.

A good library is really no different from the classroom in this regard. We must have organization, structure, collection visibility and personalization to be conducive to learning. 

The library as a search engine provides absolutely no motivation for anyone to engage with content, even if good content is in it; and now the disconnect between the library and the rest of campus has grown wider, because there is little collaboration with the faculty on collection development.

Where we once sent around publisher catalogs and forthcoming title lists (which faculty appreciated because it helped them keep up and keep their research interests from fizzling out), where we once consulted Choice and other book review sources, and sent emails to faculty like, “I saw this announcement for new book on the History of Wallpaper and thought you would be interested!” (we may not have bought it, but they liked that we were letting them know about it); where we once managed the budget conservatively, so it lasted throughout the year to avoid gaps in the collection, now the budget is put into packages in the beginning of the year and as a result, we have less contact with our faculty and no collections to worry about.

Of course, sometimes librarians can and do add individual titles to the aggregator’s or publisher platform, often at significant cost relative to list price; but when they do, these additions are not visible to those on the other side of the search box. Of lesser concern is that no one at the school knows that the librarians added them, or that they are there in inventory awaiting discovery. We can only hope that someone comes along and searches for something so it might be “discovered” by a user in its lifetime.

Shockingly, our library systems provide us with no mechanism, no widgets or plugins, to display new titles, but without call numbers or at least a well-formed 050, there would be no way to organize a new title feed.

Increasingly, the ocean of content to which we subscribe as part of “big deals” is not cataloged according to library bibliographic metadata standards either, and therefore, it cannot be meaningfully displayed and presented online according to a disciplinary framework.

Now it is more difficult to spot what important titles might be missing from the library’s “collection” or to apply bibliographic approaches to the management of scholarly resources, and some might even question the validity of such bibliographic approaches to the management of digital content.

Contrary to good library practice, publishers often provide little more than the title and publication date in the discovery records they supply to libraries. Therefore, the resources we license from different vendors cannot be displayed in their scholarly context as a library collection. They are searchable aggregations of content which scholars might find useful. Items do not stand in intellectual relationship to each other. There is no internal logic to our holdings. There are secondary sources but not the primary ones, minor works but not the major ones, literary criticism but no literature, volume 2 but not volume 1, and often nothing, in terms of scholarly monographs, that are current or in demand (due to publisher embargoes), unless we have added them ourselves.70 They do not signify what is important to know.

Journal articles, once considered ephemeral entities, now may enjoy a longer life than the scholarly monograph, which was previously treated as more enduring. Vendor-controlled bare-bones discovery records come and go as portfolios come and go, so what we have at the end of the day is a fluid repository or commercial product inventory, a record of just-in-time entitlements linked to publisher websites. Aggregators and publishers add and remove content from our inventories, often trading titles among each other like a back-room poker game, without much effecting our license agreements. Librarians have become increasingly divorced from content, a consequence of our automated systems. The trend will likely continue until the whole of the library is a subscription to one or two aggregators’ comprehensive database packages, licensed to universities as “Academic Complete,” with a choice of two flavors, EBSCO or ProQuest. 

The increasing commodification of the academic library has transformed every aspect of our systems, our standards, our workflows, our staffing levels, our roles, our access policies, our metadata, our interior architecture, and our capacity for user engagement, but yet its impact on learning, literacy and scholarship, especially future scholarship, is largely unknown, unrecognized, unexplored, and not even discussed much in library literature.

Libraries have indeed become the “tail-end of a publisher-aggregator supply chain.”13 Metaphorically, we unpack the boxes and put the inventory out on the floor, and sometimes, as with autoload holdings, we don’t even need to do that much.

Our vendors like it that way, for it helps them to monetize their content. I don’t want to be on the tail end of anything.

How can people at a university even begin to learn about an academic discipline, or feel that they have achieved some level of mastery over it, if a discipline is no longer visible or accessible to them through academic library collections? 

What does an academic degree represent if not familiarity with the published literature in a discipline?

A search engine alone is not ideal for this kind of learning, because what is retrieved, while relevant to the query, seems random, not relevant to anyone else. It is not ideal for communicating scholarly value.

Only collections provide a needed overview, sense of value, integrity and disciplinary framework appropriate for an academic library. Only collections, because they can be tailored to the needs and interests of their audiences, provide for a truly student-centered library learning experience for the college library. Only collections signify and convey care and respect for scholarship and learning to foster academic commitment and user engagement with the resources provided by the library. Only collections signify what others think good, which is a motivator to engage with the resources in them. 

And if collections once vitally mattered to the library profession thirty years ago, the very thing which fundamentally defined a library as a library, why should collections be considered to be so inconsequential to our library service model and practice today, just because our resources are delivered digitally? Whether in print or online, the framework should be the same. From the standpoint of the user experience and education, is the “discovery of resources” on aggregator and publisher platforms really a replacement for curated collections reflecting what is thought significant and good by our faculty, librarians, scholars and experts in the field? Can we really be good stewards of our acquisitions budget, are we really serving the needs of the university well, with this model?

With digitization in libraries—or more precisely, the shifting of responsibility for the provision of the academic library’s content and metadata from the librarians (and faculty) to large commercial entities—comes the challenge not only of what to do with the space where the stacks used to be, but how, and if, the library might support more ambitious and idealistic academic library objectives, e.g., “intellectual inquiry” or “literacy” or “access to disciplinary knowledge“—or even serve as a reliable foundation for learning about an unfamiliar field or area of study—if what we have to offer is for the most part invisible to users, and not organized or displayed as a collection of titles, or authoritative, that is, presenting what educated people or scholars working in the discipline think significant and good to know. The content we offer may be “scholarly,” but searchable aggregations of content is not scholarly, or adding scholarly value. This may be a hard point to get across, but the metadata we provided which constituted the old catalog was not just about access, but context. Discovery is a mish-mash of content—a useful tool, but not a great interface for an academic library.

The collection itself is an extremely important form of scholarly communication for which there exists no online equivalent or substitute.

It is what made the library a valuable resource to students and scholars beyond just providing access to information. Resources plus resources equals just a bigger bag of resources, but it lacks organization or integrity. The intellectual work of the academic librarian, of evaluating, selecting, cataloging, describing, preserving and displaying individual titles in collections mapped to the disciplines, so they might be seen and appreciated by others, is almost gone.

Traditional academic library objectives, the more scholarly objectives of college and university libraries, were about presenting, preserving and providing broad access to the scholarly literature of a field and community, a coherent body of knowledge, common points of reference through which it was possible to create new knowledge and erudite people. It was not just about access to information in the moment, but about knowledge itself; encouraging actual familiarity with the authors, titles, influencers, ideas and the literature of educated people in society. 

Traditional librarianship also valued independent learning by students, that is, reading outside of a class assignment, because it is not reasonable to expect that a few classes are going to teach everything or even most of what a student needs to know to be successful in his field. It upheld the idea that reading is empowering, an act of self-determination and self-actualization. Traditional librarianship stimulated demand for its collections by acquiring titles in anticipation use and placing them into a larger intellectual context.

This is how it encouraged browsing, and browsing is learning.  

Achieving the more idealistic or philosophical objectives of academic librarianship has become more challenging as the resources that the library acquires, whether individually or as a subscription package, are neither presented online in some immediate, visible way to users, nor capable of being experienced as browsable collections. 

The model of a physical library as a kind social space for people to be to get work done and of an online library as a search engine or a fluid repository of resources which might be useful to someone should he have a need is a passive model which does not actively encourage user engagement with resources. It does not encourage literacy. It isn’t a good or effective model for teaching, learning, or creating educated people. We need discovery, but the whole of the library experience constituted by a passive search portal affords too shallow an experience to be an online library for a university library. 

  • It does not help students grow in knowledge of themselves or of the world.
  • It does not inspire or turn people on to new things.
  • It does not keep faculty up-to-date, or make scholars aware of new titles in their field.
  • It does not improve “academic commitment” or attachment to that school, since there is nothing local or unique.
  • It does not instill respect for intellectual achievement or inspire the creation of new knowledge.
  • It does not create educated people.

These are some of the outcomes I would expect of any good college or university library, including one that is fully digital.

Sidney Harold Meteyard. The Lady of Shallot.

The traditional academic library presented users with a pleasing tapestry of human creativity and thought as it evolved through time. Collections were our product, and they were visible as collections to a larger community of scholars. Through cataloging and collection development, the academic library preserved the scholarly content of the discipline over time and made users aware of new titles in their areas of interest.

Throughout this book, I will express hopes, expectations, needs and requirements—say, business or organizational requirements—for a future library and future library software, so the academic library might be reimagined and reinvented, rather than being seen often as it is today by many people in my field, a lost cause.31 A change of direction is possible through four mechanisms:

  1. The work of OCLC and the Mellon Foundation, who are doing interesting things with collections and collection metadata in an effort to protect and preserve cultural knowledge in both libraries and museums. Because OCLC has experience with large-scale aggregation and metadata enrichment, with conspectus analysis and collection evaluation tools, they have the potential to develop new and more engaging library user interfaces for the academic market, building upon its academic library services platform, WMS. OCLC currently has only a small share of the academic library system marketplace, but unlike EBSCO or ProQuest, it offers vendor neutrality. I will discuss some of OCLC’s more recent initiatives later on in this book.
  2. A return to prescriptive standards for libraries through ACRL, with the recognition that institutional “objectives-assessment” approaches in higher education and libraries have only resulted in continuous cost-cutting and lowering of academic library standards, not in continuous improvement or greater accountability. For reasons I will explain, following this model, which ACRL recommends, does not help the library to be more accountable as a library. ACRL should also seek to develop standards specifically for libraries which are fully digital, even if these are just a prototype for something yet to be developed.
  3. With library-centric prescriptive standards or recommendations, ACRL / ALA can exert influence with accrediting agencies like SACS. College and academic libraries have always needed accreditation to be our big stick. 
  4. Working with library system vendors to improve their product. If the only user experience a library system affords is searching across databases, are they needed? When looking for articles, researchers tend to go directly to subject specific databases anyway. Vendors should realize that once collections go, library systems go. We don’t need it to check out or manage books. No school is going to pay for the convenience of searching across databases, especially once administrators realize that a webpage with databases will afford access to the same content. It is in our vendors’ best interest to develop more engaging collection-centric interfaces.

I believe we must embrace a more humanistic and scholarly practice, a return to raising awareness of new and important publications, of stimulating demand, and providing access not just to “resources,” but to knowledge. This does not necessarily mean a return to print, resuscitating the library of thirty years ago. Far more than “access to information” or familiarity with vendor products and platforms, students and scholars need an objective and impartial view of their field. 

The ability to accurately and impartially visualize the world of knowledge and the scholarly activity in it, along with the ability to present curated content of interest to a particular community, is the true and unique work of academic librarianship. 

The online user experience of the academic library today is a generic and fairly uniform across all college and academic libraries, cloud-based search application capable of cross-searching the library’s owned and subscription content. Discoverability is beneficial, of course, especially if one does not know where to look to find scholarly books and articles online. But this discovery experience, text search with hierarchical list-ranked results, is not one that is unique to libraries (Google, for example, is not a library, nor is it perceived as one); nor should discovery be the whole of the user experience of the library. Search should be only half of the equation. It is not rich or immersive enough, and does not convey or confer scholarly value. Total immersion in peer-reviewed scholarly literature is also not an ideal approach for teaching lower-division students. Undergraduates benefit from a library with books and publications tailored to their needs, interests and educational level. Traditional libraries accomplished this by creating context-rich learning environments suited to the tastes and needs of their audiences.

Maintaining good collections is what being student-centered was about for a library, not providing centralized seating arrangements.

Despite what librarians may do currently to select and add individual titles to aggregator platforms, to enhance vendor products, its contents are no longer perceived by anyone to be a product of librarians, or human effort, or a reflection of local or community interest or values. 

When we add a title to an aggregator platform, we are throwing the starfish back into the ocean.73 We know we have done a good deed by buying that certain ebook or journal, but no one else knows it is there. If anyone comes upon it, they assume the book was there all along, just a part of the vendor package. Furthermore, only an infinitesimal percent of the library’s resources is visible at a time. On a very basic level, a ten million dollar library is experienced the same as one with a ten thousand dollar budget. There is neither the awe inspiring experience of the library sublime of the large university library with large historical collections, nor the academic intimacy of the small college library, where each resource was selected with care and attention for the benefit of the user or community. 

People complained about the old library being wasteful, but the library in the cloud is no less so.

A small percent of any library of licensed content is ever seen, only now we may be paying a whole lot more per use, or for lack thereof. Libraries cannot buy just one title, but we often are often strong-armed into buying the whole package, even if we do not want to. Academic titles cost the library many more times than its physical counterpart, but small college libraries cannot easily benefit from an economy of scale of a larger institution; yet they are often required to support distance learners and equitable access to library resources by SACS accreditation’s guidelines. As it stands, it would appear that databases are needed for school accreditation, but collections—that which defined a library as a library—are not. If the objective is “literacy” and “independent learning,” this is not a correct model. Only collections truly support these educational objectives.  

A Catholic school or an HBCU, art school, or any other school with a unique community or specialty or following cannot effectively promote its resources to its respective communities through the singularity of a search box and generic databases. It must operate on the title-level to offer actual collections. Art schools must offer art books, HBCUs must offer black books, seminaries must offer religion and philosophy books, and those who teach journalism must acquire titles written by journalists. These titles must be presented in a way that is visually compelling and public, as in, this title is of presumed interest to many people. 

Library systems and websites must help us to create a unique sense of place online and in person, one that is enjoyable, interactive, and educational to browse. Browsing is learning. At this point, through discovery, we can only acquire items and hope they get discovered in their lifetime. The model is ineffective, and no amount of instruction of direct student engagement can compensate for the lack of library collections. 

Franz von Stuck. Falling Stars.

The expansive experience of collections is what defines the aesthetic and intellectual experience of an academic library. At a university or college, can the value of academic library collections be demonstrated from a business or educational perspective?

Collections are our former glory. Library collections are what made the library an intellectual and a social place. There are what made the library good. People came to the library to see what was new in their field, to spot trends, and to stimulate their own research in new and grow in often unexpected directions. They made the library aesthetically and intellectually pleasing, even as a place to study. The collection was an is unique as an intellectual experience. Nothing has come to replace it, not even online.

I write because I think there may be opportunity to develop something new.

Without collections of fresh and interesting titles on display, organized by discipline with a critical mass of similar or similarly-scoped titles surrounding them, the library does not reflect the current state of knowledge, literature, expert opinion, or what is thought significant or good by a larger community of readers and scholars. Access alone is not enough, even combined with instruction, because knowing how to find information does not inspire independent learning. We must have a way of delivering a better library experience in person and online to be the unique educational experience we once were to support user engagement.

The trend away from collection development, where librarians and faculty work collaboratively with faculty to select and raise awareness of individual titles, toward blanket acquisitions and resource management, the practice of licensing large packages and having vendors supply the library’s contents, is the path toward greater commodification, reduced quality, lower literacy levels and diminished impact on college campuses. A college library must maintain collections in anticipation of use to be effective and to create a sense of place. Doesn’t this mean that a library needs a large budget? No, it merely needs to be “right-sized.” A small college library can be excellent, especially if it maximizes the value of titles through presentation, display and promotion.

The collection development statement of Lee College, a small community college in the Houston area, describes an admirable philosophical commitment to quality collections maintained in anticipation of use:

The goal of the Lee College Library collection is quality, not quantity. A collection has quality to the degree that it is relevant and appropriate in quantity to the number of students and faculty who use it. Quality is compromised either when new material is not added or when inappropriate material is retained. As a secondary goal it is preferable that the library’s collection be used. But there’s an attendant need for the library’s collection to be potentially useful, in anticipation of use. A high usage rate usually correlates with material purchases that meet the needs of the curriculum. On the other hand it must be acknowledged that it is impossible to accurately identify uses that fall outside of actual circulation. In-house use is a notoriously poor measure of use, since students frequently reshelve books, and some books that are reshelved were not helpful. Therefore, books that show little to no use in the statistics will be critically evaluated for potential usefulness, accuracy, timeliness, and quality, in order to determine whether to promote them or deselect them.74

Where the University of Houston Library System, in contrast, states on its website that it will no longer be able to afford to buy books in anticipation of need, but will wait for book requests before acquiring them.75 I do not know whether this policy extends to ebooks as well.

A library which purchases books only upon request or in an ad hoc way is no longer functioning as a library, and is less valuable to scholars who might have previously relied upon the library to help them keep up with scholarly publishing in their disciplines. If I were a prospective student, I would think twice about attending a university whose library waits until a request comes in before it buys books.

Something is very wrong with that model.

In the transition to booklessness and collectionlessness, librarians have outsourced cataloging and selection to the vendors from whom we license digital content. I realize that this trend developed out of necessity, for we had no digital content or hosting platforms of our own, and the tide of digital resources rose too fast for us to rise with it. We had to scale quickly to meet demand, negotiating deals to license thousands of ebooks and journals at a time. New library systems, workflows, vendors and digital products sprang up to meet this need. In all honesty, libraries went online without a carefully developed online interface, business plan or standards for the user experience of a digital library. We simply bought what was available on the market.

Where the practice of buying in bulk was once regarded as acceptable to supplement the library’s collections, now packages of aggregated content have replaced them. Many libraries have done away with the professional and intellectual activity of title selection or content curation, monitoring scholarly publishing, reading reviews, and the evaluation and selection of individual titles, in favor of a more efficient and streamlined resource management approach, where acquire whole product lines as an annual subscription, just as any big box retailer today might manage its product inventories with buyers ensuring the quality of the merchandise. 

A modern academic library cannot do without these workflows, especially for managing its serial content. It took years, many hands and expertise to develop our print collections title-by-title, cataloging them as we went. Packages of digitized content provided by aggregators and publishers were needed and convenient. It was good for the transition. 

Now we need systems designed more around collection development and collection management, marketing important titles and maximizing their value by being able to place them within an academic framework, rather than our providing passive access to aggregated commercial packages of content. Libraries must provide a better, more robust and engaging user experience than passive “access to,” and it must offer a more meaningful framework than discovery. It must strike more of a balance between collection development and resource management.

It needs content curation, display and personalization. 

There is no reason why ejournals and ebooks should not be able to be arranged and organized by classification so they can be visually navigated (browsed) online, regardless of their originating source. I don’t care if this publication lives in SAGE and another one lives in Science Direct. It should come together as a singular collection of titles. We need better systems and better metadata to create better library interfaces, and a return to the ideal of access to library collections online, not greater access to more information or the low bar of “adequate relevant resources.” 

We must stop competing with the Internet and do what we do best as libraries. This does not necessarily mean a return to paper (there is a cost-benefit which I will cover in a chapter below), but it does mean constructing a community and communal experience around texts and ideas. 

If people wonder, “Why can’t we be more like Amazon?” “Why can’t the library be more fun to browse?” one small reason is that most of us do not administer our own websites or servers anymore. If we do not administer our own websites, it us difficult to develop content-driven or dynamic websites to engage with users online, the sort of features one might expect at any ecommerce store or publisher website today. (For a short while, popular content management systems like WordPress did allow for the creation of easily maintained, dynamic sites, but in the university, autonomous sites were replaced by institutional content management systems controlled by IT.) 

Therefore, our resulting static pages, managed by another department, one which is driven more by the need for security than providing access, tends to emphasize what is stable over time, commercially-branded products or our interior spaces, or generic Pexels images, but not our dynamic content, what’s currently in demand, what other scholars or users are reading, or what is new in the library. EBSCO and ProQuest databases are platforms, but they are not in themselves scholarly sources. (Scholarly sources are authoritative titles, intellectual works, not platforms or services.) At the same time as library systems and content are all hosted and increasingly managed by vendors, and our websites have been co-opted by IT Departments, our physical spaces are being transformed into meeting spaces, seating areas, and conference rooms in the name of a new librarianship stressing collaborative learning and oral forms of knowledge transmission. The academic library places no emphasis on titles, intellectual works, only convenient access to publisher platforms.

Inside the library, as on our websites, there is no emphasis on books, publishing, scholarship, ideas, culture or any form of intellectual life. They are just vacuous institutional and impersonal spaces which are open long hours. The Reference desk is also gone in many libraries, replaced by a “Welcome desk.” There is a popular idea that “putting students first” in a library means seating students in the middle of the room and putting books out of view, or not providing them at all. “Putting students first” (as in, we want a librarian who puts students first, not books first), has become a euphemism for library booklessness and practically a slogan for the new librarianship. Putting students first in the library should never mean not providing books for them.

If there are any physical books left in the academic library space, they are likely just serving as academic wallpaper, not as a collection we would expect anyone would want to engage with. Random old titles set out on shelves, a result of ad hoc acquisition patterns, what Collection Development warned us not to do. 

Scholarly value is aesthetic value, and the library’s role is to create that context in which titles have meaning (that is, heightened aesthetic and intellectual value). This is how we encourage literacy

Libraries are a reflection of their larger society, and as a society, we may be beyond circulating physical books. I totally get that. I don’t want to carry books around either, or shelve them, and I expect immediate access to what I want to read when I want to read it. But we must reimagine the online library and our physical spaces both as destinations which are enjoyable and meaningful for users to intuitively browse to become aware of new publications and ideas in the first place, and to become engaged with the scholarly, intellectual and creative activity of literate people, even if the content is delivered and consumed virtually. The library should provide for a shared community experience, not just of a space, but of culture. Users might browse a physical or virtual manifestation in the library, but check books out digitally (tap and go) to read them. In the library there can be video presentations about current titles and interviews with scholars to create a shared experience and greater engagement. There is opportunity for virtualization, content curation and even artistry on a conceptual level

Beyond selecting which big packages to renew each year, the intellectual content of the library is perceived as no longer our responsibility. We license the package, vendors provide the content. We neither select nor catalog individual titles. We do not do marketing or display of titles. We do not inform faculty about titles (I do in my practice, but many do not). We may negotiate better prices to be able to license more or better packages of content, but through these same systems provided by our content aggregators, scholarly activity is practically invisible both to us and our users, unless someone thinks to come along and search for something. Lacking immediacy, mere access to resources, does not instill respect for scholarship.

To respect something is to make it visible, to place it into public view where it can be seen and considered again and again. The more public and seemingly permanent we make something, the more an object is perceived to have social value and respect.

With the near universal adoption of cloud-based web-scale discovery systems, academic libraries have become efficient at acquiring and providing seamless access to ever expanding digital content (e.g., I can activate and make instantly available a package of 130,000 academic ebooks in less than a minute in our discovery system, no cataloging required). The system is scalable, meaning we can buy a huge package and make it available quickly. 

And yet, despite offering users convenient access to an ever expanding universe of articles and publications, there is a feeling that librarians are delivering less value to their institutions, not more. In fact, it often seems like the more we access provide, the more hours we stay open, the more we classes we are willing to teach at a moment’s notice, the shorter the response time to a query, the more we beg to embed ourselves into the classroom, the harder we try to serve the goals and objectives of other departments, the less we are valued.

Far from the vibrant “learning hub” architects promised to create, libraries have become desolate places. 

The creation of open office spaces in the name of librarianship does not represent progress in librarianship, it is just the only thing architects know how to sell, for they do not know how to create a modern library, only a modern space.

Architects know how to design beautiful spaces, but not necessarily beautiful libraries which promote awareness, learning and engagement with scholarly resources.

A beautiful space is not good enough.

The Academic Library as a Community Resource. People used to be able to go inside the academic research library and access all of its owned and subscription content. It was an asset to the whole community.

Many librarians believed, and some still believe, that the State of Texas liked it this way, and that there existed a State mandate or requirement for publicly-funded academic libraries to share their resources with other publicly-funded academic libraries, with public libraries and the visiting public. The legislation which established the TexShare program (TGC 441.223), a statewide library consortium originally intended for public academic libraries, would seem to imply that such a mandate exists, as the TexShare program was established by the State legislature for the following reasons:

(1)   to promote the future well-being of the citizenry, enhance quality teaching and research excellence at institutions of higher education through the efficient exchange of information and the sharing of library resources, improve educational resources in all communities, and expand the availability of information about clinical medical research and the history of medicine;

(2)   to maximize the effectiveness of library expenditures by enabling libraries to share staff expertise and to share library resources in print and in an electronic form, including books, journals, technical reports, and databases;

(3)   to increase the intellectual productivity of students and faculty at the participating institutions of higher education by emphasizing access to information rather than ownership of documents and other information sources;

(4)   to facilitate joint purchasing agreements for purchasing information services and encourage cooperative research and development of information technologies; and

(5)   to enhance the ability of public schools to further student achievement and lifelong learning.

When a library becomes a consortial member of TexShare, they not only are able to buy a subsidized comprehensive package of scholarly databases, but it is implied that the participating member will share the rest of their resources, or their collections, with other TexShare member libraries, who are comprised of public and public academic libraries. 

Resource sharing has usually been regarded by librarians as being in the best interest of students, scholarship, the institution, and society. Whether or not a mandate can be inferred from the legislation—I suppose it doesn’t exist if TexShare, SACS or THECB doesn’t enforce it—certainly it seems a contradiction, a bit hypocritical, for us inside the library, especially libraries that are TexShare members, to say we are all about creating life-long learners, while simultaneously denying life-long learning opportunities to anyone not currently enrolled in classes in our institutions. 

Our former broad access policies meant, for example:

  • doctors would continue to have access to medical literature after they graduated from medical school;
  • lawyers (and the public) would always have access to a law library;
  • architects to the literature of their profession;
  • museum professionals, art dealers, conservators and artists to an art library;
  • teachers, engineers, grant writers and computer scientists would continue to be able to consult an academic research library.
  • retired mathematicians could continue to engage with publications and work on proofs and unresolved problems;
  • alumni could return to the library to recharge, retool and refresh their skills.
  • a business library was available for start-ups (market research, business plans, access to technical and trade publications) to support entrepreneurship by their own alumni. 
  • future scholars—high school students—could use the college library and not only get a feel for being on a college campus, but could possibly change the world, as many a brilliant high school student has done.

As collections have gone away, so has community access to scholarly resources through college and university libraries.

As a librarian who helps students with their research projects and theses, I take umbrage with other publicly-funded universities, and especially TexShare institutions, erecting barriers to my students from accessing their publicly-funded, tax-payer subsidized resources, not due to license restrictions or policy change or some new definition of Fair Use in education, but due to a new authentication protocol promoted by our vendors called “SSO.” 

For me, access is very much a matter of principle, because it isn’t like people are beating down our doors trying to obtain access to our resources. Previously, academic libraries were about the scholarly nature of their collections, not so much who was entitled to access them. We offer scholarly resources (that is, for use by scholars), not scholastic resources (that is, for use by those in school). It was our product which we managed, and it was subject only to US copyright law. As a university, we were open to everyone, all scholars—the very connotation of a “university”—even if few people ever came back to the university to do research. We could leverage public access to the academic library when doing development work and grant writing, since the library could be presented as an asset to the entire community. Never before have we created barriers to students from other schools in public colleges and universities who wanted to use the library. 

However, a new, more restrictive access policy or protocol, brought about by technological advancement and our vendors’ professed need for greater security, has prompted the widespread adoption by academic libraries of Single Sign On (SSO), a type of federated authentication protocol. Usually where SSO is implemented, the proxy server is dismantled. As Dowling points out, access by visitors inside the library is no longer supported, limiting our ability to share:  

Likewise, as access to publishers becomes established as just another service available through the SSO, universities will increasingly look for options to turn off the library’s proxy system and remove the complexities, administrative overhead, and security risks involved with running it.

. . . Unfortunately, implementing an authentication system that removes IP access and requires all users to provide login credentials excludes one category of valid users. Many libraries explicitly serve walk-in users and license online content to include access for them. As walk-ins, physically present in the library, they are well served by IP authentication. This is a situation in which authenticating the location works well, because the individual is not in the user database.[43.

Dowling, Thomas. We Have Outgrown IP Authentication, Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 32:1, 2020, 39-46, DOI: 10.1080/1941126X.2019.170973.]

Our largest vendors promoted SSO, promising a more personalized user experience on their own platforms if authentication were tied to users’ individual university email accounts rather than to a virtual server location (the proxy server managed by the library), and claiming security concerns with proxied access.

After the implementation of SSO, however, there was no need for our institutional users to come to and through the library’s website to be authenticated. All public access to the library’s subscription content was either discontinued or required IT’s involvement to generate temporary credentials.

The IT Department now controlled access to the library’s digital content, and would, just as our vendors must have anticipated, establish more restrictive access policies to library content based on the same generic rules and policies that applied to computer access, institutional email, Blackboard, campus software and other commercially-licensed products. In this way, the library became even less the creative and intellectual product of librarians, faculty and scholars, and more a commodity or tool of vendors to be used by those enrolled in school to complete assignments.

Additionally, through these restrictive policies, the library and institution has missed out on important opportunities to use the library as a recruitment tool, to do fundraising, to support alumni, to form partnerships with business and support innovation in their communities.

It missed out on opportunities to support future scholars and scholarship.

Abandonment of Collections. In the last ten years, university libraries across the country have abandoned their former commitment to collecting for the needs of future scholars, or for future scholarship, either expecting resources will be always be available digitally in the future, or else not concerning themselves with it much at all. Abandonment of collections has often meant more restricted access policies, including at publicly-supported institutions. We license content only for access by our own and do not worry so much about other scholars or advancing knowledge in our communities.

The objectives assessment approach to budgeting and institutional assessment has also discouraged use of library acquisition budgets in ways that might be construed as not contributing to student success in the short-term, within the time constraints of the assessment period. For many medium-sized college and university libraries, going fully digital has meant adopting a “just-in-time” acquisitions model, licensing what is needed for class—or what is thought needed to get through the accreditation process—rather than devoting themselves to the more scholarly activity of shaping, directing and anticipating future research needs through collecting activity.

Browsable, visible collections, logically arranged according to the disciplines and topics within them, developed and maintained in anticipation of need, have been eliminated in academic libraries and replaced by searchable aggregations of scholarly resources, much of it, for better or for worse, nothing anyone would have necessarily selected to purchase for their respective communities or libraries. I understand the advantages, that we can provide easy access to so much more content than we could before, even if it might not be “the best” content. When it comes to package buying of digital resources, most of us think we are paying for some good stuff, and all of the other content is “free.” We sacrifice quality for quantity, thinking that more is necessarily better service in the Digital Age because no one has to see whatever they are not interested in seeing. The dregs stay on the bottom, out of site.

Inside the library, we may say we are about scholarly communication or life-long learning, but our unmediated presentation of content through discovery no longer mirrors scholarly communication in the disciplines, as did our former arrangements by LC classification. This very legitimate complaint has nothing to with anyone’s personal preference for print vs. digital format, or “nostalgia,” or resistance to change, but preference for a mode of presentation which was widely believed to be highly beneficial to scholars, as well as being better for us inside the library to market our resources and manage our budgets responsibly. 

The academic library lacks the autonomy it enjoyed even a few years ago. Consider that libraries formerly maintained their own web servers which they themselves managed and administered, along with library system software, a proxy server and mail severs. This allowed us to do creative things with our websites in terms of displays, feeds and marketing. I developed many library websites with new books feeds and “mash ups” with other content, which was the trend in the 2000s.

Now many academic libraries are unable even to make simple updates or alter their own websites without involving university IT personal or Marketing Departments, or both. The library is online, but the library may have little control over it.

To facilitate online communication, often to get around roadblocks, academic libraries typically purchase a CMS product called LibGuides, which function like a secondary website, templates that allow librarians to create and maintain instructional pages and topical research guides. The library’s discovery layer from their system vendor constitutes a third website, complete with its own navigation menu, meaning that the academic library now consists of three websites kludged together: the library’s home page managed by IT, the system vendor’s discovery layer homepage, and the LibGuides pages. 

No organization would ever set out to design its online presence in such a disjointed way.

Imagine a web developer in a conference room saying: “Here is the vision I have for the library’s website,” and then showing three completely different websites cobbled together, each with its own navigation menu and home page. This is now typical for a library. Add to this the fact that the physical space, designed by an architectural firm, and the virtual space of the academic library may seem as if they have no common purpose.

This situation is so typical, we may hardly think about it, but we ought to. Like how plant and marine life respond to incremental increases in temperature, the intellectual life which comprises culture and civilization is a very fragile thing and can easily die off. If intellectual life doesn’t exist even at the largest of universities, it exists nowhere. The university library often supports innovation and entrepreneurship in its earliest stages. The library nurtures intellectual and creative life. 

What took over 3,000 years to create can be destroyed in less than a decade. For the most part, scholarly literature does not live in the library anymore—the institution does not “own” it—but it exists in data centers belonging to a handful of very large companies to whom the academic library, and therefore the university, is beholden. Our major software vendor is also content aggregator, and through it, we have remade in its image, the with the consequences of this on learning and literacy unknown. 

The new “library learning center.” It sometimes feels like those who are advocating for change in libraries for the sake of a better learning environment would never be themselves inclined to actually use an academic research library under any conceivable circumstance. These are the people who never went to the library in college. These are the students who didn’t bother to buy the textbook or read the assignment. I don’t know what is wrong with these people. Beautiful historical libraries everywhere are being gutted and repurposed in the name of a new librarianship, but whose librarianship is it? Is it the librarianship of scholars and intellectuals, or is it being made to appeal to some common denominator who would never be likely to ever use a library?

Scholars aren’t coming to these new spaces, for we have given them no reason to come. In some instances, the library now looks like an adult day hab center, with puzzles and board games, but no newspapers or anything to read in them. What the library has is a mystery, the facility gives no clues. The faculty have no use for it, because they cannot use it to keep up with their disciplines or trends in scholarly publishing (of course, we do license the content which they can access online). Educated people in the community and independent researchers don’t come to it, at least not anymore, because in many libraries, visitors are no longer permitted to access to the online resources, even if they are allowed to enter the space.

All we appear to offer is a work space, and there are spaces just like it all over campus.

I am not saying that we cannot make the academic library into a space to be enjoyed by many more students than currently do, but can’t we at least consider the possibility that we are making it bad and boring to students and scholars, not necessarily any better for learning or even any “more social,” by transforming it into an empty space with empty rooms, more seating areas, more windows and grand staircases leading nowhere? This has little or nothing to do with helping the academic library fulfill its scholarly mission or helping students realize their potential.

It is a space to study, not unlike spaces just like it all over campus and just about everywhere else in this Digital Age. 

We are also ignoring a healthy contingent of students who enjoyed the traditional library for what it was, those for whom the library already was already a social place, thank you very muchstudents who enjoyed hanging out (yes, sometimes with me at the Reference desk, which has been since removed by architects in order to promote “collaborative learning”) sharing a book they read or discussing ideas. Why are you reading Schopenhauer? Wow, how do you know about the Dice Man? This sort of casual conversation is not likely to occur in our newer bookless spaces because there are no shared objects of joint attention. There are also opportunity costs. Readers and creative types who were attracted to the traditional library were often the same intellectually curious students who went on to populate the graduate schools at the university.

Now, they go elsewhere, to a university which validates their interests and values.

The academic library was that special, memorable place on campus to discuss Foucault, Said and Chomsky, a new urban fashion clothing line, or some real world project they were working on or thinking about. It takes all kinds of people pursuing all disciplines to make the world a good place to live. From an academic perspective, art, design, music and literature are no less important than any other major, and indeed more important because they often are what make life worth living. Do you want to live in a colorless world without music and art? My librarian colleagues each brought their own flair and personal enthusiasms to their roles, as each librarian will tend to attract his or her own followings among the student body and faculty. For us, it was not “about” access to information, or desk statsbah! It was about intellectual discourse, fostering creativity, and maintaining a content-rich environment where people feel motivated to share and explore ideas, and creating a place where scholars felt good about being scholars.

Architects make claim that these empty spaces they are building are about collaborative learning, but they are wrong. This is truly what our old, more personal and intimate book-filled spaces were about: scholarly discourse and conversation. Now, few dare open their mouths in the echoing monuments to learning which have been erected, for the moment they do, will be silenced by the others who are there just to study. Without collections and new things on display, books to browse or authors to discuss, we have given them nothing to talk or think about.

There is no intellectual life in it, and nothing of interest to meet the eye to inspire their creativity, awareness or intellectual development

Beyond being another a social place on campus like the student center, the library should maintain as core objectives and mission improved literacy (as in, knowledge of the literature of educated people in the discipline), independent learning, and community engagement publications.

To this end, the future library needs carefully considered business requirements for how its physical environment, its website and even its authentication protocols will all work in concert, one library, to support learning, literacy, value, and intellectual inquiry, with “literate” at the college-level meaning someone who is culturally and professionally literate (someone who possesses knowledge of the literature of a discipline), familiar with the authorities, vocabulary, references, core publications and influencers, themes, topics, trends, biases and limits of knowledge in his or her profession. This means thinking about how the academic community at the college is made aware of current titles, how the library is going to market them, including digital content, both online and in its spaces. 

Unlike a collection, what we now offer to our users online now isn’t perceived by users to be the intellectual product of academic librarians, nor anyone else for that matter. It isn’t. It is just content or resources which the library has made available though license agreements with vendors.

For a profession which in the 1990s aspired to “organize the Internet,” we now appear unable to organize ourselves, to develop standards for how scholarly content might be displayed online within a disciplinary framework. 

At this point, our electronic resources cannot be meaningfully browsed. This is a serious shortcoming for a library. There is no overview of what is in our repositories, because there is no classification / call number assigned to them. Should a collection analysis be donenot easily done without classification or call numbersmuch of what is included in our inventories would not be what any expert or subject librarian or expert would have acquired for their communities according to our former collection development guidelines. 

Putting the Library Back into the Library:
New Strategies for the Digital Age.

n his plea for balance in libraries, The Enduring Library : Technology, Tradition, and the Quest for Balance,76 Michael Gorman, widely regarded a founding father of the library profession, laments that libraries are placing excessive emphasis on technology and information, and not enough on what he refers to as “true literacy” and traditional library services.

Of course, since he wrote The Enduring Library, books have all but disappeared from many libraries, along with reference librarians and catalogers, government document librarians, and just about everyone else. The library did not endure, but was all but taken over by vendors. To my mind, the challenge before us, if we believe it is still worth the trouble, is to identify what was good and valuable about the traditional library, and if possible, to try to bring these ideals, values, perspectives, user experiences and functionality forward into the Digital Age. The first step in the process is identifying what we want to be, then concerning ourselves with the how. “How” will likely involve entities outside of the library, working with Clarivate, OCLC, the Mellon Foundation, ALA and accrediting agencies to establish standards and systems which support broad access to authoritative library collections. I believe this is mission-critical. We must create libraries which reflect scholarly values and community. 

To achieve library goodness, I believe academic libraries need online store fronts which place emphasis on good titles in good collections (not “relevant resources”), the ability to present titles as collections representing a more global perspective. We need improved browsability of resources as authoritative collections, organized by the priorities of the discipline, so our contents can be meaningfully assessed by users and managed by librarians according to expert reviews and community interests.

The library should be interesting and educational to browse, capable of presenting the new in context. We do not need to be limited to one modality. Inside the library, we should emphasize publications, conversations about ideas and trends. We should hold book tastings and experiment with virtual fulfillment (that is, users can browse a print copy in the library but download a digital copy to take it with them) to encourage intellectual exchanges around books, ideas, and scholarly literature (including the sciences). We should have interactive digital displays, the same technology used in museums and trade shows. We should have cable TV. The library must be content-rich, a window to the world; not a literal window. The building must be functional as a library, not a metaphor for one.

For libraries who maintain print, we need better tools and strategies to manage hybrid and digital collections as collections, rather than managing print here and online resources there, maintaining two distinct repositories. We must return to offering collections as our main product, not access to vendor packages of resources or architecture as our product. We need designs which emphasize reading and intellectual culture.

We need mission statements focused on literacy, culture, knowledge and education. We should focus on titles as titles, as collections of what is significant and good and important to know, not just on the passive mechanism of eresource discovery. We must form an understanding that to collect, or the illusion of a scholarly collection, is honoring and valuing to works. It signifies our investment in them over time, and if we are not investing in them, why should anyone else? It constitutes a form of scholarly communication which expresses, preserves and sustains community value across generations. It allows for cultural continuity. Digital library systems must fully support the concept of collections and display, not just “discovery” and federated access.

We need personalization and many of the features of e-commerce businesses, while at the same time cultivating the unique experience of a library in our physical and virtual spaces. We must take browsing seriously as a form of learning and build spaces which encourage that activity in the library. 

We should provide content-rich spaces, where books and publications are the focus, because this is an important part of our educational mission. The college bookstore should not be more interesting to browse than the college library. We must be student-centered, but not a student center. We need to use media and technology to make our libraries more experiential. We need virtual stacks, perhaps a culmination of the largest academic libraries in the world combined, a virtual WorldCat.

We must strive, even against all odds, to bring collections of titles back into focus, because collections are a unique and important part of how the library and its librarians add educational, intellectual, cultural and scholarly value to the university and the scholarly community at large. Visible collections of selective titles, organized according to the priorities of the discipline, educate users and express value, respect for scholarship and intellectual life. 

Collections present the scholarly activity in the discipline, a subset of the knowledge that is known, and through this arrangement, works belong to the discipline where they are considered to be authoritative or significant. Its scholarly context and value can be easily apprehended and relationships to other works more easily discerned. Library collections also have character, allowing the presentation of special subjects or topics relevant to the school, where through a search engine these same resources lack visibility, especially as a form of communication. Works stand in intellectual relationship to other works, and this layer of organization achieved through classification, bibliographic description, and display is what librarianship is about. In this way, we transmit and preserve knowledge. 

At a research institution, browsable, maintained collections allow researchers to assess new titles and see where there are gaps in knowledge. Collections signify to users intellectual engagement and expertise by librarians and faculty at that school. 

Collections of thoughtfully selected and arranged titles have intellectual and aesthetic appeal, signaling their value, while creating additional opportunities and incentives for independent learning and browsing, where the results of a search engine do not.

If the library is to be a social space which remains true to its mission, it must design spaces which promote browsing and engagement with library collections. We must take back the library, or put the library back into it. Regardless of the format of the resources of the library, quality collections must remain central to the mission and marketing initiatives of a library for it to maintain its credibility, and our credibility as academic librarians within an academic environment.

A bookstore, part of the Zhongshuge chain of bookstores in China, considered by many to be libraries even though they are retail spaces. All use mirrors to create interesting optical illusions with books and to create an intimate timeless space removed from the concerns of the world.

 

The Commodification of Modern Academic Libraries.

n 2020, we are confronted by many of the same issues Gorman identified in 2003 in his library manifesto, The Enduring Library,76 and again in 2015, The Enduring Library Revisited,78 but contributing to the library’s transformation in the academic space is not so much digitization, but outright commodification by commercial entities known as “content aggregators,” businesses who buy content from publishers, often back-listed content, and re-package it for sale as databases for institutional licensing and access. The leading academic library systems are now owned by academic content aggregators, ProQuest and EBSCO, who dominate the market. 

Today, everything from our content to our metadata to our access model to our user interfaces are impacted by the forces of commodification and commoditization by our vendors.

For the most part, a modern library system is just an inventory management system populated with content supplied by large aggregators and publishers. Academic libraries are on the receiving end of the publisher-aggregator supply chain,13 passively acquiring most or all of what they have in inventory at any given time.

This makes it possible for the largest academic library to be managed by a miniscule staff, perhaps in the near future, no staff at all; and then eventually, just an annual subscription to one vendor who provides their comprehensive “research solution” in the cloud which is accessible only to those who have paid tuition or are institutionally-affiliated.

The commodification of library services by content aggregators and large publishers for whom the library is its only market (the price point of academic titles are too high for most people) is the most significant development in library services today. While academic databases formerly complemented collections, now many libraries offer only subscription packages and databases, but maintain no actual collections in print or online.

Staff may say “the collection is online,” but what is online is not a collection at all. It isn’t a collection in the intellectual or aesthetic meaning of the word. It just sounds nice, precisely because collections are nice.

In place of collections, we offer a searchable inventory of vendor entitlements which mostly live on various third-party platforms. Isn’t it great that the library can allow users unmediated access to so much content? Of course it is great! Who wants to go back to the days of bound periodicals? Not I. Using institutional credentials, researchers can access thousands of scholarly resources in one fell swoop through a search box or else by going directly to the publishers’ sites and authenticating there to conduct research. It is wonderful and convenient, especially if budgets are large.

But there are downsides.

Unlike collections, “resources” possess no intrinsic value to users. We are not giving anyone a reason to engage with the content we license until their point of need, since it no longer represents to them what scholars, experts in the field, think important to know. The intellectual and scholarly framework is gone. It reflects not necessarily what is good, what is best, what is significant, what others think good and important to know, but what an aggregator has thought profitable to monetize and make available to its customers for a flat fee.

Whether a Catholic library or HBCU, the user experience of the modern digital library is generic and increasingly all the same: EBSCO, ProQuest and Gale databases typically form the library core, complemented by JSTOR, SAGE and Science Direct. There is a high probability that no one in the library is selecting titles individually for that school.

If no one is selecting them, no one knows about them, and no one in the library can advocate for them or promote them.

Even if some librarians are augmenting aggregator packages with additional titles added to the platform, these are not experienced by users as belonging to a collection of good things. Few associate any of the titles discovered in the online library as having anything to do with the intellectual efforts of the librarians who work there, even if they are doing their due diligence and adding better titles to vendor-branded platforms (often at a high cost, for these titles are often licensed at many times above list price). While affording great conveniences and efficiencies of scale, this model of librarianship does not communicate or express value: not our value as librarians, nor the intellectual or scholarly value of the works themselves.

Our major academic library system vendors (ProQuest Ex Libris and EBSCO Folio) are in the business of aggregating and packaging academic content for sale to libraries in ever-expanding and often overlapping packages (the library may license the same content many times over but in different packages), databases whose cost increases each year at rates that have been declared unsustainable even by the largest universities. Librarians often complain about the lack of cooperation between the two major players, EBSCO and ProQuest. Because of EBSCO’s lack of cooperation with ProQuest, EBSCO content doesn’t work well in ProQuest’s discovery tool, and its usage stats cannot be harvested through the ALMA platform. ProQuest will not allow EBSCO’s discovery tool EDS to serve as a front end for ProQuest Ex Libris systems. ProQuest Ex Libris customers don’t want to buy EBSCO databases and ebooks because their content isn’t very visible in Primo.

Most concerning to me than lack of vendor neutrality is the lack of emphasis on literacy, reading or knowledge either in the physical space of the modern academic library or online, and the transformation of campus libraries into vacuous learning / tutoring / student centers or work spaces.

Like Google, we provide passive access to contentgranted, it is better content than what can be found on Google or Google Scholarbut we are doing little to stimulate intellectual inquiry, knowledge or user engagement with any of it aside from making it available.

Maybe it is too late to be posing this question to my fellow academic librarians, but do we sincerely believe that searchable aggregations of academic contentwhat many of us have been reduced to in recent yearsare functioning as academic libraries from an intellectual or aesthetic standpoint? 

An even larger question, perhaps, is do we feel we are even entitled to business requirements or prescriptive standards of our own for what makes an academic library good, even after ACRL, our professional association, has moved away from developing standards in favor of advocating an institutional outcomes assessment model?80 What is a modern library, and what constitutes a good one, seems important for us to know.

Library Aestheticism (Learning for Learning’s Sake):
The True Measure of Our Success.

he plight of the college and university library, like the rest of higher education today, is often tied up with institutional accreditation and assessment, specifically how the school defines and measures student success, and how the library is seen as contributing to this plan. Librarians may be asked to justify themselves and their budgets according to an institutional outcomes-assessment plan, and not according to what makes the library good and successful as a library. In these outcomes assessment plans, we must not just demonstrate collection use, but that students are learning from this use. Moreover, the learning must be tied to “measurable objectives.”

According to the way student success is measured by educational institutions, providing quality collections to users, even providing evidence of increased collections use, are likely to be dismissed as “outputs,”81 not evidence of learning outcomes. Proof that we support student success often means subordinating the needs of the library to the ELOs of the classroom, a “learning center” model. 

Understandably, college administrators are often preoccupied with “student success” as defined by traditional indicators of institutional effectiveness (enrollment, retention, progression and degree completion rates), while traditional academic librarianship, librarianship as a profession, has always regarded itself as being more about student success as defined by the individual student and scholar.

Encouraging learning for learning’s sake seems to support independent learning seems to almost contradict the idea of “outcomes assessment” in the university. That whole OA model was designed to promote greater accountability in education, but what does this look like when applied to the academic library? It might mean in practice that the library buys only what is needed to support classroom instruction, which means it is no longer acting with integrity as a library with necessary autonomy and funding. Outcomes assessment is just used to cut costs, not to improve education or educational outcomes. A learning center is not better than a library. A library is academically rigorous with its own standards for goodness, a learning center merely strives in some ill-defined way to support student success, however that is defined. 

A good library encourages students to pursue their own curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular research interests to go beyond classroom instruction at that school to exploring individualized pathways to success in their chosen field and in life. It does so primarily through the provision of engaging and attractive collections and library professionals who are knowledgeable about what is in the collection, keeping up and keeping faculty apprised of the published literature in their disciplines. Academic librarians support the acquisition of knowledge and learning, whether this is for a class assignment, enrichment, reinforcement, professional development, the public good, personal interest, a publication, career advancement or intellectual curiosity. 

This is the academic idealism upon which the library and library profession is founded.

We believe in the benefit of learning and the pursuit of knowledge as a good in itself, not necessarily in relation to a class assignment or higher GPA or a degree. We want students to explore their passions and channel their interests into creativity and the production of new knowledge—or how about people who feel good about being on campus at a university? This is not to say we have no relevance to the business objectives of the university, but perhaps more than any other entity on campus, the library acknowledges that students come to the university with their own educational or career objectives in mind, and quite often their ambitions are not completely satisfied by what they are learning in their classes. The library is often the anchor for disaffected students, “better” students, and nontraditional students who do not necessarily care about homecoming or what purports to be “student life.”

It often happens that the student’s interests may be too specialized or too advanced, or fall outside of the degree plan offered by the school. The curriculum often lags behind new trends and developments in the field. The faculty cannot be expected to know or teach everything that the student needs to know to be competitive. In all honesty, sometimes students object to the politics of the modern-day classroom which are often anachronistically superimposed on texts to arrive at some predictable conclusion. Finding alternative points of view in the scholarly literature can be validating to students.

The student’s educational goals and aspirations may be perfectly valid from an academic, professional or industry standpoint, but the institution, in order to achieve its own economies of scale and its own business objectives, must channel students into one of a few career pathways leading to a generic degree which they offer.

Students are earning an IT degree, but what they have in mind, and what is driving them, is writing an app for an Android phone, game development or something to do with cryptocurrency. They are learning welding, but they dream of Burning Man, custom cars or something creative, not industrial pipefitting. The library supports these more individualized and personal pathways to success in life, catering to the whole person, and by doing so actually reinforces a student’s academic commitment and attachment to the school. 

The academic library should provide a framework for independent learning, creativity and self-discovery. Creating a warm, intellectually stimulating environment through resources is part of it. 

This is student success as defined by the student.

The library also seeks to turn students on to things they might like or want to know about.

This is also student success as defined by the student. 

How are these different definitions of student success, the one defined by the institution, and the other defined by the student, to be reconciled in terms of a library’s budget? 

The honest answer is, they aren’t.

Depending on how student success is defined, outcomes assessment can become simply a cost-cutting measure.82 Indeed, as a result of a narrow definition student success which emphasizes only objectives-based assessment measures leading to degree completion, the academic library is rapidly disappearing at institutions of higher education,83 at imminent risk of becoming a student success or learning resource center, a tutoring center, or just a quiet space to study to get work done.

To many of the scholars at a university, and to many tuition-paying parents, the value and appeal of the university library is not in the provision of work space or “adequate resources needed for course completion,” but in providing engaging, attractive and authoritative collections representing disciplinary, academic, professional and cultural knowledge, what is thought significant and good by those working in the field or discipline. That is what makes the library good and effective, social and engaging as an academic library for students and scholars. To tuition-paying parents, the library they see when bringing their kids to tour the school influences their perception of the quality of the education at that school, whether their child takes advantage of it or not.

The design of library buildings and library websites both should emphasize knowledge of collections and resource use, that the promotion of the titles people might like, want or need to know about to be competitive in their field or to be an educated person, even if these resources are delivered or consumed online, a reality which should present new opportunities for library designers to create new and compelling environments beyond the glass study halls being constructed in the name of a new librarianship. I’m all in favor of intimate spaces scaled to books and people, warm light, and electric fireplaces.

The library might be a Times Square, a marketplace of ideas, a window onto a larger world, a virtual stacks of every library everywhere in the world, but there is no excuse but failure of the imagination, or anti-intellectualism, for a library to be just an assemblage of tables and chairs, even if the entirety of the library’s collection is online. At a former library, the Cataloger took it upon herself to catalog ebooks which she thought would be of interest to the community to increase their visibility. I brought her an ink jet printer on an after Christmas close-out sale at my local Walgreens, which she used it to print out covers of select ebooks to display them in the library. (Previously, when she cataloged print books, she would strip the jackets and display these in the library.) It was beautiful, but then, in the library’s redesign there was to be no paper or bulletin boards.

There was no thought given to how to we might raise awareness of digital content in the design of the physical space. 

Traditionally, academic libraries were able to stimulate demand for their resources and create a sense of shared value by a kind of visual merchandising, showcasing good content within organized collections reflecting knowledge in the disciplines and contemporary culture. Our industry standards were designed around this ideal of broad access not just to information, but to knowledge, through search and browse of cataloged collections. 

There is an experiential and social dimension to traditional libraries, with collections presenting to its users what others think relevant, good, authoritative and valuable to know, cultural value which is just not conveyed through the passively-generated hierarchical list-ranked results of a query performed against aggregated, commercially-branded publisher content. Our largest library system vendor is an academic content aggregator, and through it, the library has been remade in its image as a kind of mini-aggregator, a federated search portal which we call “discovery,” an application which has almost universally replaced the traditional library catalog in academic libraries everywhere.

  • Through discovery alone, the student has no ability to obtain an overview of his field as he could with browsable collections.
  • Faculty have limited ability to see new things that have been added to the library’s inventories so they can keep up with their areas of interest.
  • Records of entitlements are loaded into our systems automatically; therefore, no one inside of the library sees them or knows about them, encouraging ignorance of staff.
  • Although this streamlines acquisitions and eliminates the need for title selection or cataloging, the records of books which have been added to our system remain invisible to us and to our user community as well.
  • Of course, resources can be found if someone thinks to come along and search for them, but the value and reach of each title is significantly diminished both by its lack of visibility and lack of scholarly context. The more content a university acquires, the less likely any one item will come up on the first page or two of a search query.
  • Nothing is seen unless someone comes along and searches for it, which is unlikely, because nothing is seen in the first place.

How is this encouraging learning, especially among undergraduates?  How is it encouraging literacy or knowledge?

Yet, in our new assessment-driven environments, the more idealistic or philosophical objectives of academic librarianship, such as promoting independent learning, promoting knowledge of the disciplines, encouraging literacy, maintaining good collections in anticipation of use, or even support for research, may be perceived as frills, even an irresponsible use of funds, antithetical to the more pragmatic institutional objectives of “get them to and through.”

Likewise, encouraging students to read for pleasure, the pursuit of personal knowledge or even purely academic interests, support for intellectual inquiry or inviting students to explore anything outside of what is needed to complete a graded class assignment are likely to be judged a waste of students’ time and the financial resources of the college or university, rather than a fundamental part of the college experience of students’ college education to which they are entitled.

It is through visible collections that the traditional library was capable of motivating students to learn beyond the classroom, presenting knowledge of the discipline or profession, what others think good or good to know. This was one of its many benefits, including representing diversity of opinion and thought.

Visible collections formed the intellectual backbone of the campus library and of a university, signifying to others what is significant and important to know by educated people, by scholars and professionals working in a discipline. Visible collections, putting resources where they can be seen and considered by users, convey respect (from the Latin specere, “look at”) for authorship and scholarship. Visual collections are an important part of our merchandising, a necessary part of our business model, and being able to be good and effective as libraries.

These days, rather than assessing whether the library is good as a library and requesting funds to achieve library-centric goals and objectives, many schools are asking their library to justify their budgets only according to direct and measurable contributions to student success, through what is called “outcomes assessment,” but these measures often have little to do with collection development, collection use (use has been classified as “output” and not an “outcome”84), robust library user interfaces, independent learning, or being a good library. 

While the library conceived as a tutoring, resource or study center to get assignments done is certainly not without practical value, the purpose of a college or academic library, why it exists, is not the completion of anything. As a profession, librarians claim as a core value to be about life-long learning, which would seem to contradict the short-term outcomes-based assessment methods against which we are increasingly being asked to benchmark library services. We are about independent learning, not learning tied to successful completion of tasks.

Good academic libraries encourage learning and knowledge for its own sake, as a core value, as an intangible good, not just for assignment completion. 

The library’s purpose is to showcase works and publications of community value in order to encourage user engagement with them and through this, further the education of its users so they can reach their potential. Despite its good intentions, the academic library has never been able to develop measures to demonstrate either the business or scholarly value of its collections on learning outcomes, increased graduation rates, retention (increased academic commitment of students), enrollment, completion rates, or even student and faculty publications resulting from the library.

This is not to say it has no value or impact on these measures, or that the collection has no value, but that its value cannot be unequivocally demonstrated through concrete, objectives-based assessment methods which have become standard determiners of value in higher education.

We have usage stats, but no way to demonstrate the impact of either collection use or library facility use on “student success” or “institutional success.” As libraries continue to be redefined and funded by their institutions only according to a narrow definition of student successwhat students need to complete courseworkand as big deals with large commercial vendors replace cataloging and collection development activity (eliminating the need for librarians), our spaces are being converted into bland learning centers, or “swapped”83 with other learning spaces on campus, even eliminated to the extent that accrediting agencies will allow.

Another example of the swap is where a library is funded by a State legislature to be a “new library,” but the school and the architect design something meant to house multiple tenants as part of some new library design concept, which is a form of misrepresentation or graft of public funds. An example of this can be found here. If the State allocated 50 million for a library, that does not mean for you to build something or multiple tenants and call it a next generation “library.” One architect writes in a blog post on the future of library: 

An interesting trend has been unfolding in academic libraries. The library has been welcoming new neighbors. Specifically, programs that support student and faculty success such as math emporiums, writing centers, academic enrichment programs, and excellence-in-teaching centers, are now being given prominent real estate within the library. Before examining the opportunities and challenges of these synergies, it is important to place it in the larger context of the academic library’s evolution and the significant moment this trend represents. Namely, that the arrival of new neighbors within the library heralds the emergence of the third generation of academic library design.86

Another example swap may be found in a job posting for a Head Librarian at a local community college, where one of the chief responsibilities of the librarian is to “Make the library an integral part and essential component of Learning Commons; make library services people-centered rather than book-centered.”87 The Head Librarian is to report to the Director of the Learning Commons, rather than the Learning Commons being a component of the Library, as was always traditionally the case. There is also an assumption that a library that is book-centered is not student- or people-centered.

In researching this book, I have often encountered this strange sentiment over and over that books are an impediment to student success and learning (I devote a chapter to this below, see “Putting Books Before Users”), and somehow if a librarian is attached to books they are obviously introverts and not people-oriented. People I know who read are the most people-oriented people you’d ever meet. They have a natural curiosity about humans and the human condition, which is why they read.

Even though the institution may be down on the traditional library, when it comes to marketing, colleges such as this one will resort to stock images of bookstores rather than showing what their own barren library, their intellectual hub of learning, looks like. This advertisement for Alvin Community College which appeared in a newcomer’s guide to Houston88 uses a Pexels image of a bookstore in Greece (all the books are in Greek), not an image of the school’s own library:

Likewise, this image of a bookstorenote the giftwrap racks in the backgroundis used by Texas Southern University in Houston to represent its College of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences 89 after its library went almost entirely online:

I realize that these images are merely convenient for someone designing a school’s webpages or in the Marketing Department to grab and use to get their job done. It may also be intended to serve as a visual metaphor, not to be understood literally as “this is the library on our campus.” But still, the fact that neither of these schools provides images of their own campus libraries while at the same time alluding to a traditional library ideal in their media releases and websites is in itself suggestive of the fact that booklessness may not be such a positive image for a college or university library after all, even in the 21st century.

Maybe no one really believes that bookless libraries are more appealing to students, that they really do create a more student-centered environment than those without them (I explore this in my chapter entitled, “Do Students just want Normal Libraries?”). Books apparently have some cache, or are not a turn off, or else Marketing wouldn’t use images with books in them to market the school.

The appeal of the library to students is in its ability to convey what is significant and good according to the field, culture and larger community with which users seek to identify. For an academic library, this means it must be able to raise awareness of publications organized by discipline and subject. It must be able to promote new and popular titles. 

I believe that the physical library and its website should strive to be content-rich learning environments

Whether this is achieved through the medium of pbooks or ebooks, smart boards or virtual reality (see “Virtual classrooms and online libraries,” below), through websites or bookshelves, or some combination of all the above, it doesn’t matter to me. What is important is that the library provide an interesting, meaningful educational experience reliably reflecting a larger world of scholarship, culture, ideas, knowledge, innovation and goodness. 

Strategies for how this might be achieved are discussed below.

Collections : Libraries : : Curriculum : Instruction

any people, including most of my librarian colleagues, now regard “booklessness”bookless is what is called a library that goes all-digitalas forward-thinking and progressive.

The idea that print is obsolete is not an uncommon sentiment in higher education today, but in some circles it would appear that attitudes toward print have been influenced by, and conflated with, unfavorable attitudes toward “book learning,” lecture formats (the lecture is a cross between reading and oral delivery) and reading as dated pedagogical models. In other words, it isn’t just about a book’s particular format anymore, whether it is read on paper or online, but about the value of knowledge not immediately tied to some practical purpose, some predefined learning objective, or demonstrable “skill”; the educational benefit derived from sustained engagement with texts in any format is now questioned. In modern educational theory, through a perversion of Bloom’s taxonomy, reading and lectures are frowned upon as passive activities. According to a current mentality, teaching students to use a free online app to create something is “good pedagogy,” but having students read a book or attend to a lecture is “bad pedagogy.” But Bloom’s taxonomy was supposed to be a way for students to demonstrate knowledge once acquired, not a way for them to acquire it.

Bloom never said that students shouldn’t be asked to read or attend to lectures, how he is sometimes interpreted today.

Even in higher education, there is a new bias against text-based learning in favor of what is called experiential learning and learning by doing. Granted, when studying biology, there is nothing quite like the thrill of looking into through the lens of a microscope and seeing paramecia, didinia, volvox (if lucky) and amoebas (if very lucky) in a perfectly clear drop of pond water. I did that for a Science Fair project with my son (fifth grade), using the microscope in the biology lab at a district high school. I got the idea from a kid’s Dover book, A World in a Drop of Water. We sampled many water sources in my area: pond, bayou, bay, brackish, ocean and tap. It was a wonderful peek into an unseen world, and kind of creepy also, especially witnessing a didinium gorging itself on a hapless paramecium. Reading the book filled in the gaps and trained our eyes with what to look for, since on a slide many organisms (the amoeba) are but a thin outline.

Experiential learning is great, but it has the drawback of being inefficient and limiting the type of learning as well as the content that can be achieved within the time constraints of the classroom. Balance is needed.

Would it be preferable for students spend an entire semester rediscovering the laws of motion and gravity for themselves using model rockets, when they might spend one week reading a good text on gravity, and then move on to some other aspect of physics?

A civilization that cannot perpetuate knowledge through texts is doomed to rediscover knowledge that is already known, endlessly re-inventing the wheel.

Newton’s famous Principia Mathematica, 1687. Newton discovered gravity and wrote a book about it, so students today do not need to waste time rediscovering the effects of gravity for themselves. It is knowledge that is already known. I agree with Gorman’s assessment that academic librarians should play a key role in raising literacy, not just information literacy; but these days it does feel like an uphill battle.90

My son is graduating from a recognized suburban high school in Texas this year without having been exposed to any English or American Literature. His district also got rid of curricular textsno textbooks, no teaching of literature, no Great Books, no Puritans or poets, no Hawthorne or Poe. No Transcendentalists or Modernists or Progressives or Social Realists. No Depression-era writings of hardship and survival. No Dust Bowls. No plays. No knowledge of literature, literary periods and genres. No culture. 

The reader might be quite surprised that I am circumspect about these changes to the high school curriculum. I say to myself, does it really matter if he has not plodded through Homer, Oedipus, The Canterbury Tales, a Shakespeare play, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Swift, Shelley, Waugh, Hemingway, etc., done the big sweep of the Great Books, as I was expected to do in high school? Does it matter if he has never read Animal Farm or 1984, or Anthem, Brave New World or even a contemporary novel in its entirety? I honestly cannot answer this question with certainty. I lack clarity. For one reason that I cannot remember half of what I read in high school. Also, I cannot decide if these are timeless texts or mere cultural artifacts from our collective pasts. I think there is a place for them in high school, but there may be greater value pushing the canon forward to more contemporary times in order to boost reading and literacy levels. 

Some speculate that we are entering a new digital Dark Ages, a new post-literate society, where people have lost the ability or will to read. In a 2011 commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, author and speaker Marc Prensky, who has written books on education reform, proposed a ban on print books at the university, arguing that such drastic measures are necessary to move education forward into the 21st century.91 I’ve discovered that this idea that the elimination of books in itself constitutes a form of progress is a fairly common one in higher education, or at least something I have heard repeated at my own university when it was constructing a new library that was predominantly bookless. There is an inevitability about it which becomes self-fulfilling.

And it isn’t just about the elimination of print, but a de-emphasis on all forms of reading. Everywhere, including library job postings, there is an absurd idea that student-centeredness for a library has to do with centralized seating arrangements rather than an emphasis on providing outstanding collections. (The last time I saw this was a job posting from Alvin community college.)

Collections form a necessary intellectual framework and core for the academic library and its services. It provides an overview of the body of knowledge and scholarly communication in a field of study. It is a mechanism by which libraries raise awareness and promote learning. Without visible collections in print or online, the library ceases to be a library. Furthermore, just because a library has books doesn’t mean it has collections, and collections do not necessarily require physical books. They are not the same thing.

A library can be a library without physical books, but without visible collections and collection visibility the library loses intellectual appeal and integrity as an academic library. 

Collections provide for a certain kind of pleasurable user experience that is unique to libraries, but surprisingly, they have no corresponding equivalent online. As I will illustrate below, many have attempted to develop a robust virtual browse tool to replace the physical stacks, but these projects never got off the ground. The lack of support for collections, content curation and resource promotion in our user interfaces present significant shortcomings in the library’s transition to being fully digital.

What online libraries do not have:  virtual, browsable stacks. Book and journal titles cannot be visually arranged by LC classification, which has for decades been our industry standard.

It might be argued that only an educated person might perceive the difference between academic library collections and citations of aggregator content. Only someone knowledgeable about the field and keeping up with scholarly publishing would know or care about what is missing from aggregator packages. It is precisely for this reason, because students cannot be expected to know, that we act in bad faith as library professionals and educators if we abandon the ideal of providing quality collections to them. I don’t care so much how it is done, but that it is done.

A curated collection constitutes the most student-centered learning environment possible, because it is intended for the students at that school and demonstrates care both for the student and for scholarship. We show respect for the items in our care by selecting, organizing and presenting them in meaningful ways, placing them into collections and making them visible to members of our community. We show respect for them also by investing in them, knowing about them. Placing them in positions of prominence so they can be seen and considered by others—the original Latin meaning of “respect”—within their most appropriate scholarly context shows respect for the objects in our care and respect for our users.

To make something visible, to put it in a visible location, to put it into context where it can be appreciated, is to show care and respect for it and for the viewer. 

A library collection gives a broader scholarly context of a work to enhance its meaning and perceived value by a larger community. It is only when titles are arranged into a collection that they reflect disciplinary knowledge. A collection also gives the impression of lasting value, something worth investing time into, and which others have invested in, where, in contrast, ad hoc resources that are part of publisher packages are perceived merely as convenient but as ephemeral, not memorable, and ultimately insignificant. When books and articles appear online, the html format seems less valuable than the corresponding PDF of the printed page, because the fact that it exists somewhere in some physical format, that it was printed, gives it greater weight, credibility and value to the article. 

A good library acquires items in anticipation of need to encourage collection currency and browsing. Persistence over time and visibility in a public space lends meaning and social value to the intellectual and cultural objects in our care. We show respect for scholarship when we appear to invest in the titles themselves, placing them into selective, visible collections developed to meet the needs and interests of the community. 

The academic library whose content is determined not by the collection development activity of librarians but by contractual agreements with vendors was at one time deemed unscholarly

Questia: The First Academic Undergraduate Library Online (2000-2021)

wenty years ago, after Questia introduced one of the first online academic libraries, it was dubbed a McLibrary.92 Even years after it launched, librarians contended that Questia wasn’t a real library, but rather some commercial product posing as an academic library. Its content was determined by license agreements with publishers rather than by librarians.

But being a mere academic content aggregator was not the vision their founder originally had for the platform (I do not even think content aggregators existed back then) even though that is what it became. I know this for a fact, because I was there in the Houston office in January 2000, months before it became “Questia” (it began as “TLG,” for the first initials of its three founders, all Rice graduates; but L and G soon went their own way), drawn to the company by Troy William’s inspiring democratic vision of creating the first Liberal Arts and Social Sciences library which would be accessible to everyone in around the world for a low monthly fee of $19.95. I could really, really get behind that, since I was all about the democratization of libraries, having experienced my own perpetual frustrations with access to scholarly resources once I left school, often begging my friend at the Rice Fondren Library to fulfill ILL requests for me, even though I did not attend school there (Rice has been my go to library forever). Also, as a former System Librarian, it would be fascinating to learn about the architecture of a digital academic library. I had been reading about them at Rice University’s Fondren Library, where I often went to use the art library and keep up with journals in library and information science. 

As a side note, to take the job at Questia, I resigned from my position as Chief Curator and Assistant Director for the Museum of Printing History, where I often spoke to school children about the importance of books and reading to civilization, freedom and democracy, for a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to work toward the development of this first academic library in the cloud

Since rare books and antiquarian prints had long been a passion of mine—I have been collecting since I was 14, when I discovered Samuel Weiser’s occult bookshop on a trip to NY and purchased some out of print titles on the “Holy Kabbala” and ceremonial magic by A.E. Waite—the Museum of Printing History had also been a once in a lifetime opportunity. It was a museum start-up and a conservative institution, which is itself a rarity in the art world. The Museum featured artists and master printmakers, past and present. The museum also showcased culturally and historically significant objects, including bibles, books and historical documents which changed the course of history. 

We showcased pop-up book engineers and Japanese woodblock prints. It had several working art studios with resident artists so people could see art being made. I enjoyed creating programs for adults and children, writing grants, putting together exhibits and helping it grow, which it did through the help of printing companies, oil companies and other corporate sponsors, gallery owners, dealers and collectors. Our conservative orientation, and emphasizing the connection between printing and political freedom, helped our cause as a tiny upstart museum in Houston. The museum’s permanent collection, which I had helped to shape and develop, along with about 25 exhibits each year, showcased the Great Books and documents which spread democracy and changed the world. It featured gorgeous engravings and lithographs of explorers like Audubon and other naturalists, engravings by war correspondents in the days before photography, historic newspapers and documents, maps, and a variety of operable printing presses, including a working model of Gutenberg’s press.

I mention all of this because I went to Questia thoroughly believing in the cause of democratizing the academic library. And they offered me more money as well.

At Questia, I thought I was on the ground floor of some great and noble venture, like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Only in the Houston office in 2000, there were no Mortimer J. Alders, no intellectuals or philosophers, just, as it turned out, MBAs from Compaq, Minute Maid and Enron. Soon, in the wake of Y2K and dot.com busts, MBAs started flooding in from all over the country to help create the world’s first academic library online. Strangely, the executive team didn’t think they needed any academic librarians to create this academic library, except for me; I was the exception. I was golden for a long while, even though I was there only on full-time contract for much of my tenure. I didn’t know if this was hubris on their part or ignorance on mine, but I discovered that most people had a very different concept of an academic library and of librarians than I did. For me, it was then as it is now, all about quality collections.

Questia was not going to be about that. 

I concluded that it said less about me and more about the company that I was Questia’s first and only librarian for many months in the year leading to launch, even though the company had raised over 160 million dollars in venture capital to become the first academic library online, inspired (according to the founder) by his own experience with Harvard’s undergraduate library.

For my first few weeks there, I thoroughly enjoyed my solo status, explaining things like OCLC, authority control, MARC records, AACR2, LC Classification, CIP data, LC Subject Headings, collection development, a collection conspectus, and other library standards to MBAs, most of whom, despite having attended the best schools, had no idea that librarianship and its metadata were so complicated.

I passed around my tattered copy of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules and the largest binder ever made containing the MARC bibliographic format , emphasizing that these standards allowed for system interoperability and best of all, free metadata. I demonstrated, using the staff or MARC view of online library catalog (I think Voyager libraries), what the MARC record looked like, and how it was tied to search and display in library systems. The cataloging rules and MARC records blew their minds. I explained aspects of the bibliographic record to programmers, and LC classification and subject headings. Since I was in Product Development, I encouraged academic library standards for the development of the user interface for the Questia library, with authority control, not just a search engine on digitized books. I talked about the necessity for browsing by call number. I had also learned the rudiments of the Perl programming language, which I had already been familiar with prior to arriving at Questia, since all of the leading library systems ran on Perl. This digital library built on Perl, Oracle and Unix was interesting to me; I was interested in the system display and well as the content. I lived 5 minutes away, but in those days hardly ever went home, working from 7am until late at night. The company brought food in so people would not go home. 

Initially, the CTO, an imposing man who went by the name “Krately,” was not much interested in what I had to say about existing library systems and how they worked. He was building it from scratch, he informed me, which is what his team of programmers were already doing on his side of the floor. Everyone, including me, was intimidated by this man, but I thought developing a library system from scratch, especially by an outsider to the library profession, seemed ludicrous, when existing ones might be adapted with metadata gotten for free from harvesting the Library of Congress and other Z39.50 targets (from university libraries and the Library of Congress). Open platform systems were available (with open platform systems, you buy it, but you possess the source code and ability to change it). It would be like setting out today to develop a spreadsheet instead of using Excel, or writing an application to interface with Excel rather than using SharePoint. 

In 2000, academic libraries had already developed consistent and uniform industry standards for bibliographic description, record sharing, searching, cross-referencing, sorting (on LC number, developing sorting routines is no easy task because the number is not strictly alphanumeric and it often has more than one decimal), authority control and interoperability, and much of our software was open platform (the code was proprietary but customizable once you bought it). The fact that there were no other librarians there serving as consultants to him concerned me. What was this CTO doing? I feared he and his programmers were underestimating the complexity of library systems, as lay people often do, and wasting time developing something that would not meet academic library standards for the search and display of bibliographic content. So I persisted, not wanting the product to suck. 

After providing him with a copy of Library Technology Reports‘ in-depth review of large library systems (which I obtained Rice, photocopied and left anonymously in his chair), something in him clicked. Maybe he saw the possibility of adapting an existing system. He sent out a memo announcing a sudden change in direction toward a MARC-based system, crediting my influence. He had me write an RFP for a library system, tailored to his specifications, checking off and circling some of the things mentioned in the report which resonated with him. Through this bid process, we discovered that a competitor to Questia, who was racing to launch against us, had already signed an agreement with the leading library system vendor. That would have been NetLibrary.

About a month later, he unexpectedly resigned. There was much speculation as to why he had departed so suddenly. Layoffs followed the next month, blindsiding everyone. It was rumored to be only the first round. My beloved boss (VP of Product Development) was terminated along with many others. Everyone I was close to at Questia was suddenly gone, and in their places, strange faces. I was spared, offered a permanent position at a reduced salary from contract labor and moved under Marketing, where I was given the dubious title of “Collection Manager.” After that, with Marketing at the helm, I felt my chill token status inside the company despite my important sounding title. I was there so that Marketing could say, “Yes, we have real librarians working here!” Most annoyingly, they began to recruit bright-eyed librarians from top universities, who vacated great jobs (jobs which I would love to have had, except I never finished that second Master’s degree . . . ), who upon arrival asked me, “What are we supposed to be doing?” What was I supposed to say, that you were hired to give credibility to the service?

By then, Publisher Relations determined the contents of the library. The company had been correct, they didn’t need librarians to manage their collections, because they didn’t have any collections to manage. The library’s contents were to be determined by deals with publishers, large license agreements, and these deals were negotiated by MBAs. This is my point for sharing my Questia story: Questia was not only the first online academic library, but the first collectionless library and also the first librarianless library.

From the outset, the company did not want to hire librarians, not even me, to select titles or manage their collections for them, at least after retrospective collection development was done. My boss had told me as much before I took the job, but I didn’t fully comprehend what he was saying to me. An academic library without librarians or collections was quite simply beyond my comprehension. We would have collections, but they would be digital, I thought.

How do you create an academic library without collections and academic librarians to maintain them? It seemed as if it would have collections, just assisted by technology, and my role at Questia was to help with that workflow which did title selection without title selectors. Indeed, I had been hired for a unique project, to create a collection development strategy for automating retrospective collection development, a bibliometric system for recommending good titles and establishing their relative worth when to be used when Acquisitions was negotiating for rights for titles with publishers, basically so they would know how much a title was worth to scholars. 

The system was successful. It was fed by citations, recommended title lists and the records of peer libraries in Questia’s priority disciplines. Any librarian would have done exactly as I did, reaching out to OCLC (who initially did not want to work with Questia because it was a commercial entity, but they changed their minds). Through a Conspectus Analysis which I developed using the print LCC schedules in Technical Services at the library at the University of St. Thomas (they were not available online in 2000) and publications on conspectus from Rice University’s Fondren Libraryand OCLC, of course, for they possessed the holdings records of every academic library in the countryQuestia successfully harvested, normalized, weighted and ranked the holdings of twenty liberal arts libraries, including Harvard’s Lamont Library (the library which had inspired the founder), mapping titles to Questia’s supported disciplines in order to feed Questia’s Rights and Acquisitions pipeline. That had been my brainchild. 

The greatest challenge for Questia was not identifying what books to acquire, which is what librarians on the outside thought when they saw what was in Questia’s collection, but the time and expense locating and acquiring a good copy of each book, arranging for it to be sent to the company, acquiring rights for it, sending the book to Indonesia to be digitized, performing quality control on the scan, marking it up, adding it to the platform and cataloging it. It would be impossible to create a digital library quickly using this title-by-title workflow. They had to sign on publishers, and took whatever scholarly content they could get to form its collections.

The company had started out with an acquisition model very much like a traditional library, but Questia’s acquisition, rights management and digitization process was inefficient, expensive and slow. Questia had no reliable source for obtaining out-of-print books, something I also helped with. (Years later, Google partnered with academic libraries to digitize their collections for Google Books, but publishers sued Google for copyright infringement.) Books with photos and illustrations presented additional copyright barriers, no small problem for supporting disciplines like Art and Architecture. Furthermore, no one wanted to negotiate for rights over this and that title, let alone for the little images, photos and illustrations inside of them. In some cases, with books containing photos of artwork hanging in a museum, it wasn’t even clear who even owned rights to the image. (Many books on the platform went live with the images stripped out until the photographer or illustrator could be tracked down and permission obtained.)

For the library to grow at a sufficient pace so it could start selling subscriptions and generating revenue, management realized that agreements had to be forged on a much larger scale. Because the traditional approach to creating a library wasn’t working for a for profit business, Questia ended up signing on publishers, not selecting individual titles based on their scholarly value or individual merits, as academic librarians do, or at least did back then. In terms of its business model, Questia was forced to become less like an undergraduate library and more like a content aggregator.

Apart from lack of a quality collections, which library critics always equated with the company’s lack of librarians, a few librarians also objected to Questia’s format, with some speculating as late as 2005 that an electronic library like Questia could never be a real library.93 The complaint was not so much that it was electronic, but that it did not reflect local character, the students and faculty at a school. It was impersonal and generic, a mere commodity, and a good library could never be that.

After continuing to sign up academic publishers over the years and being bought by Gale, Questia closed doors in December 2020. The founder’s dream of providing universal access to an academic library collection for a low monthly fee died with it. 

The irony is that on the academic side of the library profession, we are almost all McLibraries now, with most or all of our content provided through aggregator databases and third-party commercial platforms, and with very little of it selected title-by-title, cataloged or displayed according to traditional library standards or the best practices formerly advocated by the library profession. Everyone has embraced discovery as the accepted solution for libraries. 

As much as librarians complained about Questia back then, protesting that it was a commercial product and not a real library, we have all become Questia now, a commodified commodity.

Despite Questia’s cool reception by academic librarians who argued Questia wasn’t a real library because it didn’t have real collections, academic libraries today have almost all adopted the same or similar acquisitions model. 

From Booklessness to Collectionlessness:
The Academic Library as a Work Space and Discovery Portal.

t isn’t an emotional attachment to print format, or job security, or technophobia, or nostalgia, as many undoubtedly think, which causes librarians such as myself to question the strategy of booklessness for a college or academic library, especially at schools with programs in English literature, Art, Communications, Journalism, History, Music, Education and the Social Sciences (disciplines where the book format is still integral to scholarly communication), and with large populations of undergraduates attending on campus. I realize that defending collections goes against current trends to improve and modernize libraries by re-purposing stack space for sitting and collaborative work space, and to realize some progressive ideal of what a modern library ought to be, which, of course, by all accounts, is paperless. It goes against trends which regards the purpose of a library is to be a search engine which retrieves relevant documents rather than a unique experience of bodies of knowledge.

The new library in the cloud, and the empty spaces it leaves behind, does not encourage learning and engagement in the way that a traditional library did, or at all. From an educational standpoint, it is, to my mind, ineffectiveand not necessarily because its content is delivered digitally. It is because our interfaces are not designed to be digital libraries. They were designed to be search tools. We have no online storefront which is library-like. Our interfaces do not support the user experience of online collections. Our systems—I am mainly speaking of ALMA Primo and OCLC WMS, and others which use a discovery interface—merely support the retrieval of linked citations of academic content determined to be relevant to a query, that is, whenever a user comes to the library’s website and performs a search. This is not a library by academic library standards. 

Until recently, academic libraries supported the user experience of both search and browse, the latter forming a visually and intellectually pleasing experience of the publications into collections which comprise the disciplines. It is what people think of when they think “library.” 

The presentation of quality publications arranged by classification, described according to a set of standard rules for bibliographic description, and corresponding to the organization of disciplinary knowledge, was at one tine thought to be of utmost importance to the student and scholar, not just because it allowed items to be easily located on the shelves, but because the arrangement allowed users to visualize the scholarly activity in their disciplines, namely, the authors, titles, topics problems, and ideas which shape and define it. It is that unique user experience of collections, a visual representation of what is thought meaningful and good by a larger community of learners, authors and scholars, that is being rapidly eliminated in favor of a one-dimensional experience of a search portal to e-resources which live in on third-party commercial platforms.

Librarians should create content-rich learning environments which prioritize resource visibility and use which are interesting and educational to explore. Libraries must be about both retrieval of resources and browsevisual display, logical arrangement and visual navigation of curated resources intentionally developed to be a collection for that community of usersto be effective, and being “effective” means nurturing independent learning. Providing users with the opportunity to browse a good collection is an important part of the educational experience an academic library provides. Browsing visible collections, corresponding to the discipline and the interests of the community served, actively encourages intellectual inquiry and independent learning in ways that a search engine does not. 

Certainly, the library in the cloud provides an efficient mechanism for finding and accessing whatever content someone might come along and think to search for, but it doesn’t raise interest or promote intellectual inquiry in the way a good library should.

It doesn’t offer access to authoritative collections, even if good resources have been licensed by the library. They are not able to be presented to the user in a disciplinary context as a collection. What many of us offer now is a search box that searches the metadata of content that lives on aggregator and publisher platforms. It also does not appear to others that the library is selecting resources for them, even if they are. There is no sense on the part of users that people knowledgeable about the discipline acquired these resources, because over 95% of the library’s content is so obviously part of a package. Whatever the library buys on top is simply added to an aggregator package where it often remains invisible throughout its lifetime.

If a library has abandoned its commitment to quality collections, it is not encouraging learning or student engagement as it should. It is merely offering a convenient way to search aggregations of third-party whose quality content is vouchsafed by its brand or label, just like any other commercial product or commodity. Despite the millions spent annually on library resources even by medium-sized colleges, and typically at least 100K annually just for the system alone, the user experience the library provides is not as robust, immersive, interesting or engaging as it ought be. It isn’t inspiring and doesn’t reflect the user community at that school. 

A library at any school, college or university exists to promote learning opportunities outside of a class assignment, to encourage creativity, to promote literacy, and to stimulate intellectual curiosity and a sense of community. Librarians support literacy and learning, not just by assisting with class assignments and helping students locate relevant information, but by exposing users to the titles, resources, trends, ideas and concepts they would not have otherwise have known about or thought to search for, or necessarily been exposed to in class. At a university especially, the library should be able to present to students the core publications which comprise their disciplines and titles that are of interest to generally educated people. We want the library facility and its website to provide a content-rich, stimulating environment that is interesting and meaningful for users to explore. 

I believe students want their school library to present them with the latest and greatest, to expose them to new ideas and thoughts so they can grow and learn, and envision their own pathway to success. 

They want the library to show them things they might like or want to know about, what other people like or believe important to know in their disciplines. The collection should provide a needed intellectual context and scholarly framework conveying community value and meaning in relation to larger culture or community of readers. It is that relationship of the work to a larger intellectual context of a collection and community or readers which stimulates interest and creates a sense of value.

While the landscape and priorities for college and university libraries are rapidly changing, there continue to be legitimate reasons for many college and academic libraries not to go fully digital at this time which have nothing to do with anyone’s personal preference for a particular reading format. I am not going to defend print format, at least not yet. I will defend, as a fundamental business requirement for an academic library, the presentation of visible, browsable collections reflecting scholarly activity in the disciplines supported by the university. 

Libraries should be about intellectual and cultural objects, not about their empty spaces.

The purpose of a library is to promote independent learning, scholarship, and promote resource awareness and use.

To this end, the college and academic library must offer visible, browsable collections organized according to the priorities of the disciplines and their communities. To be effective as a library, the library facility, the library system and the library website all must support the goals and objectives of collection visibility and resource use. 

Collections may be independent of format and access model, in the sense that collections can be physical or online, licensed or owned, or a combination of all of the above; but bibliographic resources must be represented (and perceived) by users as collections of scholarly titles in a field of study in order for an academic library to be credible, trustworthy and successful as a library.

Discovery does not replace the need for a bibliographic approach, making sure the library provides the best of the best in scholarship. For example, at a university, how would you teach WWII without reference to the works of George Mosse? If your school offers graduate study in English literature, you should have Harold Bloom’s and Stephen Greenblatt’s books and critical editions of the works of major authors. Someone must be keeping up with the field to make sure that the library offers new titles of significance. Every academic field has its rock stars, its luminaries, and if you are not recognizing today’s bright stars, you are not encouraging the stars of tomorrow, your own students who may be among them.

The academic library which appears to not significantly value scholarship or learning is not a place where scholars (even aspiring scholars) or learners want to spend their time.

Ensuring that titles are capable of being placed into their most appropriate scholarly contextcapable of logical arrangement reflecting the organization of knowledge in the field or disciplineis something library professionals should require as baseline for the user experience of any academic library system

Libraries must promote resource use in their physical spaces and online, because display in context is a vital part of creating and assessing scholarly value. Students learning about their field should be able to visualize scholarly activity through the collection, at least what forms the core titles in their respective fields.

Visible collections, maintained as collections, also means users can more easily grasp what is new, significant and authoritative in their areas of study. The organization and presentation of the collection by discipline, the design of the library’s website and design of the facility, must all be intended to promote resource visibility and use.

The collection itself, its contents and organizationthe fact that it is perceived by users as an authoritative collectionencourages learning, where a search box whose content is made visible only in response to a query is less effective at stimulating inquiry and communicating scholarly value. 

Collection Management, a scholarly journal for librarians. Collections have always been fundamental to the user experience of a good library. Can collection management now be replaced by resource discovery (a search engine) without compromising the user experience? 

People today often express the sentiment that books, and therefore collections, are obsolete. I completely understand this point of view; people today read online. I read online. However, when it comes to educating students, we know that merely making content findable through a search portal is bad pedagogy. It doesn’t inspire learning, raise awareness, convey the social or intellectual value of resources, or promote disciplinary knowledgeeven if good things might be found in the library’s digital repository. 

Access alone is not enough. For most libraries, merely providing access to scholarly resources contained in a repository doesn’t constitute an effective learning environment. If the objective is to support independent learning and promote intellectual inquiry—”inquiry” is considered the earliest stage of research—the library without managed, visible collections falls short, because it offers no mechanism for the promotion of new resources, no organization of selective titles by subject or discipline, and no user engagement with an actual collection reflecting disciplinary or professional knowledge. It doesn’t expose students to new things or present them with an organized overview of their field of study, provide insight into what others value or think important, or reflect the priorities of the discipline. 

The user experience of a collection—both the opportunity for the student to learn what others in the profession think important to know, and the opportunity for the student to discover what he thinks important or interesting to form a professional identityis an essential part of a student’s college education.

Defenders of the new empty spaces will say that librarians should now focus on people, not books. In job interviews, school administrators want to hear, “Books don’t matter. It’s people that matter!”

This is like saying teachers should focus on students, not on instruction. 

Academic librarianship is not about seating arrangements, modern buildings, or empty spaces. It is not about who is entitled to access our entitlements. It is about presenting to scholarly audiences what is significant, authoritative and good as defined by a larger community of readers, scholars and educated people, and conveying a sense of shared value. A good collection reflecting scholarly activity or community value is our main product. A library anticipates need and stimulates demand for its own resources through the care and presentation of collections, through showcasing what is good. 

Academic library collections reflect expert opinion of what is important to know, what is good, the best, what other people or professionals in the field think valuable and are reading and discussing, combined with what is believed to be of interest to the local community. It is an expression of shared culture, shared values, shared interests and a community of learners

A good library should be a content-rich learning environment presenting students abundant opportunities for self-exploration and incentives to browse. The library should be dynamic and changing, reflecting publishing activity, culture, creativity and innovation in a changing world. My vision is to showcase books and ideas, human experience and creativity, not furniture, architectural space or views out the window. 

The library should be designed to showcase the creativity, interests and work being done in the community or at that school: if a university library, it might feature poster sessions of research, examples of student art and writing, performances, faculty publications and book recommendations. The creativity and the work of others inspires creativity, and this should be the primary purpose of the library: to inspire creativity and the production of new knowledge.

The emphasis on collections stimulates intellectual curiosity and demand for services. It encourages resource awareness and use, and sense of community value.

Of course, libraries in the Digital Age don’t need to hold on to as much as we used to. Since so much of the collection is digital, we might begin developing effective ways to integrate display of ebooks with physical offerings in the library space, as well as offering digital downloads of a selection of current physical books which stay in the library.

People still enjoy browsing print, being introduced to good things even if users may prefer to download a digital copy (virtual fulfillment), leaving the book in place for someone else to see and discover. With some initiative and access to color printers, ebook covers can be printed and placed in the library and even all over campus, for example, displays of the covers of new and noteworthy science books in the Science Building, art books in the Art Department, etc., where they can be made visible and downloaded on the spot.

We also need better websites for showcasing content, including the support for the virtual browsing of digital content, and ways to generate and manage digital notifications of new books, including ebooks. Offering virtual collections organized by LCC should be what library system vendors should be striving to achieve.

If we are to be fully digital, we need online collections and also marketing tools to promote awareness of new titles, rather than being a passive repository for people to come along and discover whatever is of value to them, content which is likely to appear to users to possess no intrinsic value of its own.

Commitment to independent, self-directed learning. Libraries in higher education should be invested in quality collections reflecting trends and scholarly activity, concentrating efforts on exposing students to great titles to encourage greater knowledge, literacy and sense of self-direction. Investment in collections requires intellectual investment, following publishing activity, reading reviews and alerting faculty. They are a reflection of the expertise, commitment to scholarship, keeping up with academic publishing, and care for students at the school.

While the relevance of collections to libraries, and libraries to universities, may sound obvious to those who graduated even a few years agowhy, of course, libraries have collections, you may be thinking to yourselfin truth, faculty can no longer count on academic libraries to offer them in any format. College and university libraries may subscribe to a few large multi-disciplinary  aggregator packages and subject-specific databases and nothing beyond that. The only thing emphasized by the library or by its librarians (if there are any) may be familiarity with vendor products for completing classroom assignments. 

While our physical collections have gone away, our online presence, our user interfaces, have not expanded to provide a modern browsable store front or virtual stacks

Certainly, discovery has been an invaluable tool for medium and large libraries to allow their electronic content to be searchable though one convenient Google-like search box, and its widespread adoption as the library interface, one encouraged by system vendors, has also assisted publishers who sell to academic libraries to allow them to better monetize their content. Discovery systems help the library acquire content in large packages, and make this content instantly available without need for cataloging. Libraries now acquire items in bulk, including many items which they would probably never have elected to purchase individually under former library collection development guidelines. 

Discovery offers so many advantages that the downsides are considered negligible, if they are considered at all. But there are many downsides to discovery as the totality of the digital library interface in terms of facilitating user engagement and learning.

From knowledge to knowledgebases. What librarians call discovery is an excellent tool for providing access to large amounts of proprietary content which resides on publisher platforms. Most academic libraries use a discovery layer as their OPAC (online public access catalog), more commonly known as the “search box.” Behind this search tool is an index to which academic publishers who sell to libraries contribute.

However, discovery encourages only a shallow or superficial level of engagement with resources, first because it requires users to search for content for it to be seen (not ideal for students and those who are unfamiliar with the discipline, or those who want to keep up with their field), therefore minimizing the sense of significance of titles found in discovery. Second, it does not position a work within a broader scholarly context in which it is considered valuable or authoritative by scholars. Third, the user interface presents too few items on a page to give a overview of what is there. Last, aggregators often omit from packages the most significant, recent and important titles, which they hope to license to the library individually and at a higher cost (so the publisher can get more for better titles). Today we might not notice what important titles are missing from the package. We do not worry about what we do not have as we used to when we maintained collections.

We are no longer taking responsibility for the content of the library. Many libraries no longer subscribe to Choice or bother much with collection development.

These drawbacks, if they are considered at all, are thought negligible; as long as sufficient resources are findable by others who might look for information on a topic, we dust our shoulders. It is up to users to come along and find discover for themselves what has value to them, rather than academic librarians presenting to the community what has objective value to a discipline or community of readers, scholars, professionals and experts. 

Consider that the meaning of an academic degree is not the number of hours spent in a classroom, but literally a person’s degree of knowledge, his mastery over the body of literature which comprises an academic discipline. But what and where is this knowledge at the university, if it is not in some way represented by visible collections of good and significant titles, arranged according to the priorities the discipline?

A good academic library collection tells students: here are the key resources, the authorities, the major works, the minor works, what is new, the common reference points, the critical editions, the key issues and the trends, the works most valued by those in your field.

It also allows users to easily grasp what the library has in an academic or topical area. This experience of collections is a fundamental part of the education of students, their becoming independent learners and professionals in their field. Collections need not be physical, but if they are online, they must be visible as collections of intellectual works in a discipline, and not as searchable aggregations of content whose only manifestation and importance is in their relationship to a user’s query. 

While the academic library is rapidly eliminating its print collections in campaigns to modernize and innovate, it has no ability to support browsing collections through its web-scale resource discovery systems. The metadata isn’t there to make that happen.

Discovery systems used by academic libraries for search are not capable of adequately supporting the user experience of an academic library collection. They are merely like Google, search engines indexing a central knowledge-base containing the metadata of licensed publisher content which the library’s users are authorized to access. This user experience supports resource discovery but not collection discovery. It doesn’t provide students or faculty with an overview of the scholarly activity in their disciplines. I’m not saying we should get rid of discovery, but that it is insufficient “to be” an online library. A search engine should not define the user experience of a library in the 21st century. 

Just like everyone else in the 21st century, I spend most of my waking hours online, including portions of that time reading books and articles which I access though my library. But I see the changes which have occurred within college and academic libraries as lost opportunities to develop better and more valuable library experiences and better user interfaces, for librarians to be able to facilitate user engagement with books and other cultural resources in new and innovative ways. 

I believe that:

  • A business requirement of a library is that it actively and effectively promotes resource awareness and use.
  • Libraries should be dynamic, inspiring and interesting than spaces to sit to study or complete assigned coursework.
  • Library websites should be engaging, not static pages featuring a search box and links to online resources
  • Libraries should not depend on its users (collaborative model) to share their knowledge to function as a place for learning.
  • Libraries should strive to be content-rich, interesting, intellectually stimulating and educational places about ideas and knowledge.

I’m all for the creation of beautiful environments and sun-lit social spaces. I’m all for amenities to help students succeed in school and in life, and enrichment programs to bring more people into the library. I like food, drink, and poetry slams as much as the next person. I’m ready to convert our spaces into a home away from home, like some Internet start-up company circa 2000, so students can work around the clock and never have to leave (as long as I don’t have to stay late or clean up after them). I’m in favor of discovery.

But how do we balance students’ personal needs with our academic mission to function as a library? How do we market the library’s resources to facilitate learning without being able to effectively place content in front of users, or present resources to them in ways that are interesting and meaningful to students and to scholarly audiences? 

The larger question may be how far do we go toward the transformation of the campus library into a student center, media center or study lounge (with a search engine as our primary user interface) without forgoing what is good about the library, and especially when universities already have a student center, many computer / media labs and lounges all around campus?

How do booklessness and collectionlessness affect the perception or our brand as a library?94

How does booklessness influence student perception of the quality of the library as a library and of the quality of instruction at the school? How does “the new academic library” function to help students learn, as new library advocates claim, and where is the proof of that? What are the outcomes of the library’s becoming only a study space and a resource discovery tool?

Is this still even a “library” by library professional standards? 

The New Library Gothic:
Glass Windows, Tall Buildings, Light and Air.

n recent years, the traditional library has been portrayed by new library advocates as a wasteful, decaying book repository whose time has come.95 Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. Closer to the truth is that at many campus libraries, print collections stopped being funded, or adequately funded, many years prior to the current efforts to eliminate them. 

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the library’s budget was increasingly committed to journals, whose cost continued to skyrocket at the expense of books. Then, in the 00s, online databases consumed the acquisitions budget. There was need for the campus library to support distance learning and online degree programs, but its budget remained flat. At that time, and continuing to the present, funding was allocated for library databases and serials subscriptions online, but not much, if anything, for print books. As the physical collection dwindled, replaced only by the same databases and discovery interfaces which had already been in place for many years, fewer people came into the library, either because users found what they needed online, or else people no longer anticipated good things would be in the library.

At many academic libraries, the print collection languished and was abandoned. It become a reliquary of intellectuals of the twentieth century, not in alignment either with curricular programs or student interests (except, of course, for the few oddballs who were studying history, art history or literature). Despite ample seating, plenty of space, extended hours and friendly librarians eager to assist practically around the clock, fewer students were coming to the library even to study, preferring other locales on campus where they could more predictably gather with peers, socialize and eat while working on assignments. With the widespread adoption of campus course management system software, professors are always available by email and willing to help students succeed in their classes. 

In the Digital Age, fewer students appeared to want or need the services many librarians traditionally prided themselves on providing. From what I could tell from library literature and blog posts, this was not just at my library, but everywhere. Librarians continued to assert that collections didn’t matter to their business model, that we were all about “doing,” not having. For libraries that went fully digital, ongoing collection development, title selection and cataloging was soon replaced by “resource acquisitions management,” negotiating prices for large or specialized packages of digital content and making them available through a discovery application, a search box.

Once physical collections were no longer funded, public services went into free fall and the whole thing fell apart. I saw it happen in my library, for through the years my desk stats, which in 2012 averaged about 30 visitors / day, fell to pretty much zip.

My title was Reference (changed to Research and Instruction), but for years I did almost everything that there was to do in that library, including system upgrades, managing the website, access services and discovery in addition to instruction and practically ghost writing a few theses and dissertations to help people graduate. While I used to do collection development for books and ebooks, my favorite thing to do, I also was the primary technical contact for vendors, was the liaison with the graduate school, taught most of the instructional classes (Freshman and everyone else), did student and faculty orientations, taught all of the graduate student library classes and administered the website for library. I was liaison to several departments, all Humanities, Communications, Computer Science, some Sociology. I also taught World Literature in the English Department on my own time. 

In the meantime, our own literature proclaimed, “Reference is dead!” and “Librarianship is Dead!”31 Others said academic librarianship was dead. I wondered, based on my own experiences, if librarianship really was dead, or if we had killed it.

Like Gorman,[48. Gorman, Michael. The Enduring Library: Technology, Tradition, and the Quest for Balance. ALA Editions, 2003.] I too didn’t like what the library was becoming. I would chalk it up to age, but no one else, including our students, seemed to like it either, which was a clue we were doing something wrong.

Without books and print, the library was a boring, colorless space, stagnant and unchanging, with nothing new to share or experience but an empty space. 

Our primary purpose and function in the library had always been to maintain a content-rich learning environment, to actively promote literacy (informational, academic, disciplinary, cultural), to encourage knowledge of the collection (with which we were expected to be familiar), knowledge of publications in the disciplines, and to showcase good things other people might want to know about.

Being a good library meant stimulating demand, and being a window onto a world of ideas, thought and possibility, which in turn motivated and inspired students to want to learn and pursue their own individual pathway to success. The library was supposed to be aspirational. Previously, before the library became subscription content and a search engine to search this content, we kept faculty apprised of new publications in their areas of interest which in turn kept their research from fizzling out. We helped them keep up to date, and the library up to date, so our students were kept up to date. Now what?

From about 2006 to the present, new libraries were built at college campuses across the country, hollow monuments to learning, designed around a fundamental assumption that library collections are online, and the library facility itself need not play any role in the presentation of the intellectual content of the library to students. What developed was what I call “the new library Gothic,” with height, space, light and glass being primary design attributes. It did not seek to encourage literacy or support intellectual engagement. It lacked narrative value. It has not been designed to promote resource awareness or use. The library so full of mysterious things and semi-sacred artifacts had been whitewashed, desacralized, converted into a generic office building.

Today, architects pitch directly to college presidents at conferences, telling them their “dark and cluttered” library has to go.97

What they present as their library solution is a vacuous glass box, a prominent building comprised of many levels of expensive custom-designed seating with no thought given to the display of resources. 

One example of such a new library is the Harper College Library, shown below:

This facility, as with other “new academic libraries,” does not encourage resource awareness or use. It is just an open concept building. Does it meet library professional standards for what a library is and does? If no collection is being housed in it—the collection is online these days—how is a building justified as a new college library and not a student center?

 

Grand staircase typical of new library designs. It takes up space and is the main design feature to give the building greater prominence (height). Here the grand staircase is called a “learning link,” in other libraries, it is called a “learning staircase.” We all know it is just a staircase possessing no magical properties.

 

Architects build new libraries on a monumental scale, but there is nothing inside of them to warrant such a space. As a selling point, they claim the new library “focuses on people, not books.” State legislatures are funding new inflated glass libraries at colleges and universities often without any post-occupancy assessment as libraries or reference to library requirements.

I do not mean to pick on any one library. I do not have to. (And I have never been to this library, I am going from the renderings that the architect has put online.) There are now countless examples of vacuous multi-level glass boxes just like this one which have been built at college campuses over the last few years. Most look like this. These buildings, impressive from the outside—Wow, just look how big the library is! one might be inclined to think—but there is not much library on the inside. At this time, historic Carnegie libraries are also being converted into office buildings and public work spaces.

This building is just a building, not a library. It is hollow and redundant, with many floors of open seating, open atria and open stairwells to give it height. 

And now, like the small child in the famed story, I will point my finger in the hope that others in my field might follow suit. This building is not a library. Why? It does not promote independent learning, resource awareness or use. It does not stimulate intellectual inquiry. It is not a content-rich learning environment. It does not promote library professional values or the goals and objectives of the library to be a library.

  • It does not represent to users scholarship or publishing in the disciplines.
  • It does not seek to raise awareness of new things. 
  • It lacks emphasis on knowledge or ideas.
  • It doesn’t motivate students to learn.
  • It doesn’t place value on reading or literacy.
  • It is just an empty building.

Suppose I am right, and everyone in the library world agrees with me. What should be done about it?

For one thing, ALA should oppose them. They should say: State legislatures must stop committing millions in public funds to the creation of new libraries where there is no library in them. Library magazines should also stop showcasing empty spaces as libraries and start asking “Is it a library?” We should strive to develop prescriptive standards to ensure “library goodness.”

To me, if a design does not promote resource awareness and use, it should not be considered a library. Maybe instead of windows, it needs tall walls on which to project virtual collections, or offer some other kind of interactive digital experience. A library should meet certain performative requirements to be a library, such as it makes users aware of resources to encourage engagement, literacy, knowledge and learning.

Moreover:

  • Accrediting agencies should evaluate whether these empty facilities are providing a library experience and a good value for students, especially at four-year schools.
  • ACRL should stop worrying about how we can add value to the institution and start defining about how to be a good academic library.
  • In the State of Texas, The Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) should evaluate its requirements for the libraries at publicly-funded universities to provide access to the citizens of the State of Texas to scholarly resources, given the increasing trend of libraries licensing and not owning content, impeding libraries’ ability to share resources.
  • Perhaps the Texas State Library and Archives Commission should require matching funds for TexShare databases into collections for all participants in the program, so member libraries do not just offer access to TexShare databases and provide only these, saying “This is the library.”

If I were the TSLAC, I would also stipulate that libraries who subsidize their offerings through TexShare, and all publicly-funded academic libraries in the State of Texas, must make their resources available to the public. If they receive public funds and TexShare databases, academic libraries must post notice on their websites that resources are available to the public inside of the library

There has been a gradual restriction of public access to academic library content over the last 30 years coinciding with the shift from owned to licensed materials. License agreements with vendors and federated authentication protocols (Single Sign On) restrict access to only those with active institutional credentials, allowing for no or limited community access, which academic libraries once provided as a matter of principle. Physical books and media were once lent from academic to public libraries; but ebooks and articles in many ejournals cannot be loaned though ILL.  

Teachers, community college faculty, museum professionals, medical professionals and grant writers often made use of the academic library’s resources. I am not saying libraries need to retain books or print journals just to ensure sufficient public access to scholarly resources and technical literature, but we must understand the broader impact of our acquisitions decisions on the communities we purport to serve.

Once libraries do not own their own resources, vendors can dictate the terms of access, as they are currently doing. While librarians may be about broad access to information and encouraging life-long learning, vendors are about monetizing their content. Increasingly, they determine our access policies.

What is at stake is not just our idealism. Without the ability to offer community access to library resources, the library loses out on opportunities to supplement its funding through community partnerships, membership (friends) programs and grants.

Library Directors will have difficulty raising funds for a library that only serves those currently enrolled in school. Alumni will be less inclined to donate to the library if they cannot use it. The institution may no longer support high school projects which involved use of the college library, therefore missing out on recruitment opportunities. 

If the library goes bookless, it still needs ways to expose students and scholars to new titles and the publications in their disciplines and ways to make the library content-rich. The facility must fulfill business requirements and objectives of an academic library, especially if it is funded by tax money to be an academic library. 

The academic library should have functional requirements other than to be a space or a building. The academic library should have its own business requirements and prescriptive standards which constitute a common framework for being online. Post-occupancy assessments of publicly-funded libraries must be published to ensure public accountability for facilities built with public money. If the library is fully digital, or bookless, library designers still must take into account how users will be made aware of resources in the space.

While these inflated glass showrooms are being built and floors emptied of books, no corresponding library user interface has been developed to sufficiently compensate for the fact that the library’s collections are no longer visible to users.

The new library should be conceived of as a whole, not the building as one thing and the user interface another. We should think about library design holistically, as a complete user experience, not the building, web presence experience and systems each as separate entities, each with their own requirements. In the 21st century, libraries require a comprehensive library design strategy. The physical and the virtual should be integrated with a singular strategy, purpose and mission. The library should have one uniform set of business requirements which delineates its purpose and requirements as one 360 view.  

Through our current systems and spaces, it seems we are limited in two significant ways:

  • Resource visibility: Resource visibility is a measure of the likelihood that a particular item added to our system will be seen in its lifetime by those who would be interested in it (if they were aware of it). What good is buying an ebook if no one sees it? Discovery poses a resource visibility problem because a user must look for the item to be discovered.
  • Collection visibility: Collection visibility is the ability to present resources in their most appropriate and meaningful scholarly context, where they might be most valued and appreciated by our users, for example: Here are the key resources which comprise an area or discipline, the seminal works, the works about works, logically arranged and presented according to how users would expect to find them. Discovery systems do not afford the user experience of a collection.

Currently, we cannot present collections as collections online, even using the most state-of-the art library systems. Just making things available should someone come along and search for them does not strike me as an effective library service model.

The user experience of the library online. When I speak of the online experience of the library, I am not suggesting that the online offerings are not good, but rather stating that through our user interfaces, publications are invisible to the student and scholar, minimizing our efficacy, and the chance that someone who might otherwise be interested in a title would learn about it through the library.

We can buy abundant resources, but the design of our websites and facilities does not add additional insight or value to scholars. The design does not promote engagement. Imagine we were selling resources, not just providing access to them. What would we do differently? How successful would we be?

Where in years past, academic librarians were expected to be familiar with the collection, today many of us have fallen victim to our own passive acquisition systems: librarians removed from the acquisitions workflow do not know what is in inventory until they themselves perform a search. At many libraries, collection development no longer exists. Collection development, formerly done title-by-title by subject specialists, has been replaced by more efficient resource acquisitions management workflows, the licensing of large packages of vendor content made instantly accessible through discovery. 

There is a nagging suspicion with our current user interfaces that even if we were to provide access to everything that anyone at the university might want to search for through our discovery portals, we and our user interfaces are still not adding significant value to the educational experience because as libraries have become increasingly automated. We are neither promoting knowledge of the discipline through our resources and interfaces, nor promoting resource use in any visible way.

We are acquiring and activating resources, but not effectively activating readers. 

What we offer online is not the experience of a robust online library collection, one that fosters community and intellectual engagement or exposes people to things they might be interested in, but rather a searchable repository of licensed publisher content available to people enrolled in school to get their assignments done. There is a world of difference between these two service models.

In the academic space, we must offer more engaging user interfaces to serve as our store front and also ensure some way for our systems to support browsing selective collections. I also believe libraries should be experimenting with virtual fulfillment (browse print, check it out by downloading) and the display of ebooks in their spaces. 

Academic librarianship was always about supporting and nurturing intellectual inquiry, not merely providing passive access to resources. The library should strive to be a content-rich learning environment. Browsing authoritative collections and displays of current and contemporary works of interest to students makes students want to read and learn, making their education more meaningful and relevant to them. The library should be about presenting what others in the scholarly community are reading, writing and thinking about. It is about knowledge and ideas, good things brought to light and shared with a larger community. 

A search box and relevance ranking alone doesn’t convey quality or goodnesswhat’s in, what’s interesting, what’s new, or what’s good. The experience is not particularly meaningful to the user who is trying to obtain not just relevant resources to complete a class assignmenta myopic viewbut knowledge of the scholarly activity in a discipline or obtain a broad understanding of an academic subject area.

If in we are continuing to do title-by-title selection in this new environment, it may also feel thankless, for through discovery systems alone, the ebooks we are buying individually (often at a premium price) have no way of being presented to the user as part of a visible, browsable collection, and therefore nobody is likely to see them or even know they are there. The likelihood of anyone, including those who might be inclined to read them, discovering the ebook in its lifetime is slim to none if discovery is all we have to make people aware of new titles. 

Schemes to convert the physical library into something which never was an academic library by library professional standards, a learning commons/media center, or just a digital repository, have become popular among some librarians, with legitimate opposition to this trend by others.98 But the opposition is shrinking, growing smaller every day, with some college students who prefer the experience of traditional libraries using their public library instead. 

Our modern systems have been designed to facilitate efficient acquisition and online access, and not to engage students or scholars, help them learn about their disciplines, or promote resource use. Our systems must support the organization of titles by classification and support the experience of browsing collections if they are to provide scholars with a unique and meaningful academic library experience. Likewise, our modern spaces must strive to be content-rich and intellectually stimulating to support a library experience. 

Findability is important, but what about turning people on to content they might like or need to know about? Isn’t support for intellectual inquiry a fundamental requirement a good library? 

The Necessity of Browsing to the Aesthetic and Intellectual Experience of a Library.

t my institution, a university with over 8,000 FTE, and many graduate programs including in English literature (where I was also Adjunct Faculty), History, Communications, Education, MIS, Urban Planning, Education, Business and the Social Sciences.

The departmental buildings, some of which had history and character, been retrofitted with student lounges, computer / media labs, writing labs and vending machines. The Science, Music, Art, Humanities and Education buildings had study spaces. As far as I could tell when I walked to these buildings to give presentations, these were where students were spending time during the daytime. Music and Public Affairs were bustling (and Music had music, and they liked it that way!). The new Science building had comfortable seating, tables, chairs and a café. The Art Department had Apple computers, the software students needed, and of course, the studios where they needed to be spending time to create art. I loved the Art building, the smell of the studios, where so much student work was on display, the achievements of brave souls whom I imagined were pursuing art degrees despite their parents’ loving disapproval and worry. Public Affairs always had interesting guest speakers and seminars, intellectual life. It wasn’t like there was no campus life. It was there on campus in abundance, just not in the library.

After the library stopped buying books, the departments would sometimes create secret satellite libraries of donated books and materials in their buildings. When I weeded, the faculty were there to cart the books back to their department. One day, I discovered English graduate students sitting on the floor leafing through them in the student lounge. The faculty believed books were still valuable to students, even if the library and administration did not. Departments also had desk copies of textbooks and other books which could be lent out to students. It was also common for faculty to lend personal copies of books because they had long ago given up on the library, which was never responsive to their requests. I observed that students spent time between classes in the buildings and colleges where their classes were taught or in the student center where there were concessions, other students, a bookstore, a computer lab, tables of people selling stuff, occasional DJ, giveaways, and other diversions.

Many departments provided students, at least graduate students, with quiet places to work and student lounges (lined with discarded library books) where they could use a printer and could collaborate with faculty who officed close by. Many colleges had their own media centers and software used by their discipline or department. One school licensed GIS software, another video editing software, another an expensive statistics package, another a digital soundboard and television production studio. Each college maintained its own licenses and media labs, often supervised with experienced lab technicians for the exclusive benefit of their own students and faculty. This kept students and faculty working in their respective departments or colleges, but it made it difficult for Public Affairs to use the GIS software licensed by Geography. There were already a variety of study environments and computer labs for students all over that campus. I concluded that without either collections, coffee or media labs with specialized software staffed by people who knew how to use them, the central library offered no strategic or social advantage to students as a place to study except perhaps after hours, after the librarians had gone home.

When I taught instructional classes for senior capstone projects, I was surprised, but not surprised, to learn that many graduating seniors had never been to the library even out of curiosity, even though our campus was fairly small. Students were everywhere, it seemed, but in the library. We had plenty of space, seating and light, yet this became the rationale for a new library. What we lacked were good current collections, which was certainly not my choice. In my first year or two, I did collection development, but the Director who hired me and who believed in the value of books departed, and was replaced by an interim who stopped all print acquisitions. After a few years, she was replaced with someone who continued the policy of not buying any books. If students came to the old library, they went straight up to the third floor to go to the computer lab to print out a paper for class and back down and out the door. To go from point A to B, they didn’t pass any books or resources; and if they did venture out into the stacks, they would see nothing but extremely old and dusty materials, disintegrating under fluorescent lights. It was also unnerving because no one else was up there, and this made people feel uncomfortable. Even staff some members didn’t venture to certain floors without a buddy.

It didn’t help the cause of the library that those who entered the space didn’t see any new books, or any books for that matter. And students entering for the first time were expecting to see them, and disappointed by their absence. 

Don’t y’all have any good books? is not something a librarian ever wants to hear. I was the only librarian on the floor because I typically nested at the Reference desk, and I taught most of the classes anyway. I also was one of the few white people on campus, so I was easily recognizable to students, my face like a salesman’s tie. I thought I had good insight into how the library might improve, and yet I often felt that whatever I said was suspect. The small campus bookstore was flat out more interesting to browse than the library, presenting a small selection of books of interest to college students. I often dropped in there to scan popular books and the textbooks to find out what was being taught each semester.

Current titles on display make for more interesting and intellectually stimulating environment and serve as a marketing tool for the library, the librarians, the school, and the books themselves, of course, because—unlike their ebook counterparts—they are visible, provided that people are coming into the library in the first place. People want to experience what others are experiencing. Books on display are also perceived to be books that are valued and in demand. 

If the library is configured for it, students may browse print in the library but download the book online. There may be no need to physically check books out. People may want to see the book on display and browse through it before deciding to invest time into reading it, but they might be able to simply download a copy to take it with them to read on their phones or tablets (virtual fulfillment). We can also market ebooks in the library through displays of their covers, both inside the library and in the departments, so people can be made aware of them. This would allow for a greater emphasis on ideas and content in our increasingly sterile and impersonal spaces.

The presence of quality collections organized by the disciplines, and our making an effort to display what is new, significant, good and interesting in the field and in contemporary culture, also suggests to others that the librarians are actually doing something, they are keeping up with new publications, and that the librarians just might know something about them and about the discipline. Good collections boost library usage across the board. Booklessness, and a lack of collection visibility, on the other hand, what many of us have been reduced to in the last ten years as part of the “new library movement,” robs users of learning experiences which come from serendipitous browsing, the most enjoyable experience of libraries reported by users.

Why should we librarians celebrate as progress the elimination of what our users liked best about us? 

The main reason why books and collections continue to be important in the college library space is that they expose students to new ideas, thoughts, movements, intellectuals, and trends, and disciplinary knowledge (the body of knowledge which comprises an academic discipline or profession).

Even if the library is completely online, maintaining strong collections in the disciplines should be regarded as a key service we provide. It allows our graduates to be more competitive, and encourages them to exceed the knowledge of their professors, who may have graduated a long time ago or specialized in one narrow area. It also makes the library as a space more interesting. 

Browsable collections, in print and online, are essential to libraries if the library is to be good, or if it is to be a library at all.

In theory, good college and academic libraries are not about satisfying existing demand for resources but about actively stimulating inquiry and independent learning. To accomplish this requires that we present to scholars not just with “good resources,” but with authoritative collections, and for resources to be able to be displayed and comprehended as carefully and intentionally developed collections reflecting the current status of the discipline, and not just searchable aggregations of digital content the vendor made available.

It is our job as academic librarians to present to users what is good, new, significant, authoritative, important, talked about, seminal, acclaimed, controversial, cutting-edge and award-winning.

The library must encourage browsing and display, and not depend on someone to come along and search for something. We should be telling users what’s good by community standards, or at least leading them down interesting pathways to explore.

The library should raise awareness. It should showcase good things. It should be current. If the library is good, I believe students will come to it to browse, or at least, will be inclined to browse and engage with books and ideas. 

If the collection is good, browsing is learning

This user experience of a good library can only occur if the library is committed to maintaining visible collections in the disciplines, not just to resource discovery.

As an academic library, we ought to be able to present library collections arranged by discipline in some immediate, browsable way, so users can see all of the titles the library has on whatever topic, arranged in a logical order by discipline. How can we expect anyone to obtain an overview of a new area or learn about an unfamiliar discipline if the publications which comprise the discipline are not visible

“The Reader” in the New Academic Library.

y library happened to be at a university with beautiful landscaping, 150 acres of flower beds and old growth trees, a residential campus with ten colleges, a school which emphasized its unique and diverse culture, character and history. As an HBCU, it emphasized pride in the cultural and intellectual achievements of African Americans, and it aspired to create the leaders of tomorrow. 

Even more reason, it seemed to me, to provide a stellar and vibrant undergraduate library experience emphasizing the cultural achievements of African Americans inside the library and online, and even more reason to provide books, beautifully and attractively displayed. Many students there had come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and, given their backgrounds, the impression of the bookless library did not strike them as being particularly modern or innovative

Most of the students chose to attend the school in person for a unique college experience, dubbed an “HBCU experience,” a selling point for the school. I believe that in that particular environment, where students were on campus—this was not a commuter or online school—the physical book had cache and signified value to those students who came to the library. It embodied worth, including self-worth, and investment in them, where the invisible, impersonal ebook in a generic vendor package, a book which had to be summoned from a database to even be seen, was perceived as a cheap substitute for the real thing.

The library didn’t have books, except extremely old and worn copies, and any newish ebooks were just “whatever” was included in an academic aggregator package online, which meant we had nothing current or in demand. There was no leisure reading collection either, except a few very old paperbacks locked up in special collections, since the older generation of librarians insisted that academic libraries do not have popular books. Books about the African American experience—ordinary titles, not rare books—had been customarily locked away into special collections, even those titles with multiple copies, making these titles unable to circulate, less visible, and less accessible to users. This restrictive policy was established several Directors ago who believed that the African American resources would just get stolen if not protected. This policy of placing all of the “black books” into Special collections, along with refusing to buy new books, infuriated many faculty members and two successive Deans. A widening chasm grew between the library and the faculty. Nothing could be done about it, at least not by me. I tried.

When I taught English classes, I purchased and lent copies of my own books (even though I was “the Librarian”): Black Athena, Blacks in Antiquity, The Story of Black, lots of others which should have been available through our HBCU library. Even I couldn’t buy books for the library, for about eight years. I operated like any other Adjunct today, scanning my own stuff and putting it on Blackboard, as most faculty do these days. Adjuncts are hired to teach classes at the 11th hour. They don’t have time to explore the library.

Years after the library stopped buying books, the plan to build a new library funded by the State of Texas was formally announced. We were receiving 43 million dollars for a new library.

After that, the need to weed the collection became the new justification for not buying books. We are getting a new library in four  years. Why start buying books now? We’ll just have to move them! I represented the Humanities and Social Sciences when I said, we should be maintaining our commitment to collections, not stopping just because of a building.

There was no thought about the large gap in the collection or that students would come and go without having access to current titles. The collection had been allowed to languish for years, no money for books. Closer to the truth was that the collection was seen as completely irrelevant to library services and to the university. We were all about instruction now, and maintaining a collection had nothing to do with it.

Because of the perceived necessity of drastically reducing the size of the collection and moving the remainder to the books into the new space, whatever could be back-filled into the design, the policy of not buying books was continued, and could conceivably be continued indefinitely, which made weeding decisions more difficult. Out of 300,000 books, I weeded about 250,000 to meet the Director’s monthly weeding quotas so we would “fit into” a new five-story building.

Surely, we were going to be buying books again. What else was going to fill up the space?

The task of weeding pretty much fell to “the reader” in the library. I didn’t mind. I poured over spreadsheets of titles, researching them, checking them in WorldCat, reading reviews and compiling lists of titles we should retain and others that we should have. It was my mental escape, along with teaching World Literature. I loved literature and intellectual history, and even though the old books were physically in bad shape, the collection contained some gems (which I left behind if I thought someone else would appreciate them). I reconnected with wonderful oddball titles I had long forgotten about since graduate school, Valentine’s The Experimental Psychology of Beauty and Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of “As If.” It was interesting that that library has so much by Thomas Carlyle, his brilliant one-hit-wonder Sartor Resartus, a literary parody of German idealist philosophy, formerly read even in graduate English classes, but studied no more; the works by and about the obscure American fantasy writer James Branch Cabell, popular in the 1920s, whose beautifully illustrated editions I have at home. There was an almost full run of Loeb classics for Greek (green) and Latin (red) authors, so precious to me when I studied those languages a long time ago. They were real luxury items then. I scoured used bookstores for them.

There were many books on ancient languages and comparative linguistics, Proto-Indo European language trees and many Anglo-Saxon dictionaries; books on Neo-Latin and the pastoral form; rows of German, Russian and French literature which no one at that school was studying or ever would again.

There were illustrated travel books from the late 19th century with engraved plates and elaborate fold out maps. Intriguing to me also was a German encyclopedia set from the 1930s printed in fraktur (the preferred typeface of Nazi Germany) with pictures of what appeared to be German officers. The library had opened in 1927 and was never weeded, and it was an excellent collection probably until about 1985, when it fell off a cliff, having to allocate more of its budget to serials and then databases. Its collections were now faded from having been continuously bathed in fluorescent light for many decades, spines barely readable and fore-edges covered in caterpillars of dust and soot. At one time, the collection had been excellent and cared for by educated people who, German encyclopedia set aside, knew what they were doing. The library had been impressive at one time.

Faculty received first dibs on everything, then students. I, on the other hand, was reluctant to partake, concerned about conflict of interest and the optics of the librarian filling up the back of her SUV with library books (should someone think to take a picture of me and post it to social media). I gave away The Catholic Encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Jewish Encyclopedia (from 1901!) and magnificent Encyclopedia Britannicas, including the famous eleventh edition from 1911, with contributions made by all of the leading intellectuals of the day. I wanted them, but I wanted more that other people enjoy them. I also weeded the Humanities, but conservatively, because I wanted the collection to be good for students. In hindsight, I might have made different decisions, but I never had the big picture of what this new library was going to be. I did bring home some Classics books which required knowledge of Greek or Latin to utilize, something for my old age (I had to read Homer in the original, so the Loeb classics were a souvenir of my own past); and quite a few specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias to help to rebuild civilization when it collapses, and many more precious books I had absolutely no use for, but just appreciated. Someone’s life work was that Anglo Saxon dictionary. . . or Proto-Indo European trees. Turns out, wool, birch trees and bees go way back to the beginning of civilization. In hindsight, I should have scooped up more Loeb classics when I had the chance; but someone in the future might need a interlinear translation of a Latin or Greek writer.

I taught most of the library instructional classes at that school, and had for years, so I was very familiar with our programs, but I did not have any idea to what extent the new library’s collections were going to be funded moving forward. Therefore, I was weeding in the dark, without a scope. In my mind’s eye, I had created scopes, a new collection development policy which guided my weeding decisions, and I began to write down notes for each section. Still, I was less likely to toss a completely worn out copy of Othello, for example, if I thought it might not be replaced. I was over confident it would be.

The faculty from each area who assisted me with the weeding project were asking me the same questions.

When and will we be able to buy books again? I did not know.

How big is the space we are trying to fit into? I did not know.

I was merely given monthly weeding quotas, never a total number, causing me to weed and re-weed sections as the plans changed and there was going to be less library in the new library. Weeding meant making sure the discarded book was removed from the catalog and went through a deaccessioning process. Rather than depreciating the books, which is the norm in libraries, accounting wanted to know the dollar value of each of the books we were discarding, and this need to research and report the price of the books we were discarding created a bottleneck in cataloging.

I helped the library get past that by obtaining guidelines for depreciation of library books from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and another guideline published by the University of Texas. In the meantime, the old library had become a composite of subscription databases, packages of resources requiring almost no ongoing maintenance. What little there was to do with the databases was my job, too. The transition from http to https and the need to install security certificates caused some hiccups with the proxy server, but it was pretty much smooth sailing after that. ProQuest and EBSCO ebooks, aggregator packages constituted our ebook collection.

Months prior to weeding, I led the library through an upgrade to put into place functionality which would help streamline the weeding process. I went to an ELUNA conference and learned from that a later version of our ancient Voyager system had features to help with global changes and deletions through its Pick and Scan module. We upgraded. I also implemented discovery, both Primo and EDS, making both available to our users because so much EBSCO content didn’t turn up in Primo, and each has a different algorithm for searching. While my title was Reference—there was no job title on the books for Technical/Digital Services or Web (although for years I did Reference, Instruction, Discovery and Web)—I wondered what Discovery Services Librarians at other institutions did all day, and if there was more to it than what I was currently doing in my current role. I had no trouble managing discovery, the website, reference, technical support, usage reports, most of instruction, LibGuides, weeding, much of ILL, accreditation reviews, and other things, including serving on university committees and Faculty Senate. I was one of three librarians, and I still felt underutilized much of the time on a campus of 8,000 FTE.

Graduate students came to see me to discuss their research, and I soon realized my chief value was assisting students with theses, dissertations and papers. They were grateful to have my help, especially the international students. 

Over the years working in the library and being the only librarian on the floor, I had witnessed the steady decline in foot traffic which coincided with the moratorium on book buying. I had seen the drop in desk stats. I no longer needed any student assistants at the desk; my boss, who had decided we were not going to buy books, and who maintained this stance for many years, asked me why I thought the traffic in the library dropped.

I told her what I had told her many time before, that the heaviest users of the library were readers, and readers (in my liaison areas) were no longer being served by her policy of booklessness. Our humanities students and faculty (and others) are not using the library any more because our collection development policies are not aligned with their needs. It is instinctive for a librarian to assume that failure to maintain good collections, to buy and promote new books and provide nothing of popular interest made the library dull and unattractive to users. This is what our library professional literature had always told us, at least.

If people aren’t coming in, you need to change your collection development practices.

Admittedly, it was harder to sort cause from effect now, especially because since that rule of thumb, times had changed, degrees had changed, and so many were claiming, or rather proclaiming, that even at a university, today’s students and scholars don’t want or need books—not just physical books, but any books at all. It was not necessary for the library to offer reading materials any more, thought the Director, who believed that throwing out the books (which she had done at her last college) was progress.

I pondered how we could legitimately claim to support information literacy, which we did, without supporting actual literacy, or keeping our collections current (of course, “currency” is a factor in assessing a item’s credibility, according to the infamous CRAAP test). A pervasive attitude among administrators seemed to be:

These students don’t need to read, reading is a waste of time.
They just need to get their degrees.

Was it elitist of me to defend the library full of books and leisure reading materials when all students really needed was Academic Search Complete to find their requisite five peer-reviewed sources to write their five-page essay on gun control or “A Rose for Emily”? Was it elitist to argue that students benefited from reading, including co-curricular and extra-curricular reading? It seemed many of our students wanted popular books to read, and these popular books did not cost the library much at all. 

Each year before the budget hearing, I continued to advocate for books. About one year before the new library’s opening, I ran usage reports and showed where we could easily shave $100,000 off database renewals (redundant and unused resources) and use these funds for new books; I know $100,000 doesn’t go very far, but it would be a good start for an Opening Day collection, especially if we used those funds to acquire popular materials, and if followed by $100,000 set aside in a draw down account each year. After a side-mouthed promise of 100K from the Director, filled up an Excel spreadsheet with titles, ISBN and price. But the Director suddenly decided, swayed by another librarian, to commit the funds to purchasing yet another database. 

For just under $100,000 (anything $100,000 or more had to go to the Board), the library purchased perpetual access to the Houston Chronicle Archive, a resource which is available for free to subscribers of the newspaper (which we were) and available to non-subscribers for a very low fee of $2.50 a week. The Serials Librarian / Interim Assistant Director twice recounted that she said to the saleslady when asking for a quote, that the cost had to be under $100,000 so it didn’t need to go to the Board for approval.

The salesperson came back with a quote for $99K.

So like that, my promised book money for the Opening Day collection was gone.

I complained to the Director in private. We had gone many years under her administration acquiring nothing. How were we even a library? The budget was always sunk into databases and then there was no money when someone requested something. We had no current titles. We do not get them through EBSCO ebooks. When the faculty made requests, the answer was always, “We have no money.” If a faculty member published a book, we made them donate a copy of their book to the library. It made no sense. We were an HBCU, but didn’t acquire books of interest to black audiences, either. The university offered graduate programs in English Literature, History, Journalism, Education, Sociology and Communications. I was the liaison for the Humanities and the Social Sciences. These disciplines needed books! They needed collections. We had JSTOR, which is great, but people in literature need literature. Students in Journalism, Public Affairs, Sociology and Communication needed contemporary authors. 

That day, the Director, who has since retired, quietly sat me down and slowly poured out a cup of tea. Then revealed to me that at her previous institution, a community college, she had simply thrown out all of the books and shelving (but in this same conversation she also mentioned, that they had brought them back after she retired). She had been at her former institution for 30 years, threw out the books, retired, and then came out of retirement to my institution to “build the new library” at my institution.

She regarded getting rid of books as an accomplishment she could use to her advantage to claim to be “moving the library forward.” In this context of “throwing out the books,” she mentioned to me that where she used to work, there was a reader in the library. At first I had thought this reader might be me, but as she went on with her story I could tell that there really was a reader where she used to work (only one in her old library, apparently. . . .), someone she said she almost fired because he “read books at work”—and it was most definitely a “he.” The purpose of the story was to express that the objective, her objective, was simply to eliminate print.

“Eliminating print, the more the better, was apparently what the university administration understood her plan to be.

They wouldn’t understand weeding the collection and buying books again. (As in, why did you just throw out 250,000 books if you were going to start buying them?) All of this time, I thought I was weeding a collection ultimately to make the collection better, not with the goal of getting rid of collections. Had I known, weeding could have been carried out much more efficiently. 

I also imagine her belief that there was no connection between collection use and library effectiveness was as troubling to the reader at her old library as it was to me. 

I knew that my faculty in the English Department, History, Art, Music, Journalism and Communications, a few of the departments which offered graduate degrees, were not involved with the decision to no longer buy books or maintain collections. There was no solicitations of input, no focus groups. It was not brought up with the faculty. I was close to the Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences faculty because I also taught classes. They were not happy with the library, and they had not been for a long time. They couldn’t count on us. We weren’t buying ebooks either, at least not individually. There was no strategy, no collection development plan, no collaboration with faculty, no concern about the intellectual content of the library, no concern that not providing collections hurt the education of students, especially in the Humanities, depriving them of learning opportunities that they might have otherwise had.

This was not some “emotional attachment to print” on my part, but my attachment to being a good library.

I tried not to care, but when a new book came out by or on Colson Whitehead, for example, or something on African American art and literature which I knew we ought to have to be a good HBCU library, it bothered me. I couldn’t peruse Choice or Booklist or read the New York Times Book Review or wander Barnes and Noble, or listen to an interview with an author or book discussion on NPR or watch Bill Maher without feeling guilt and regret when I became aware of wonderful, worthy titles that I thought the library should have, but I could not acquire. We were depriving students of a library. 

After weeding over 75% of the collection, we moved to the new space and opened the new library without new books. I expected the faculty to complain, as they had been for years about our not buying books, but fewer people came to the new library because of its location on the edge of campus and lack of convenient parking. When we opened, librarians were assigned to tour people through “the space,” which is what it was.

For those who came in to see the new library, no one seemed concerned or surprised that there were no new books. No one asked me, “Where are all the new books?” Not even Faculty Senate, who came to the library once a month to air grievances about lack of parking, adjuncts taking their jobs, compensation and post-tenure review, seemed to notice or care that we were still buying nothing. No one said anything. Not a word.

Well, someone did, actually, one person, a doctoral student, also a friend of mine, who emailed the President asking why the new library had no new books. He had copied an email I sent to him, and he used that as the basis for the complaint. I was blamed for this complaint, as if no one else in the entire university but me would care that we weren’t buying books and had no ability to do so “because” the library lost its jobber (B&T) years ago. 

On the other hand, why shouldn’t the President of a university and the Provost know that the new library was not able to buy new books?

After that, because the President contacted the Provost, and the Provost contacted the Library Director, she was supposedly “drug across the carpet”—but for what exactly I do not know—for not buying books? I thought she thought booklessness was what the administration wanted, what they understood. Print would be phased out. 

For a collection to be of value to scholars, a collection must have critical mass. You cannot just stop acquiring for years and then begin again, like turning a water hose on and off. A consistent approach over an extended period is what makes a collection valuable. Plus the modern, minimalist design of the space, that it had been designed to place no emphasis on books, would have made it difficult to place new books where they might be seen.

With its bright lights and rubberized and flooring, it it had the atmosphere of a 24 hour gym, including janitors constantly rumbling though with gigantic trash cans on wheels to make sure there was no trash. Months later, COVID hit, enrollments plummeted, my classes were cancelled, furloughs were threatened, and I headed off to another library undergoing renovation and reform, just like the one I left. There was a sense of inevitability to it all, as librarians have all adopted the view that print is obsolete. Resistance seems futile.

Whether new books would have made a significant difference on usage patterns in our library, I really cannot say.

For my own curiosity, just to satisfy myself, I wanted to determine through some study how and if library acquisitions patterns impacted resource use, student enrollment and retention, and how collections added value; but I had no practical way of gathering this data or isolating the issue apart from all of the other factors afflicting libraries today. 

The question is not about just retaining books in the library or about numbers of books relative to FTE, data which one can easily obtain from published library surveys, but the impact and value of maintaining and presenting good collections. Collections, not just “books.” There is a qualitative aspect to it. Even if they have a collection development policy, as most libraries do because these are required for institutional accreditation, who is to say that schools are following them? 

I wanted to find out how other college and academic libraries, those holdouts who hadn’t gotten rid of print, those who were actively maintaining collections in any format, were faring compared to the barren libraries which just subscribed to databases and were done for the year. It became something of an obsession of mine. I was informally following Catholic universitiesmy bellwether, because of their strong intellectual tradition in the Liberal Artsto see if their libraries were also getting rid of books, and if so, what they were putting in their place apart from just more seating. Were Conservative universities more likely to retain print than Liberal ones? I was also wondering about those libraries who had gotten rid of print, but still did title-by-title collection development of ebooks.

How were they doing compared to their peers? 

Without books in the library, or without any title-by-title selection going on even of ebooks, there was no a happy collaboration with faculty, as I had previously done when I first arrived at my university, sending around Choice forthcoming title lists and publisher catalogs, asking them about their research and keeping an eye out for other things they might like. Keeping faculty apprised about forthcoming titles and maintaining good collections was an easy and much appreciated service I previously provided, a way that I added value.

Now, there was no collaboration or sharing books with students or faculty, or turning users on to new things they might like. There was no collection development, and there were no collections anymore.

Library inventories seemed to be on autopilot and invisible, which was as frustrating to me than the empty space we now occupied. 

Increasingly, I was feeling that Discovery was a like a black hole that the entire library had fallen into. I had implemented it, I understood it, and I saw its advantages. But it was a federated search application, not even a digital library. It doesn’t do what the library did.

It also seemed, compared to years ago, librarians at the university were now no longer expected to know much about anything but vendor products and how to pull things out of databases. We were not expected to be familiar with the collection because there was no library collection to be familiar with. 

Now no one in the library was reading reviews and selecting titles.

No one was cataloging books.

No one was weeding them.

No one was engaging with them.

Because no one inside the library knew about them, no one was promoting books to students or faculty.

What we offered to users were packages of digital content brought to us by publishers and aggregators, EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, SAGE, Elsevier, JSTOR and a handful of others, searchable in discovery in the event someone might want to access them. I wanted desperately to get away from there, do something else, go to work for another library but like being a horror film, all libraries were Zombies, moving in this direction. It was inescapable. 

There is an ideological debate raging within academic librarianship, with some librarians proclaiming that defenders of print—or the opposers of schemes to convert libraries into desolate work spaces—need to evolve with other librarians digging their heels in, not wanting to see their libraries destroyed by those who think throwing out books in itself represents a form of progress—especially when there is nothing to take the place of the browsable collections through our current user interfaces.

My thoughts are that it is not so much the librarians, but the library user interfaces which need to evolve, so that the library can maintain and market its collections in a more modern and professional way, and return to being a reliable source for what is good, significant and important to know in a field.

Our websites should be a destination for scholars, presenting them with lists of forthcoming titles in their field, articles on notable books, calls for papers, and insight into what others in the university (and at other universities) are researching. We need a rich store front.

Because of the current limitations of discovery interfaces to assemble e-resources into browsable collections online, with booklessness, necessarily comes collectionlessness. People are proposing that library collections reflecting the academic disciplines, traditional collection development strategies and modes of presentation, can and should be replaced by more modern and efficient acquisitions and access workflows. Through this model, where the library agrees to buy in bulk from publishers, the library can license and make available tremendous volumes of electronic resources at once and not need to worry about selecting titles or cataloging them.  

By going predominantly bookless, my library hadn’t just eliminated print. It also did away with collections, display, promotion, scholarship, access to bodies of knowledge, opportunities to turn students and faculty on to new things, the idea of creating a stimulating learning environment, and all that had been good, interesting and unique about the user experience of the library. It had eliminated our chief marketing tool and the main thing which people liked about the library experience: the ability to browse good, authoritative and interesting collections. 

Online, we became just like most other academic libraries. A search box, a listing of databases, LibGuides, and some forms.

There was no longer any sign of intellectual life in the library. We were perceived as just a search application for third-party content needed only for institutional accreditation and assignment completion, one which, incidentally, needed no librarians to manage its contents.

The User Experience of the New Academic Library.

nitially, everyone in the library was excited and curious about this strange animal called a “new library,” and the promise of new growth opportunities and roles it might bring.

Like the blind man and the elephant, each of us had different hopes and expectations of what the new facility would be like. The Library Director spoke about makerspaces and green screens. The architects spoke of their experience and insight building new libraries, and claimed special expertise in constructing 21st century “learning environments.” The IT Department spoke about a building full of technology, and Facilities spoke about energy efficiency. I wanted to learn more about new libraries too, for they portended the future of my profession and possibly my own career trajectory.

Naturally, I thought we would have an Opening Day collection (I had already developed one in Excel for a little over 100K, along with a new collection development policy better aligned with programs and crafted with faculty input) and a new books display area, perhaps a leisure reading collection which we had never had before. 

I imagined we would have guest speakers and gallery space for traveling exhibits. I thought we would have a classroom for instruction. I thought for certain we would start buying books again with a good-sized book budget. I had thought things would be, well, normal again, after having been on hold, book-wise, for so long. I kept a wish list in my drawer, compiled by perusing back-files of Choice and NYT Book Reviews which our Serials Librarian had tossed into the recycle bin when she cancelled most print subscriptions. I pulled Choice reviews and years of New York Times Book Reviews back out of the bins and carted them to my office. I also mined Books in Print online to populate a spreadsheet entitled, “Opening Day Collection.” I also had lists of each year’s best books from NPR and other sources.

Having weeded most of the old collection of 300,000 titles, working with the faculty in the departments on that task, I felt I had unique insight into collection gaps and where it needed to improve. I never imagined 43 million dollars could be spent on a new library with no set aside for books to go into it, or built with no place to display new books. 

The new facility took a little less than three years from conception to completion. However, for reasons I might only speculate about now, the tiny library staff and faculty were hardly involved in its planning. During the “public comment” period, a part-time librarian colleague and I ventured to the General Facilities building to make our comments, since librarians hadn’t been asked by the architects or the Project Manager for our input or needs.

In the very beginning, a team of architects—I am not sure they were the ones the administration ultimately hired—spoke to the library staff, but it was a sales pitch explaining their design concept based on primordial campfires, caves and watering-holes, their points of reference for the design of 21st century learning environments (taken from pre-literate / oral culture, I noted to myself). Had I not been so caught up in their creative use of metaphor and British accents, I might have thought to ask, “Why are you building a library based on design principles inspired by pre-literate peoples, and how will this design promote literacy?” 

When it all began, I had assumed, just as with any project, there would be a requirements document created that would identify, clarify and sediment the library’s needs, what the library was expected to do, furthermore classifying these needs as essential, desired, or just nice to have. I urged the Director to create a Business Requirements Document for the new library, and I provided her with examples and new library checklists I came up with from other new library construction projects. She responded coolly that she was not the Project Manager for the new library and it was up to him. Who is the Project Manager? I do not know. She knew, and she knew I knew she knew.

We were kept in the dark. The way we librarians found out what was going on was through media releases. In them, the architectural design team kept speaking about “community engagement,” gathering community input at public Town Hall meetings. Their definition of the library’s community seemed to be Third Ward, the black neighborhood surrounding the school, not the students or faculty, the actual users of an academic library. (Residents of the surrounding neighborhood would not be granted access to the digital library, either.) They never conferred with the librarians in any formal way. They also did not engage with the faculty. My Chair in English had heard nothing, and he always had his ear to the ground. Weeks later, during the public comment period and at my request, the Director gave us the go ahead to make our comments, and so off we went on our Golem quest in search of the building which contained the room which contained the plans for the new library. 

In a large conference room across campus, where the blueprints for the new library were set out, my colleague and I went to work. We plastered the blueprints with handwritten sticky notes which we had brought with us for that purpose. I added notes like Reference doesn’t have a physical collection, and doesn’t need shelves. Reference should be called “Research Services,” and we need semi-private consultation space (not behind a wall where no one sees us). Also, Research Services should be close to where wherever people are actually working on papers (close to the front entrance of the library there are only directional questions asked, and there is no place for consultation). The technical processing area does not need to be so spacious, for there is only a Cataloger and Cataloging Assistant, and books will be coming in shelf-ready.

Where is our instructional classroom / presentation / meeting room? It should seat at least 50, as our last presentation room was often filled to capacity.

Where are new books displayed? Where is a secure gallery /exhibit space? Where is the media viewing room? Where are the public service points? How do we secure the building for after-hours study?

These were things I had mentioned to the Director after she had shared the preliminary plans weeks ago with the staff. I think she was frustrated too, because I know she also didn’t get many of the things she wanted.

In the end, the sticky-note campaign had no discernible impact on the design of the new library.

It was too late for changes to be made, too costly. The “programming stage” had ended even before input was gathered from the public or from the librarians who worked there. The building was completed a year ahead of schedule.

What was erected was a very narrow building that was mostly hollow atrium and unusable space, a five-story angular glass structure located on the far end of campus, far from the colleges of Sciences and Arts, across the street from the law school and law library. It was far from English, Journalism, Communications, Music, Journalism, Art and those disciplines (my disciplines) which had made some use of the old centrally located library, disciplines whose students where most likely to be readers. The new library was completely empty through the center of it, a startling waste of space, with open flooring on each level centered around a hard wooden bleacher sitting (collaborative learning) staircase, the building’s centerpiece, the exact same staircase (same materials, everything) which I had seen at UH:

The same collaborative learning staircase is now everywhere in educational settings. I am not convinced they are a good use of the space, since no one likes to sit or stand on them.

There was no public or student parking around it, just 24 hour reserved parking. 

The structure had been designed to be as tall as it could be under the circumstances of having nothing much to go inside of it. It had a large open stairwell on one side which took up one whole side of the floor in addition to a staircase in the middle with an atrium above. No one was likely to use the wide stairs which took up a good half the building, so anything placed on that side would not seen by anyone. The building was comprised of open stairwells, atria, and wide hallways, large unassigned offices (curiously designated as “staff workrooms”), offices assigned to tenants, elevators and enormous open airport-style restrooms without doors, positioned next to restrooms with doors for the staff to use. 

Its walls were glass computer-controlled electrochromic windows, a special reflective material containing ionized iron particles capable of turning black and blocking out the sun when stimulated with an electric current, each window section programmable through a cloud-based application. It seemed fairly useless and very expensive technology, and we kept having meetings about the windows so we could “explain the windows” to people when they came to the library. Why would anyone think to ask about them? Why would I want to be able to dynamically darken a single window panel? Likewise, the building featured outdoor balconies, but the doors had to remain permanently locked for safety reasons. Its thick blue-gray glass walls, glaring unfiltered LED light strips (which appeared to suck the color from things under it), narrowness, hard surfaces, exposed conduits and persistent loud hum gave it a strange vibe, like being on the inside of a fish tank or life support system. Despite being torturously cold (my office was a perpetual 68 degrees), the smallest space heater could cause a breaker to blow, so they were forbidden. One day, for some inexplicable reason, the AC unit seized up, and a blanket of warm humid air and still quiet filled me with a sense of serenity and peace. Someone finally turned the vacuum cleaner off. 

On my floor, the electrochromic smart windows were set to a gray so it looked as if a storm were perpetually approaching. I would go outside and realize that, wow, it was actually a beautiful day outside, just not inside the library. Inside, there was no signage directing students to staff or to the small unmanned computer labs and print stations on each floor, a decentralized “stacked” design which created support issues when the printer ran out of paper, as it did each day, many times a day, or someone couldn’t figure out how to login to the study hall app, which also resulted in misdirected anger toward me, the only staff person around to vent to. Frustrated students inevitably found their way to my office to complain, where I would call OIT and also volunteer to print their papers using my printer if they sent it to me by email (I was not allowed to stick their unclean flash drives into my USB port).

On each floor, the view of the librarians’ offices were completely eclipsed by a protruding façade of airport-style restrooms. Not putting doors on restrooms within a quiet study space meant industrial-strength power flush toilets and dryers were heard throughout each floor; but was especially loud in our offices and in the Director’s office. Every conversation in her office was punctuated by the sound of flushing toilets from the adjacent restroom and even several floors above her office. One day, I was on the phone in my office and a toilet flushed. “Oh, you can you hear that? I am sorry, I office next to the restrooms.” 

The fact that they would put open airport restrooms in the middle of each floor suggested that maybe Moody Nolan really didn’t know how to design 21st century learning environments after all.

  • View outside of Special Collections.
  • First floor, not much to see.
  • Fourth floor, pretty empty.
  • Atrium around a staircase. There are no instructional classrooms which seat more than 24.
  • Entrance showing the collaborative staircase. No place to display books on the first floor.
  • Entrance showing the welcome desk. It is very loud because of the placement of the HVAC system, not a good place for collaboration.

Admittedly, the building looked fantastic on the outside, with jaunty mid-century lines; but on the inside there was little of interest to meet the eye. The sheets of blue-gray dynamic glass, color palette of light gray, white, maroon, and tan (maroon and gray are school colors); and several floors of nearly identical (“stacked”) floor plans and lack of display space meant that there was little to see or experience in the library except for an installation of African Art outside of Special Collections, which was actually the best part of the new space. Apart from that, it was all monotonous, gray and colorless. It wasn’t an intellectually stimulating space to visit or spend time. The building was a modern design stylistically, but it was not a modern library.

I never would have imagined the long-awaited new library would be like this, so cold and lifeless, and especially because it replicated so many of the shortcomings of the old library, the exact same things librarians had complained about over the years: an open empty lobby area with no books or way to effectively display them; study rooms placed on the far ends of upper floors of a five story building where they could not be monitored by the one staff member on duty at night and on weekends; lack of ability to confer with patrons in a semi-private consultation space, poor signage, no way to secure the building during extended hours; no exhibit space for student art or traveling exhibits. There was also no large classroom or meeting space, either, which was the most popular and heavily used feature of the old library. There was no glass walled video viewing room. There was no visitor parking close to the building as there was with the old library, where we had a visitor parking lot, making it harder to host community events. It seemed to be designed to be an empty space, with atria, walkways, staircases and other unusable space taking up much of the interior space of the building. There were dead zones (purposeless space) everywhere, and there was no warmth to it.

The State of Texas had funded a new 43 million dollar library, but there was no library there, just an empty building.

And so like that, my academic library with comprehensive collections preserved since 1927 was gone, replaced by some over-engineered technological wonder with millions of State funds put toward programmable electrochromic window panes—like that was going to be meaningful to students—and useless self-check out machines and high-end smart security gates (Why, why, why if we are not buying books?), but nothing at all for books or resources to go inside of it. This was the building “full of technology” we had heard about for years. None of this technology had much to do with improving the user experience of a library as a library, improving education, or attracting people (especially scholars) into the space.

It made me wonder what, if anything, could be done to build a better library, or improve the existing one.

According to the American Library Association’s magazine, American Libraries, this was an award winning new library design.

I pondered to myself, is this really a 21st century library?

I tried to keep an open mind for my own sanity, but it seemed to me little more than a place to sit and look out a window. It wasn’t satisfying to work in a library without either seeing new books or students. Even I couldn’t acquire books for my own classes, the ones I was teaching in English. I looked to other libraries, but they were all going in this direction, even Catholic liberal arts colleges. It would be easy to chalk my response up to my advanced age, but my younger colleagues seemed also not to prefer the desolate new space which the architects had built in the name of a new librarianship which they said would appeal more to the current generation. It didn’t seem to. I could have designed a better library with media rooms and interactive displays, stuff going on all the time. 

As I have come to discover, what happened to my library, this white-washing by tall windows and whiteboards and glass, is a common occurrence today, including the fact that the librarians are discounted or excluded from the design process for new libraries, rather than being regarded as stakeholders or subject matter experts.15 There are no post-occupancy evaluations of new libraries as libraries in library literature, for obvious reasons.

Everyone in my field is too worried about losing their jobs to say anything.

New libraries continue to be built at great public expense, but without any assessment of them as libraries, only as designed spaces. With new academic libraries, the more impressive the space, the more conspicuous the absence of books, whose cost pales in comparison to the technology, empty space (for things like monumental learning staircases), and the commodified packages of aggregated content the new library typically provides.

Educated people and scholars care about books, content, culture, media, and especially knowing what other educated people know and are writing / thinking about. Even if they don’t care about reading physical books per se, they care about the ideas in them.

They want the library to turn them on to new things and new thoughts. That is what makes a library good for scholars.

Whether usage would have dropped at my library regardless of efforts to revitalize the collection through an Opening Day collection of new books, attractive displays, leisure reading, sponsor a book program, exhibits and current materials targeted more to the interests of undergraduates, and creative ways to display ebooks in the physical space, coupled with programming—fun things like Bob Ross nights and “tell us about your research” night—is a question no one can answer, but my own opinion is “yes.”

It was at least worth a try.

I wanted to display ebooks in the space to encourage use. (I also wanted to simulcast and stream college games in the library above the collaborative staircase.)

Online, I wanted to showcase outstanding student work in our library’s digital repository so parents could google their child’s name and see a paper they had written at school, and this might possibly help that student land their first job after graduation.

I wanted art exhibits and Research Week poster sessions to bring the place to life.

I had hoped to display student art and writing in the library space. I wanted musical performances from the Music department, video shorts from Communications, and a way to bring people together. It was an HBCU, so I definitely wanted to showcase the best in black literature, authors, artists and intellectuals. I wanted to create a vibrant place for community and culture to thrive. 

For a medium-sized campus library with large numbers of undergraduates and graduate students on campus, the presence of new books in the library, attractively displayed, would have contributed to the creation of a stimulating and educational learning environment.

It would have made the library more interesting and appealing to students, even as a place to study. 

Do College Students just want Normal Libraries?

he trend in my field is to insist that students do not want or need books, but spaces to create media and tools for making objects (3D printers, laser cutters, and materials). There has been recent anecdotal evidence, which I will present in the course of this essay, that students actually want “normal” libraries with books in them,100 and not the innovative work / study spaces—with maker-spaces and green rooms—being built to replace them. According to Wong:

Likely in the hopes of proving that they have more to offer than a simple internet connection, many college libraries are pouring resources into interior-design updates and building renovations, or into such glitzy technology as 3D printers and green screens that is often housed in media centers or maker-spaces. Yet survey data and experts suggest that students generally appreciate libraries most for their traditional offerings: a quiet place to study or collaborate, the ability to print research papers, and access to books. Many college libraries are reinventing themselves, but perhaps they’re trying to fix an institution that isn’t, in fact, broken.

However, if administrators or library leadership are convinced that college students aren’t checking out books (I think they want to see them in the library, browse them, and then download them to check them out), or interesting in reading them, or that a library isn’t needed to support academic degree programs, it becomes a self-fulfilling situation. 

When it comes to the construction and design of new academic libraries, the planned de-emphasis on collections should be concerning to everyone at a university, even the Marketing Department, because the collection that people see reflects the quality of instruction at the school. Not only is the library without books unappealing to students, but it might convey a negative message to prospective students and their parents about the quality of education at that school. 

Whether the empty college library, the collectionless library, is interpreted by outsiders and prospective students as modern, forward-thinking and progressive, or whether it is judged negatively, as boring, unappealing, unintellectual, impersonal and stingy—are two (categorically speaking) different responses to our new bookless spaces.

My own belief is that libraries, museums, and churches all share a similar sort of ethos, to preserve and present to users what is significant and good by community standards, that is, what the discipline, culture and community thinks significant and good. This is what makes a library interesting and good for others to explore. 

The Significant and the Good. While through the years, some of my favorite students, my fellow readers, expressed disappointment that there were no good books in the library and my favorite faculty members boasted to me of visiting larger area libraries with new books and print collections, it appeared to administrators that no real harm was being done, either to the students or to the school, by not buying books, and condoning the suspension of all collection development activity except for the acquisition of subscription databases and a few independent newspapers and journals.

Certainly, many libraries, especially community colleges in Texas, are going in this direction, replacing libraries with learning centers, and making the MLS degree optional even for the director of these spaces—or in some cases, leaving library director and librarian positions vacant until SACS accreditation comes around, or turning former Librarian positions (MLIS required) into Library Assistant roles. Collections and collection development activity in libraries are becoming increasingly scarce, as are professional and good paying jobs, as acquisitions is done through large license agreements. 

Aggregator packages of ebooks have come to play a more significant role in the academic library. Previously, aggregator ebook packages were intended merely to supplement library collections, never to be the library’s collection. Admittedly, the average student might not perceive the shortcomings of ProQuest Academic Ebook Central or EBSCO ebooks to be a college or a university library’s book collection quite as acutely as myself, someone who teaches English literature, reads the New York Times, listens to NPR, watches PBS and reads books. I’m sure I fall into a certain shrinking cluster group of people who visit bookstores and is interested in national book awards. It takes someone knowledgeable about the disciplines and keeping up with scholarly publishing to know what isn’t in aggregator packages. Front-list titles, better titles, and titles in demand are never included in aggregator ebook packages. Like kid’s toys, the cooler stuff is deliberately omitted and sold separately. 

Only an educated person might notice or concern themselves with what is not there which really ought to be. 

Of course, the library can pay more to fill up it aggregated packages with better titles, picking out books title-by-title, but it may not be a good value proposition, because adding titles a la cart costs a lot more per title, and there is no way to know if it will make a difference. Adding selective content to aggregator packages often feels as if we are enhancing the user experience of the package, which we are, rather than enhancing the user experience of the library. If we meticulously add titles, no one even knows we have added them. This presents a disincentive to librarians’ doing collection development.

Users have no idea that the titles we add to an aggregator platform didn’t just come with the package, or the efforts and cost we have undertaken to add them to a vendor platform. The value add of collection development is imperceptible through our current systems.

Aggregators employ artificial intelligence for monetizing their content, for identifying what titles that are in demand, and just like any commodity, can predict how much each title might yield in the market at any given time. Better titles are strategically withheld from aggregator packages. Publishers know what is in demand, what not to put them into aggregator packages, because they want motivate libraries to buy these on top of the package at a premium price. I imagine they use a tool like what the airline industry uses to assess the value of titles. (ProQuest knows which texts are being used for a class. If a book becomes popular, it gets removed from the platform and a salesman tries to sell the book individually to the library the following year.)

For someone needing resources to write a paper for class, the ebook package is fine. For someone wanting to actually learn about the discipline or conduct research, it is not fine. Shouldn’t the latter be the objective for all colleges? The inability to browse and display books by call number also creates a barrier to access.

As mentioned above, as a consequence of reduced budgets and/or shifting priorities towards serials and then toward online databases and digital formats, and then ceasing to buy print altogether, the same books remained on the shelves year after year with no new things added to them, forming a faded, dusty repository of limited scholarly value or aesthetic appeal, a collection gone to seed.

Low circulation of print and not the library’s failure to maintain collections, was used as evidence to confirm, should anyone think to question it, that books at a university library were not cost effective and no longer needed to support the university’s academic programs.

This same story played out, not just at my library, but at countless academic libraries across the country. Of course, changes to the way that libraries are assessed contributed to the neglect for library collections. Under a corrosive but surprisingly common management philosophy in higher education, one which promises greater accountability of public funds,101 usage of library resources were dismissed as incidental, not providing sufficient evidence of learning leading to student success, at least as success was defined by the institution. Under an outcomes assessment approach, one even encouraged by ACRL (Association for College and Research Libraries) to demonstrate value, usage of library resources was deemed an “output,” not an “outcome,” and judged to be irrelevant to the mission of the library and the school.

Buildings, Not Books:
Anti-Intellectualism and The New Academic Librarianship

fter decades of research during the 20th century extolling the educational benefits of books, libraries and reading on studentsand the detrimental impact of booklessness particularly on minority and disadvantaged communitiesit would be hard not to consider the “new academic librarianship”which emphasizes “buildings, not books,” to be a kind of scam, the proverbial emperor without clothes.

Why would legislators across the country allocate hundreds of millions to erect new buildings called “libraries” with nothing inside of them, and moreover nothing meant to go inside of them in the future, or anything more for online resources? Why are proposals to build libraries without books or collections receiving such generous legislative, local and donor support? 

Some institutions not only constructed prominent bookless buildings called libraries, but also moved their print holdings into doomsday-like facilities equipped with robotic storage and retrieval systems,102 as if they were storing gold bricks, weapons-grade plutonium or antidotes to smallpox, instead of old textbooks from the 60’s and 70s, and many other things which would have been weeded under good collection management practices. Unfortunately, mixed up with them (I looked at their catalog) are viable, seminal works in literature, history, philosophy and art, perhaps never again to see the light of day.

A peek inside the ARC (Automated Retrieval System) at University of Central Florida’s John Hitt Library, which, when complete, will house all of the library’s print holdings.

 

The automated retrieval of a zoology textbook from the 1970s in a promotional video103 used to demonstrate book retrieval using the ARC. In the UCF library system and many others, books have been eliminated from the library to make room for collaborative study spaces. Interesting that this unattractive text was used to as marketing to demonstrate the benefit of this multi-million dollar system.

Paradoxically, while print books—and perhaps any book outside a textbook—are deemed as being of little value to a college education,104 and from surveys we know that such a minute part of the academic library’s acquisitions budget (if anything is allocated to them),58 at the legislative level, there still seems to be unlimited funding for technology for the manipulation, storage, retrieval, securing and tracking of print materials, such as robotic storage and retrieval systems (RSRMs) and offsite storage facilities; RFID automated material handling systems and smart gates; self-check out machines; dynamic glass and sophisticated computerized LED lighting systems to ensure that the natural light entering the building never perceptibly fluctuates (which might be distracting to readers of print, but not those on screens). Why invest so much in print technology when libraries themselves seem to be no longer investing in it?

With many new libraries, books are eliminated from the floor, with the entirely of the stacks placed into offsite storage, or discarded, reduced to whatever can be incorporated into the design like wallpaper, set into nooks and shelving units in low traffic areas to lend atmosphere, placed in areas where one might have formerly expected to see potted plants. They do not meet the viewer’s gaze. They are marginalized, just part of the décor. There is no expectation anyone would want to engage with them. 

There may be no books displayed or placed in prominent places in the new library. There is no assumption that people would want to see new books when they walk in the doors of a library, or would find them more interesting or valuable, say, than views of others occupying the space, or views out the window, or absolutely nothing. Most astonishing to me, there was also no sense that the library had an obligation to provide authoritative, visible collections, representing knowledge in the disciplines, as part of its academic mission. 

While new libraries are all different of course, a common theme which unites them as a new library is not the age of the facility, but an ideological emphasis on collaborative and individualized work space, over and against the intellectual space which was the 20th century library, which was about literacy and knowledge through collections.

Seeking to redeem the new space, and to a lesser extent the librarians within it, is a bizarre theory that sitting-and-talking space—termed “collaboration”—is the new locus of library learning, the seat of intellectual exchange, rather than readers engaging with authoritative collections and scholarly resources. The librarian is re-envisioned as a “collaboration facilitator.” This new pedagogy exonerates the new facility from having to concern itself with the practical details of how the library without visible collections, even online, will actually encourage learning and awareness of resources. The most valued “resources” become the other people who are there.

The response to booklessness and collectionlessness by new library advocates is not that “the collection is online”—because that would negate the rationale for a space in the first place. Such a response might also risk criticism that, even though the stacks are rapidly disappearing or already gone, the library’s collections really aren’t online, for libraries do not yet have the technology at their disposal which can present digital collections to its users as collections so they can be browsed.

In addition, current and more popular titles are often excluded from packages licensed to libraries.

Nor can we assess the impact of abandoning of collections as a construct for searchable digital aggregations of publisher content, where no discernible investment effort has been made them except for making them available, should someone wish to access them. While all libraries are different—students and faculty in STEM fields may not have the same needs as those in the Humanities or Social Sciences—the abandonment of visible collections is bad for business, both the business of librarianship and the business of the university. 

If book learning and reading are considered irrelevant to higher education, perhaps we might question the value of all scholarship, publishing, and academic credentials, and treat them as the mere Vanities many people already believe them to be, especially as the Open Access movement increasingly shifts costs from the institution to the author in ways that seem to be becoming closer and closer to pay-to-publish schemes anyway.

By eliminating visible collections, we are suspending disbelief in the possibility of reading, education and scholarship to positively impact the lives of our students. The elimination of the library is just a canary in the coalmine. 

New Library or No Library?
The Need for Business and Functional Requirements for Academic Libraries

Within librarianship, it is puzzling why so many librarians are willing to embrace the new academic library, with its various study spaces, collaborative learning staircases, and lack of emphasis on reading resources or publications, as signs of progress.106 

What compels them to do so? Do they really believe in this brave new world of librarianship? 

Is literacy even a goal of new libraries?

How are new libraries to be assessed, especially compared to the old? 

What makes a library a library in this Digital Age, and beyond this, what makes it a good library, as opposed to some other kind of entity or service (e.g., a building with tables and chairs, a search engine, a book repository, a computer lab, a help desk or a student center)? The question is important, and not just for librarians. Since public dollars in the tens of millions typically support the construction of new libraries, should there not be some common understanding of what libraries are in the 21st century, what they are for, what they are expected to do, and what makes them good? 

Of course, the academic library now provides over 95% of its resources online,107 but how does this new space prompt users to engage with these online resources? How does the facility promote resource awareness and use? And, if the expectation is that the library is online, what should that user experience be like to encourage learning? What should the user experience of the online library be like? 

As university libraries go bookless, what defines the library as a library, or the user experience of one? What are our standards for library goodness?108 Library goodness puts into perspective that the library has valuable outcomes which are (1) unique to libraries, but which (2) are not directly measurable in terms of its outcomes. 

Library goodness acknowledges that the greatest benefits of the library are immeasurable, learning objectives not defined in advance, which is not to say that they are worthless or without value, but that its value might be judged through qualitative or indirect means. The impact of a good library is not measurable, but the impact of collections on knowledge, perception, perspective, thought, learning, literacy (including cultural literacy), creativity, identity formation, experience, opinion, judgment, behavior, action, critical thinking, culture, professional competency, sense of community, inspiration, self-discovery, meaning creation and truth.

On the Necessity of Business and Functional Requirements
for Achieving “Academic Library Goodness.”

As much as Library and Information Science purports to be an empirical and evidence-based discipline, there is no consensus as to what our buildings, our collections (if we need them anymore), our services, or our user interfaces should be at this time, or generally what defines a good user experience of a library in the 21st century.

For college and academic libraries, there are really no prescriptive, qualitative standards or business requirements for libraries, even to assert:

  • the library, including its facilities and websites, should encourage resource awareness and use;
  • the library must promote literacy (including cultural and professional literacy);
  • the library by definition supports “success” as defined not just by the institution, but also by its students;
  • the library strives to expose students to disciplinary and professional knowledge beyond what is needed to support classroom instruction;
  • the library must support the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge in subject areas relevant to the mission of the school;
  • the library must add educational and scholarly value to the institution through the appropriate care, management, access and display of authoritative collections, in print and online;
  • the library must provide some mechanism to keep students and faculty informed about new and emerging scholarly activity in their areas of interest and specialization.

These are some bullets I’ve pulled off the top of my head, just to get the ball rolling. I imagine others will have thoughts based on their own experiences.

Once the brainstorming stops, the work of developing business (technical, functional and nonfunctional) requirements begins. In an ideal world, our faculties, our websites, or systems, our methods of assessment, and hopefully our funding, should be perfectly aligned to achieve whatever ends are determined to be the library’s mission. 

Academic libraries are in need of business and functional requirements of their own, that is, existing outside of the institution, in small part because many have experienced the detrimental impact of library leadership defining the library only according to hard evidence of measurable-learning-outcomes-of-student-success-as-defined-by-the-institution. It’s a beanbag throw at a carnival, meaning we waste a lot of time and energy throwing beanbags at a really small hole, and the prize isn’t that good.

Outcomes-based assessment is what drives the university today, and admittedly there is little that critical thinkers, scholars, or anyone else can do about it. As others have described,109 outcomes assessment initiatives in higher education have not always led to continuous improvement or greater accountability, but to continuous cost cutting measures for anything whose impact cannot be explicitly and measurably demonstrated to benefit “student success” as defined by the institution (mainly, degree completion). Librarians should not all rush to become “collaboration facilitators.”23 We just need stronger leadership and better advocacy in the academic library world. Accrediting agencies and library software vendors are our two big sticks. 

We need library facilities and websites which are designed to encourage resource awareness and use, and we need library systems which help us to manage, promote and market our collections online. We need assessment based on library goals and objectives, with the implicit understanding that a good library with strong collections is good for the institution.

The assumption in academic librarianship has always been that students would not be adequately prepared, become educated people or professionals in their field just from classroom instruction and assignment completion alone. At better institutions, the library was on equal footing with the classroom, and students were expected to take greater responsibility for their own education. The collection was there to support assignment completion, research and self-directed learning.

However, under outcomes-based assessment tools, collection usage doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count as a learning outcome, and therefore, the library’s collections and resources do not matter, either. By advising that academic libraries commit themselves to outcomes assessment, knowing full well that collection use is not an outcome, ACRL has not done anything protect libraries from the notion that everything we do or that everything a student learns in school has to count toward degree completion or else some other measurable outcome. A college that is just about degree completion and not education is what we once referred to as a “diploma mill.”

Since 2011, ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education shifted away from a prescriptive model for what makes a library a good library to an outcomes-based assessment model in which the library establishes its own measurable outcomes to fit within the institution’s assessment outcomes.111 There is nothing in ACRL’s Standards to ensure quality or quantity of library collections, formulas which had been provided in library standards until 1995.112 

Regional accrediting agencies like the NEASC (even in New England, where I would expect the standards to be the highest in the country)112 and SACS in south, set minimum standards to which a school must comply, including its library. All require evidence of the provision of adequate and appropriate learning / information resources to support the mission of the school.114 There is no definition of “adequacy” in terms of prescriptive measures or formulas, as there once were. Some require the library to provide tangible evidence of student learning outcomes, typically supported by evidence of library instruction and other forms of direct student engagement, which ignores the role of the collection (any format) in student learning and support for research.

This has allowed the academic library to be redefined in the following ways:

  • as a collaborative and private space for meeting and working (should students need a place to go);
  • as a service to provide instruction and research assistance (should students need help searching for relevant articles or citing sources);
  • a search application to discover resources and access licensed content (should students need to look for something, or access something, presumably that their professors told them to look for);
  • as a static repository of old books and documents (special collections);
  • all or any combination of the above.

How a collaborative space manages to generate measurable learning outcomes, while collections use and stack space do not, is somewhat puzzling, but the answer is there is often asserted to be a connection between “time spent studying in the library” and higher GPAs or degree completion. Prior to COVID-19, this connection between a “space” and “learning” was one which institutions could take to the bank. 

None of this really has much to do with what makes an academic library a good library or even necessarily an optimal learning environment for college students or scholars. It is not indicative of what is taught in library school programs about our core values, collection management, user engagement and building community, all of which form the essence of a good academic library experience. 

In academic librarianship, the extent to which a library succeeds in inspiring intellectual inquiry, independent learning (learning outside of the classroom) and cultivating knowledge is the extent to which an academic library succeeds as a good library. 

The work of the librarian is to create and maintain a context-rich learning environment consisting of intellectual and cultural works reflecting disciplinary and cultural knowledge—presenting what others in the field think significant and good—so that meaning-creation and independent learning by its users can occur. 

If academic libraries are to be interesting and valuable to both students and scholars, and remain viable into the 21st century, they must provide compelling, unique, intellectual and personal experiences, and employ modern marketing techniques like any other online business today which have successfully transitioned from brick and mortar to online.

Our business and functional requirements for our facilities and our systems, as well as our methods of assessment, must reflect the library’s own mission, goals and objectives beyond being an empty space or a scholarly search engine.

Discovery is not a “Digital Academic Library.”

believe that good libraries exist to provide opportunities for users to discover common cultural, disciplinary and professional knowledge, what others think significant and good in their respective communities. It conveys what is good, reflecting intellectual achievement and shared value. This is how it motivates creativity and inquiry.

The experience of visually navigating titles hierarchically arranged into a library collection is commonly referred to as “browsing,” but it would be a mistake to associate browsing with lack of seriousness, intensity, or intellectual value to scholars and students trying to learn about an academic area or discipline.

Support for browsing collections of publications the library stands behind, arranged by discipline, specialty, field and topic, is a fundamental part of the user experience of a good academic library. Librarianship isn’t about books as physical objects, or preference for particular reading formats, but about intellectual objects, publication activity (which some have called “scholarly communication”) and presenting these in a way that enhances their value to scholarly audiences. Scholars need to see their disciplines visualized; it is the function of the academic librarian to help them see the publishing activity disciplines, to present and preserve scholarly content.

If the collection is good and arranged appropriately, browsing is learning.

The collection itself is an important form of scholarly communication revealing what the discipline thinks good or important to know. We cannot communicate effectively as a library if our content is invisible, not organized by the priorities of the discipline, or not maintained. Librarianship is curatorship, not presenting what we think is good, but representing to others what the academic community thinks significant and good to know. 

At this time, libraries have no efficient mechanism for providing users with an online browsing experience to compensate for the lack of physical collections and elimination of browsable stacks, at least when it comes to ebooks and ejournals. This is because academic librarians cannot sort, arrange, order, harvest or evaluate collections of titles in their inventories without call numbers in the metadata and databases configured to sort by LC Classification. For the most part, the digital content we license in quantity from publishers and aggregators do not have call numbers, thus limiting the design of our newer systems to being efficient resource acquisitions management tools, but not good collection management tools. 

These days, we may casually say to users that “the collection” or “the library” is online, but what most libraries offer to users is not a collection in the traditional library sense, or in any sense, anymore than what turns up in a Google Search is a collection or a library.

The academic library collection is not really online. The resources we license from vendors are available in abundance online, but the library’s collections, as collections, are not. This seems to be a problem on many levels, for us and for our users, who now cannot get an overview of publishing activity in their disciplines through the library. There is not only “no library in the library” in the library space, but there is no library in the library online either, at least from an academic librarian’s perspective. 

We just provide the ability to search scholarly content, but there is no academic or disciplinary context provided for any of it. The experience is impersonal; through our systems we cannot even display new books or a selection of items on our home page which might be of interest to our communities. 

What we offer is a searchable aggregation of licensed academic content, a search application, one which, for many reasons, provides insufficient visibility for ebooks57 and no support for browsing collections, either browsing or collections of digital content. In addition, resources are often simultaneously available on the publisher’s own platforms, meaning there is no reason for the user to necessarily go to the library’s website or through the discovery portal.

From a user experience, discovery provides insufficient visibility for the tremendous amount of content large libraries acquire on behalf of their users. Despite the library’s paying vastly more for academic ebooks than their print equivalent, digital content is not all that visible through discovery unless someone looks for the item. 

Students go through their programs experiencing only a small fraction of the library’s vast inventories. I have a million relevant results, but my screen at most displays only ten items at a time. I know, I know, we are supposed to teach people to narrow their topics and filter. But ten results at a time is not an optimal or intuitive way to experience a medium to large academic library. Whether one is searching Harvard University or Haverford College, the experience is identical, ten records at a time, results not proportional to the holdings or records returned. Furthermore, the content discovered in discovery is often over the reading level and too narrowly focused for undergraduates. Compared to the collections which discovery has replaced, which could be more finely-tuned toward specific audiences, it may not really be an effective pedagogical tool given the millions spend on licenses to make scholarly content available. 

Discovery is a wonderful research tool, but to me, it is not a library online, that is an online library. I want to be able to see and assess my collections as collections, for example, to retrieve all the titles (books, ebooks and ejournals) that I have in the area of, say, 16th century English literature (arranged by author, title, criticism about the title, etc.) or fine art, or printmaking, or ancient philosophy, and place them in a logical order.

I want to visualize and experience the collection as a scholarly collection, identifying strengths and gaps, new titles and old ones. I want to sort and assemble all my books and ebooks in some meaningful order together, so I can organize them by discipline, sub-discipline, topic and title. I want a shelf-list. I want users to experience items placed within their disciplinary context. I want to be able to weed my ebook collections, seeing what items have been superseded or dated. I want to send around system-generated new title lists of books and ebooks arranged by call number. I want to manage my collection as a collection, not as vendor / publisher “inventory” or entitlements.

Even if the library acquires millions in licensed content, the visual experience of it is the same as one with a very small collection. A library consisting of ten million volumes or ten thousand provides fundamentally the same user experience online. Through our UI, the amount of content a library has may hardly be perceptible. Library interfaces typically display, at most, ten items at a time to ensure legibility on the mobile screens. On a horizontal axis, such as a laptop, one may see only three or four items at a time:

View of the library catalog from a 14″ laptop. Because of the inability to view more than just a few results at a time in response to a query, even where the user is told there may be thousands of relevant results, much of the library’s entitlements lack visibility.

This design is intended to be mobile friendly, but most people sitting down to do library research are doing it though a laptop or desktop computer. As our collections have gone online, this standard interface, which was fine for locating the call number of a book on a shelf, is disproportionate the amount of content we have, or would like to put in front of the user as a digital library. 

Also, when users perform searches in discovery, substituting a synonym or slight changes to the query can produce very different results, making the user feel as if his research is always incomplete. While bibliographic and authority control in discovery is complex topic which warrants a separate article, search engines are semantically dependent, while retrieval through a classification scheme is not. It’s not an either/or but a both/and. I will speak more about discovery interfaces below, and one alternative to classification for the organization of bibliographic data. 

As the physical collection is rapidly disappearing, we must address the limitations of our user interfaces and fact that our online catalogs and discovery tools are being asked “to be” the online library, a purpose for which they were not designed and a function which they are not equipped to fulfill.

For the online library to be successful as a library, new user interfaces must be developed which support virtual browsing, online marketing, and greater collection visibility as a collection which reflects scholarly values and value. 

Dissenting Voices. As Sherlen and McAllister write, it is easy to ignore the voices of librarians at conferences, and at the university, who disagree with visionary schemes to eliminate books and convert the library into little more than media labs and group study spaces.98 

If the strategic direction of university libraries is guided to a great degree by the goals and priorities of their directors, then an examination of those values is warranted. It is important to assure a university library—under the direction of the library director’s leadership—continues to properly align with the mission to serve the university’s research and curricular needs. But a trend in current library leadership values and priorities can arguably become disconnected from the library’s traditional service mission to university research. This trend is exemplified by the popularity among university library administrators to direct their libraries to repurpose budget funds and floor space away from traditional book and other tangible collections toward new services such as digital project services, local e-publishing, expanded media labs, and group project facilities (Blumenthal 2005; Gladden 2018).

It is common for architects design new library buildings without placing any importance on physical collections, nor offer any solution for how to employ new technologies to increase user engagement or awareness of the library’s online resources and support browsing within the physical space. 

What seems to me a chief business requirement for a good library, to encourage resource use, is not even necessarily a design consideration for new academic libraries today. But just like any retail operation, we must be able to effectively market and merchandise our resources. The physical and online library should both constitute content-rich learning environments respectively, not empty spaces.

Support for collections. The library’s collection, as much as the classroom, is a pedagogical construct which encourages knowledge in and of the disciplines. Its objective is to enrich the learning and the intellectual life of its users, not just by providing access to needed resources, but by presenting to users a coherent body of knowledge and turning them on to what is significant and good in their field so they in turn can become educated. 

It is not a passive book repository or an aggregation of resources, but an effort to provide a snapshot of what the discipline and other educated people regard as significant and good. It reflects community standards for what is significant and good.

The collection seeks to expose scholars and students to new and significant titles, ideas, authors and topics that they might not otherwise know about or think to look for. It has both a marketing and a pedagogical function. The college library collection reinforces learning in the classroom and often makes classroom learning (the education he is receiving at the school) more valuable and meaningful. Ideally, collections encourage students to go beyond the classroom to obtain knowledge on their own, becoming more competitive in the workforce or pursue applications for the knowledge they have acquired in the classroom.

Good collections, visibly displayed, also honor and value the publications in them. They demonstrate care for the student and consideration for the scholar, and also for the scholarly enterprise. The art and science of situating and presenting cultural objects within their most appropriate social, intellectual and historical context within a collection, is what also makes academic titles more valuable and interesting to students and scholarly audiences to browse and explore. 

Today, the curated collection is likely to be negatively portrayed as construct of traditional librarianship, or some elitist activity, where librarians are the gatekeepers of knowledge who limit access, rather than affording it through professional judgement, knowledge about publications and discipline, and judicious allocation of the budget. Naysayers will say that: “The library collection is built on speculation. It is created and shaped by people who often know their disciplines quite well, but are unable to guess with real precision the exact needs of the library’s specific patrons.”117

This negative depiction has only arisen in light of alternative modes of acquisition for electronic resources encouraged by vendors, where librarians license tremendously large packages of resources in bulk, or by PDA programs where oftentimes casual user behavior triggers costly purchases for items unlikely to be used again or which duplicates content already owned by the library. I also understand that the idea of collections and a librarian as a curator of content is often treated derisively in the age of text search, relevance-ranking, Big Deals and PDA. Many in my own field assert that the idea of a curated collection is obsolete. Why do we need anyone to curate content for users in the 21st century? The answer is both that we must not allow vendors control over our acquisitions, and second, that we add scholarly value by presenting an item within the context of its discipline.

We cannot provide or convey value without content curation, appearing to invest intellectually in the goodness of our own content.

Maintaining strong, quality collections, in anticipation of use, was once regarded as a pre-eminent service academic librarians provided to their user communities, and the way libraries demonstrated responsibility and accountability for their budgets.

Rather than being done away with, the need for collection management tools are more important than ever precisely because acquisitions is automated. If the collection management tools are not available, we may end up paying a lot of money for open source content, things that are dated, a whole lot of foreign imprints, obscure things which have nothing to do with our curriculum or community, dated titles and things of poor value. We may be buying the same titles from multiple vendors. Collection management tools must also be there so items that are of greatest value to our user community can be displayed on our websites. We must provide users with a way of browsing our collections by discipline.

Books presented not in any particular order in a library context, dated and superseded titles, for example, signifies a lack of care with regard to the collection, lack of care for the user, and/or lack of knowledge about the discipline and lack of care for how institutional resources are being allocated.

Ad hoc collections of random academic content, or collections presented in no particular order, a volume 2 without a volume 1, demonstrate a similar kind of neglect, lack of care for the collections, a disregard for scholarship, and lack of care for the user. Having no way to organize our content by subject and discipline is bad for our business as academic libraries. Being able to retrieve and sort by classification number is what I consider to be a fundamental business requirement. It forms the basis for collections and collection evaluation needed for good stewardship.

A collection means that users can predict with some degree of accuracy what will be in the library when they need it and to keep them up to date with new things. However, as the library’s budget is not unlimited, it would certainly be better to acquire what experts in the field think is good and significant at least as its core (libraries would always be able to buy what patrons wanted throughout the year) rather than allow vendors or uneducated people to drive the acquisitions process for higher education any more than we would have them teaching the classes. 

Library collections consist of the items that the discipline or generally educated people think significant, presented in their most appropriate contexts, so they make sense to other educated users. Presenting visibly curated collections of titles arranged by discipline is our ideal. It is an important part of libraries’ ability to add value and encourage learning.

Classification is the key to be able to analyze and assess a collection, so it is significant when this functionality is dropped, missing, or no longer supported by the vendor of a library system, saying it is no longer needed. 

As our print collections have disappeared, our user interfaces have remained item retrieval tools, not able to offer the user experience of browsing a library collection online. Discovery systems, the library’s current UI, and its workflows, provide no support for browsing electronic collections by classification. This is reason alone some libraries might want to hold on to print a little longer, at least until our systems have evolved to be able to present browsable ebook collections online.

Good collections, visibly displayed, kept current and focused on student and faculty interests, help the library and the school create a sense of community and value surrounding academic achievement, the work of scholars and knowledge, and it is this same sense of value and appreciation for scholarship which keeps students interested and engaged in the university’s own academic programs. 

Support for collaboration. While libraries should support collaborative learning, as they have always done, I am not convinced that collaboration is more valuable or significant than the sort of learning librarians encouraged through engagement with significant titles and good collections. Our method of collaborating with students and faculty previously involved cultivating a mutual appreciation for the intellectual and cultural works which comprised the disciplines. It meant recognition of flagship journals and seminal works. The collection, comprised of publications in the disciplines, was what established common ground for collaboration to occur. Scholars do not need a space for collaboration, for they can collaborate online.

In terms of outreach to students, librarians want to encourage literacy, reading and consulting authoritative sources, not consultation with peers. Maybe collaborative learning works better in Denmark,118 to tackle real world problems, but not so much at American universities.

Of course, students want to study with classmates and peers around them, especially working late into the night when other places are closed. This is a good thing. Those who study with others may be more successful academically and less lonely, and therefore more likely to stay in school. But good libraries are also a good thing for students, and being a “space” has nothing to do with being a library. Students could just as easily be anywhere—a student center, café, bar or in the dorms—and have the exact same learning outcomes as if they studied in the library.

Support for creative ideation. Students attending a college or university want to belong to something larger, to forge personal and professional identities. Provided it is good, the library can and should be an important part of creating that identity as well as their discovery of new possibilities and interests which they didn’t know they had. It is this positive vision of a successful future self, and reinforcement for a sense of value for the knowledge they are acquiring in classes, is in large part what keeps students in school. 

Ideally, the library provides students not just with just what is needed to complete a degree. Apart from supporting research, a library should present to students what they need to be successful in their field or discipline, and also help them to become educated, interesting, creative and engaged people. The library doesn’t simply support success as merely defined by degree completion, but presents students with myriad individualized pathways to success in life. 

A good academic library supports not only student success as defined by the institution, but also as defined by the student.

It should turn them on to things they would never think to look for, and reinforce goals beyond their degree to motivate independent learning. It should be a window onto the world.

Funding co-curricular resources which appeal to student interests is an small investment the college or university can make which can play a significant role in keeping students engaged in school. Once upon a time, I began taking computer programming courses at the community college. I didn’t care about “enterprise anything,” the focus of these workforce-oriented courses. I cared about developing digital libraries and natural language interfaces.

While I was studying programming and digital libraries, my outlet was the academic library, mainly the Rice Fondren Library, where I could access many good books and journals on topics relevant to my academic interests. It also let me feel that on some level I was part of a larger community, even if only vicariously skirting along the outer edges of it and looking in.

Whatever the particular demographic, a good library will speak to the hopes, dreams and personal aspirations of a wide variety students in ways that their textbooks and course curricula do not. It is a place not just for completing coursework, but for what I call, “creative ideation.”

This is good for the university’s bottom line and for campus life.

Browsing / Collections as Business Requirements for Academic Libraries.

he libraries I remember were vibrant, interesting and hopeful places which featured works which other people found interesting and good (which is in part what made them interesting and good to me as places to browse and explore). Browsing a good library collection let me know:

  • what was newly published in my field 
  • what was valued by others in my field
  • the larger disciplinary context for a work 
  • related items in my area of interest
  • historic trends in the discipline over time 
  • an overview of what was available in a discipline, field, specialty or topic
  • interests that I didn’t know I had, things I would never have thought to search for, or even consider. 

The library was formerly committed to showcasing what was significant and good.

Today, academic library systems, or our user interfaces, do not do any of these things, at least not very well.

For example, where I used to be able to use my system to generate new title lists to share with faculty or put into an RSS feed—and put this out to my website—this is now no longer possible. Even if we have good content, we cannot market it effectively because—shocking for a library system—we have no way of placing electronic titles acquired through packages into a meaningful and pleasing order. 

Physical collections of titles, with titles selected individually according to their merits, are gone or going away, replaced with searchable aggregations of academic content, scholarly resources licensed in bulk from vendors whose business is the commodification, packaging and licensing of digitized publisher content to academic libraries. This content cannot be reassembled into a library collection because it is not cataloged according to library standards. The academic library’s leading system developer is also a “content aggregator.” Through these interfaces, which all large and medium-sized academic libraries use, there is nothing to replace the user experience of browsing the stacks. Classification/call numbers, which formed the intellectual backbone of academic library collections and supported browsing, are also gone or going away.

Within our most sophisticated and advanced library systems, there is surprisingly little support for managing, assessing or presenting our digital or hybrid collections as collections to our users. It is not possible even to generate a shelf-list of ebooks and ejournals in a call number range. ALMA, the leading system, merely treats the 050 field (LC Classification) merely like an alphanumeric field.

Library systems are adept at ingesting publisher provided metadata, but the industry has not made support for browsing by LC Classification or virtual browsing a priority, despite the fact that numerous studies suggest that browsing collections offers a uniquely defining experience (that is, the experience is unique to libraries) which is meaningful to students and scholars.

Browsing is especially important in the early stages of research, especially stimulating it in the first place. Providing some reliable mechanism for browsing library collections onlinevirtual browsingis to my mind essential for providing good library services, and even more so now that the physical collections are disappearing. Although written in 2012, Lynema’s “Virtual Browse: Designing User-Oriented Services for Discovery of Related Resources” provides an excellent overview of experimental user interfaces which leverage virtual browsing, including images of browsing interfaces which are no longer around. 119 

It isn’t necessarily the print format or the physical book that is significant for academic librarianship—I’m not hung up on the book format—but the presentation of visible collections which reflect the scholarly activity in the disciplines, and the proper placement of publications into their broader social, intellectual and historical context, according to library industry best practices and standards.

Visibility is an important attribute of value. What has value is visible, and what is visible is more highly valued, and more likely to be valued by others. 

The ability to browse visible collections, and all of the benefits of this in terms of enhancing scholarly value, creating a sense of community around scholarship, and promoting engagement with resources, is a core business requirement of any good library, whether physical or digital. Print books may be optional for some academic libraries, but highly visible and visibly maintained collections are not.

While wandering through the stacks and browsing is what people report liking most about their experience of the academic library, browsing collections of ebooks and ejournals onlinea virtual stacksis not supported by any modern library system today. What we offer in its place is a Web service called “discovery” which searches a centralized index of normalized metadata records of the books and articles to which the institution is entitled based on ownership or license agreements, generally including large aggregations of content. Based on a user’s query, the service returns relevance-ranked results. In most instances, the bibliographic records (MARC records) and the linking mechanisms to sources are now maintained by vendors. The advantages to the library are scalability, being able to acquire large aggregations of content by activating them in discovery, and, in theory, eliminating the need for cataloging.  It supports newer, more efficient models of acquisition and resource management. Today, one librarian can effectively do what used to require the coordinated efforts of many. In less than 15 minutes, a library can acquire and make available (to authorized users) 130,000 academic ebooks provided by an aggregator. Discovery has been a game changer, especially for libraries which have a lot of buying power.

Discovery is also particularly advantageous for journal articles and serial content which must be continuously updated. Not only is there not need for a Cataloger, but there is no need for a Serials Librarian. With books eliminated, there will be no need for Circulation, either. 

Rather than assuming discovery is simply a more modern and intuitive experience for users, we might ask how well do discovery interfaces support the library’s “business requirements.”

For example:

  • How well does discovery (search engine) alone encourage user engagement and resource use? 
  • What impact does collectionlessness and booklessness, in both our physical and virtual spaces, have on perception of the library, its librarians, scholarship or the behavior of users?
  • How might visible, browsable collections of ebooks be offered online and in our physical spaces, even through tokens or books which stay in place in the library, but can be download to be read (virtual fulfillment)? ‘
  • What are the advantages and unique opportunities to the user of being able to browse collections?
  • How might providing visible collections and increasing collection visibility assist the library with marketing efforts?
  • How does discovery impact the perceived value of the items in our care?
  • How do we properly assess the value of library collections within institutional assessment plans?

From Outcomes Assessment to Functional and Technical Requirements for Academic Libraries.

In the next section, I will do a deep dive into current library technology, mainly academic library systems, and specifically our discovery systems, to function as a digital library in the 21st century. I will explore ebook metadata and the standard user interface, as well as exploring other user interfaces which go beyond discovery.

Given that the library has acquired access to relevant resources, is access alone though a search portal sufficient to meet the academic and educational objectives of a library? Should it satisfy accreditation requirements? Can we be successful creating and sustaining educated, knowledgeable, communities of learners merely by providing access to relevant resources, but not browsable collections?

A library collection is special type of scholarly communication about scholarly communication.

As a form of communication, a collection must be visible or perceptible as a collection to convey meaning and value. A collection must have intentionality. That is, the items in it must appear to have been selectively chosen for a specific purpose or audience based on shared or common values, and their parts must have a meaningful relationship to one other, forming a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Good library collections have a rationality, predictability and pleasing consistency to them which allows its users to anticipate with some accuracy what is and will be in the collection (good collections are often said to anticipate use). 

What tools, technologies and strategies are in place for the academic library to present the library’s entitlements and holdings as collections to scholarly audiences today?

Do libraries still offer the experience of a collection, or are collections themselves, in any format, now considered obsolete, as some librarians have asserted?120 121 Is the provision of relevant resources sufficient to meet the goals and objectives of the college and the university library? What are our library professional standards for an academic library online, and can librarians even have any standards, given consolidation in the library software industry, seemingly irreversible changes to acquisitions workflows, and the fact that librarians are exercising less control over their systems, their collections, their metadata, and their user interfaces than ever before? 

In this first section, I discuss the limitations of our most widely used academic library system from both a traditional (collections-based) library approach and a modern marketing perspective. I emphasize the continued relevance of library collections in the Digital Age. The second is about new models of assessment in academic libraries, with special attention given to the “outcomes assessment movement” in higher education and institutional assessment plans, and their impact on how libraries are being assessed.

Institutional assessment are commonly based upon a “business objective” or outcomes assessment model, a management approach borrowed from the business world and applied to education in the 1980’s to ensure greater accountability in education.122 Where library-centric objectives like “collections use,” “independent learning,” and “support for scholarly research” fall into this model is unclear, because although libraries support learning, we have no pre-defined learning objectives and the impact of libraries on literacy and reading, or a way this might be assessed, is also uncertain. The first one, collections use, has been dismissed in library literature as being a mere output, not an outcome,123 and the latter two, or anything similar to them, are not measurable. The issue is not just an intellectual or philosophical one—what one considers to be an “outcome” vs. an “output.”

At many institutions, budgetary appropriations are tied to specific objectives which must be be assigned either to some measurable scholastic outcome (for example, higher GPAs) or business outcomes (impact on enrollment, retention, and completion). This often puts the academic library in a very difficult and precarious position. 

In trying to manage by objectives and align the library operationally to the goals and objectives of the classroom or to the parent institution, which our professional association advises in place of standards,124 it is tempting to sacrifice the library’s own intangible goals and ideals to achieve greater cost-savings to the university. 

Perhaps we might want to question to ask if an outcomes assessment model is necessarily a fitting or an appropriate one for an academic library to begin with, or an institution of higher education for that matter. Are we going to suggest that the only acceptable form of learning or knowledge in higher education is that which has predefined answers or performance indicators or known outcomes? Isn’t the whole purpose of an academic library to encourage independent, self-directed learning and support for the creation of knowledge that is not yet known?

What one expects a college and academic library to be and how we justify ourselves in the Digital Age, whether the library exists merely as a study hall and a service for students to retrieve needed resources to complete assigned courseworka learning resource center modelor whether, as was traditionally the case, the library is conceptualized to have a broader mission and purpose of its own which extends beyond the classroom, e.g., to support independent learning, to stimulate intellectual inquiry, to support the student’s own definition of success (that is, whether or not it is tied to a specific class learning objective or degree requirement), to encourage reading, to facilitate the acquisition of disciplinary and professional knowledge, to support research and inculcate the habit of life-long learning among its graduatesand other immeasurable learning objectivesare now in question. 

Because of the widespread adoption of business objective / outcomes assessment models, and through it, the downgrading of the academic library into less ambitious learning resource / media centers, it is worth asking if in the 21st century, librarians in such sterile environments remain committed to the idea or ideal of learning beyond the classroom, and if so, do administrators at the university, Provosts and Academic Deans, acknowledge and support this mission?

It is also worth asking if, for the sake of public accountability, is it ethical to fund the construction of huge multi-million dollar buildings on campus called “libraries” in the funding request, but which have no collections inside of them or online, or no library business requirements? The campus gets a new building, but it doesn’t get a new library. 

In an academic setting, does our function as librarians begin and end with the acquisition and activation of resources in discovery systems, or is there an obligation on the part of librarians to market their collections, to stimulate demand for their resources, and to create environments whose purpose is to promote engagement with resources?

The last section more closely examines the physical environment and rhetoric, or theoretical framework, of the new academic library. The architecture of the new academic library has a pattern language all its own, often involving an emphasis on negative space and natural light (even if it is filtered through computerized glass walls to prevent glare, and modulated by computerized LED light strips to compensate for cloud cover), modern design, over-sized seating, grand facades, collaborative and private work spaces, big-stepped sitting staircases linked to learning, and tall glass windows. Unlike libraries of old, which encouraged academic intimacy, these new structures are designed on a grand, open scale. If there are books, they are often placed into low shelving units (or out of sight and where they are less likely to be used), so as not to interrupt the view of other users in the space or views of the outside world. There may be little inside of these new and newly renovated facilities, but the building or space is impressive, even if the purpose of its design seems mostly symbolic. 

Within the new librarianship, there is a discernible emphasis both on visual appearance of the facility, and orality, that is verbal exchanges resulting from open concept designs and collaboration in our newly transformed spaces; but the learning outcomes of these new designs are not documented, at least not in library literature. There are almost no post-occupancy evaluations of new academic libraries. For the sake of public accountability of the university and job security of its employees there would probably only be positive evidence presented, not an honest critical evaluation. The lack of standards or business requirements going into these projects, combined with lack of post-occupancy assessment, allows for new buildings to continue to be built which have nothing to do with being a library as opposed to a “space.”

I will discuss what has been proposed as the pre-eminent role of the 21st century librarian, a “collaboration facilitator,”23 within these new empty spaces, and other notions about modern learning environments rooted in oral culture—all of which have seemingly arisen in response to library booklessness, and the need to justify both new library building projects, and to a lesser extent librarians, at a time when books and collections in any format are going away. While architects emphasize openness, screens, technology, automation and empty space, these designs might also be construed and boring, impersonal, monotonous, stagnant, institutional, cold and stressful. The design most conducive to reflection, and associated with it, is one of intimacy: dens, cozy spaces, soft surfaces, organic materials, a varied color palette, variety within the space (capacity for exhibit and display), clerestory windows (for the placement of interesting things at eye level while bringing in light). “Academic intimacy” is the aesthetic of wanting to curl up with a book, and of scale and lighting most appropriate to the presentation of books. The library should be spacious, but not feel empty.

As I have already mentioned, the move to eliminate print collections at universities, and vocal proclamations of print’s imminent demise are not well-coordinated with available technologies to present library collections (as collections) virtually, to effectively promote resource awareness and use, or increase an appreciation for them as shared intellectual and cultural objects which have value.

In this age of Amazon, decision-makers, and even my fellow librarians, may be unaware of the limitations of modern library systems when it comes to collection management and display of electronic resources, which increasingly come and go from our inventories like sea shells rolling in the tides. 

Virtual classrooms and online libraries:
Do libraries have an educational pedagogy of their own?

ith the COVID-19 pandemic, students experienced surprising difficulty learning in online classrooms when their schools closed. Night after night, the news featured children expressing profound sadness that their school was closed, because online learning was too hard for them. They said that they just couldn’t learn online. My own child, who was not particularly bothered by school closures, exclaimed, “Mom, online learning is crap!” Many parents were at a loss. Given the ability for modern school-aged children to spend hours in front of a screen playing Minecraft and Pokémon and Call of Duty, why should the online classroom have proved so daunting to them? Probably for the same reason hours of Zoom meetings feel so draining to us. Sound quality is poor, there is a time lag, and none of it seems real so requires us to try harder to attend to it.

Perhaps learning would have been better through a more immersive virtual reality platform like Second Life, which many colleges experimented with years ago, with interest peaking in 2009. Around that time, several colleges, including even a few in Texas (it wasn’t just a California thing) built out entire virtual campuses, classrooms and even libraries online,126 127 128 129 and advocates extolled VR’s potential educational benefits.

Second Life still exists, but I don’t know who goes there these days. To my knowledge, there have been no revivals of Second Life classrooms in the wake of COVID-19. Some libraries apparently continue to live on in some capacity in Second Life, complete with card catalog, reference desk, reference librarian avatar and visible stacks—artifacts which, ironically, may not exist in the physical realm of their libraries anymore. An example of a Second Life library (albeit public) can be seen here:

Curiously, the effort to build virtual libraries online, complete with browsable stacks, has never been a goal for mainstream library system developers, even though this virtual library experience is what many ten years ago predicted the future of online libraries would be.130 The project is continuously taken up by universities. [ 34. Lynema, Emily, et. al. “Virtual Browse: Designing User-Oriented Services for Discovery of Related Resources.” Library Trends, 2012, Vol.61 (1), p. 218-233. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/34605/61.1.lynema.pdf?sequence=2] and abandoned.

It is likely that the trend in academia toward the development of virtual campuses, and by association, their libraries, was curtailed by iPhones, the need to design responsive, lightweight platforms for viewing on mobile devises and smaller screens, rather than on  immersive virtual worlds. Perhaps it just struck everyone as immature, like building a university in Minecraft and expecting people to take it seriously. (Also, when virtual libraries peaked twelve years ago, the ebook market was not nearly as mature as today.)

Where it was not possible years ago, today it might be possible to build out virtual libraries with readable ebooks, or make something like this replica of J.P. Morgan’s library functional, not just a Second Life mesh:

The JP Morgan Library in the VL platform, Second Life. This is just a skin or mesh, but other library additions in Second Life allow real books and archival boxes to be opened and viewed.

Or create one’s own library (with the extension pack):

A book display made by someone in Second Life in 2010, with books that can be opened and read. A Virtual Reality feature which allows students or professors to make their own libraries or bookshelves for others to explore might be a very popular add on to a library automation system at a university.

While these early efforts to graphically recreate the physical stacks in virtual environments using video game technology may appear to trivialize the research process—it does rather remind one of Minecraftthe importance of serendipitous browsing and discovery to research, as one could the physical stacks, particularly at the early stages of the research process, has been somewhat documented,131 as is the perception among librarians for the perceived need to create a better platform for browsing in an academic environment, now that accessible collections are rapidly disappearing from libraries.132

As Cook writes, “It is incumbent upon librarians to take seriously the role of serendipity in the early part of the information search process, and what may be lost as a corollary result of the ongoing shift away from physical research materials to online research.”133 While universities are experimenting with Oculus systems (requires a headset) and VR technology to enhance the study of archaeology an architecture, Cook concludes that while “physical collections are quickly disappearing to make room for collaborative learning spaces . . . the books-on-a-virtual-shelf conceptions of virtual reality have not yet been realized.”134

All of this talk about classrooms and collections in VR may sound pie-in-the-sky, which at this point it is. However, as educators, academic librarians might consider that if an online classroom through the university’s learning management platforms fails to sufficiently engage students, why should we expect that the online library modeled upon a search engine, our current heuristic model, should succeed in educating students, encouraging research, or inspiring people to learn? 

If learning online poses such challenges, why expect providing passive access to ever expanding digital content (especially much academic content that is not geared to undergraduates) will sufficiently engage students and scholars, especially when these same resources are often accessible to authorized users other ways, for example, by going directly to the publisher’s platform, or through Google Scholar?

Even now, scholars can often experience a better, richer, more personalized and more comprehensive search experience by going directly to the publishers’ own platforms where their documents reside. On some level, academic publishers are competing with the library for the same users. Indeed, scholars tend to consult just a few publishers and platforms regularly, and if they can get to full-text, they prefer to go directly to them rather than indirectly, through the library’s discovery layer.

One study claims that even librarians tend to avoid discovery in preference for subject specific databases (publisher’s platform), unless they are searching interdisciplinary areas or areas with which they are unfamiliar.135 

Although it is easy to search and retrieve content through a search engine, at large universities, discovery tends to submerge students into a sea of esoteric, peer-reviewed scholarly articles in response to their customarily overly broad queries.

What comes up in discovery is often irrelevant and incomprehensible, say, to a first year nursing student needing to write a five-page paper on diabetes. I know, we all tell students that the peer-reviewed article is the gold standard, a source of good and credible information, that it is better than Wikipedia and information they can obtain by Googling; but we all know this is not true, not even in the sciences. It is a white lie we all tell. Unfortunately, the sola scriptura of the peer-reviewed article is very often written in opposition to the magisterium of received doctrine, knowledge represented by books in collections, contained within less volatile and more readable publishing formats. It is the nature of scholarly publishing that progress is made by reacting against conventional wisdom and the status quo, but these students may not have the perspective to differentiate possibility from truth. Students lack discernment because they are not yet educated in their disciplines.

In healthcare, consumer-oriented websites often contain better information for students, presenting standard protocols and orthodox opinion, rather than scholarly articles intended for researchers describing statistically significant findings, which can be less than .01%, from experiments with mouse models and tissue cultures in Petri dishes, or with limited populations. Seasoned scholars take these articles with a grain of salt, for they know how to put findings into perspective. They also know negative findings have not a snowball’s chance of getting published, so investigators positively spin their findings, within ethical limits, to argue a significant outcome even if it is less than .01%. In scientific literature, there is subtlety and bias. We tell students peer-reviewed sources are unbiased and objective, but scholarship will never be unbiased as long as people must write articles to keep their positions and their funding from drying up. 

In the Humanities and Social Sciences, books are the most important vehicle for scholarly communication. Books are often aimed at generally educated readers with background material provided, where articles are written for specialized scholarly audiences, experts presumed to be already familiar with a topic. Books are what earns tenure. Books reflect sustained intellectual effort, usually providing the conceptual framework necessary for a subjective opinion to form into objective fact. The old library, our cogent book collections, were better suited for broad searches and the undergraduate experience, and through their durable cloth formats and consummate placement in a good collection, they communicated that they were objects of value, worth investing time into. The collection communicated, “These are the titles valued by those in the discipline or by educated people in contemporary society.”

Even though we tend to think of relevance-ranking as returning results most relevant to the user, information retrieval through a library discovery service is also a more impersonal experience lacking social context or disciplinary framework. This disciplinary framework establishes a work’s value as authoritative within a particular context or framework. This information is meaningful to scholars, for what is authoritative in one field is not in another. 

With our current user interfaces, it is also not clear that anyone selected the items turning up in discovery, knows anything about them, or has invested in them. They appear when needed, summoned by a search query, and disappear when they are no longer needed. If they are relevant only to the user, they might not seem very important to know about. 

On the other hand, with print collections in our traditional library space, we could put a book in a student’s hand and say, “You really need to read this. It is right up your alley!” Or, “Doctor so-and-so, I immediately thought of you when I saw the review of this book! Let me know if you want me to order it.”

With our print collections and bibliographic systems, it was easier to keep faculty up to date about forthcoming publications, and for our systems to support collection development activity. Academic intimacy in the library was fostered by visible signs of readership and use (date stamps, pencil marginalia), the fact that there was a discernible intellectual relationship between one work and another, and that collections in the library reflected the values and interests of a community of scholars at that particular institution. 

Those who decry the old library as a passive book repository, and complain about the amount of money spent to “warehouse a book” on the shelves each year,95 might be surprised—although in the case of Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, I do not think so—at the cost academic libraries incur to for pay for annual or perpetual access, along with hosting fees and other indirect costs for titles no one at their institution will likely access—not even necessarily because no one would be interested in them (there is that, of course), but because they sufficient visibility.

No one will think to seek them out, or be motivated to look for them in the first place. I view this as both an inventory (right titles) and a merchandizing problem. 

There is also the issue of quantity over quality. Large aggregator packages to which all academic libraries subscribe have been described as “churning constants”137(I think of them as chum buckets because they typically “chum” our collections with an abundance of cheap content no one in the library would otherwise have acquired) for content that doesn’t move in print or cannot be monetized any other way, often cheaply obtained by the aggregator from the publisher, including many titles that are dated, and out-of-scope, foreign imprints; books on narrow topics which may never have been singled out for purchase by anyone in the library or its faculty under our former, more stringent collection development guidelines. This is not to say there isn’t some good stuff in them, because there is; but its purpose is to monetize content for the aggregator, not to be a good library collection. Choice Outstanding Academic titles for libraries and New York Times bestsellers are not included in these packages until many years go by.  

Many libraries buy, as they must, individual ebook titles on top of aggregations to entice users with more fresher, more relevant or more popular titles to their users, but the terms of doing so title-by-title are often egregious. These ebook titles, licensed only to libraries, cost often 10 times above list price, or more. The prices for academic ebooks are ridiculously expensive, and getting higher each year. The economist who wrote the often cited article explaining how much it costs libraries to warehouse a book on the shelf each year25 was merely trying to sell ebooks to libraries; it confuses books with titles. Libraries buy titles, and the cost of maintaining that title on the shelf is nothing compared to its digital replacement. Why listen to what he has to say? I’d rather have the same book on my shelf for $4.20 for five years than have to pay for it many times over at $150, with hosting fees on top. Even more problematic for the library, is that on an ebook platform users have no idea that a particular book was selected by a librarian. Whatever individual titles we purchase and add to the hosting platform may make the hosting platform better, but it doesn’t add to the library’s perceived value.

Title-by-title acquisition of ebooks feels like throwing the proverbial starfish back into the ocean.139 We have no way of presenting “our titles” to users, our select items. Users come upon the items we laboriously purchased mixed up with a bunch of other aggregator stuff. And then there is the junk purchased in perpetuity which was great at the time, but turned into an albatross. Even with the knowledge that no one would would want to access a Excel VBA Programming for Dummies 2009 in perpetuity, the library may have been forced to license it that way.

The old book repository which represented waste and decay is no better or cheaper in digital format. It is just less visible to everyone, including even to librarians, in an environment where collections are invisible and might be argued to no longer even exist.

Visualizing Collections.

The point of the academic library is not to provide access to needed resources to support classroom instruction (learning resource model), but rather to stimulate intellectual inquiry and independent learning beyond the classroom. The extent to which it does so, exposing users to things that they would never think to search for,  is what makes it good as a library. We want the library to do more than “retrieve.”

However, our most advanced and sophisticated academic library system, with all its analytical and data visualization capabilities, its Oracle Business Intelligence, are not configured for collection-based management, the assessment or the display of e-resources as library collections. The system’s main purpose is resource acquisitions and electronic access management, facilitating the efficient acquisition and access to a mix of aggregated and selective vendor packages of academic content which live (and are simultaneously accessible to authorized users) on publisher and aggregator websites.

Our major system developer, ProQuest Ex Libris, is a content aggregator, and through this system, the academic library has become but a smaller content aggregator. Due to the limitations of our current online environment, booklessness has become nearly synonymous with collectionlessness, where libraries no longer seek to provide ways to present authoritative, quality collections to users so that publications might be meaningfully browsed or experienced as collections.

What we offer instead is a kind of scholarly search engine.

While the acquisitions strategies vary from institution to institution, with some offering PDA and others doing more traditional title-by-title collection development, increasingly libraries mostly offer searchable aggregations, not curated collections reflecting what experts in the field think important to know. Most in my field see this as progress.121 Obviously, I do not. I am not as delighted by retrieval as I am by browsing a coherent and well-maintained collection of titles in my fields of interest.

The library’s discovery tool allows those with institutional affiliation a convenient way to search the library’s owned and subscription content. With single-sign on and other methods of authentication, students and faculty can conveniently access library-licensed content through the library’s discovery interface. They may also access subscription content through Google Scholar, or by going directly to the publishers’ websites. E-resources do not need to be “cataloged” because the vendor and publisher assume responsibility for access through our discovery systems through the provision of KBART files and MARC records. 

In the modern library, scholarly content has been made more accessible than ever before, but there is a downside: access alone is limited in its ability to encourage use or convey value. A search engine is neither an effective pedagogical tool nor a good marketing tool. 

Human beings assign greater value to what is valued by others, which was part of the excitement of the old library. The traditional library was a construct which conveyed value for scholarship in ways that the modern library experience does not. It emphasized in an objective fashion what other people, experts in the discipline, regarded as important to know, not just what is most relevant to a query, summoned up in the moment just to complete a certain task.

Visible collections help to emphasize the value of the items in them and help to make users aware of them. They are an invaluable educational and marketing tool. It isn’t that libraries are obsolete, but I fear we are on the verge of making them so by not sufficiently appreciating and capitalizing on what made libraries good and pleasing to students and scholars in the first place. 

Browsable Collections vs. Searchable Aggregations. One important issue to me, perhaps the most important one in the debate about print vs. digital formats, is that the technology is not yet available to afford users with a really great online library experience, particularly when it comes to ebooks or browsing digital collections.

Through the academic library systems we have available to us, ebooks cannot be ordered into virtual stacks for browsing.141 Our systems and their interfaces are fine for what librarians call “discovery,” that is, for item retrieval, especially for known item retrieval, and also for locating whatever physical books and journal titles may remain on our shelves, but, rather astonishingly, they do not support collection browsing. 

Rather than moving towards a better, richer, more immersive and enjoyable user interface to compensate for the lack of visibility of physical collections in libraries (resulting from the shift to e-preferred collecting policies, robotic or remote storage schemes for print materials, and new library designs which place books out of view), as one might expect or assume in this time, our current academic library systems are built around what is commonly referred to as discovery, a cloud-based application which searches vendor- and library- supplied metadata records for everythingarticles, books, ebooks, videosto which the library is entitled, and then some; but which at this point, displays only ten results at a time. 

Web-scale, indexed-based library discovery systems, or “discovery” for short, is the technology behind the library’s all-encompassing everything search. This technology is not a new development. It has been around since about 2006, available as a subscription search service which for a long time co-existed with the traditional library catalog. Gradually, it came to replace the traditional OPAC, the online public-access catalog, which had been used mainly for locating call numbers of titles of print books and journals so they could be located on the shelves of the library. Discovery interfaces now often come bundled with academic library management systems. Academic publishers have contributed to the success of discovery. It helps them to license large subscription packages of ejournals and ebooks to libraries year after year. It helps publishers to monetize their content, and it helps librarians keep their content, especially serial content, up to date. 

Despite the obvious advantages of discovery, its seeming ability to search across so many publisher platforms—it is searching a central discovery index of metadata records, not performing real time searching thousands of ebooks, articles and documents—it is worth raising the question why search alone should have come to define the user experience of a modern academic library, rather than offering users a more immersive, immediate, visually pleasing and unique experience of browsing library collections.

Where did our stacks go? Browsing the stacks has defined the library for hundreds of years, and was a prominent part of early efforts to create virtual libraries. The stacks are what made us good and memorable, representing what was good to know.  

What commercially viable online storefront would survive as a static web page with a search box featuring, at most, ten items at a time, while telling the user that thousands of potentially relevant items are in its inventory? What library would offer random resources of indeterminate quality, rather than striving to offer the best? 

Our inventories are not comprehensive, yet we don’t seem to offer selective collections either. Our websites and user interfaces do not place items into a disciplinary context, where they might be valued by audiences seeking to obtain an overview of their field and what is in the library. They would probably like to know what other scholars are viewing. Of course, libraries don’t incentivize demand for items like retailers with pop up balloons, “Someone at x university has just downloaded a chapter of this book!” or, “102 of your peers have read this article!” The least we could do as academic librarians is present titles to users in ways that are attractive, logical, organized, engaging, attractive and visible.

Through the latest technology available to us, library collections for all practical purposes no longer exist, and it is no wonder users may feel that their searches though discovery are incomplete (I discuss user and librarian attitudes toward discovery below); classification provided a reliable way to browse, at least at the title (book and journal) level. The latest academic library systems do not support collection browsing, the visual presentation of ebooks and ejournals organized in a logical arrangement according to classification or some other external framework.

The most frustrating aspect to me is knowing that the problem is not resulting from any technological limitation. Library book browse tools have been around for a long time. Nor does it represent a philosophical shift among library professionals, that use-based analysis alone is sufficient to ensure quality or demonstrate scholarly value. The most recent and commonly assigned textbooks on collection development, for example, Peggy Johnson’s primer, Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, still widely used in library collection development classes, explains collection-based approaches in libraries and their history. Any mention that there is now no way to meaningfully apply these approaches outlined in her book to e-resources in our current environment comes at page 290, in a cryptic statement:

Although e-resources always should be considered when the collection is being analyzed, many of the analytical methods described in this chapter cannot be applied easily to these formats.142

The problem is lack of good metadata. Unlike their print counterparts, ebooks and ejournals are not assigned call numbers since they live online, not in a shelf location. Without classification, ebooks and ejournals cannot be placed into a meaningful scholarly context for them to be evaluated or valued as we did our print collections.

Without classification, there is also no systematic mechanism for making new additions to the collection known to users who might be interested in receiving notifications of new titles in their areas of interest. As it is, vendors add new titles, delete others, all through an API, but it is up to the library user to come along and periodically conduct a search to see what new items have been added to our inventories. 

What library discovery systems discover are the citations generated from the metadata records of third-party content available to the library through its license agreements with publishers: libraries license the package, the publisher provides a file of our entitlements to our library system vendor, and items become discoverable in our systems.

I believe that scholars want to know more than what publications are relevant to their search query. They also want to be made aware of the latest trends and publications are in a particular discipline, and where an item fits into a broader scholarly conversation. Scholars want to keep up, and they want the library to help them stay current. They want to be made aware of things they did not know about or think to search for. If the library is merely a conduit to publisher content, it is not living up to its potential as an academic library. The library should support all stages of research, including stimulating it. 

An online academic library must also support the acquisition of disciplinary and professional knowledge through the presentation and display of titles as collections. It must in all ways strive to be a content-rich learning environment which celebrates and inspires academic achievement, knowledge, research and authorship.

Classification of Knowledge. Librarianship has often considered itself to be about the organization of information. What is the ultimate point of this organization? What is the value of a taxonomy or classification scheme where text search exists? Search is about locating information, but classification is about representing knowledge. That is the whole point of it, to represent a whole. 

Educator preparation programs place emphasis on tools used to organize the information presented to students so it can be more easily comprehended by them, structures called “graphic organizers.” Graphic organizers and scaffolding, gradually moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, are important for learning in the classroom. In the library, the same instructional principles apply. An organized, visible collection supports learning. 

It is only recently, with the widespread adoption of discovery systems and the advent of bookless libraries, that classification has been assumed by library system developers to no longer be needed. Why a classification scheme might still be needed for direct retrieval, or to organize a library’s ebooks and ejournals so they can be effectively and meaningfully browsed when, after all, our systems provide a seemingly more intuitive way to find books and articles through text search, does appear to require some explanation.

Since electronic resources do not need to live in a single shelf location, why bother to classify or assign call numbers to them at all?

Indeed, classification today might seem rather pointless, as people have told me. No one is likely to look for a book by typing in a call number, as they might, say, an ISBN number. Agreed, users are not likely to search by class or call number. But users might enjoy the opportunity to visually navigate a selective collection of books and journals online which are organized by classification, that is, by their discipline or field of interest, and they might enjoy viewing lists of new titles organized by classification, so like topics and titles fall together. They might want to see all that we have on a topic or subject area that is semantically independent. How are we to manage our collections without classification?

Scholars might enjoy being able to browse items to the left and right of a virtual bookshelf to see what else the library has which might be of interest to them. All of this was made possible by classification.

In Western philosophy, logic, classification and knowledge are interrelated. Knowledge involves categorization of the known.

The art or science of classification, the ability to organize information so it can be comprehended and retained, and knowledge are inextricably linked. In the Western mind, at least going back to Aristotle’s Categories, things can only be known, analyzed or fully understood only if they can be classified. Classification has served as the basis for the logical arrangement and meaningful organization of knowledge, but especially of scholarly books in libraries, so that like topics collocate and items within a collection can be properly contextualized and evaluated within the scholarly context where it is most valued. While the LC Classification system (LCC) is not an ontology, and has certain peculiarities—for example, 100 years ago, there was no Computer Science, so that had to be placed inside of Math—classification is necessary for an academic library to properly manage its collections and support browsing in academic disciplines.

There is a consensus that academic libraries cannot provide quality collections to its users without reliance upon an appropriate classification system.143 A library does not offer meaningful collections to the user without classification, and cannot itself evaluate and assess its own collections without use of it. A library should provide not just access to content, but context, and that disciplinary context is provided by classification. It should seek to provide users with a unique form of visual navigation and systematic display called “browsing,” which is not a casual activity or noncommittal attitude as the word might suggest. Browsing in the library and scholarly sense is describes navigational functionality, a reliable way to visually navigate and apprehend collections of bibliographic data, and is not indicative of attitude or level of seriousness of the user toward his subject.  

Currently, our systems provide librarians with no ability to generate and display new ebook title lists, no ability to facilitate online browsing (virtual stacks) or present users with the experience of academic library collections as such.

If the purpose of the academic library is to support intellectual inquiry and scholarship, it certainly must support search. That goes without saying. But it should also support collection browsing, engagement with library collections as collections, and encourage resource use through contextualization. Marketing resources, not just passive access, should be the primary objective of our systems and our user interfacesOffering passive access to vast aggregations of digital content is not an ideal pedagogical or business model for a library because it does not encourage resource use or user engagement. It does not promote library use. It does not represent bodies of knowledge.

One modest advancement would be to expect that library user interfaces support browsing of ebooks and e-journals by classification, where items can be precisely and most meaningfully situated into their most appropriate disciplinary context, and presented by classification for users to browse.

Another advancement would be a mechanism for displaying new books and significant publications in their respective fields of study, that is, browsable collection highlights. This functionality would also be dependent on classification, or the assignment of call numbers, to the bibliographic record.

Browsing is Learning. Browsing in academic libraries has historically been facilitated by use of the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system, or reliance on some other classification scheme which reflects the way the library’s users would logically expect to find materials arranged in a collection.

An LC Classification number is part of the full descriptive bibliographic record for academic book, ebook and serial titles, regardless of the number by which a library might choose to shelve it. The number in the 050 of the MARC bibliographic record reflects one cataloger’s understanding of the most appropriate, logical placement for a work, considered in its entirely, based on its intellectual content. Where subject headings can highlight different aspects of the work, including specific chapters, the classification number alone describes what the work as a whole is about. 

LC Classification helps to define the value of the a scholarly work in context, according to its discipline and place within a hierarchical knowledge tree, where it stands in intellectual relationship to other items around it. Scholarly works are perceived to be more valuable as part of a broader scholarly conversation. According to cataloging practice, academic library books and journals are cataloged in the specific sub-classes and divisions where they are considered most relevant to users, and also considering who is the scholarly audience for which the work is written.

Scholars want to see a publication presented in its scholarly context. If a library book, scholars want to be able to browse to the left and right on a shelf to see what other books are there on the topic. We should be able to provide this user experience online.

While some may not grasp the importance of classification and browsing for supporting scholarly research, browsing is indeed an important information-seeking behavior among scholars, every bit as important as search. Understanding the context in which a scholarly work is written is an important part of understanding the text.

Browsing also helps to stimulate and inspire new research so scholars do not continuously go down the same pathways and eventually have their research interests fizzle out. Browsing helps to stimulates intellectual inquiry and the newcomers to a field or area learn more about it. It is fundamental to the learning experience libraries provide. Browsing is a form of learning and engagement with resources which we should encourage. It is what defines a library as a library. 

Academic libraries online must support browsing of ebooks and ejournals. While services such as Browzine have stepped in to fill that need, to enable the browsing of ejournals by discipline, nothing like this yet exists for ebooks. 

Browzine is a popular Web service available to libraries which allows their journals to be browsed alphabetically by title within subject areas though a graphic interface. It also provides thumbnail images of journal covers. Why is browsing not part of a modern library automation systems?

The problem of classification of ebooks and other digital content so that they can be effectively browsed online is a vital problem. I believe if libraries are to survive into the 21st century, we offer an experience that is more exuberant and valuable to students and scholars than “information retrieval.”

Is Library Classification Vestigial? It remains to be seen if LCC will continue to be used for the presentation and arrangement of ebook and serial titles in new bookless libraries, or if it will even survive into the second half of the 21st century.

Understandably, there is a feeling that, with the disappearance of print, classification is no longer needed because e-resources do not need to live in one location on a shelf. Where the LC classification/ call number in the 050 was at one time extremely helpful to catalogers when it came to assigning local call numbers to the holdings record for physical books—the locally assigned call number is placed into a different field, not part of the bibliographic record as is the 050—now it may appear that it serves no function and can be disregarded. The old title-by-title cataloging workflow does not even exist so much in libraries anymore, and especially not for ebooks or for the library’s online resources. 

Interesting to me is that this particular change, unlike those that occurred to metadata in previous years—like Dublin Core, or METS and MODS—is not the outcome of a library standards committee convening and making a determination that we don’t need to follow our metadata standards anymore, or that our bibliographic cataloging standards for books do not apply to ebooks. Ideally, by library professional standards, we ought to be cataloging our ebooks as thoroughly as books, but workflows vary significantly from library to library, with many deciding that vendor discovery records, while admittedly not good, are good enough. 

I also understand the feelings of indifference when it comes to cataloging ebooks. It is easy to sweep bad or incomplete metadata under the rug. First, few see it, after all, and only librarians know, or have the ability to know, if the metadata is bad, and what is not showing up in a query when someone conducts a search. It is sort of an honor system that we try to make things the best they can be.

Second, although over the years we have carefully cataloged our libraries book by book, there was so never so much interest in the library’s print collection as when the books were being thrown out. All we had to do was set out a discards cart, and people came out of nowhere, flocked to the books and carried them off, like seagulls to a bag of Cheetos. For many of us, the old library is gone and not coming back. Do we really need to start cataloging ebooks when vendors are willing to provide us with an easy alternative? Wasn’t that the selling point of the new system, that we wouldn’t need to catalog our ebooks? The will to catalog ebooks (or, more realistically, to develop workflows for enriching vendor-supplied metadata) is weak, understandably so, when many of these books are not even ours—we are just leasing them for a limited time period. Some we buy in perpetuity, but most we license for a while and then they disappear. 

Perhaps there is no point in trying to tame the tiger of ebook metadata.144 Vendor titles seem to slip in and out of our inventories without affecting our license agreements or customer satisfaction. People rarely seem to miss what isn’t showing up when they perform a search, even if we think it ought to be there. 

From Booklessness to Collectionlessness. In traditional academic librarianship, the collection was equated with the library, and was practically a philosophical topic in its own right. Traditional collection management presupposed that the library’s product was not just information (or its transfer to the user), but disciplinary knowledge, embodied in collections of books and journals, organized by discipline. 

While methods for assessing the scholarly value of both the individual titles, sub-collections and the collection as a whole varied, the starting point for assessment generally began with a shelf-list report of books and journals arranged by classification. These might be sometimes be mapped to specific disciplines, called a conspectus, or a collection map. The report could include other aspects: cost, publication or coverage dates, usage/circulation stats, and format. It could be used to evaluate how funds were being allocated, or which subject areas were being most heavily used. The methods for evaluating collections varied from institution to institution, sometimes depending on the capacity or aptitude of technical services to create such reports. Sometimes they even involved comparisons with peer libraries. Histograms could be performed to assess collection age in specific areas or disciplines, as the books in different disciplines age at different rates.

For a collection to be a strategically planned collection, items have to stand in a logical relationship to other items in it, and reflect publishing in the discipline. There are general guidelines librarians follow, for example: We don’t have volume 2 without volume 1. We do not have the minor works without the major ones. We do not have works about x without having the works by x. We don’t keep many years of superseded titles or dated materials. We do not buy in an ad hoc manner—year after year buying nothing in a discipline and acquiring only because of an upcoming accreditation review. If we have Marcuse, we have Adorno and Habermas. The collection should be balanced. We try to maintain a consistent scope so users will be able to anticipate what will be in the collection and come to expect good things will be there. We do not add irrelevant titles to the collection just because they are cheap, donated or free.

At least, those were the old rules and conventions under which the physical library operated. With discovery and our electronic collections, such as they are, we do not appear to worry so much about quality. We are a portal, not a collection. We buy or license large packages of scholarly content, and let users decide for themselves what is good and relevant to them. Many libraries are deciding to no longer offer collections to users in any format, merely packages of aggregated content. New academic library systems have been designed to manage the acquisition and user access to large packages of ebooks and journal content offered by publishers and aggregators, in which we license the good with the so-so. 

Modern library systems are not built to help librarians to manage or evaluate collections of titles using traditional assessment techniques, tools and approaches that we were taught to apply to print collections. Discovery systems, our modern library management systems, are not designed to help librarians to evaluate online collections, create digital displays, encourage user engagement, or promote resource use using digital marketing techniques. We can certainly evaluate the usage of a publisher platform, a package or a portfolio, but without call numbers it is impossible to evaluate the quality or scholarly or intellectual value of our collections as a whole.

As mentioned above, the metadata for ebooks and ejournals now placed directly into library systems by vendors are often lacking LC Classification, which provided a disciplinary context for an academic title. While some vendors, for example Taylor & Francis, have successfully partnered with OCLC to provide enriched metadata to their academic subscribers, others are loading into our Community Zones records that are not descriptive, which some have referred to as “discovery records.”

It’s Called “Descriptive Cataloging” for a Reason. The objective of descriptive cataloging is to accurately describe the intellectual contents and scholarly significance of a work, both the work as a whole and its component parts, so the work is able to be discovered and contextualized by scholars through the record that the cataloger creates.

There are many arcane punctuation and encoding rules to follow in creating good MARC records, and every so often, to my surprise, new rules and fields come down the pipe. In addition to accurately transcribing bibliographic data and following odd rules for capitalization and punctuation, catalogers create access points through use of a classification system and subject headings. Here familiarity, with the subject matter and the discipline is extremely helpful. Of course, one must first read (or effectively skim) the book, and then assign metadata to it. 

We librarians don’t do that much anymore. MARC bibliographic records now go into our systems without much notice, sometimes hundreds or thousands at a time. In the system of my library, I have to go out of my way to view them, which I do from time to time when I want something to do. Ever since the 1990s, when vendors began providing shelf-ready books with cataloging records which could be uploaded into our systems, catalogers have been complaining about their poor quality. But it was never like this, never what I am seeing now coming into our discovery systems, and I cannot help but be concerned when I see them.

I have received promises that the records will eventually be automatically updated, that these records are just provisional or preliminary, but there is apparently no timetable on the part of vendors for updating the CZ, the Community Zone. My colleagues on library lists do not know either. Oddly, there is nothing about MARC records in our license agreements with publishers. I have a feeling that with the transition to digital formats, vendor supplied metadata for ebooks and ejournals will continue to erode, especially as publishers are told by vendors of library systems that LC classification and other library-centric values are now optional.145

During the COVID-19 crisis, when library conferences were cancelled, a cabal of publishers and aggregators (there were a few librarians present) gathered to try to define the minimal standards for ebook bibliographic metadata in the form of a new NISO standard, “E-book Bibliographic Metadata in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization13, as if libraries hadn’t already defined this for ebooks through their MARC standard. I didn’t find out about it until a few days after the 45 day public comment period closed, after which time I began to send emails with my comments. That publishers and aggregators are seeking to define the minimal standards for the metadata for ebooks doesn’t sit well with me, for librarians and their MARC records are on the tail end of this metadata supply chain. 

As most librarians know, many years ago the Library of Congress took it upon themselves to prepare a MARC record for every not-yet-released book sent to them by publishers. This resulted in the image of a card catalog card or its values being represented on the verso of the title page, the copyright page, for most books a library might be interested in acquiring. It also resulted in a librarian-created MARC record, at least a skeletal one, for every library book, complete with LC classification and LC subject headings, which other libraries were free to copy or download into their system though a standard protocol (Z39.50).

CIP information of the verso of the title page. Publishers partnered with the Library of Congress to provide metadata, including LC subject headings and classification numbers, to libraries. LC is not eager to extend its cataloging program to ebooks.

Unfortunately, the LC CIP program is not being extended to ebooks unless there is a print equivalent published at the same time.147 In other words, it is reserved for print books. Therefore, publishers do not have a reliable mechanism of obtaining library classification and subject headings for their ebooks unless they hire their own catalogers or else contract with a third-party cataloging service, which some do. 

Despite the lack of classification numbers and subject headings in much of our vendor-supplied metadata records, the will to catalog ebooks and the staffing to perform the task in libraries today is often lacking, especially with the common belief, promoted by library system vendors, that discovery systems have made cataloging unnecessary. Libraries may purchase ebooks by the hundreds or thousands in a package. These titles magically appear in discovery, and even if their metadata isn’t good by library cataloging standards, it is often good enough for someone who looks for a specific title. Without subject headings and other enhancements to the record, items may not be all that discoverable, but they usually can usually be found with sufficient effort. 

Cataloging ebooks, or at least editing, enhancing and providing LC classification / call numbers (and subject headings) to potentially thousands of vendor discovery records may feel like a thankless chore and an unwise use of resources in today’s libraries. This is especially true for ebooks, which are perceived to have a more limited lifespan than print. The fact that they are now acquired in bulk also has something to do with it. It is likely that no one inside the library hand-picked these titles, they do not live on university servers, and often seem to fluidly enter and exit from our library systems as it serves the needs of publishers and aggregators rather than the faculty or librarians, creating further disincentives to invest in them, to treat them as anything but the commodities they have now become. 

This is not to say that discovery systems do not also provide great advantages. As I mentioned above, library holdings can be immediately updated by the vendor and publications made instantaneously accessible to our users. Who would want to catalog those books? Our systems are scalable: we can activate three items as easily as 130,000 in discovery by activating a publisher package. Article content, which was not visible in our former catalogs, have become a primary focus of the discovery experience, which is extremely advantageous for STEM fields, where the peer-reviewed journal article is the primary format for scholarly communication. It had become an indispensable tool to make immediately accessible large quantities of continuously updating serial content.  

Until a few years ago, most academic research libraries offered a catalog for monographic (book) titles and print journals, and a standalone discovery tool for their searching their databases. Now that print is being eliminated or not maintained by many libraries, replacing the traditional catalog with discovery makes the collection appear richer and up to date. Prioritizing digital content and discovery has significantly impacted library workflows by making them more efficient.

Increasingly, however, no one inside the library routinely familiarizes themselves with the ebook titles that are passively acquired by the library through these blanket publisher agreements. No one has selected them. No one has cataloged or physically processed them. No one knows they are there, or notices when they depart. They enter and exit the collection on quiet cat feet.

As part of a regular workflow in the library, no one routinely sees ebooks, or their metadata, except to make sure items in the collection are active in discovery.

We have no mechanism for actually displaying new titles through an automated feed, so we or our users can see them.

There is no way to display or arrange our ebooks as collections to be browsed or evaluated as collections.

The essence of a good library is not passive access to resources in the event someone should think to look for them, but in encouraging resource awareness and use, and creating dynamic environments which cultivate interest in books, reading and research.

To sustain user engagement, we must be able to market the items in our inventories as belonging to a quality collection.

The hallmark of a good library is not defined by access to items which can be found on our site—they can be found by Googling too—but inspiring our users to learn more, to explore and to grow through engagement with collections because they represent a body of knowledge worth investing in.

New Uses for the 050 field. So far I have spoken in generality about the limitations of new system designs and vendor supplied metadata. It is surely a chicken and egg situation. The fact library systems emphasize discovery and not collections or browsing means that publishers have no incentive to provide an LC Classification number as part of the metadata it provides to libraries. Metadata costs them money. They want to sell books, not catalog them. 

I have argued for the need for classification numbers to support browsing, for without being able to organize our collections by classification. LC classification reflects the disciplines. Without that, there is no disciplinary context. Browsing publications by classification is unique to libraries. You cannot do it through Google Scholar. You cannot do it at a publisher website. It is uniquely a “library” thing. When people reflect back about what they liked about their academic library experience from their college days, it was browsing the library’s collections; it was not just the books, but their organization into meaningful collections. Browsing quality collections, consisting of publications which others in the field think significant and important to know, is a fundamental part of the library experience and how we encourage independent learning. It absolutely and uniquely defines the user experience of an academic library collection. We must be able to replicate this experience online.

Discovery records for academic ebooks, the cataloging records loaded into our systems by publishers, often lack LC Classification numbers. Even those from some of the best academic publishers, with the most robust metadata, lack 050 fields or valid LC call numbers put into them, and therefore, as far as I can tell, there is no source for LC classification to support a book browsing tool or to facilitate collection browsing. 

Even the best academic publishers, with the richest metadata, cannot fathom the Library of Congress Classification system well enough to provide libraries with a well formed LC call number in the MARC record. Springer consistently places broad class numbers into its ebook records, which would undermine efforts to develop online browse tools which feature collections of library ebooks.

Example of a skeletal MARC record for a new ebook, with no 050 field at all, nor any LC subject headings. Discovery records such as this are being placed into our systems in large numbers through large deals with vendors. Without enhancing the records, many of our newer ebooks may be undiscoverable though discovery.

It is important to note that this field can be either assigned a value by the Library of Congress or by any library who wishes to assign a valid LC call number to it, as long as the proper indicator is chosen.

The Library of Congress recognizes the function of the 050 field to support collection evaluation and browsing applications.148 As I will discuss below, slightly more attention is being paid to the 050 now because of the desire on the part of some librarians to harvest and organize ebooks by classification, and to perform collection assessment by discipline. In addition, OCLC has recently launched an experimental tool called “Classify” which might help facilitate the rapid assignment of classification numbers to ebooks to facilitate bookshelf browsing.149 As far back as 2004, Frank and Paynter experimented with an application for automatically assigning LC classification numbers to the contents of a specialized digital library based on LC subject headings of the items in the collection.150 It remains to be seen if virtual bookshelf browsing will become as important feature of OCLC’s library system, WMS, which could give it a competitive advantage over Ex Libris’ Alma when it comes to winning librarians’ favor. 

A few libraries and developers have tried—indeed, even Google has tried—to develop a virtual library which supported browsing by classification.151 Vendor-supplied ebook discovery records are widely recognized as being not up to library cataloging standards for books, but, due to the dynamic nature of ebooks, many smaller libraries have come to depend on them rather than laboriously editing, enriching and/or batch-loading them, as many larger academic libraries do.152 

Library Interfaces without Classification? There is an alternative to classification for the organization of bibliographic citation data in discovery tools which does not require an external schema or taxonomy, or for classification to be part of the metadata record itself.

Fifteen years ago, there was a fully developed library discovery tool called “Grokker” which could search and index hundreds of sources and databases at a time, return results, place them into metadata fields, form these into citations, dynamically cluster and label these (even allowing for disambiguation) and permit users to zoom in to clusters of bibliographic citation data linked to its source. Each circle represented a clustering category created on the fly, with the size of the circle reflecting the number of results. Grokker was based on a federated search model combined with a semantic-clustering engine. Rather than going to a centralized index of publisher provided metadata, as Primo does, Grokker went directly to publisher platforms through connectors (APIs) to conduct real time searches of the documents and return results to the application for processing. 

The simple circular interface Groxis, Inc. developed is now gone. The company closed in 2009 after signing an exclusive agreement with Gale, a competitor to EBSCO and ProQuest, which turned out to be not a good business move. Its underlying technology of dynamically clustering bibliographic citation data is still around,153 and people are still conducting research on building better semantic clustering engines for bibliographic citation data.154 

Grokker ca. 2007 employed an intuitive visual navigation system based on semantic clustering which combined searching and browsing. The size of the zoomable circles clued researchers in to the number of search results retrieved in a category.

Semantic clustering to dynamically organize / cluster citation results better seems to be one way library discovery interfaces might improve, and in some intuitive way combine browsing with searching. Using of a clustering engine does not rule out the possibility of applying an external taxonomy or subject classification system to citation results, but one is not needed for categories and labels to be generated.

The Limitations of Discovery as a Library User Interface. While Grokker and semantic clustering search applications are able to combine searching with browsing to some extent, and therefore offer a richer and more intuitive search experience, they still do not convey that there is a collection there. We are still limited by the fundamental drawback of discovery as a library user interface, that it is dependent upon people to pull things out of it, and does little to place items into a larger disciplinary framework.

As the reader might have inferred, I believe that good libraries are about the presentation of good collections, actively presenting what is good or significant, and perhaps even accounting for why an item is good and/or significant. Through discovery alone, there is insufficient collection visibility or strategies to promote user engagement with quality collections. Indeed, there really is no such thing as a library collection in discovery, only aggregations.

Libraries should now be thinking beyond discovery to make library collections visible again.

I understand the logic and practicality of not assigning LC classification / numbers to items that do not live in a particular shelf location. Indeed, while some publishers manage to do a great job, it also perhaps seems unreasonable to expect that academic publishers, from whom we may license tens of thousands of books at a time, to provide libraries with catalog records pre-populated with library-centric metadata (LC classification, LC subject headings) to make their ebook content more discoverable in our systems, especially if our library system vendor is not actively encouraging these standards,155 and especially when, on some level, publishers are competing with the library to be a research destination; and when they themselves do not use anything like a MARC record to facilitate discovery on their own platforms. 

Whether vendors assume responsibility for the MARC record is an interesting question, probably one of the most interesting ones which has arisen with new systems designed for vendors to load records into our systems.

Can we legitimately complain to the publisher that the library cataloging records they are placing into to our Community Zone are lacking good metadata? My feeling is that is that if Taylor & Francis can do it, so can Springer and Elsevier and other international publishers.

Either work it out with OCLC or hire catalogers. 

Beyond discovery interfaces. The library can facilitate a unique and valuable experience to scholars only if it maintains good metadata and if it supports collection browsing. In the library world, browsing is the visual presentation of ebook and ejournal titles by subject classification, so they can be presented and experienced by users as an academic library collection according to academic library professional standards.

The elimination of book browsing from our interfaces, and lack of support for classification of ebooks and ejournals (which supports browsing), not only influences perception of value of items in our collections, but also makes our collections less capable of being evaluated, managed and assessed by librarians according to our own standards. It also makes our discovery service less able to be assessed, that is, for librarians to determine what is not showing up which should when someone conducts a keyword or subject search. It makes the library less meaningful and valuable to scholars who want to be able to browse publications in an area, and makes it harder to promote what we have in our collections to users. 

It contradicts numerous studies supporting that faculty prefer browsing, at least to see or visually navigate collections to obtain an overview of a field, discover new books added to the collection, and discern trends over time in a field or specialty. As one scholar writes over concern of his library going to robotic retrieval and closed stacks, browsing collections is critical to research:

Being able to browse the library shelves is a critically important part of my research as an academic. I often find vitally useful resources by tracking down one book through the catalogue and then looking at the surrounding shelves to find related topics. I am very concerned that an automated retrieval system will prevent me from finding such important research materials. If there is to be an automated retrieval system, could there at least be a photographic representation of the surrounding books on the shelf so that the shelves could be “virtually” scanned by eye? (Robins 2008)156

Even if, when surveyed, faculty do not express preference for a particular reading formata common question asked in surveys by librarians when determining how much space and the library’s budget to dedicate to print in new facilities—their response, one way or another, does not mean these scholars do not wish to be able to browse library collections online.

Sentiments such the one expressed above by faculty in the quote above motivated the Macquarie University Library to develop a virtual browse tool for print books, when in 2012, when they went to closed stacks (as a result of implementation of a robotic storage and retrieval system). However, they encountered difficulties continuing to use this tool after moving to a new automation system, Alma/Primo.157

In May 2013, Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab launched a visual stacks browse tool prototype for their Hollis catalog, called StackLife, which featured a dynamically assembled vertical bookshelf generated from bibliographic and circulation information fed into it by their library system, which included print and electronic resources. Users could click on the book to get to the record or the resource. With this new visualization tool, which was a prototype, the spine measurements and page numbers generated a book icon proportional to the description in the bibliographic record. The book icon cover could appear in one of 10 shades of blue, corresponding to the number of times a book had circulated. While the project was abandoned after the Harvard Library went with a new automation system, interest in developing a browse tool for the academic library space is evident.

The University of Minnesota also made use of a collection browse tool which was part of a former system, but abandoned it after the tool was no longer supported.158 There have been many efforts to build a virtual library which would support shelf browsing, including by Google. 

Alma / Primo VE, regarded as the most powerful library system on the market, comes with a little known Collection Discovery feature which allows librarians to create user-defined collections, and manually populate these with titles, but for reasons I have already mentioned, the application cannot place titles in order by classification. (They are in MMS/system designated number order.) Shown below is a collection of new books on “Allergy & Immunology,” but books on AIDs, food allergies, and asthma are mixed up. In addition, the bibliographic data which appears on the tile does not include author or publication date, making it of less value to scholars compared to the information on the spine of a library book. 

“Collection Discovery” is a feature of Alma/Primo which allows titles of books, ebooks and ejournals to be manually added to user defined collections for virtual browsing, but the books in these collections cannot be ordered by classification, and tiles do not display (even on mouse-over) basic bibliographic data scholars expect to see, for example, author and date of publication.

As much as librarians are eager to display new ebooks to users so that they might have greater visibility and use, no librarian wants to present books to users in random order, and with incomplete citation information. I’m hoping that this feature of Alma/Primo VE is just a start of something good. As publishers, aggregators and library system designers are trying to forge new metadata standards for ebooks to make it easier for them to monetize and auto-populate our collections with their content, we must respond with some library-centric standards of our own.

Clearly, there is a strong desire and demand for academic users to be able to browse collections of ebooks online, as this has project been taken up by several universities in over the years.159 Support for LC classification and collection browsing is a perfectly reasonable expectation for academic libraries, even if it remains to be seen how LC classification numbers might be systematically assigned by publishers to the discovery records they are placing into our systems. 

Putting Books Before People: The True Meaning of a Patron-Centered Library

s print collections dwindle in the drive for libraries to innovate and modernize, no new interfaces or library standards for discovery metadata have emerged to support visually browsing a library’s online or hybrid collections, or to assist librarians perform collection-based assessment for their ebook collections. We cannot easily put new books in front of users through our systems. We have no store front, only a search box, in some instances front-ending millions of dollars of inventory. All we have to show for it is a rectangle. No matter how much or how little a library acquires, it can be relied upon to produces ten “relevant results” at a time. 

Alma libraries have the capacity to harness Oracle Business Intelligence and Data Analytics, but wait, what?—it cannot be used to produce a simple shelf list of print and ebooks combined?160 

The 050 field, the Library of Congress Classification / Call number, could be used to support a virtual browse interface, as several have suggested,161 too often this field is incorrectly populated or omitted altogether by publishers and vendors in the MARC records they provide to libraries. Few libraries have the staffing to manually provide LCC numbers to the records of the thousands of ebooks they obtain from vendors, a reality which left one librarian to conclude that, if we are to support browsing, we must lobby MARC record vendors to make them aware of the importance of including call numbers.162

So far I have discussed that the technology available to libraries to support booklessness leaves much to be desired. Through the technology we have, our collections are not only invisible, but they cannot be meaningfully be browsed like a library collection, making them less useful to scholars, especially to those in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Resource visibility and visibility as a collection are important to ensure a good user experience of an academic library. Our current systems do not have any way of making collections visible. It is not a good model for students who come to the library without knowing anything about a discipline.

The academic library must put books before people to be effective. It must maintain visible collections and collection visibility. 

Do students prefer bookless libraries? What we know from the limited studies163 that students do not care very much for bookless libraries, and when given a choice, such as in a major metropolitan area like Houston, with several universities in close proximity, students will sometimes choose to go to libraries which maintain larger print collections. In my library orientation class, after explaining all of the fabulous things students have access to through the library, including ILL, I tell them that by virtue of their being enrolled at an institution of higher education in Texas, that they are entitled to check books out from any state supported school or public library, should they wish to do so. All they need is a TexShare card. A surprising number of students line up to get the card, even though I make it clear that they only need to obtain one if they wish to check out books from the other library. Many professors in graduate Research Methods classes at my university require students to visit other libraries, and they recommend students request the card.

Granted, larger libraries might offer other attractions and amenities beyond their print collections, such as other electronic databases, cafes, relaxed food and drink policies, longer hours, and perhaps more people around. An student  from India who felt homesick and isolated at our campus (an HBCU) went to the library at the university down the street, where she often ran into people from her own country, which made her happy. We do not even know to what extent other libraries are used by our students, how and with what frequency, whether the presence of current print collections makes libraries more intellectually stimulating and appealing to students as places to study.

We do know that often it is the pursuit of a single book which initially sends them to other library in the first place, and sometimes they want to go back to check out books, that is, asking for a new TexShare card when a new semester begins.

TexShare cards, which extend borrowing privileges of students enrolled in a Texas public institution of higher education to other libraries in the state, can anecdotally help the library track where students are going, at least as a preliminary. It is none of our business why they are using the other library or what they are doing there, because it is an entitlement. Because students can decide if they want to order books through ILL or go in person to the other library to obtain a book, we know students can be surprisingly eager to venture forth to unfamiliar campus libraries in pursuit of a book. I hope that they want to see what else the other library has which might be of interest to them, which is why they choose to go in person, TexShare card in hand, rather than requesting the book through our ILL services. (But realistically, they also might not trust our ILL services to produce the needed book in their desired time frame.)

Along the same lines as why students prefer one library over another, if students have a choice of where to attend college, to what extent does a library with physical collections (or not) factor into their decision of where they go to school? By that same token, do prospective students evaluate the library’s website and databases online to form an opinion about the quality of education at that school before applying there?

What is it prospective students are hoping to see when they are herded through the library by tour guides? Are they looking for other people? Are they looking for computers? Are they looking for interesting books on display? Are they looking at the size of our collections? The friendliness of the librarians? Collaborative learning spaces? Are they interested in seeing the library at all, or just taking the requisite tour all around campus?

Yes, absolutely students want the convenience of databases to get their assignments and coursework done, but I think, they also want a library with visible collections to experience, especially one with books which appeal to them and reflect their interests, personality, tastes and identity.

They want access to see and browse through books that are current, even if they might prefer to download a copy to take it with them to read (what I call “virtual fulfillment”). They want to experience the books that other educated people in their field know about. They may want contemporary nonfiction and leisure reading. I believe that student preference for books or visible collections might even ultimately impact the business objectives of the school, but studies of this nature—whether the quality or mode of the academic library influences enrollment and retention—are non-existent. 

When people think positively about their experience of college libraries, it is the pleasurable experience of wandering through the stacks coming upon something unexpected, but deeply meaningful, which comes to mind. This is called serendipitous browsing, but chances are, as accidental as it may seem to the user, in some way a quality collection (and therefore a librarian) was behind it. 

Years ago, librarians were taught that the experience of curated collections was essential to the academic experience, how we supported intellectual inquiry and added value to the university. I still believe a good collection should be thought of as a pre-eminent service libraries provide to their user communities.

Perhaps because it is just a bit gratuitous in this digital age, physical collections might also demonstrate greater respect or care for the academic disciplines we support, greater respect for scholarship, and greater care for the student. Curated, cared for, collections create new avenues for discovery and a motivation to learn. They represent a body of knowledge. Done right, collections are enjoyable and meaningful for scholars to browse, where random aggregations and ad hoc accumulations, in any format, connote the opposite. Lack of care and ignorance of the discipline. If we want to build communities of readers and scholars, we need for collections to be visible, not just searchable. 

As many of our institutions are rapidly moving toward booklessness, large packages of ebook and ejournal content are comprising more of our collections. Some of the largest aggregator packages are often comprised of academic titles which are no longer in demand. While there may be good things in them, publishers will tactically withhold their better titles, current titles, seminal works and critical editions to encourage academic libraries to pay for these titles individually.

Even if we laboriously add better titles to the EBSCO or ProQuest ebook platform, we end up knocking ourselves out only to enhance the user experience of our vendor’s ebook platform, but not necessarily improving perceptions of the library. Users do not know which titles librarians have selectively added to the EBSCO or ProQuest ebook platforms.

If their experience is a positive one, they will think well of the platform, but not necessarily any better of the library. 

A searchable aggregation of resources is not the same thing, or a substitute for, a good library collection. Presenting users with visible, curated collections and emphasizing what is good are our best marketing strategies, for both print and online.

Discovery alone fails to cultivate a culture of learning on a college campus and diminishes our value, as well as the value of the items that are in these aggregations we are calling a collection, but isn’t, anymore than what Google Scholar searches can be experienced as a library collection.

A good library collection is what makes the library interesting, what supports a sense of community and continuity. Resources are our common bond with faculty and students. By placing quality, appealing and relevant collections in front of users in a way that can be easily seen, visually navigated and browsed, users are more likely to find something they like, something meaningful, something significant, something interesting, and oftentimes, something completely unexpected

Maintaining browsable collections which reflect scholarly activity in the disciplines is an important way academic libraries and its librarians stimulate intellectual inquiry and inspire research. To continue to do so into the 21st century, we must decide either to hold on to print for a while longer, at least until the point at which our vendors provide user interfaces and metadata which fully support and promote the user experience of academic library collections. 

Improving Collection Visibility in Library User Interfaces.

ith bookless libraries, the collection may be visible only through what librarians refer to as “discovery,” a search engine, which is to say, it isn’t visible as a collection at all.

I believe the lack of visibility of collections is a serious problem facing all academic libraries at this time, especially as more libraries go fully digital. If we cannot see or visualize the collection, we cannot effectively manage or promote it, or the resources inside of it. If users cannot see the collection, they will not benefit from the learning opportunities and stimulation that a good collection provides. If the collection cannot be made visible as a collection, we cannot work collaboratively with faculty to make the collection better. Most of all, though, a collection that is out of sight is out of mind. It does not motivate or inspire.

While some have speculated that research libraries today have no need to support browsing or even collections in the traditional sense—and that conspectus (which I will discuss below), collections and browsing have been made obsolete through a combination of search, “big deals” and PDA,121—to me it is not a good thing, or a sign of progress, that the user experience of the academic library in the 21st century has been reduced only to search, and what is being searched is looking less and less like an academic library collection, and more like, well, random aggregations of academic content which cannot even be reassembled into a meaningful collections for browsing or assessment.

Discovery, the library’s indexed-based search application, which searches metadata of the library’s owned and subscribed content, is truly a wonderful thing. But realistically, as an interface, it has not made libraries more attractive or valuable to scholars or regular users. In fact, the opposite may be true. Today users often prefer to bypass the library’s discovery interface or website (depending on the method of authentication supported by the library) to go directly to the specialized databases and journals we license on their behalf.

Once users figure out the platform or database where their journal or preferred content actually lives, and that they can get to full-text through single sign on (authentication on the site itself), we lose them, which means to me that our discovery interfaces are not a good value proposition. It isn’t that they are too hard to use, or professors do not know how to search them, but as just search engine, we offer limited value to our users. 

Sure, we can track and claim any usage activity on the publishers’ websites “for the library,” but we should not ignore the reality that on publisher and aggregator platforms, researchers are often afforded a more attractive search experience than what we provide. There, users have greater confidence that their search has been exhaustive, thorough and current. Through search alone, libraries are not competitive with publishers and we are not giving users a reason to come to the library or our website. 

Indeed, numerous studies over the years have revealed that neither librarians nor its users even like or trust discovery interfaces, and for many reasons prefer to go directly to the publisher’s platform to conduct research.135 166

Another place they prefer to go is to Google Scholar, where they can search citations from university repositories, open access repositories, academic publisher platforms, as well as the library’s subscribed content—and then link to full-text that way. 

It is time that library system user interfaces presented users with a unique and inviting library experience, and not just a generic search experience for aggregated content. This means we need to support browsing, affording users the opportunity to visually navigate and engage with good collections. We need to make collections visible again. And it can be more than just access to resources. In an online environment, we should strive to make usage by scholars visible to other scholars (how many times others have downloaded the title) because in academia, just as outside it, use by others compels interest; people naturally want to read what other people are reading so they are not left behind. We need better user interfaces which support collection browsing, engagement, and analysis.

Our purpose as academic librarians is to maintain and promote quality collections which reflect scholarly communication in the disciplines, not just to provide access to subscribed content. Tools for better collection management and collection development, along with collection browsing online, should be requirements for library systems today. Through our user interfaces, we could be orienting users to their disciplines as well as promoting new publications in the disciplines.

The same metadata which supports patron browsing is also a prerequisite for librarians to properly evaluate and assess the quality of the collection. Indeed, a standard approach to collection management in academic librarianship since the 1980s has been through a collection conspectus, which begins by mapping the collections by LC classification / call number ranges to the disciplines supported by the institution.  

The conspectus is recognized as a standard tool for describing, assessing and evaluating academic library collections, even around the world.167 Many collection development policies at universities have been based on a conspectus approach. The Library of Congress still uses a conspectus approach, and it is still recommended by IFLA. OCLC currently owns the last version of the RLG/WLN Conspectus, which they call “CES,” but it is not too difficult to create them from scratch using the LCC schedule to make one’s own collection map.

Without something like a conspectus, or a collection map, as some refer to it,168  it is impossible to do strategic collection development in a large academic library. Today, libraries can run usage reports to evaluate journals usage, platform usage, ebooks usage, and database usage, but we cannot evaluate the quality or depth or usage of our collections as collections, by discipline, division and subject. We cannot evaluate the intellectual contents of our collections, or report use by subject, institutional disciplines or specialties (which in the conspectus is defined by call number ranges). Sadly, libraries cannot even easily or reliably generate a simple list of books and ebooks combined, let alone do analysis by classification, as we used to be able to do. We cannot perform a histogram on our collections as we used to be able to do, to visualize the age of our publications in targeted call number ranges. The rise of discovery has made it easier to acquire and make available digital resources and journal content, but harder to assess the quality of our monograph collections.

Some libraries are going to great lengths to develop their own collection maps, either applying traditional conspectus divisions as their starting point169 or simply trying to generate a shelf list of both print and ebooks by classification and then adding visualizations to answer questions about the collection, such as usage by subject area.158 An outcome of Johnson and Traill’s efforts at the University of Minnesota was an integrated browse tool for both ebooks and print resources, which was not previously possible because of missing LC classification data in the 050 fields of the MARC bibliographic record.

With the shift from print to e-resources, and the restructuring of systems away from the traditional bibliographic approaches, our systems no longer support the analytical approaches librarians commonly applied to collections to evaluate them.

Using the most advanced system available to academic libraries, I can run analytics to evaluate usage of a vendor package of aggregated academic titles of ebooks, for example, but I cannot tell which specific call number ranges are being requested more frequently, identify superseded titles, identify subject areas which are most heavily uses, identify assess gaps in the collection, compare my library’s collections with peers, or systematically compare them against “outstanding titles” lists. 

Making collections visible as collections should be a priority for library system developers and our user interfaces, especially as libraries are becoming fully digital and the collection is currently not visible any other way.

At this point, many academic library interfaces have become mere record retrieval tools, more specifically, a searchable index of the metadata of third-party (publisher and aggregator) content to which the library is entitled, with some of our own (mainly print, sometimes ebook) records added into the mix. Publishers place a file of the library’s entitlements into a central discovery index where they become immediately accessible to users upon activation. With the growing trend toward booklessness, users experience the totality of the academic library’s often vast holdings and entitlements through the narrow window of the library’s discovery interface.

Indeed, students are likely to encounter this same user interface at almost every medium to large academic library in the US:

Results display page of Alma, the most widely used academic library system software in the world. Even as libraries move towards fully digital collections, discovery is all it does, 10 results at a time. The result is that library collections lack sufficient visibility and intentionality (no one knows if the book was deliberately selected for inclusion or if is was merelyt part of a vendor package). Lack of intentionality and collection visibility are two unfortunate side-effects of going fully digital.

Granted, there is a magic to its ability to search across so many different sources, publishers and media types in one fell swoop, which is precisely what it was designed to do. It is convenient for us and for our users. When we purchase an ebook, it can be made instantly available in discovery without needing to catalog it. A record, albeit often perfunctory and substandard by library cataloging standards, is placed by the publisher into our systems upon activation of the resource.

Through discovery, librarians can acquire and immediately make available very large packages of aggregated content, ebooks and e-journals, without having to catalog all of these resources. Selection and deselection, additions and deletions, are now handled automatically by the vendor, offering certain advantages (namely, scalability), especially those libraries with a lot of buying power. 

The downside of discovery, particularly when the print collection is all but eliminated, is that it is just a search tool, not actually an online library. 

  • Discovery doesn’t do anything to establish the library as a unique experience, to stimulate inquiry or resource use, to promote books or reading, or to place books and journals into their appropriate scholarly or intellectual context.
  • It also doesn’t expose people to new ideas, to unthought thoughts, to the things they would not otherwise go looking for, or might not know how to even search for. 

The ebooks in the bookless library cannot be browsed in the way print collections could, in call number order. What we offer now falls short of both professional library standards of the presentation and organization of bibliographic materials, as well as industry standards for e-commerce to market products online. A bookseller or publisher would never use search alone as its user interface with customers, and it would not limit users to a view of ten items at a time, but would present 50 or 80 items in order to increase the likelihood users might find something they like. 

Another limitation with our user interfaces, which also impacts our success, is that it is incumbent upon our users to periodically come along and perform searches to discover what new items have been added to them, for we have no systematic way to extract and promote new titles in the disciplines to highlight them.

Showcasing what is new, topical and current is another business requirement libraries have in order to remain relevant to our users. 

Another challenge with ebooks within the new discovery paradigm has to do with the metadata being placed into our systems. Vendor-provided MARC records for ebooks often lack library-centric metadata, specifically LC classification and LC subject headings. As publishers and aggregators are looking to streamline their own workflows, they are audaciously seeking to define the minimal metadata for ebooks171 to a few data elements which fall far short of the national standards for descriptive cataloging for books which libraries adhere to, the MARC 21 bibliographic format.172 Of course, libraries are free to enhance and load their own cataloging records, but even then, if they go to the trouble of adding classification to the 050 fields of ebook records as some have done,158 our systems still do not support browsing by classification.

Another issue with booklessness is the high cost of academic ebook titles compared to print. For libraries, academic ebook titles are much more expensive than list price for print, some reported to be up to 150 times list price for simultaneous multi-user access.174 Small and mid-sized campus libraries, if they select titles individually or are keen to provide their users with in-demand (front list) titles, are not likely to realize any cost savings by going fully digital. Our pricing tends to be supersized, as we often pay for unlimited access, in perpetuity, whether we want it that way or not. The cost for an academic library to warehouse a book25 on a shelf is really trivial compared to licensing and hosting fees for an ebook. With a small library budget, I can acquire so much more in print, often with considerable discounts, than by going with the electronic version of the same. Another problem is publisher embargoes, the fact that the ebook is sometimes unavailable to be licensed by libraries until weeks after it appears in print.

Studies by librarians on the value of ebooks compared to print, especially for smaller campus libraries, have not corroborated assumptions that ebooks actually save the library money. For libraries, ebooks are much more expensive than print. Yet, decision-makers outside of the library often erroneously believe the university will save money by cheaper book prices, and also no longer needing to warehouse books on its shelves. 

Ebooks also cannot be shared among institutions like print, and, as with much of our digital content, they are not accessible to those who are not currently enrolled in a course or affiliated with the university. If the mission of the academic research library is to support life-long learning, as is often stated, why should the holdings of the academic library be inaccessible to alumni? Why should doctors after graduating from medical school no longer have access to a good academic library?

If our mission is to support scholarship, why not continue to provide access to ebooks and ejournals to scholars outside of the university? The simple answer is that if we did so, we would be in violation of our license agreements with vendors. But we never had these restrictions before, when we were predominantly print collections, when we owned our own content outright. When we bought the book or journal subscription, we owned it: “fair use” and copyright laws governed our policies, not vendor license agreements. 

With print, academic libraries provided public access to books and journals. We provided access to all scholars who came into the library, regardless of enrollment status or institutional affiliation. 

Academic librarians always served students who attended other schools, people who needed to do research for a project for their jobs, journalists, grant writers, teachers, artists, museum professionals, high school students, writers and independent researchers, lawyers, business people and entrepreneurs. (Outsiders were never beating down our doors, and it was kind of exciting to assist someone with a real world project for a change.) In the transition to becoming fully digital, many academic libraries have been forced, because of vendor license agreements and single sign on protocols, to restrict access only to those with current institutional affiliation. Our facilities may be open to the public, but our resources are not. 

Finally, another challenge with the policy of booklessness is that students who attend on campus, those who desire to have the full college experience instead of the convenience of an online degree, still expect to see books and current titles in their campus libraries. They feel that the library with books provides them with a higher level of service, a more vibrant and meaningful experience than online access alone.  

To prospective students and their parents, a visible physical collection is perceived to have higher value and signify greater investment by the university than an invisible online collection. Good physical collections convey greater personal investment and expertise by the staff.

When there is a physical library, students and faculty believe that the library staff are personally knowledgeable about the collection. However, they do not have the same high opinion of librarians once the collection goes online, even if librarians are reading reviews and continuing to do title-by-title selection just as before, adding our contributions on top of packages. 

When touring campus, people judge the library, its librarians, and faculty—indeed, the entire institution—by the collections they can see. Of course, students want and need electronic databases for paper writing, research and assignment completion, but they also want a library with new (and old) books. They want to see and experience the books that other educated people know about and value. They believe, as do their parents, that the library is a valuable part of their college experience and education to which they are entitled. It is what makes the library interesting and good, and the university seem a less lonely place, even if many use it simply as a place to study. Other students will take advantage of the additional learning experiences the library affords. Students feel as if they are part of something larger when they study surrounded by books, because it means they are standing in a tradition of those who have achieved success and recognition in their field of study, and this in itself is motivating.

Even if books are not strictly needed for the successful completion of assigned coursework, students derive educational benefits, better knowledge of their disciplines or profession, intellectual stimulation, a historical perspective, and enjoyment from being able to browse library collections. Books reflect the culture and the character of the place, the spirit of the age (and sometimes of former ages), and the interests of faculty and student body. Seeing books on display raises students’ awareness of the world around them, deepens their understanding of their discipline and the world, and stimulates intellectual curiosity.

It is an essential part of their college experience.

The library with books prominently and centrally displayed, with collections maintained over time, also creates a sense of continuity and community on campus in ways the bookless library does not.

Print collections also allow librarians the opportunity to casually engage with students about their academic interests and intellectual pursuits, where initiating conversation with students gazing at screens—even to ask, “Do you need assistance?”— feels a bit invasive. A library with physical books and maintained collections creates a sense of value around scholarship, while electronic texts are experienced as ephemeral and inconsequential, or at least perceived to be that way by students. And to a large extent, they are correct, for who outside a university setting can even access that academic ebook?

To Prensky’s point, libraries really cannot be forced to evolve beyond the limitations of the software that is available to them. Taking print away won’t force libraries, their systems, or their users, to evolve faster, or necessarily make the online experience any better or more engaging for our users. Evolution requires that our profession return to the development of standards for its systems and its metadata, and envision what a fully-developed digital library online should look like. 

Library designers and architectural firms who claim to be engineering the 21st century library experience might give some thought as to how digital collections might be meaningfully integrated into the physical space to create a modern library that is more than just a building with open seating areas. At the same time, library software product developers might consider how a library online can be more than just a search box with list ranked results. 

In both the physical library space and the virtual one, we want to provide users with a browsable collection of new and significant titles, prominently displayed, to encourage engagement with our resources.

Library collections serve an important educational role and are central to the user experience of a good library. Discovery is about finding information, but library collections are really about about knowledge. Collections reflect the library’s commitment to the academic disciplines, to scholarly communication, to education and to knowledge. Whether in print or online, collections are the essence of a good library. 

For libraries to be libraries, they must be content-rich learning environments, where items are not only visible without needing to be invoked by a user’s query, but also stand in relation to other items in collection, developed and maintained by scholars (or scholars at heart) over time. Collections are an important part of the library’s aesthetic appeal, the primary way librarians inspire learning at the university.

Beautiful redesign of the Haverford College Lutnick Library, PA. Do libraries at conservative institutions hold on to print more than libraries at liberal ones?

Is the “New Academic Library” the Emperor’s New Clothes?

n library professional literature today, all aspects of the traditional service model are being questioned, including the value of physical books in the academic library space, the value of reference and instructional services (or maintaining the reference desk as a distinct and separate service point from circulation), and most recently, the value of maintaining collectionsOpinions among librarians vary widely on all of these aspects of our practice, but the overarching question really is what should be the user experience of an academic library in the 21st century? 

In recent years, there has been a very peculiar philosophy of librarianship emanating from both ACRL, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the dean of a large library school,40 perhaps the largest library school in the country, a philosophy which I will call library as facility, where the library is conceived as a new kind of innovative public work and social space, with the librarian acting a collaboration facilitator.23 The new library, as it is sometimes called, was supposed to increase learning opportunities through shared access to work spaces, technology, materials, tools and people—anything but books, it often seems. Work spaces, maker spaces, and computer labs do not perpetuate and sustain a culture of learning and education at a university. 

The traditional collection-centric service library model accomplished some important things that their new library, despite its emphasis on innovation, technology, socializing and 21st century learning, isn’t able to do very effectively, if at all.

Many of these things are what people liked about the library, and what made the library good as a destination, attractive and useful to educated people, scholars and aspiring professionals—even as a place to congregate, collaborate and socialize, which the new library purports, without any evidence, to do better than the old. 

The library, provided it was good, represented the current state of culture of educated people and the current state of the disciplines supported by the institution. It actively showcased new and significant publications, and helped users keep up with trends, which were important ways the library added value to the university. It represented the contributions of intellectuals and scholars across place and time, something one cannot get from Google. By going to an academic library, students and scholars felt as if they were experiencing something meaningful, learning what other scholars in their field deemed important and meaningful, inspiring their own research and intellectual inquiry, taking greater control over their education and their lives, as well as connecting with others through shared texts and common cultural reference points. It was an ideal learning environment. 

The old library certainly didn’t need to have everything to be good. No one ever expected that of the library, and if it retained everything, we know as library professionals that this would not result in an optimal user experience for users. Being a repository was never our objective. We knew if people could see an abundance of good things in the collection, they would come to trust it and us, and assume items with which they were not familiar were also good, or something they just might want to know about.

These are important ways in which libraries encouraged independent learning, intellectual curiosity, scholarship, and the pursuit of knowledge and fulfilled its educational mission. This is the aesthetic of the academic library, the essence of “library goodness,”178 and the user experience we should still be striving to cultivate.

New academic libraries being built across the country and around the world at this time are based on different service models and assessment plans, and often on ambiguous concepts (e.g., collaborative learning spaces, active learning centers, student learning environments), which seek to justify, through some new pedagogy, the provision of little more than the provision of tables, chairs, seating arrangements, study rooms and empty space in the place that the traditional library once occupied. 

As more of the collection is online, academic libraries are being converted into student centers, and public libraries are being converted into public office spaces, all in the name of building a better library

Yet, new library buildings are often designed without any emphasis on collections, books or reading in any format. American Libraries, a magazine of the American Library Association, often features these new facilities as modern libraries, and as evidence of continued investment, innovation and support for libraries—but in fact, the opposite may likely be true. Generic buildings such as this new library may be built with re-purposing in mind:

Many new academic libraries, such as this one at TSU in Houston (completed in 2019), are designed as atria buildings to be tall but without emphasis on books or resources or services which would justify the space. The assumption of this modern design is that books are no longer central to the mission of the academic library.

It is not my purpose to argue for the legitimacy of a traditional library service model widely lambasted in my profession as dated and nostalgic, but to say that we librarians should strive in all ways simply to bring what was good about the old library into the 21st century, to construct an immersive and vibrant user experience grounded in user engagement with quality content. We should try to make our spaces educational and “aspirational.” 

I believe that without visual emphasis on books, scholarly publications, and collectionsbasically, intellectual objectsnew libraries cannot function successfully as libraries, any more than a museum can function, or create value for its users, without an emphasis on cultural and aesthetic objects. Libraries and museums are both fundamentally experiential, and regular users go their to browse, to find something they like, or find intellectually or aesthetically stimulating. Just as a museum is focused on aesthetic objects, a library’s focus should be on intellectual objects.

Within a library setting, emphasis on titles and resources conveys a sense of value and commitment to scholarship, a common culture, the absence of which sends a message which has nothing to do with innovation, technology, or anything positive. It represents ignorance and privation, especially because it is called a “library” and people come to it expecting to be turned on to new things in that space, but find nothing inside. 

Libraries should place popular and interesting titles in high traffic areas to encourage browsing and student engagement with them.

They should strive to creatively merchandise publications, make users aware of them, promote them, and create conversation around them. They should try to instill the habit of reading outside of class assignments. They should convey value and respect for knowledge for knowledge’s sake, not just for assignment completion. Librarians who are knowledgeable about the collections encourage reading in students. 

If there are physical collections, virtual fulfillment may represent an important avenue for libraries to explore. People still enjoy browsing print, but may not wish to carry books around to read them or be obligated to return them. With virtual fulfillment, users can browse print in the library but download an electronic copy to with to take them to read. We should also try different ways of representing ebooks and e-resources in the physical library space and even beyond the walls of the library. 

Modifications to our discovery tools and websites to make the library’s online collections more prominent and easy to browse is another area ripe for development. There have been projects at universities and Google to develop virtual bookshelf apps to recreate the experience of wandering through the stacks.151 Unfortunately, these initiatives have been short-lived, perhaps because increasingly, ebooks are not afforded call numbers and quality metadata like their print counterparts,180 making it harder to order them on a virtual bookshelf. 

Libraries and museums share a similar ethos: they are about cultural and aesthetic objects, and presenting these in ways that constitute a meaningful experience.

For the user experience of the library to be good, and for librarians to be valued as professionals, we must make a determined return to content—including digital content—within our physical spaces, and also develop rich, content-centric websites to enhance our online presence, with personalization and many of the features one would expect to find in commercial websites.

Library as “Building” and Learning as “Staircase”: The Rhetoric of the New Librarianship.

oday, funding for the construction of new libraries is often allocated entirely to the building and building technology. There is often nothing inside of them but tables, chairs, sofas, study rooms and empty spaces. Books are either not visible, or else appear to serve a purely decorative function (sometimes referred to as “academic wallpaper”). 

With new library renovation projects, is not uncommon for millions to be allocated to energy efficient smart window and lighting control systems, robotic storage and retrieval systems, remote storage facilities to house a worthless collection while the new library stands vacant, RFID systems, retro modern-styled furnishings, with an abundance of empty space left over serving no discernible purpose. 

Who cares about robotic storage and retrieval technology and self-check out machines when the library is not investing in books anymore, and hasn’t in years? Has anyone brought up the point that the extent of cataloging for these older titles was intended merely to place researchers in the general vicinity to browse the stacks? There are no analytics in old catalog records. If you know you want a title or books by a certain author, it works well enough, I suppose. I would rather be able to browse the stacks.

Despite the investment in technology as itself a kind of design objective, there is often little discussion about the user experience of the library beyond providing quiet places to sit to get work done, or learning objectives of the space beyond assistance with assignment completion. 

Library professional magazines routinely and uncritically feature these new bookless spaces as innovative libraries, as examples of “new libraries.” As I write, historic Carnegie libraries are being converted into open, empty public work spaces, their books often put into remote storage. In a college and academic environment, the elimination of books in the name of 21st century learning, progress, and improved librarianship, should not be regarded uncritically by our own profession. It is not proven that, all things being equal, bookless libraries offer superior learning outcomes when compared with our former content rich, collection-centered facility which emphasized books, ideas, research and publications. 

I understand the need for libraries to be digital today. STEM libraries in particular, where journals comprise the collection, significantly benefit researchers by being fully digital. In addition, libraries with a strictly vocational orientation, where people need access to technical manuals and reference materials are fine online. Students and faculty need access to scholarly databases, which get more expensive with each passing year.

But let’s not be eager to redeem these empty spaces which are replacing the traditional college and research library by imagining them to be functioning as some sort of “learning commons,” or worse, a primordial learning environment suited for the preferences of the 21st century learner.181

For even if as a culture we have slipped into what some call “secondary orality”, why should the library make its priority to contribute to illiteracy and ignorance?

And if the space were designed for oral knowledge transmission like in the days before books (aka, the Dark Ages), the faculty are still not going to be the rhapsodes or storytellers for our imaginary campfires and watering-holes inside the library. Older generations of scholars are not eagerly waiting on our collaborative staircases to drop wisdom on passersby.

Indeed, our spare, light-infused learning environments have little appeal to scholars. We cannot feed their creativity or inspire their literary production through the provision of vacuous spaces, tables and chairs.

Libraries are about creating community by showcasing cultural and intellectual achievement: what is current, significant, new and compelling in the disciplines and in culture. They are about what is good. Libraries add value to the academic community by placing intellectual objects, usually in the form of texts, into broader public view.

To this end, a library really needs three things to be successful:

  1. the right titles,
  2. the ability to place these titles into meaningful relationship with other titles, into a collection,
  3. the capacity to place its collections into public view. 

Librarians who are intimately familiar with, or at least know something about the collection, are a plus. 

A library must display and promote publications, contextualize them, and create meaning around them. This is the primary way academic librarians support reading, research, education, community, intellectual inquiry and knowledge in the 21st century. 

New Models of Librarianship. There are many proposed library service models to address the phenomenon of collectionlessness in the new academic library. The deans of library schools, such as Danuta Nitecki, are particularly adept at re-purposing the library and librarians through schemes which try to reassure everyone that the library, and librarians, aren’t going away any time soon. Library as venue, where success is measured by facilities use, is her latest rendition of a libraries matter but collections do not.40 

It is foolish to think that after eliminating all of the books, that we can turn around and assert value as library professionals simply by documenting facilities use. Everyone knows how many students are using the space to study or complete group work has little to do with the efforts of librarians. Furthermore, students can study with wi-fi all over a college campus today, and often prefer to do so where there are food services and other students around them. Every academic building on a college campus today has seating, tables, lounges, vending machines and students at the tables set out for them to study. No one is counting heads at these various locations to determine how many students are studying, say, in the Communications or Education building. What difference does it make where they do it?

Another proposed scheme for asserting value without collections is serving as some kind of “collaboration facilitator,”23 but what are the measurable outcomes for facilitating collaboration among faculty members and students? And what magic wand do we have for getting faculty to collaborate with each other? 

Good libraries encourage browsing, intellectual inquiry, the exchange of ideas and the feeling of community much better than the generalized, bland and often empty learning centers now called libraries, where knowledge transmission is often theoretically moored, not in authoritative collections, publications, or even online resources, but in orality, in the big nobodaddy of collaboration, which architects and library designers (even our own library professional associations) are keen on advancing as the pre-eminent learning modality of the 21st century library.

Library Technopoly: Replacing Culture with Technology184

he trend for new library construction projects to downplay the library part of the library goes back at least to 2003, in what began as fascinating study by a doctoral student in Education to assess institutional priorities motivating the construction and design of new academic libraries.15

The conclusion, derived from a survey of 53 new academic libraries (85 were surveyed), is that in most instances, the needs of the academic library and its operations were not considered or thought important in the new library planning process.186 In many instances, funds were allocated to “sophisticated light and window control systems for both energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.”187 Building size was also considered an important factor independent from collections188 or library operations.

According to this study, while there were acknowledgements that students were now using different formats, but there were no new service plans or funds set aside for deploying new technology to enhance the user experience of online library resources, to raise awareness of digital resources by those in the physical library space, to improve the collection itself, or how items might be displayed to add interest or promote resource use. 

  • Why not, for example, use technology funds for a new automation system and enhancements to the catalog and website?
  • Why not devise tools to promote online resources in the physical environment?
  • Why not devise tools to promote new ebook titles online?
  • Why not use technology and visualization tools to track and display to other users what researchers are doing in real time and where they are going online?

Why are so many new library design firms fixated on strategies to manage physical inventory through costly solutions (RFID technology, robotic storage and retrieval systems, smart gates, self-check out machines), when everyone acknowledges that circulation is at an all time low, and less than 5% of library budgets are going to print?

Why declare the physical collection to be obsolete, but at the same time deploy robotic technology for storing, managing and preserving the physical book? How does the new multi-million dollar library function any better than the old in terms of learning outcomes?

Despite much speculation about how the new people-centric, socially-oriented empty spaces will add value to students and to colleges and universities, there is no evidence that a building alone, or a building that is just an empty space, no matter how nice, how architecturally innovative or spacious, will result a better education, improved scholarship, increased professional development, better retention, higher enrollment, support meaningful intellectual exchanges, or offer any measurable educational or learning outcomes.

It isn’t that I am insensitive to the need to replace worn out facilities, to provide beautiful study or work spaces to students, or for librarians to evolve and adapt to new roles in the Digital Age. It just seems that the millions going into a new library building construction projects are a lost opportunity for genuine innovation to improve library services. I care about the user experience of the library itself, not the user experience of an iconic space. 

We know from many years of study with low income students and families throughout the course of the 20th century that impoverished learning environments do not inspire learning. How is it that a library that is not focused on its resources, on the importance of its own scholarly content, in any way capable of encouraging others to attribute value to it, or to the scholarly activity they represent? How is a library that is primarily a work space attractive to faculty or aspiring scholars?

No genuine philosophy of librarianship can be founded upon the mere provision of study spaces, seating and natural light. At a university, the focus on intellectual inquiry and creativity is what makes it good and attractive to scholars. 

Library architecture and infrastructure, including our websites and automation systems, must serve a legitimate 21st century librarianship, without which architects and educators—jumping on the bandwagon of the “new library movement“—will continue to create multi-story structures of open staircases, lounge areas, balconies and study rooms, glass and LED lighting, without sufficient consideration given to the educational, intellectual and humanistic purpose of an academic library, our processes, and our need to actively promote resources to those who come into our spaces.

Some new libraries often use staircases, landings and catwalks as design elements to emphasize vertical lines and transparency, while putting books out of sight.

Dignitas or Vanitas? The hidden meaning of the stacks.

In the Digital Age, where so much is competing for our users’ attention, academic libraries must seek new ways to offer a stimulating and vibrant learning experience for scholars, which means a concerted focus on content, especially new content, to put intellectual inquiry and new ideas front and center to our communities. This is the only way to make the library a destination.

With the move to becoming fully digital, new academic libraries have gone not towards vibrancy and the world of ideas, transcending time and place, but have been more “about” the superficial experience of their engineered architectural spaces and mundane views of outside windows, or else about the intellectual exchanges imagined to be going on inside of them, especially on large-stepped learning staircases, which have become popular with architectural designers for the last several years.189 Light-infused big-stepped learning staircases coupled with empty space lend an unprecedented prominence (verticality) to new library buildings, while collections inside them have withered away.  Libraries are no longer about publications and ideas, but about their glass windows, energy efficiency, over-sized staircases, designer furnishings and whiteboards. Yet we do not know if the learning center model is any more popular with our users, if it is any more effective at encouraging learning than the old library full of books, which always seemed to have plenty of seating for those who wanted to sit and study or do work. 

Holding on to old and worn books to lend atmosphere, like some Disney theme park, is not the answer, although some have proposed that we do precisely that, including the green banker’s lamps.190

Within academic libraries with large historical holdings, the unkempt stacks which have not been replenished with anything new may have already come to resemble a medieval Vanitas painting: a pall of dust may have settled over everything, cloth spines deteriorated to the point where the majority of them are unreadable from age, wear, and decades of radiation from fluorescent lighting. (Still, I marvel at a critical edition of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology and Crito in ancient Greek, published in 1924. Who at my university continued to check this book out into the 1980s and 1990s?) 

The ruinous decay of the stacks, and the works of those who devoted themselves to scholarship—the seeming lack of care for library collections over the course of decades—will no doubt cause some to question the viability of their own scholarly pursuits and speculate whether it is all a vanity; or else, on the other hand, if the collection is good and cared for, to consider, as Classical philosophers say, that intellectual achievements are timeless and enduring, and that one’s education will be valued by others long into the future.

Whatever one’s declared major or metaphysical leanings, the question might be looked upon, as all things might, from a strictly business perspective in the modern university: in an academic setting, the care and condition of the library’s collection symbolizes purpose and dignity (dignitas, respect and esteem, as opposed to vanitas, a “vanity” or folly), respect for knowledge and scholarship. The quality and condition of the collection speaks wonders to answering this gut-wrenching question which our students are undoubtedly asking themselves each and every day: Is it all worth it?

I believe a university should care very much about how their current and prospective students are determining to answer this question for themselves.

Vanitas or dignitas? At a campus library, how users view the collection can impact enrollment and retention.

The Academic Library as a “Work Space.”

e can easily speculate about architects’ and administrators’ motivations for building spacious new libraries that are not libraries, or have little library left inside of them. I understand their motivations perfectly well. More puzzling to me is why my fellow librarians and especially our library professional associations are celebrating the conversion of their libraries into desolate work and office spaces

Contrary to the stereotype,”191 192 the ones resisting are not the old, nostalgic and techno-phobic librarians who are stuck in their ways. Mid-career librarians and scholars alike, particularly those in the Humanities and Social Sciences, will undoubtedly feel confused by the rapid degradation of the academic and college library into little more than lounges, stairs, atria, balconies, catwalks, private and group study rooms, empty office spaces and programmable glass windows, all in the name of learning

Not so long ago, academic librarians fought hard against a perception by administrators that the library was nothing more than a study hall. Now, librarians may feel very much between a rock (“book warehouse”) and a hard place (“work space”), even blindsided by the cringe-worthy messaging emanating from our own institutions and municipalities that the elimination of the stacks, or placing them out of sight, constitutes some form of progress: our students will be able to learn better now that the books are gone. 

I am not wedded to the stacks or book format. Just like everyone else, I do most of my reading online. It is not only more convenient, but I can make the fonts bigger and read in dim light if I so choose. But to me, progress for a 21st century library would be replacing the stacks with something better, something which would help us market our content better, to help us become a modern library, and not just a modern space

Truly, I love the idea of the public library as a vibrant community center, with cooking and art classes, music lessons, café, with performances of live bands on its rooftop. I’d like to drop my kids off to spend an afternoon doing something productive and also preferably cultural, even if they are not reading. I’d raise money for an indoor multistory play structure / obstacle /ropes course in the middle of the children’s section to give them exercise and develop coordination. I want Bob Ross painting classes, sewing circles and leisure learning. I want exhibits by local artists and children’s art on display. But just as with academic libraries, public libraries are also likely to be made over into some kind of horrible, vacuous bookless business center.

Indeed, the trend to turn the public library into office / business / work space, paralleling trends in academic libraries, is occurring in public libraries everywhere. This is one architect’s vision 193 for one of the oldest libraries in the country, the Free Library of Philadelphia:

The Free Library of Philadelphia appears to be free of books now.

This might have been a meaningful project for the architect, and undoubtedly lucrative for the storage solution provider, but why would anyone bother to enter the building or spend time this place? (Why convert a historical building to mid-century modern design?)

What makes it successful, or not, as a library?

Closer to home, in my own suburban community, League City, TX, library planners insist, based on the studies they have conducted, that what people really want and expect from their library are not books or resources, but private study rooms and public work spaces.194 Who are these people? Why is it the residents of League City have so much work to do? The finding that citizens need more work space justification for the construction of much bigger, empty facilities at taxpayer expense, and with little more (and often less) for the collections inside of them or offered online. 

The vision for new libraries advanced by architects and self-appointed library design consultants, often without any input from librarians, is seemingly the same everywhere: very large, minimalist spaces for people to get their work done. At the end of the day, the new library is a public office space or lobby. There will no doubt be social gatherings and events as well, but ultimately it is just a business center, not a library, which is about cultural achievement and ideas, a means for the public to reach their own creative potential.  

Where before the collection allowed people to feel grounded in the space and gave them a reason for being there (even if all they wanted was a computer or place to sit), inside the new library there is no connection between the library and the scholar, or the library and its community, or the library and ideas or larger world, and nothing to establish a unique sense of place. 

No doubt, many new academic libraries offer a certain kind of anesthetized appeal as buildings, but from what I have seen in library publications, many do not offer to users the intellectual stimulation, the academic intimacy, the inducements to learn, or the aesthetic experience of a good college or academic library. 

Our library professional magazines devote special issues to these spare facilities, proclaiming them to be beautiful and modern, but I don’t see what is to be gained by “converting historical Carnegie libraries into modern vacant structures.195 Isn’t it time to assess if vacant spaces are really meeting the needs of students and scholars?

Granted, every library is different and we all might not see things the same way. But the 21st century academic library should not be conceptualized as vacuous spaces, illuminated stairwells and open seating arrangements, with success measured by body counts. If the collection is online, we need a way in the physical space to emphasize our online collections.

Nor should it be envisioned as assemblages of primitive learning environments, “caves, a campfires, and watering holes,”181 from a time people were illiterate (the “Dark Ages”) and therefore had to get information from other people, instead of books and authoritative sources. It shouldn’t be envisioned as a chat room or public lounge where the users are on display (“Users are seated in the middle, because they are the focus, not books. . . “), with rooms off to the side available to rent by the hour.

Academic libraries should foster engagement and awareness of the most significant cultural and scholarly resources today. That is our mission, to help create and sustain educated people.

The new 21st century library should make an effort to harness new technology to do what the traditional library did, only better. It should be a content-rich learning environment, a Times Square, a marketplace for ideas.

The library should be a vibrant and stimulating attraction, full of distractions and temptation to read, learn and explore, one that strives to actively and imaginatively engage users in significant and interesting resources from the moment patrons walk in the door or land on our websites. It should speak to users like an oracle, fostering serendipity, meaning creation, knowledge and insight. It should stimulate the mind and the senses. It should awaken creativity and curiosity. 

At minimum, it should convey the value of scholarship and knowledge for knowledge’s sake, not just to pass a test or complete a task. 

The modern library done right in the Netherlands, called LocHal, made from a converted train shed. New books are attractively displayed in an inmate space which encourages browsing, but there are still plenty of options for socializing, gathering and public programming. The collaborative staircase does not replace the collection, but balances it; the regular steps are proportioned wider than the bleacher stairs, creating a more inviting appearance than large block steps which create an obstacle. Books are visible on the ground floor where librarians can provide assistance and readers advisory, putting books in readers’ hands.

For the last 15 years, there has been a vigorous re-imagining of libraries as conference centers, social study spaces and tutoring / learning centers, with a determined shift away from collection-oriented interiors and assessment plans toward what is conceived by architects, college presidents and some library futurists to supposedly more socially-oriented, service-oriented and consumer-driven designs.197 New libraries, supposedly developed around new service models and priorities, are popping up everywhere, showcased in library literature as beautiful and innovative. But are they really? More to the point, are they really libraries, or are they the emperor’s new clothes? How successful are they as libraries and by what measure do we evaluate their success?

We might take a step back from philosophies and ask what categorically defines libraries as a libraries—as good and beautiful libraries—from a professional library standpoint, and are these new facilities better than the traditional library for supporting higher education and learning? How do new college and university libraries actively support publishing, research and scholarship? How do they support student success? How do they support intellectual inquiry?

As libraries are shorn of print, paper, publications, collections and outward signs of intellectual life, there has been a concomitant ratcheting up of pressure for librarians to gather evidence, based on measurable outcomes, to demonstrate their continued relevance to the university, and specifically to “student success,” however that might be defined (at this time, 2020, there is no consensus). We must forget about “life-long learning” because that’s not a measurable objective. “Knowledge” or “inspiration” isn’t measurable either. Usage stats? No good, that’s on output, not an outcome.  

Staring into a dark abyss of institutional assessment, with its nagging insistence on tying all conceivable library goals in some measurable way to either classroom learning or institutional outcomes, goals that are not library-centric (that is, measures having anything to do with the library’s being a good library), librarians face a profound challenge: The college and academic research library was never fundamentally “about” instructional support for classroom learning, and even less about the business objectives of the university. Indeed, the harder we work to tie the library to the remedial learning objectives of the classroom, the more redundant and irrelevant we become. It is a paradox. In terms of demonstrating value to those who fund us, however, it seems we can only be about “student success” as defined by the institution (enrollment, retention, progression, completion), not about scholarship, publishing, learning for learning’s sake, or success as defined by the student or scholar. 

The academic library was always, theoretically speaking, more ambitious than mere classroom learning or assignment completion, even degree completion. Libraries are about learning beyond the classroom and research. They have always been more about learning outside of the classroom than inside of it. We are about support for the acquisition (and creation) of disciplinary and professional knowledge. We serve the academic disciplines and the purpose of furthering intellectual inquiry. We serve the individual’s own definition of success, helping him or her achieve his creative, intellectual and career potential

A corollary of this is that as library professionals and educators, an important part of our job function is to actually stimulate demand for resources, not to passively make them available to those who might wish to access them. That is not being a good library, or affording users an optimal library experience.

Mechanisms for stimulating demand—for marketing resources and content—must be a key part of the design of the 21st century library, a part of the architectural solution or plan. It must promote resource use of print and online resources (there is absolutely no reason we should need to print out and tape up covers of ebooks in a brand new library—there should be comprehensive plan for the promotion of ebooks and ejournals baked into the very design of the building). But a prerequisite of this is maintaining a good collection with the technological infrastructure in place to provide a 21st century library experience.

Influenced by a common perception that everything students want or need can be found online, many within the library field are ready to proclaim that we are no longer about publications, reading, titles or collections in any format, but about teaching information literacy classes so students can identify truth from fake news (I’m not sure I can do that. I’ve admittedly been “foxed” by fake news quite a few times myself, even though I imagine that I engage with media on the right and the left ecumenically), or help students with their class assignments. This certainly sounds practical and very meaningful, a way to directly add value and justify ourselves in some way that aligns with university assessment plans.

Librarians can certainly support classroom instruction by showing students how to perform research, identify authoritative sources, and cite sources for papers. Indeed, we have always done so.

However, it may not be clear to university administrators or the faculty that it is the responsibility of librarians to perform this function, or that they are vitally needed to perform this task. If I were a Provost or Dean, I would assume that any faculty member qualified to teach college-level courses, faculty who are presumably spending all their spare time outside of the classroom writing papers for publication, should also be able to show students how to perform basic research in their disciplines and certainly demonstrate to students whatever tasks and skills are needed to complete the professor’s own course assignments. For if he doesn’t know how to do research, why is he teaching or grading research papers?

The solution to making ourselves relevant is not to declare collections obsolete or make support for classroom instruction our exclusive mission, but to more effectively leverage new technologies and designs to promote engagement with content, specifically with collections, both in print and online, in order to create and sustain the next generation of readers, writers, scholars and leaders. We need to build and sustain content-rich and dynamic learning environments which reflect scholarly communication in the disciplines.

We should seek to preserve and amplify what made the library good for scholars, and explore truly innovative ways to market physical and virtual content to both physical and virtual users. That should be the primary objective of new library spaces, along with greater integration of the physical and virtual resources to support community engagement with our content. As a profession, it is vital that we renew our commitment to the disciplines, and to the provision of quality content within a disciplinary framework. We need a clear sense of what the user experience of a modern library should be, and what our business and technological requirements are to achieve this, rather than depending on architects and design firms to define what a library is and what it will be in the future.

It is the communal browsing experience, the shared cultural referents, and disciplinary knowledge which we want to encourage and preserve. That is what makes the library a library, or at least, what makes it a good one. 

Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Library has completed a beautiful redesign with a good balance between the social and the intellectual, the modern and the traditional, space and content. Do conservative schools value print more than liberal peer institutions?

Making Room for Space, and other Paradoxes of Modern Librarianship.

hen new libraries are discussed, whether public or academic, there is one universal theme: elimination of stack space to make room for collaborative study spaces. 

Booklessness, or the appearance of it (books may be stowed away in low traffic areas or moved off site), is often spun as a peculiar benefit of the 21st century library, in itself signifying progress and innovation. There has been very limited discussion about the value of collections to our academic missions, but a shift from collection-centric assessment models to outcomes-based models has also, for obvious reasons, tended to negate the value of collections and those who work to maintain them.

On a conceptual level, I think it important to ask:

  • What does the new library have to offer to faculty and students who are interested in orienting themselves and succeeding within their academic disciplines?
  • How do new libraries effectively promote innovation or awareness of new or significant publications in the disciplines or encourage use of these resources?
  • How do they encourage learning?
  • How do they browsing for new ideas to encourage inquiry and research?
  • How does a bookless library reflect upon the university?

With this shift away from publications and collection use, there has also been a new emphasis on librarian initiated-interaction (e.g., poking students who come within eye-shot to see if they need help, greeting people as they walk through the doors; more aggressively selling ourselves and our “services”; and assiduously documenting these efforts and casual encounters as “evidence” of our value).

There is also a questionable trend to count in our assessment frameworks the utilization of our spaces by students for any conceivable purpose,198 whether for study, reading, creating, conversing, snacking, meditating, socializing or sleeping. Why is facilities use a measure of our success?

New libraries are being built without consideration for the most important function of the academic library within a university: raising awareness of new and significant publications (in all formats, print and digital) within the disciplines, and encouraging user engagement with them.

For example, we buy thousands of ebooks, but have no effective or efficient mechanism for promoting them in the modern or traditional library space. This seems like a design flaw to me. If our collection is predominantly online, why can there be no way to promote e-resources in the physical space?  If more than 95% of academic library acquisitions budgets are for online materials,107 why should there be no evidence of this in the physical library facility? There is so much discussion about data visualization right now, yet there is no way to visualize the library’s collection in our physical spaces? 

The same sort of criticism would be leveled at an art museum which places insufficient focus on the art in its collections. Expecting people to learn about new and significant titles on their own by pulling them out of your catalogs and databases or discovery layer is not an effective library service model

Libraries have the same or similar aesthetic purpose as museums, to cultivate awareness and appreciation for intellectual and cultural artifacts.  

In order to do so, it needs just a bit of darkness and mystery, a feeling of transcendence of time and place, not glass walls where dust motes float in the air and the mundane world is ever present.  

Cornell Art Library

Scaled to the Book. The architect of the Cornell Art Library, Wolfgang Tschapeller, wanted to devise a way to emphasize vertical lines and openness along with creating more intimate spaces for books. While not filling me with warmth and and a sense of intimacy, the book grotto is a place I’d like to explore. There is no focus on new books or “marketing” or resources in the space.

False Dichotomies: Having vs. Doing

hile these new facilities are still called libraries, and librarians work there at least for the time being, it not clear to librarians that new libraries are serving in that capacity well, or at allor what library professional assessment standards, if any, ought to be applied to them.200

Around the world, a similar trend to convert libraries into social and work spaces is occurring, including in public libraries, which are being transformed into stunning community centers “with books thrown in,” as one BBC reporter cheerfully describes.201 We have yet to know how these library spaces are faring, their impact on their communities, their impact on librarians, if the renovation has succeeded in attracting new users while maintaining the old, and most importantly, their impact on learning. So many articles and press releases bear curious statements like, “With the new building, we decided to put people first,” referencing the fact that expanded seating arrangements in the middle of the space have replaced the stacks.

Well, what did they think they were they doing before? Putting books first? It does sound catchy: The library is a place where we put books before people. 

In addition to creating buildings for gathering together, campus and community leaders alike are eager to build new libraries not full of books, but full of technology.202 Just as books were once thought indispensable to the scholarly enterprise, technology is now presumed to be a similar sort of intrinsic good. In the public discourse surrounding new libraries, “technology” is often used euphemistically, as code for “not books,” rather than something specific that everyone wants (it is hard to get people to agree on what technology is needed beyond wi-fi, larger screens for communal viewing and a place to recharge). Nonetheless, engaging with technology and others in the library space is thought to have educational benefit in higher education, and appear to occupy a status that books once held. 

The often repeated sentiment in library literature now, that “We all know that today, having doesn’t matter, it’s doing that counts. . .”, stated by the President of the American Library Association,203 presents a dangerously false dichotomy, one that too often underscores a troubling reality that the impact of our collections on learning cannot be meaningfully evaluated or factored into the outcomes-based assessment models in wide use today.

Having a collection, one that is current, topical, interesting, selective and browsable, is an important service which libraries and librarians provide to their communities. Academic librarians cannot provide good library services without a means of offering visible, meaningful collections that stimulate, support and inspire research. Without doing, we cannot have, and without having, we cannot do.

Having quality collections is fundamental to a good user experience of a library. Collections do not need to be physical, but they need to be visible, browsable, and perceived by others to constitute an actual collection, cultivated with intentionality and care (curated)—not passively acquired, random aggregations of third-party content. The library must strive to be more than a costly academic search engine. 

It is an error in thinking that now we librarians should now be wholly unconcerned about “having,” or about resources, that we can  shift gears and be about doing. I would venture to say that to users, our having resources is what matters most to them, and if they had to choose between access to a librarian or access to resources, they would pick the latter. 

Providing quality collections is a core function of libraries, along with stimulating demand for resources, which it cannot do well without collection accessibility, high resource visibility, a marketing plan, and staff who read, specifically who keep up with the scholarly literature in the disciplines.

That colleges and universities are building “new libraries” without investing in library resources should not be a cause for celebration by ALA and ACRL, and should not be treated as a kind of progress. 

So please, my fellow librarians, stop saying “having” doesn’t matter in the 21st century—it matters to our users and should matter a great deal to us.

New Library (Nieuwe Bibliotheek) in the Netherlands, which based its design on patrons surveys, is a departure from pragmatic American new library “work space” models. Dutch models promote learning, leisure, hanging out and socializing, not bring your office work there. Dutch audiences prefer an intimate bookstore merchandising model where books are displayed with jackets on face-out. There is a stylish cafe which looks like a place you’d go on a date.  

The Value of Collections:
The Impact of Library Acquisition Patterns on Use.

ith the advent of new libraries,” the once lively debate over formats (print vs. digital) has been overshadowed by more fundamental questions about the need for libraries, or librarians, to maintain robust collections in any format,204 205 and moreover, how this need might be persuasively demonstrated to those who fund us.

While the leadership of our two pre-eminent library professional associations, ACRL and ALA, have long embraced booklessness—as a profession we’ve supposedly been about information since the late 1980s, and twenty years later, the library science degree at top-tier library schools morphed into “Master’s in Information Science” (no library in their name)—the sudden disappearance of open stacks over the last few years, and rapid conversion of many college and university libraries into bookless study / learning centers, collaboration centers, tutoring centers, media centers, and maker-spaces, etc., is making it harder for library directors to justify their acquisitions budgets and professional staffing levels.

Within library literature, those who defend books now risk being castigated as technophobic, unwilling to adapt to change, nostalgic or “sclerotic.”191 192

While scholars and intellectuals are still writing and reading books, guests routinely appear on talk shows and in the media to discuss their books—and publications are still the basis for tenure at a university—within the library profession, even reading has become something of a liability. In a publication devoted to books, Publisher’s Weekly, in an article written by a librarian208 there is implication that librarians who like to read are not tech-savvy or not sufficiently customer service-oriented. 

  • Why would someone who reads not be technically inclined?
  • How can you as a librarian provide good library service if you yourself do not read?
  • Why seek to stigmatize readers and reading in the first place?

Common advice for candidates for library jobs is if asked why you decided to become a librarian, never mention that you love books and reading

Today, you can be all about instruction/teaching, information literacy or “helping people,” but not about reading or liking books.

How can one be really about information literacy but not actual literacy

I believe that reading, learning, publishing and ideas should be celebrated in the college and academic library space. The space should be a celebration of books, thought, ideas and cultural values. 

Therefore, we shouldn’t be hiding books out of sight, acting as if they are a source of embarrassment, treating them as decorative wallpaper—gluing, shellacking them and tacking them to the wall or putting them into inaccessible wall niches—or making assumptions that the stacks are somehow getting in the way of students’ ability to learn, or no longer relevant to our academic missions because we are all about technology, work spaces and collaboration now.

We are supposed to be encouraging respect for publications, writing, and scholarship. 

We should not prioritize empty space or views out the window over titles, as if “nothing” has more value than the “something” we provide, whatever that something might be. Again, showing respect means to put it into view so it can be seen. Prioritizing empty space or modern design over publications is respectful. 

The impact of library acquisition patterns on use. Even as millions are spent on online resources per institution, investment in print now comprises less than 5.8% of academic library acquisitions budgets, according to a recent study by Ithaka S+R.209 The Ithaka study uses acquisitions data harvested from library automation systems over a period of three years, 2014-7. The percent of ebooks purchased individually (title-by-title selection) was less than 1% of the budget. The decline in both print and title-by-title selection practices are not really news, but what this large-scale study, generously funded by the Mellon Foundation with the support of OCLC WMS and ProQuest Ex Libris, reveals is the sheer difficulty of gathering data to study library acquisition patterns in the first place, let alone assessing the impact these trends are having on user behavior.

In the annual academic library survey conducted by ACRL (ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey), print books are lumped in with all other one-time purchases, which may include individually selected ebooks, videos, and anything else not part of a subscription package. The ACRL survey attempts to capture detailed statistics on academic library services for all sizes of library, and it has captured this same information over the course of years to allow for identification of trends over time. However, it does not ask about percent of budget spent on print, percent devoted to books in all formats, percent obtained through DDA/PDA programs, etc., or provide detailed information about acquisition patterns to allow for an investigation into how changes in acquisition patterns have impacted library usage, student behavior, perceptions of the library, learning outcomes, or the library profession as such (something ACRL’s membership would certainly care about). Through ACRL’s metrics, one cannot make any correlation, say, between declining print purchases and reduced foot traffic in the library. 

I am not attached to any particular format, but rather to the objective of maintaining stimulating, current, and visible collections which support browsing for ideas, current scholarship, creativity and independent learning. I would like some way to integrate ebooks with print books in the stacks, and raise awareness of ebooks in the physical space.

Regardless of their format, collections, titles, reading and publications must remain central to our academic mission and messaging, and to the user experience of the library.

By becoming an even bigger computer lab or study hall with more meeting and study rooms, by our focusing on connecting people with each other rather than encouraging people to engage with books, ideas and current scholarship, we may not actually be creating environments conducive to learning, despite what architects have to say about the matter. 

I believe that booklessness, and the premise of the “new librarianship,” that we are just about collaboration or technology or our services or our work spaces, but not about collections, are hurting students and faculty in ways that have not been fully realized.

It is also taking away from scholarship as a focus of the library and the librarian-facilitated conversations that new libraries are supposed to be encouraging. 

The Value of Collections. To date, no large-scale study has been conducted which seeks to determine the relative value of maintaining physical collections in a predominantly digital library environment, although this conclusion has been alluded to in a few recent studies.210 

Another related question, one completely independent of choice of format, is the continued value of title-by-title selection in an online environment, where it has become easy to allow patron-driven and vendor-driven models to determine what is offered, excluding the librarians from the process. Does it make a difference who does selection? What acquisition model makes the library the most successful?

When a greater percentage of titles are selected individually by selectors and faculty, do users benefit? How does the institution benefit? Aside from offering better, more focused collections of titles thought to be significant or relevant, when librarians (and faculty) are more actively involved with title selection, are they not better equipped to encourage use by students? Are they more satisfied with the library if they can be involved with collection development?

Is there a difference in usage or the user experience of the library where there is more collection development activity, as opposed to the library’s functioning as a passive gateway to subscribed content?211

There are significant costs for college and university libraries to fully divest themselves of print. On a title-by-title basis, pbooks are still more cost effective for smaller campus libraries (see below, The real cost of ebooks ), and most books published today are not available in ebook format to be licensed by a library—at least, not for a few months or years after their print debuts. Those books available to be purchased by a library in ebook format represent a very small percent of book publications. Therefore, without print titles, our collections cannot remain current. We also have a difficult time promoting or raising awareness of ebooks in the library space. 

Our often misunderstood job as academic librarians and educators is not to satisfy demand for resources, but to stimulate it!

Libraries play a significant role not just in meeting needs or answering questions, but in creating them in the first place, stimulating demand for their own resources. 

Our collections should inspire wonder, curiosity, investigation, reaction and research. We cannot accomplish this without high collection visibility and a discernible commitment to maintaining quality content. 

Whether public or academic, our patrons don’t necessarily know what they want when they come into the library or come to our websites. Rather than looking for something in particular, they come to the library to browse, looking for something to like, something interesting, something that jumps out at them, something meaningful to them, to see what is new, or explore their chosen career. 

This is the aesthetic experience that a good library provides. Our websites should cultivate the same aesthetic, putting our content out in front to invite exploration of the invisible world of intellectual endeavor, scholarly pursuit and creativity. 

A good library collection is like a living thing, the substrate of intellectual life at the university, a colorful coral reef that the whole academic community feeds upon to nurture ideas, learning, knowledge creation and intellectual development. New books are the blooms. Primarily through its collections, the library serves as a visually and intellectually stimulating place for scholars and aspiring scholars to visit to gather ideas and explore. Good collections take years to develop. Kill off the reef and the fish are going elsewhere!

Choose wisely for your library and your university.

Down(sized) and Out(sourced) in the Digital Age:
From Academic Research Libraries to “Learning Centers.”

he centripetal pull of new academic libraries away from content and collection activity in the disciplines to “collaboration” and student support seems to beg the question: Can college libraries simply subscribe to online databases and be done with it? If they do, what is the impact of this decision?

Obviously, there will be no need for librarians to be title selectors, as vendors (and patron-driven acquisitions programs) will select and manage ebooks and ejournals for us. No need for catalogers either, for Web-based discovery services are replacing them. ProQuest Ex Libris, the largest academic library system and content aggregator, is positioning itself to sell universities a complete academic library in the cloud. What will be the response from my fellow librarians then, I wonder, when Ex Libris makes the library “ex libris”? Arguing that it doesn’t meet our library standards for collections then will be a little too late. McLibraries of commodified content populated by annual license agreements are fine now and will be fine then. 

The thought seems to be that without collection development, collection management and technical services consuming so much of our space and energy, the academic library and its librarians can be liberated, transformed into something better and more useful to students. Library professionals in technical services will be freed up to do “more important things,” like instructing people how to use the discovery tool. 

At the same time, the focus of the new academic library/learning center is no longer on the provision of quality collections, engaging content, or ideas, or fostering communities of readers, but on seating arrangements to support individualized learning and study styles, innovative and inspiring architectural spaces, and offering various support services in partnership with other entities on campus.212 Space is allocated to group work with large screens (for collective viewing), video conferencing and the latest technology for brainstorming and motion capture (capturing the body language and hand gestures of participants). In other instances, there are only chairs and tables with outlets, for all library resources are available online.

At some large universities libraries, like at the University of Chicago’s Mansueto library,

or North Carolina State University’s Hunt library,

or Temple University’s Charles Library:

and countless others under construction or renovation at this time,213 214 books are not visible to patrons when they walk through the doors or in most places in the library.

Unlike traditional college or university libraries, in these new 21st century libraries / learning centers there may be no inducements for students to readin any format, in print or online. 

There is no emphasis on interesting content, new books to encourage casual reading or awareness of the world of ideas and scholarship. There is nothing to stimulate meaning creation or intellectual engagement. There may be no perceptible collection development activity of any kind.

If research activity is going on, it is not perceptible to others—and it could be, through real-time data visualization of where scholars are going and what they are doing online (while respecting privacy, of course). There is no thought to building online communities, or how to bridge the gap between the online and physical library experience.

It is merely a comfortable, communal place for students to study their textbook and get assignments done. If there are print books, they are often treated as vestigial, placed out of view (away from high traffic areas), moved off to quiet study rooms, scattered around conversation areas to create atmosphere, or placed into low shelving units to not block sight lines to other people or disrupt the view of the outside world. Books may not hit one’s gaze as in traditional libraries, where the books located at eye level circulated more frequently.

The design concept for many new libraries is to achieve a feeling of transparency and openness, and to promote collaboration, rather than academic intimacy. Within the grand scale, open context and vastness of these new facilities, if there are publications, they may seem small and unimportant, niceties to complement the space, not thought an essential part of the user experience.

Is there any effective way for librarians to demonstrate that quality collections make a difference to the university’s business objectives of attracting, retaining and educating students—to student successor are collections now deemed to be inconsequential and capable of being summarily replaced—as our library professional library associations seem to assuring usby our “doing” more, the provision of more information literacy classes, and helping people to make connections with each other? 

There is a peculiar rhetoric surrounding new academic library architecture which seeks to justify an enormous outlay for the creation of cavernous facilities, often with high ceilings and monumental staircases, glass walls and natural light, robotic storage and retrieval (RSRMs) and “smart” windows which can calculate the angle of the sun, the seasons, and position of the moon and stars, but nothing additional for the collections housed inside of them or anything more for resources offered online.

The rational, or assumption, seems to be that an inspirational building with computers is what drives learning in the 21st century. The building may be smart and technologically advanced, but what about its users? How are they “progressing”?

According to the Vice Provost and Director of NCSU Libraries, when planning the new Hunt Library,Our goal was to make a difference in the education and research of students, and something that made them want to become lifelong learners, so we decided on an iconic building.”215 This statement, along with recent trends to create bookless libraries, raises some interesting questions:

  • How can a building alone inspire “life-long learning”?
  • How can a building alone stimulate creativity, learning and intellectual curiosity?
  • How can a building without visible publications encourage publication?
  • How can a building without visible books encourage reading, especially among college students?
  • How are “new university libraries” designed by architectural firms to primarily facilitate interaction with other people (collaboration), rather than to encourage engagement with library resources (collections), impacting library collection development strategies, acquisitions budgets, staffing levels and usage of resources?
  • These newly designed spaces, continuously showcased at library conferences and in library magazines, may be innovative from an architectural standpoint, but are they innovative or functional as libraries?
  • How well do they support our academic missions?  

When planning the $170 million Charles Library at Temple University, a fantastic building which would serve as a collaboration space, “a place where intersections between all of the students and faculty and other folks who chance to be on this campus can occur.”216

No doubt, aesthetics is a very important part of the user experience of an academic library. Not only does it makes the library more enjoyable to users, and encourages them to stay, but it also symbolizes the value placed on scholarship and learning by the institution.

Without a comparable commitment to the provision of quality content and effective online strategies for promoting awareness of content, a building is just an empty gesture. 

The aesthetics of openness and transparency, and talk of collaboration of those who happen to walk through the door, is really the aesthetics of nothingness, and in many ways represents the very opposite of what a good library should be: a content-rich learning environment, where people are inspired to pursue meaning and knowledge creation on their own terms.

Campfires, Caves and Watering Holes:
Librarianship for the Digital Dark Ages.

he emphasis of the new academic library is on impressive architectural space and awe-inspiring technology, providing spaces for study, interaction with technology, the creation of digital media, social learning and above all, collaborationIn new libraries, collaboration is ostensibly the focus, while the stacks are drastically reduced or eliminated, pushed to the margins, and placed into less public, less visible, and less accessible locations. 

In a presentation given at my library, an architect from a prominent design firm explained the new academic library concept to us librarians. It must have been awkward. According to him, the library is essentially comprised of three distinct learning environments: the campfire (where the older generation, the faculty, pass knowledge down to the younger generation through stories), the watering hole (where people from different disciplines come together to socialize and share knowledge, or figure out what to do with the knowledge they got from the campfire the night before), and the cave (study rooms). I later discovered this came from an often quoted book, From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments by David Thornburg. 

Architects and new library advocates place emphasis on collaboration deriving from group study rooms, communal seating areas and chance encounters of students and faculty with each other in a common space on campus, a space everyone likes to visit because of its beautiful architecture and amenities (tables, computers, couches, whiteboards, study rooms and large screens), not necessarily, or even essentially, because of the library’s resources. They claim the beauty of the building or the architectural space, will draw people up into it. In theory, people will want to experience the space as a space. What about experiencing a library? Does that factor in, or no?

Enabling conversation, facilitating social introductions, and promoting discussion are all folded into the idea of librarians as collaboration facilitators, but how we are to do this if scholars (people with knowledge) are not coming into our spaces? Indeed, facilitating collaboration is regarded by as a pre-eminent 21st century role for librarians by those in leadership of ACRL (Association for College and Research Libraries). In the conclusion of their report on the value of academic libraries in the 21st century, Brown and Malenfant emphasize our role as “campus connectors,” specifically within the outcomes assessment movement:

The higher education assessment movement provides a unique opportunity for library leadership. Academic librarians can serve as connectors and integrators, promoting a unified approach to assessment. As a neutral and well-regarded place on campus, the academic library can help break down traditional institutional silos and foster increased communication across the institutional community. Librarians can bring together people from a wide variety of constituencies for focused conversations and spark communities of action that advance institutional mission.23

Despite the authors’ insistence on libraries adopting an outcomes assessment framework, they themselves fail to explain how our new roles as “connectors and integrators,” which they recommend, can be meaningfully assessed according to the very outcomes framework they advocate. 

The impact of collaboration, or rather collaborative learning, which theoretically occurs in these newly renovated spaces, is frankly no more measurable or significant than the impact of collections, and from an assessment standpoint, cannot be differentiated from other forms of socializing. The impact of both, or each, is as immeasurable as the other.

Even if hi-tech collaborative learning or knowledge-sharing could be meaningfully captured and differentiated from mere socializing, the library still cannot lay claim to it any more than it can, or could, the learning or research which occurred from utilization of the print collection.

If collection usage (usage stats, circulation stats) is now trivialized as having no clear or demonstrable connection with student success (that is, “success” as defined by our parent institutions, not by the users themselves), and provision of quality content is thought to have no meaningful impact on student learning or the university’s business objectives—student enrollment, retention, persistence, graduation rates—surely collaboration cannot be a preferable substitute. Collaboration has no measurable outcomes which can be used to substantiate our value, which is a good thing because we do not know how to facilitate it anyway.

Truly, I love the emphasis on community creation and socializing in these new spaces. Having more people in the library, even if all they want is a cup of coffee, a comfy couch, wi-fi and a study place is not a bad thing. But whatever happened to our profession’s commitment to scholarship, research and publishing

A Tale of Two Libraries.

t was hypothesized twenty-five years ago, when people first began speculating about the 21st century library, that in the future, only top-tier schools would continue to afford their students with access to print collections, and that there would be a widening gap between library “haves” and “have nots.” I have been trying to track this article down, which I think was called, “A Tale of Two Libraries,” after the Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities. This was not predicted because of the popularity of ebooks, but due to the skyrocketing cost of serials and electronic resources cannibalizing what remained of the print book budget. 

I cannot say for sure what is happening at newly renovated academic libraries across the countryI wish ACRL would tell us that in their annual member survey questionsbut it does appear from library literature and websites that there has been a seismic shift, even in the largest and most well-funded libraries, from emphasis on collections, new publications or contentincluding new digital resourcestoward remaking the library a kind of study hall offering customized learning environments (noisy, quiet, public, private, semi-private, low tables, high tables, sitting up or reclining, bright light or dim), and coffee bars, with various student support services tacked on. There is no discernible intellectual life in the library, it is just a collection of tables and chairs. 

Libraries have become the new student centers, funded by State legislators in the name of building a better library, but they offer no meaningful scholastic purpose over the old library. Libraries even at our most elite and competitive institutions are making their collaborative and creative work spaces top-level menu items on their websites, touting their furniture on wheels, tables, couches and available study spaces, rather than emphasizing their collections and scholarly content. They have millions of volumes, but the good news is that they have “electrical outlets” and staplers.

Ten years ago, academic libraries would never, ever have thought to devote prime real estate on their websites to promoting their assorted tables and comfortable couches.

To do so would be inappropriate, sending precisely the wrong message. Representing the library as a study hall or computing lab was considered vulgar, and the wrong message to send to university administrators and faculty to maintain a healthy acquisitions budget. (I do, however, applaud the trend in new libraries that conversation is allowed and encouraged except in quiet zones.)

Space, computers, support services and furnishings now appear to be the most important features of Harvard’s main undergraduate library:

Research Help at Harvard’s famous Lamont Library is available only between the hours of noon and 5pm, while media help can be had from 9am until 10pm. 

Some older librarians may recall that from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, the Harvard Lamont Library generated core bibliographies of what undergraduate libraries ought to have in their collections, called Books for College Libraries. Now they are featuring movable furniture, whiteboards and armchairs. 

Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, a Gothic Revival building with 16 floors of stacks and 4 million volumes, lets students know on its home page that it offers the following amenities (under “What’s Available”):

What’s Available:

Outdoor Space
Printer
Public Computers
Natural Light
Individual Tables
Large Tables
Scanner
Individual Study Rooms
Group Study Rooms
Chalk Board/White Board
Absolute Quiet
Eli Express Delivery Location
Electrical Outlets
Couches
Conversation Allowed

One would think that one of the oldest libraries in the country with over 4 million books would have more interesting things to highlight than its natural light, tables and scanner. 

The focus on collaborative or group study spaces in libraries parallel broader educational trends which emphasize a greater degree of peer interaction, project-based learning, and providing real world work experience in the classroom. I do not mean to discount the numerous studies which show that students who study and interact with peers in college are happier, have a more positive outlook, and earn higher grades. It is only natural that students would want to study together, and the library is a logical place for this. But the library should aspire to be more than this.

Aside from being a place for collaboration and group study, the new university library is also typically envisioned as a learning laboratory where people from different disciplines gather together to tinker in maker-spaces and solve real world problems using 3D printers, laser cutters, and digital production studios. No one has called my library or come in asking for this technology. They have come in asking for books, though. 

While collaborative and more traditional text-based and individualized approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive modes of knowledge acquisition and learning, and can certainly co-exist in a library setting along with beautiful architecture, it nonetheless strikes me that the consistent focus in librarianship on dialogue, collaboration and consensus-oral modes of knowledge acquisition and transmission—over content, text-based and more individualized forms of learning, hearken back to a time before printing, books and libraries.  

If you thought libraries were unexciting places to be before, taking the books away and replacing them with more computers, more tables and chairs, seating on wheels, glass-walled study rooms, vacant space, engineered surfaces and whiteboards, are surely not likely to make them more interesting places to be. 

Don’t get me wrong. I love beautiful architecture, especially Gothic architecture. I like coffee. I like computers and technology—I was a developer and systems librarian back in the day, when things were much harder.  I love a good debate, and collaboration with others, especially others who know more than me. Who doesn’t like comfortable chairs? I just don’t believe that innovative architecture, cafes, computer labs, collaboration or comfortable seating can form a solid foundation for academic librarianship at a university, whose mission is to create well-rounded, educated people. 

I believe our primary obligation as academic librarians is to provide our communities with stimulating, active learning environments, both in print and online, that are content-rich, authoritative, and inspiring, and which encourage students to go beyond classroom instruction to become self-sufficient independent learners, professionals and scholars. 

The Academic Library in the New Digital Dark Ages.

alk is cheap? Well, not anymore. Now, it requires video conferencing technology with hand-gesture recognition and brain-storming apps.218 Indeed, when people speak about library renovation projects, collaborative learning and videoconferencing spaces are often emphasized. Green screens too. It all sounds very promising.

But in an almost Orwellian fashion, we must get rid of books and paper, even the bulletin boards (“free speech areas”), in order to promote more modern, technologically advanced methods of communication.

From a traditional librarian standpoint, much of this may make no sense. No one has come into my library asking for these things in recent years, but they have asked books—especially “book” books. No one has called about 3D printers or laser cutters, either. They have asked for popular (leisure reading) books, which sadly, we do not have. We observe that people are more engaged in sticky note walls, the chaotic rebellion of the handwritten, than on slick graphics or modern spaces. We observe that when books are set out, people stop to look at them, even if they came in for some other reason.

These things attract us because they are evidence of the human and they speak to our humanity. 

Let’s talk about collaboration. Realistically, how are we librarians to get people inside the library to collaborate? And once they do, how does this fulfill our educational mission as academic librarians? At the end of the day, are we not left with little more than empty spaces consisting of tables, chairs, computers and staircases, with no demonstrable outcomes? 

Admittedly, fewer people today are reading books, and reading is not looked upon as the sign of status it once was. In fact, one study mentioned that reading books may be a signal to others that one’s time is not in demand by anyone, therefore has a negative stigma attached to it. Despite its undeniable educational benefits, reading is no longer viewed as a productive activity. Yet experiential learning can be a tremendous waste of time. Why spend lab time reinventing the knowledge that is already known? 

Even at a university, there is often limited capacity for people to make a connection between reading and academic successPractical, project-based, collaborative and hands-on, career-relevant learning at the university are now seen as superior ways to prepare students for the workforce of tomorrow, while book-learning, reading, or traditional lecture format are rejected as outmoded pedagogical methods. In Education, text and lecture based formats are eschewed for collaborative activity and group work to allow less prepared students to succeed in the classroom. 

Public libraries are also be vulnerable to a similar stigma with regard to reading. Sociologists have suggested that in today’s economy, busyness and overwork are status symbols, not leisure, enjoying cultural activities or reading books219 which may account for why the general public, when surveyed, express great interest in turning their public libraries into work spaces even when they do not necessarily have any real work to do. 

Libraries should strive to create a social context within which intellectual inquiry, reading and creativity are nurtured. This is the community we must try to build and support. That is our vocation.

In its defense, print still has many things going for it over ebooks, superior readability and visibility chief among its virtues—provided that you have a centrally located, accessible campus library. Print books can be more cost-effective for smaller campus libraries because the pricing does not include multi-user licensing or hosting in perpetuity on a third party platform which no one knows will be around in ten years.

Most importantly, though, is that “reading matter” placed front and center signifies to others that reading matters.

The presence of reading material in the library space signifies community value. Ideally, one could browse the book in the library, but be able to download it to take it with you. 

Administrators often speak about the library’s going online or being online as a selling point, especially for marketing its graduate programs. But what does it really mean for a university library “to be” online in the Digital Age? How do we effectively market our collections to turn people to things they might like or want to know about? What strategies do libraries need to employ to promote learning?

Given the consolidation of library automation system software vendors, can librarians even propose standards for our online catalogs and discovery tools, or must we now simply accept whatever is given to us by our vendors? 

Bookshelf browsing, virtual newsstands (like Browzine), and other visual navigation applications to facilitate an enjoyable, intuitive browsing experience are overdue as enhancements to the front end of academic library systems, as is personalization, the ability to present users with new content that is of interest to them when they come to the library’s site.

Certainly, the common limitation of ten results to a page, when the system often boasts so many relevant items, is tedious for users to navigate. As mentioned above, there are alternatives to ranked search engine lists, such as those which cluster results, provide for disambiguation, and visual navigation for a more intuitive search experience. 

Libraries might also benefit from what e-commerce already has to woo customers, presenting things they might like, and we also must be able to represent online an actual library collection as such, rather than simply presenting ways to conveniently parse though indexed metadata of third-party aggregated content so someone can find it, should they want to. That does not lend meaning and value to our content or our profession.

The user experience of a good collectionboth in print or onlinepromotes creativity and independent learning, precisely the same sort of open-ended and unstructured creative exploration people are trying to facilitate though maker-spaces and more collaborative modes of instruction. We need to afford users a better user experience of the library online so that it can be more closely tied to education, not in terms of classroom learning objectives, but it in terms of disciplinary and cultural knowledge. We also must be able to effectively operate on the level of titles and publications. 

Many challenges are now before us. As a society, we seem to be returning to a kind of primitivism and literalism associated with backwards and oral cultures, where people actually can’t learn unless they see and experience it for themselves. For various reasons many have guessed at, people are losing the will and the ability to read.220 This phenomenon has been dubbed “secondary orality,” a return to orality by post-literate societies. 

The creation of maker-spaces, media rooms, and active learning labs in the new academic library space, in addition to the creation of collaborative work spaces fostered by open floor plans, vaulted ceilings and light-filled atria, glass walls and technology (larger screens for shared viewing, special software apps, 3-D printers) are expensive, as is the expertise of architectural firms claiming to have special insight into getting people to collaborate and learn in these modern times.

But after the facility is built and the dust has settled, what then? Where are the impact studies by libraries who have fully transitioned to the new concept? Is it progress or regression? Is it the Enlightenment or a new digital Dark Ages?

From what I have been able to ascertain so far based on anecdotal evidence, is that no one in my discipline seems to know how to get people to collaborate, mentor and share knowledge once the old spaces are renovated or new facilities are built221, or how to differentiate collaborative learning from other less important forms of social interaction in order to arrive at measurable outcomes for our assessment plans. 

And, most importantly to me, it is not engagement with technology or with other people that academic librarians or academicians wish to foster, but engagement with scholarly and culturally significant books and articles, engagement with publications and the ideas found in them. We librarians and faculty want students to make connections, not so much with other people in the library space, or with us for that matter, but with the scholarly resources and authorities vital to their discipline and to important books reflecting the world around them. 

Of course, if more people are coming in, for whatever reason, even just to sit on our comfy couches or retreat into caves, they are more likely to talk to a librarian who can then clue them in to all that which great content we have which may not be apparent to them. 

Nonetheless, I would love to see showcased in library literature new library architecture and software applications designed specifically around the concept of promoting discovery and engagement with library resources, with our content, both in print and online formats, rather with other people in open seating arrangements—with nothing to offer to the intellect, nothing to nurture the soul, nothing to inspire research, nothing to raise awareness of new publications, nothing to encourage leisure reading or instill life-long learning, and nothing to inspire scholarship. 

Without the capacity to present our users with a rich selection of materials that are of interest and relevant to them when they walk through our doors—without the ability to create content-rich learning environments—the physical library becomes a barren wasteland with furniture for studying or texting and hanging out, but nothing of substance to encourage intellectual curiosity, learning outside the classroom, or participation in a broader cultural conversation of educated people. 

Despite protests by library users and faculty when initiatives to eliminate print are implemented or proposed, and even after similar projects are deemed failures and the books are brought back—for example with the Cushing Academy’s celebrated bookless library222 223—this trend of getting rid of print, placing books out of sight, into underground storage lockers, into compact shelving, into low traffic areas, or incorporating them as meaningless abstractions into a comprehensive design scheme continues to trend upward in buildings called libraries.

Illiteracy isn’t Progressive.

ooklessnessor rather, lack of commitment to collectionsas well as changes in how libraries are evaluated through their institutional assessment plans, has blurred the distinction between a library and an LRC (learning resource center) or LC (learning center), as the case may be.  Because college library booklessness has become acceptable, fashionable—equated with progress—all forms of bookless learning (innovation labs, maker spaces, news rooms, learning commons, information commons, media centers and “active learning labs”) are becoming more common in libraries on college campuses, replacing a large portion of the library or cutting significantly into its budget.

I would say replacing a large portion of the traditional library, but despite the enthusiastic participation of end-of-career library directors in creating these promising new spaces (which open right before they retire), I’m not sure others in the college and university administration regard media labs, maker-spaces, and smart classrooms as belonging to the library. Librarians who resist these trends with skepticism or even scholarly research (which what we do) risk criticism on many fronts, by misinformed administrators looking for ways to save money, by those wishing to be regarded by others as forward-thinking, by an insecure older generation fearing to appear obsolete, and most of all, by architectural design firms who are eager for commissions to design unique and expensive buildings called libraries, but which in no way promote resource use or library learning or anything but ignorance.

Architectural rendering of a new modern library (can’t find the source, most unlibrarian-like of me!). This is a typical design, where books and resources are not visible in the entrance way or on the first floor. It is harder to promote content or cultivate readers in this sort of modern library space.

Library Journal, American Libraries and other library publications routinely showcase the new academic library architecture without ever mentioning the impact these vacuous facilities are having on acquisitions budgets, professional staffing levels and usage of resources. After new libraries are erected or renovated, and the ribbons are cut, the library appears to be reduced to promoting its (empty) spaces, their furniture on wheels, and the same instructional services as before. 

I think it is great that libraries are striving to become more social places. I really do. Libraries were never really the stultifying study halls or book warehouses some new library advocates make them out to be.

Students have always been able to study and socialize in libraries, and relaxed food and drink policies have been the norm for most libraries since I graduated from library school in 1990. Many libraries were built with cafes in them, often in basements. There is nothing 21st century about the combination of coffee, books, and people, or comfortable seating. Drinks allow for minute mental breaks which are needed to sustain prolonged focus. Whenever students take books out I’m sure they sit with them with food and drink.

What is new, especially in library literature, is the perception that physical books are impeding student success, the advancement of the library profession, requiring too much staff, standing in the way of the library’s becoming popular with students and/or risking turning the library into a “book warehouse.” This is a very dark current that runs throughout academic library literature today, along with reminders that this generation of students never grew up reading books, so they are not likely to start when they go off to college.

Younger university administrators also are less likely to be champions of the library, believing that books are not needed in any format for students to be successful in their degree plans. In their minds, the success of online degree programs have largely proved the irrelevance of the physical library and print collections to the mission of the university. All students require are their textbooks and access to Blackboard, and the library is only something to be concerned with when it comes time for accreditation review. (In fact, I’ve noticed that the only time some libraries hire is before accreditation review, so the library looks good on paper).

Many within a university administration do not understand or appreciate the extent to which a well-stocked, well-maintained library is a key marketing tool for the university, and that books contribute to the operation of the university as such.

The library is the ultimate resource for demonstrating student-centeredness and care, precisely because many of the books in the library are there to support have the students’ own definition of success, not because they must be used to be successful in degree programs. 

Because it is just a bit gratuitous, good library collection is the ultimate reflection of genuine student-centeredness on a college campus.

Nevertheless, for the first time in academic library history, books are an albatross we must be liberated from.

The rationale is, “Get rid of print,” and we librarians will be freed up to do more important thingslike actually helping students (as if we’ve not always done both, thank you very much). Get rid of the books, and people will want to come to the library once again. Get rid of books, and our students will be forced to embrace new technologies and be better prepared to enter the workforce. 

Even though new titles are rarely available to libraries in digital format for many months after their print debut, the book is viewed as an outdated product 224 that many library directors and administrators are eager to distance themselves from for a variety of reasons, some valid, and some not. 

Dividing lines are drawn over the role and importance of print books and the need to maintain collections, with professional staff often reluctant to say what they really think about plans to go completely digital. Those who resist risk being typecast as resistant to change, obsolete or technophobic. An example of this can be found in Lura Sanborn’s (2013) article “Bookless library?”:

Are there going to be growing pains and resistance? Sure. In fact, absolutely. A body at rest wants to stay at rest. There will be those embedded in print that wish to stay in print. Internally, there will be those who throw their hands up in the air and declare it is all too much, too complicated, and too difficult to simply keep up. What was shiny and astounding three years ago looks ridiculously musty at this point. Keeping up with and making the best decisions possible regarding digital text is hard, and there will be those who refuse to embrace the new. This is predictable behavior. Fifteen years ago, working as a student assistant at a busy university reference desk, I, and everybody on staff, knew “that professor” who never got over the movement from the card catalog to the OPAC. He would always call the reference desk when in need of a book, refusing-on some principle important in his mind-to learn to use the OPAC.

Evolution takes time. We can stick with what we have, or we can move to make it better. Case in point: iOS 7 is much more sophisticated and pleasing than the initial OS X. Should Apple not have evolved in order to keep a population afraid of the learning curve within their comfort zone? To compare, so too have advancements been made to many of the digital text interfaces available to libraries. And much like with Apple, the interface, quantity, and search capabilities just keep getting better.

Despite the strong movement forward, some still find the concept of a digital library uncomfortable. When the director of the Johns Hopkins Welch Medical Library announced last year that the library was going online only and closing its physical doors, the Johns Hopkins constituency shrieked and formed a committee (Nichols 2013). However, the transition has since moved along and from the outside looks both inevitable and wonderfully enviable (Michael 2013). Instruction librarians are in a discrete space, while the emphasis of the collection is on digital holdings. This model speaks to the essential, core functions of an academic library: collection and instruction. 225

Librarians may feel pressured to reiterate exaggerated claims about “the cost to warehouse a book on the shelf” each year—about $4.20—taken from a very impressive analysis done by economist Paul N. Courant, who was on the board of several large scale book digitization ventures 25 when published that study (2010), and concluded:

Finally, we note that the argument in favor of moving toward digital versions of books and sharing both electronic and print collections is further enhanced when we recognize that university libraries tend to be located on prime real estate, and that there are uses of central campus stack space—for classrooms, study, offices, and enhanced library services, among others—that would be far more valuable than using that space to store materials most of which are used rarely, provided that access to the materials in aggregate could still be provided reliably. 227

His figure of $4.20 per annum per book has been repeated so often at library conferences and in Power Point slides, even in Newsweek,228 it has become a factoid,229 a perfect example of what happens when articles are mined for information and not read critically for bias. He was selling digitization services, after all.

The real cost of ebooks for academic libraries. It is often assumed by college administrators and non-librarians, mainly based on their own experiences with Amazon and Kindle, that academic ebooks are significantly cheaper than print books. This is a common misconception. It is absolutely intuitive that they would be. While they typically are for consumers, they are not for academic libraries, unless they are titles that are no longer in demand (called “backlist” titles). 

Vendors charge institutions more for an academic ebook, even for single use. The cost of purchasing a recent (published in the last 3 years) academic title through a typical library vendor like EBSCO is 1/3 to 2/3 higher than the cost of the same book in print for single simultaneous use.

Take a look at this taken randomly selected title from EBSCO’s Collection Manager tool. Natural Gas Processing: Technology and Engineering is $146 for the print book paying full list price (librarians usually get a 20% discount for print books through their book jobber). The same ebook is priced at $177.60, $222.00 (for 3 simultaneous users) and $266 for unlimited use.


The markup on new academic ebooks varies, but the cost for a front list title is always more than the list price for the print version, even for nontechnical titles. This observation is confirmed by the e-book price index in the librarian’s bible of statistical data and book prices, Bowker’s Library and Book Trade Almanac. It states (2016) that:

In the academic market, it has always been assumed that e-books are more expensive than their print counterparts. Users might be surprised to find that the cheaper versions of e-books, available to consumers through such channels as Amazon and the Apple Store, are not available to libraries at similar prices, if at all. . . .

The high price for e-books is not that surprising as most pricing models for academic ebooks generally add a high percentage to the list price for the purchase of e-books. Multi-user licenses are an even larger percentage. In most situations, even-single user academic e-book titles are more expensive than their print counterparts.” 230

One explanation for the higher costs for institutions is that the vendor is providing hosting in perpetuity for the ebook—even if we do not want access to the book in perpetuity, we often must buy it that way. When libraries buy books, unless they are extremely large research libraries (and even then), they never buy with the idea in mind of having a book forever. Suddenly the cost of maintaining a book on the shelves doesn’t seem so bad.

Another factor is scalability, that many users could potentially access the book at the same time. This a great benefit for large academic institutions, but smaller and medium-sized libraries cannot benefit as much from economies of scale.

Ebooks usually do not represent a significant cost savings over print unless the library is buying a package of oddball academic titles, UK imprints, dated titles, or things that the publisher can’t move in print any longer, in which case the book is valued at less than list price for print. What goes into a content aggregator’s ebook package is based not on careful vetting by librarians but blanket publisher agreements. They are commodities, like soybeans. The success of the aggregator depends on negotiations with traditional print publishers to digitize, aggregate and monetize their back-stock, called “backlist” titles. These aggregations are not “collections” in a librarian’s sense of the word. They are merely chum-buckets of aggregated content no longer able to monetized in print by the publisher. Not there is not anything good in them, but they do not represent the current state of the discipline, nor do they pretend to.

However, only those already familiar with a discipline, educated people, may appreciate the difference in quality between a package of academic ebook titles and an actual library collection. If the priority is providing relevant ebooks so students can complete a writing assignment, aggregates of ebooks are fine. If the priority is doing research in a discipline, they miss the mark.

Most academic libraries already buy large ebook packages, but deliberately excluded from these subscription packages are front list titles, newer titles and titles in demand, which the vendor hopes to sell to the library individually at a higher price. Better titles get added to the online platform at a premium cost to the library.

More concerning to me is that there is a psycho-social aspect of ebooks which discourages users from actually reading them. Since no personal investment appears to have been made by anyone in selecting the titles, and no great expense appears to have been made by the university to acquire them—since everyone outside the library believes ebooks to be dirt cheap anyway—why should our students place any value on them? Why would they want to read them? To them, ebooks appear to be items called up and used when needed to write a paper or complete an assignment, and then are to be forgotten about. Ebooks are merely commodities. There is no sense of permanence or influence, that these titles mean anything to anyone. 

No one honestly expects others to have read or heard of an ebook they come across in an academic ebook collection, but I believe the same is not the case with print books in an authoritative, up-to-date library collection. Print books are still seen as more “legit” in the eyes of young users, and they are correct: if it’s on the shelves in the library, at least a few other people think the book is worthwhile.  

Students, like administrators, also think of print books as being more costly and believe ebooks to be “cheap.” It would never occur to a student that the ebook they click and scroll through, just as they do free internet resources and free books on Google Books, may have actually cost the library $250 or more, sometimes even hundreds or thousands of dollars (in the case of reference books). 

Tangible Outcomes from Intangible Goods:
Assessing the Value of the Academic Library 

Philosophies of librarianship are part of a larger trend of libraries requiring librarians to re-invent and market themselves to demonstrate their value at a time when the institution of the library, and its relationship to the rest of the university, is under increased scrutiny and attack. The challenge is a difficult one, and also new. Historically, administrations questioned whether their library was good, and perhaps how we librarians knew it was good, not whether a library was needed

No one was requiring personal philosophies of librarianship or annual self-justifications to keep one’s job, either (they don’t where I work, but at some university libraries they do each year). They were expecting the library to come up with metrics and measures which tied to library-centric goal, not forcing them to justify their existence through measurable business objectives. 

The decline in the perceived relevance of college and academic libraries can be accounted for in many ways.

The most obvious cause is an increased reliance by administrators and scholars on information resources found on the Internet.

Today, neither the physical library nor the library’s website is the first place people begin their research. Rather than checking our catalogs and online resources first, researchers find content they might like on Google Scholar or on publisher platforms, and then check to see if the library has them. People come to the library and the library’s website not as a starting point for research, but often as a last resort to obtain a known item they learned about some place else. If all we offer is access, we have already lost the battle. Scholars have no compelling reason to come to the library or its website. We give them no reason to do so.

Our interfaces are not interesting for students and scholars to browse. As I see it, a modern library is a content provider like Amazon and Netflix, but, for various reasons, our catalogs and user interfaces have not evolved into the kind of intuitive, content-rich environments that might allow us to compete for our users’ attention with commercial entities whose websites people actually enjoy visiting and browsing.231 

The library profession has become dependent on vendors even for much of our professional development, our content, our systems and our web services. There has been so much industry consolidation, we don’t have much choice. We must deal with products and tools which do not integrate well with each other by design, because our vendors are in competition with each other. EBSCO won’t provide metadata to ProQuest’s Primo Central and ProQuest doesn’t allow EBSCO to automatically harvest catalog data to support EBSCO’s Discovery tool, EDS. 

We permit, even promote, branding (EBSCOhost, ProQuest, Gale-Cengage, etc.) instead of white labeling. We take it for granted that patrons will be driven away from the library’s website off to various third-party commercial platforms for doing research. We inadvertently end up with multiple (vendor-created) pseudo-home pages, as vendorsCredo Reference, SpringShare LibGuides, ProQuest and EBSCOencourage the library to customize a landing page with their search own box on it. 

Compounding the problem is the necessity to create responsive (scaled to mobile devices) websites, which has made it even more difficult to place content where users can see it when they land on our sites. It had become more difficult to design content-heavy websites (to promote content and services), because mobile friendly designs collapse the home page into a screen-sized menu. A further barrier to putting content where it might be seen is being contained inside an institutional CMS.

Libraries are in the process of becoming that which they previously sought to avoid, a “repository,” through ineffective marketing and poor designs which communicate that collections do not matter, despite what our users say and surveys show. I believe that, even in this age of Google, scholarly content is what matters most to our users in the university, and this should be emphasized in the design of our facilities, our websites, and our assessment models.

Legitimization, Outcomes Assessment, and the New Grand Narrative in Librarianship232

One of the most influential trends over the last 30 years in academic librarianship has been to devise new ways to assess library quality and effectiveness, and not just in-and-of-itself (i.e., “Is the library good?“), but within the context of the goals, objectives, and business management methods (“Quality Assessment”) employed by their parent institutions to evaluate institutional effectiveness, sometimes referred to as the “Institutional Effectiveness Plan” or “Quality Assessment Plan.”233

Lindauer aptly refers to this phenomenon as the “outcomes assessment movement.” 234

This approach has also become a relatively new (since 2011) best practice, or standard, for academic librarians, as defined by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL Standards in Libraries in Higher Education), the professional association for college and academic librarians. By the standard committee’s own admission, the 2011 standard 235 represents a shift in the way libraries are to think about assessment, in terms of methodology (must be “outcomes-based”) and emphasis (prioritizing the achievement of institutional and departmental instructional objectives, instead of those internal to the library):

These Standards differ from previous versions by articulating expectations for library contributions to institutional effectiveness. These Standards differ structurally by providing a comprehensive framework using an outcomes-based approach, with evidence collected in ways most appropriate for each institution.236

The bottom line is that ACRL’s new Standard is not a standard at all, but an imperative that we must align ourselves with our institutions and apply their assessment model to the library. 

According to ACRL, we are to adopt the goals, objectives and outcomes of our respective institutions, including other departments and even student affairs as our own to facilitate greater partnerships across institutional boundaries, and establish our relevance accordingly.237 And we are to demonstrate our effectiveness by measurable and verifiable (evidence) assessment outcomes tied to the goals of the institution.

Let’s consider regional institutional accreditation guidelines as a library standard, since ACRL SLHE asks us to use these when formulating library outcomes. If these guidelines mention anything about libraries, they are meant to be baseline or minimum standards, not something libraries can use to achieve academic excellence, or even “goodness.” For example, SACS doesn’t say all that much about libraries except we are to offer qualified staff, library instruction and access to “adequate” and “sufficient” resources and collections:

CR 2.9 The institution, through ownership or formal arrangements or agreements, provides and supports student and faculty access and user privileges to adequate library collections and services and to other learning/information resources consistent with the degrees offered. Collections, resources, and services are sufficient to support all its educational, research, and public service programs. (Learning resources and services)

Would you go to a professional who boasts of providing merely adequate services? Institutional accreditation standards are not library standards for achieving excellence, goodness or quality.

Also, because accreditation standards are intended to be minimum standards, if the word “library” is dropped and replaced by “learning and information resources,” as has already happened in several places in SACS,238 it is surely with the understanding that small colleges with limited enrollments, or online colleges, or vocational schools, can still obtain institutional accreditation for their programs even if they lack libraries.

The wording of regional accreditation guidelines is not intended to be a checkered flag for universities to divest themselves of their libraries, or to downgrade them into LRCs, which require neither a library collection nor any professional librarians to maintain.239 Nor is it intended to encourage the provision of merely adequate resources by the library—whatever might be construed as the defensible minimum needed to pass an accreditation review. 

Without any qualitative standards for collections for academic libraries emanating from ALA/ACRL, how can library administrators make a compelling case to their administration that their libraries are not being adequately funded, specifically, that they are not able to provide adequate resources to function as a library should?

If libraries are not encouraged to have their own goals and objectives for excellence, their own standards for goodness or quality, how can they prevent existing library budgets from being cannibalized for institutional objectives that have little or nothing to do with the academic mission of the library?

The Rube Goldberg Machine:
Managerialism in the Academic Library.

any faculty members have decried the rise of “managerialism”240 or an increasing corporate orientation in the university.241 242 243 The best definition of managerialism I have come across is “an exaggerated belief by professional managers in the value of the management concepts and methods they use, regardless of the unique values, culture and methodology of the organizations they manage”; the notion, for example, “that the same principles, values and methodology can be applied to managing a university, a hospital, a TV station, a car factory, a chain of coffee shops or an army.”244 Some have argued that corporate culture threatens to undermine or erode the humanistic and intellectual ideals of the university.

There is tension between the business orientation and academic one at any university, although people in higher education have come to recognize that both perspectives are needed for the institution to thrive. The latter values deep thinking, scholarship, and knowledge as virtues in themselvesknowledge for knowledge’s sakeeven if doesn’t lead to a specific outcome, aside from a more educated human being.

This is a sometimes referred to as a humanistic model because it supports the pursuit of knowledge to allow a person to reach his or her full potential, but not necessarily because it leads to a specific, predefined student learning outcome.

It does not ask, “Why do you want to know that?” “How is that related to your degree plan?”

At a university, academic librarians support student success, not just as defined by the university, but also as defined by the student, helping him achieve his educational goals and research objectives regardless of whether or not it is needed for a particular class assignment.

We support the student’s acquisition of disciplinary and professional knowledge, and therefore offer significant titles on a regular and timely basis, even if we cannot tell if this is helping students complete their degree pans. We also serve the faculty, whose research and publishing activity usually does not directly serve the business interests of university either. 

We also have an obligation to maintain a quality library in anticipation of use, in a perpetual state of readiness, rather than acquiring only that which is guaranteed to be used for a class, or acquiring what is requested for one, which is another way our acquisition strategies might not conform to a strict business model.

Publishing in peer-reviewed journals typically has little impact on enrollment, retention and graduation rates, the most pressing concerns for the college or university administration. (Research adds prestige to the university, but it has virtually no impact on undergraduate enrollment.) The more humanistic and academic goals of the college and academic research library (scholarship, life-long learning, etc.) and the more pragmatic goals of the institution might not line up very well. 

The library will always be a cost center, never able to justify itself financially though a measurable impact on GPAs and retention rates. In fact, operating within a strictly institutional or business framework, where the library’s goals have become one with that of their administration, the most successful and effective library manager could conceivably be one who spends as little as possible on library resources, but still manages to skate through an accreditation review. Arguably, this would be the most accountable way to go, but it is not a recipe for a good library.

This isn’t good for students or faculty, or for libraries or librarians, who will surely have difficulty “partnering with faculty” (one of the stated goals of the new ACRL standard) if the materials that they and their students expect to find in the library are never there, if users are routinely compelled to use other libraries to access significant or core titles in their disciplines, or forced to buy the books they need to support their research interests. Over time, if collections are not maintained, demand for the library’s services will drop off, and suspicions by decision makers that the library or books or librarians are no longer needed will be confirmed by low circulation statistics. 

The new ACRL standard was intended to promote greater collaboration and to advance our roles as partners educating students and contributing to their success.245 However, real collaboration is a two way street: partnering is more than just our teaching information literacy courses.

Librarians have traditionally been recognized as partners in the educational process through the quality content and resources we provide. Yet, we lack a standard set of outcomes through which to evaluate the impact of collections (both print and online, leisure and scholarly) on student learning. This does not mean that collections are not a worthwhile, but that the assessment tools and standards available to us cannot assess their impact. 

More than ever, libraries need prescriptive standards of quality to to keep us from becoming redundant, competing with, or being absorbed by, other departments and entities on campus who are also focused on student success, our budgets and spaces re-appropriated for initiatives that have little or nothing to do with library services. From this perspective, rewriting our mission statements in order to adopt the goals and objectives of other departments and even student affairs, as ACRL recommends (as a way of promoting “greater collaboration”), seems like poor advice.

Measuring the tangible impact of an intangible good. The business strategy of aligning with institutional goals and objectives, specifically institutional quality assessment plans, is particularly problematic for academic research libraries for the reason that the impact of their collections on users cannot be assessed through any objective measures that can be tied back to “student success,” as defined by the university’s quality assessment/enhancement plans.246

Years before the publication of the new ACRL standard, a similar approach was discussed in an often cited article by Sarah M. Pritchard, “Determining Quality in Academic Libraries.” Library Trends, 44.3 (1996):

Few libraries exist in a vacuum, accountable only to themselves. There is this always a larger context for assessing library quality, that is what and how well does the library contribute to the overall goals of the parent consistencies? The major objective for academic libraries, especially in an environment of increasing academic pressure, structural change, and technological innovation, must be to align themselves with the structures of higher education and the criteria by which these institutions are judged.247

Pritchard goes on to say, however, that despite higher education managers adopting the business methods of quality management, and the “micro-evaluation of libraries have given countless opportunities for detailed studies . . .”

. . . still lacking are agreed upon and objective ways to measure and incorporate library value into such processes as academic accreditation, educational assessment, and ratings of graduate programs.248

Today, academic librarians are still struggling to find ways to demonstrate their library’s relevance to their respective institutions, which usually translates into contriving ways to demonstrate our value within the context of institutional Quality Assessment plans.

By making institutional outcomes our exclusive focus, it is easy for academic librarians to forget who we are, and why most of us got our degrees in Library Science—which I doubt was to “teach Information Literacy,” “support the curriculum” or to “improve institutional outcomes,” or any of the other objectives found in librarian philosophies and in newly minted mission statements.249 Not that these are not worthwhile objectives, but they are too narrow, and they miss the point of the library.

Many of us academic librarians had hoped to enrich the lives of others, quite likely as ours have been enriched, through the experience of a great library, a library we ourselves enjoyed going to because, well, it was interesting, and made us feel connected to a larger community of scholars who were passionate about the same things we were, or with a brighter future for ourselves which we identified with. It provided a kind of personal transcendence. Great libraries are great because they have great collections which afford users with a great experience of self-directed learning to help them reach their potential in life.

This experience is what I call “the aesthetic.”

The aesthetic is the value-add which cannot be measured, the subjective experience of self-actualization and self-determination fostered by a great library collection. It is the thought that “this book was put here for me to find” by someone who knows or cares.

Of course, “greatness” is subjective and not measurable (there are surveys, of course, and usage stats), an aesthetic judgment, which are to be avoided when it comes to all types of quality assessment planning. It is the library sublime. The aesthetic is experientialThis poses quite a philosophical dilemma for libraries.  Aesthetic judgments, judgments about quality cannot be completely rationalized or measured.

As the philosopher Kant maintained, they are beyond reason. This doesn’t mean aesthetic judgments are irrational, but that rational modes of analysis can carry us only so far. In addition, libraries are compelled to maintain collections in a state of readiness, in anticipation of use; the sum of the whole—a collection—is greater than its parts, another challenge for evaluation.

Just because objective assessment of the impact of collections on our users cannot be assessed, does not mean that it should be ignored or is no longer a worthwhile goal for libraries to pursue. 

from indiahe managerial art of objectifying what is inherently subjective and experiential, through inputs, outputs, outcomes, performance indicators, benchmarks, feedback, usage stats, metrics, documentary evidence and analyses, and then folding this meaningfully and compellingly to institutional goals and objectives, and last, into our own budgetary justifications in ways college and university administrators will ultimately appreciate, is the challenge now laid at our feet.

Libraries have always attempted to measure themselves and their services to evaluate their effectiveness, impact on users, or “goodness.” This is nothing new. Some have even criticized the discipline for its seemingly unbridled enthusiasm for measurement, for being “confounded from the outset” by “false certainties of empiricism” stemming from the fact it regards itself as a science, and takes as its domain information.250 I have worked in libraries which felt like a continuous time-motion study, where every communication had to be analyzed and translated into an appropriate number of desk stats for how much information we conveyed in how many units of time to how many people. This was how we justified our value.

For many reasons both theoretical and practical—whether stemming from professional orientation, need for greater accountability, or job insecurity—librarians do tend to place great emphasis on empirical data, inputs (budgets, size of collections) and outputs (circulation, reference questions answered, usage stats), ratios (percent of budget spent to support certain programs, numbers of books per student per major) and performance measures which, regrettably, cannot ever be meaningfully tied to user outcomes, and which therefore, as Crawford states, “do not assist managers in providing a true picture of libraries to the lives of our users. . . “251

For many academic libraries, and particularly those in Southern states,252 “Quality Assessment” has presented new and interesting measurement challenges, tantamount to devising Rube Goldberg Machine that will, at the end of the day, reveal and heighten our impact on the much larger machinery of institutional outcomes assessment.

There is certainly a lot that could be written about Quality Assessment planning with regard to libraries, such as, how do we assess our assessment plans to know that they are good? Has the practice of assessing the academic library’s value through the rubric of institutional effectiveness been good for academic libraries and those who use them? Has this practice resulted in improved library services? How has it changed us, for better or for worse?

Rube Goldberg was a master of imagining complicated mechanical processes to perform the most mundane tasks, which could otherwise be performed with just a slight bit of human effort and common sense, for example, here a self-opening umbrella:

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Cartoon by Rube Goldberg, famous for devising complex mechanical solutions to perform mundane tasks you wouldn’t want or need a machine to do in the first place.

I do not mean to suggest that there is an easy and obvious solution to the problem of assessment or accountability in libraries—or that one should not rely upon all available tools and reports to make informed decisions—or that objectivity is not worth striving for.

That’s a given for any library manager. We routinely compare ourselves, statistically-speaking, to our peers, and then try to figure out what they are doing better than us so we might improve. Strategic planning is an excellent tool for bench-marking growth. Setting and pursuing goals is vital to continuous improvement—who would not agree with that?

However, as the title of my philosophy statement suggests, I believe good libraries are about a very special kind of aesthetic user experience whose impact or value or information content cannot be measured in ways that would ever rationally justify them from a “business objective” perspective. There is no cost/benefit analysis that will justify the expense of an academic research library. Therefore, I am especially mistrustful of reliance upon overly rationalized processes and externally imposed business measures like QA when it comes to library management, but most especially when they threaten to change the priorities of the academic library to value only that which can be counted, measured or valued by “the plan.”

If the library’s budget must be tied only to measurable, institutional outcomes of “student success” (graduation rate, retention, enrollment, persistence, employment rate, transfer rate, and other business objectives of the institution) or student learning success” (how well they students do on an information literacy test), this will change the priorities of the academic library into something that is not recognizable as an academic library. 

The sort of accountability required by institutional quality assessment plans inevitably entails both measurement and outcomes, but the library profession has never been able to successfully arrive at meaningful measures linked to outcomes.84

And it isn’t for a lack of effort or focus on the problem, which are further exacerbated by a failure to recognize or accept that academic libraries are about the subjective experience of usersI call it “the aesthetic”including browsing, familiarizing oneself with a discipline, reading for enjoyment (often because users find it interesting/significant/relevant), seeing what is new, reacting to the works and ideas of others, and, perhaps most cherished by users, “serendipitous discovery.”254

We librarians deal for the most part in the realm of private experience, in intangible goods, intellectual freight, but we are expected to deliver, or provide an accounting of, our tangible value so university administrators can see a return on investment.255 If we do have measurable user or student outcomes, they are often contrived for the sake of satisfying our QA plan, and usually involve those charged with Public Service and teaching Information Literacy courses, because there is evidence of student engagement.

By what mechanism is the library evaluated, in terms of its impact, other than this limited intervention, or Reference stats? We cannot lay any claim to research and publications by the faculty, even though our resources and access services support them.

The quality assessment standards imposed on academic research libraries today are often missing the finer points of the academic research library, and really the purpose of higher education, which is to encourage learning and research that is not necessarily part of “the curriculum”—at least not yet—and to empower students to be independent learners.

We want them to feel as if they are standing on the shores of a vast ocean of knowledge and human experience, and that they are free to go in any direction they choose, to learn on their own. However, one unintended consequence of the imposition of QA on libraries at some institutions has been a reallocation of the library budget away from library resources, the collection—whose impact on students or outcomes cannot be effectively assessed or measured—toward instructional services, such as information literacy programs, tutoring, writing labs, and basic computer skills classes, and a variety of student support services which lend themselves to outcomes assessment more easily, especially in the short-term. 

Within the context of the institutional QA, libraries don’t get much credit for having resources, or even use of resources—only demonstrating tangible results (higher GPAs), and these “results” must occur within the time constraints of the plan.

girlbeforeamirror

Library assessment though the institutional QA Plan will make the library’s budget look fat, as its resources can’t be meaningfully tied to specific measurable learning outcomes.

Another issue fundamental to our identity as academic librarians is a commitment to students and faculty, specifically to the individual’s pursuit of knowledge. By adopting as our highest aspirations institutional goals as defined by external IE/QA plans (plans shaped exclusively by goals and objectives for institutional accreditation, rather than library standards), as ACRL has now advised256, we are moving away from a holistic model of librarianship, in which the user defines his success, towards one that is narrow, passive, unambitious and not actually user-centered, but institutional: we merely “support the curriculum” with “adequate resources” rather than (more idealistically) helping our students obtain disciplinary knowledge, our faculty keep up with trends in their field.

While this latter role is perhaps more pertinent to academic libraries supporting graduate research, there are corollaries at the community or junior college level, where librarians support, or have traditionally supported, the co-curricular and extra-curricular, self-directed interests of our students: leisure reading, current events, bestsellers, graphic novels, biographies, life skills and “how to’s” for young adults transitioning into adulthood and into a professional workforce.

These may not be directly, meaningfully or demonstrably tied to the curriculum, but they make the library attractive and valuable to students, and habituates them to independent learning. It also exposes them to other points of view and ways of thinking, and enhances their educational experience, and has an impact on their lives, even if we cannot prove with any certainty that it does.

One would assume that promoting self-directed and independent learning at all levels—from leisure reading for college students to original research for publication for upper division and graduate students—would be fundamental to the core values of lifelong learning and academic achievement, principles we are supposed to be instilling in students.257 But even the seemingly straightforward concept of lifelong learning has been co-opted by what Elmborg alludes to as a “neoliberalist” agenda, as opposed to the more idealistic values traditionally upheld by the library profession:

Life-long Learning is enshrined in the consciousness of librarians through the ALA’s Core Values. However, bundled in this phrase are two concepts that exist in great and probably irresolvable tension: there is the ‘hothouse flower’ of idealistic values, the vision of the ‘people’s university,’ critical consciousness, and critical practice; and there is the ‘weed’ of progressive administration, narrow and unambitious in terms of its impact on individuals but able to construct an inescapable domain of discourse that places all value within the context of economic development and the assessment of data-driven outcomes.

From the administrative point of view, lifelong learning is most easily translated into a task-driven, programmatic initiative that can be easily assessed and measured for short-term success. From the pedagogical point of view, lifelong learning is translated through great effort into the problem-posing, one-on-one exploration whose outcomes are fuzzy and may not be measurable for years to come. It might be naïve to suggest that libraries should defy the spirit of the age, denounce neoliberalism, and make a pure stand for social justice and democratic pedagogy. However, it seems equally unwise to embrace a neoliberal worldview that is openly hostile to almost everything that libraries profess to represent in their core values.258

While I cannot speak to the “neoliberal” vs. “social justice” perspectives Elmborg raises—I see the dichotomy more as a top-down business/managerial/quality management perspective vs. more scholarly / humanistic / user-centered approach—it does seem pretty clear no matter how you express it, librarians as well as our professional associations like ACRL are embracing certain philosophies, strategies or best practices that may be detrimental to the success or survival of libraries in the long term.

Beyond the Curriculum? Academic librarians are, presumably, scholars committed to scholarship and the principle of academic freedom. We help students pursue knowledge and achieve their chosen educational and learning objectives—whether it leads to a degree or not.

    • We support scholarship and disciplinary knowledge as ends in themselves, as their own rewards, not because they lead, necessarily or measurably, to a degree, or to “student success” within a certain prescribed time period (e.g., within the boundaries of a Quality Enhancement Plan).
    • We librarians are glad that you used or accessed the item, but we don’t investigate in any formal way the extent to which you benefited from it, the extent to which it changed you, how it improved you, how it helped you write a better paper, or even if you found the item useful.
    • Along the same lines, if you request an article from us to get from another library, we don’t ask you to prove that you need it for a degree program or to complete an assignment before we request it.
    • We do not discourage you from visiting other libraries in order to hold you captive to just what we have if we know that there is a collection nearby which might better serve your research interests. We do not withhold that knowledge, or keep you ignorant just to increase our own stats. We are not a “business.” We don’t view other libraries as our competitors.
    • We do not say, “Why do you want to know that? That has nothing to do with your major.” Or, “You’ll have to get permission from your professor before we process your ILL request.” We support a more individualized definition of student success than course or degree completion.

Now, my own theory of library usage—which has to be at the heart of any philosophy of librarianship—is that people who value and use academic libraries, our constituents, do so because they benefit from immediate access to relevant, significant or interesting content, especially within the context of a meaningful and carefully considered collection.

To our constituents, academic libraries are not primarily “about” the services provided by librarians, or information, at least not in an obvious way. They are about collections. They are about books, regardless of format. They are about publications. They are about media. They are about content. 

When people look forward to going to library they are not imagining helpful librarians.

No, they are thinking about interesting books and collections which they hope and expect to find there; things they like and find meaningful to them. Library services are always secondary to collections, to the extent that services exist to support and promote use of resources and publications. Collections do not exist to support librarians’ services.

Getting assistance from a librarian always was a very small reason people went to a library, public or academic. 

Therefore,

    • I am not ready to declare collections to be dead or obsolete just because “the library can’t buy everything,” because large portions of it may exist in a different format, or because resources can’t be linked to assessment outcomes.
    • I am not ready to use library services as the sole indicator of quality for an academic library, or even the primary mode by which we academic librarians demonstrate our impact on students—even if evidence of direct student engagement may be the easiest way to justify ourselves.

The academic library is not primarily about inputs and outputs, users “getting answers to specific questions” or “satisfying specific information needs”—the latter are good things, of course, but despite the empirical information model which has often permeated our professional thinking about library operations—is not a correct model for any type of library, public or academic.

To scholars and regular library users, libraries are about the preservation of knowledge, sharing knowledge, facilitating the discovery of knowledge, and providing support for the creation of new knowledge through the quality of its collections.

The academic library is fundamentally a collection of research that inspires research.

To the extent that it does this well, it is successful as an academic research library.

Why Academic Libraries Still Matter in the Age of Google.

I am asked this awkward question not infrequently in graduate “Research Methods” classes.

I know this can be my cue to promote myself and my services, and say, “Librarians are your greatest resource, and that is why libraries still matter!” But I do not believe this to be true. I am helpful, to be sure, but I am surely not their greatest library resource. If I were, the library would be spending over a million dollars on me and not on EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, Elsevier and SAGE databases. 

Anyway, the entire library shouldn’t revolve around “me” or my services (some days it seems like it does, but I know it doesn’t).

I want people to derive benefit from and enjoy the library itself, with or without me. Thankfully, many people use the library regularly without ever needing to consult with a librarian, because if they did, that would be frustrating both to them and to me. Even back in the day before Google, which I am old enough to remember, few who used the library ever needed to consult with librarians. This may come as a shock to some, but it is true. The objective was librarian independence. That is why we had a logical system. Using the card catalog, most users managed to navigate to the resources they were seeking without our help, and most came in to browse and stimulate their own creativity and interests, not necessarily to find answers to pre-existing questions. They were pursuing knowledge of a subject area or inspiration, something to like, not necessarily answers to pre-defined questions. They come to wander around and stimulate their own creativity or scholarly out put. More often than not they were looking for inspiration, looking for what was new, not seeking answers to questions. 

When I speak to students, I am merely the messenger. I try to represent good published authorities and the peer-reviewed Word. I represent resources which impart disciplinary knowledge. That is what the academic library as a whole ideally does better than Google and Google Scholar. Google is for information, libraries are for knowledge.

In a university library, students, aspiring scholars, and newcomers to a field of study benefit from familiarizing themselves with what books, journals, publications and publishers others regard as influential, significant or authoritative in a field of study, as opposed to say, what rises to the top of a Google query, a content aggregator’s database, or even our library’s discovery tool.

I really don’t care if we can retrieve 10,000 titles on “health administration” from our databases if we don’t haveor are incapable of making students aware ofthe most significant, authoritative and relevant sources in their field of study, what it is they ought to know.

Awareness of authorities and trends in a discipline defines a person as a professional. Every profession has its terminology and its jargon.

One summer at Columbia University, when I was 18, I had a professor who identified himself as an unreconstructed “Neo-Hegelian Marxist” who used to speak about a philosopher named Althusser as if he were a household name (Who can forget “Althusser”?). I’m sure it was in the circles in which he ran; I wasn’t sure what it all had to do with the post-modern novel either, the topic of the class, but I enjoyed his lectures on postmodernity viewed through the lens of post-capitalism and next gen Frankfurt school critics; I was discovering a world of culture critics I never knew existed: Jameson, Lyotard, Habermas, Marcuse, Adorno, and many others, not to mention Althusser. I went from there to Lukacs, from Lukacs to Gadamer. It was like falling through endless open windows never knowing when I was going to hit bottom. It was a pretty good summer.

I spent at least half of every day in the library, discovering this mysterious new and theoretical world, trying to figure out what any of this had to do with Gravity’s Rainbow. At the bookstores across from the university (“Book Forum” was a favorite), I discovered fascinating journals like The New Left Review. Hegelianism was a thing! Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, there were occult forces at play. I would try to interpret the meaning of the words on the page as if it were a form of holy scripture. Academic Marxism was like a cult or academic subculture, also intellectual racket-ball, people referencing each other’s works. I eventually got some thread of a connection between structuralism, post-capitalism, cultural production and post-modernism, at least well enough to write a 20 page paper on Gravity’s Rainbow through the lens of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. That was my first taste of graduate school. 

While this is perhaps not the best example, every area of study and time period has its publications, influencers and scholars, its Zeitgeist, a good Hegelian term. Libraries have a vital role to play in this aspect of a student’s professional education, but only if we are able to present selective, quality collections as such. We make the invisible visible through a collection.

Through a well maintained collection, catalog and web presence, students and scholars benefit by seeing what is new and interesting in their field of study, because doing so inspires their own creativity, research, teaching, and the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge. The kind of disciplinary knowledge obtained through a good academic library collection is a very important part of an aspiring professional or scholar’s education; it should never be limited just to what is taught in classes.

The curriculum is the minimum requirement, not the upper limit, of what students can or should strive to learn when they attend an institution of higher education.

The library is a vital part of the education of our students. Apart from providing the student with disciplinary knowledge, including that which may fall outside of scope the courses taught at that particular college or university, the library allows students the opportunity to apply their newly obtained curricular knowledge in ways that are personally meaningful to them.

Librarians are increasingly asked by QA plans to define themselves, their roles and their collections narrowly, in terms of measurable targets of student impact, in terms of what they do (services), not in terms of what they have (collections), even though what many of us do, or believe we should be doing—in addition to helping students of course, is creating and sustaining an exceptionally good college and academic research library collection.

Most surprisingly, we are even prompted by our own professional standards to redefine ourselves in terms of “institutional, departmental and student affairs outcomes. . . . student recruitment, retention, time to degree and academic success” (ACRL, SLHE, 2011, 1.1-1.6)—the university’s business objectives, as opposed to something more idealistic and perhaps less demonstrable within the plan’s reporting period: support for independent learning, knowledge, scholarship and the intellectual life of the university campus.

So then, after rewriting our library mission statements to express alignment with institutional objectives, as ACRL SLHE suggests we do, it is still not clear how we are to develop the recommended metrics and performance indicators to demonstrate contributions to “student recruitment, retention, time to degree and academic success,” without fundamentally altering the library to become something which is not an academic library, but something more along the lines of a tutoring center.

You can’t embrace the mission, goals and objectives of departments outside the library and just assume this will be good for the library or its constituents, or the university as a whole.

It would have been preferable to me had ACRL also succeeded in making the “library” part of the library less expendable through its various publications and roadshows teaching librarians how to make a case for themselves.

I mentioned earlier a trend in the literature of library assessment of marginalizing the role and value of collections, or proclaiming them to be irrelevant to the success or quality of the library. Although we try to carve out new roles, in most instances, computer labs, tutoring, student affairs and online learning are handled by other entities on campus. The only thing that makes the library unique, relevant and effective to our users are our collections, our scholarly content, and the provision of support services related to these. 

A number of articles in library literature discussing service-oriented assessment techniques for measuring quality also justify the services-only approach by arguing that libraries cannot continue to grow their collections, and therefore must focus on expanding services to justify their value.

Many of these articles use an epigram from Danuta A. Nitecki (“Changing the Concept and Measure of Service Quality in Academic Libraries.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 22.3, 1996), “The measure of quality based solely on collections has become obsolete.” Danuta sets up a straw man to exaggerate service-orientation, for if you go back and read the article no librarian ever equated library quality with “size of holdings”—we all know better than to do that.

But the very idea that services can be completely disassociated from the collection and evaluated as autonomous business units presents us with a false dichotomy (collections v. services, having vs. doing). For one thing, there is interconnection between “library collections” and “library services” which cannot be glossed over.

    • Obviously, if your collection is inadequate, your users must resort to interlibrary loan for items which probably ought to be in your circulating collection. ILL service may be heavily used, responsive and popular with your patrons, but you are still providing users with poor service if they must resort to borrowing materials that should be in the library in the first place.
    • In information literacy classes, we teach students how to evaluate resources, with currency being a factor. A dated or poorly maintained collection reflects poorly on our own instructional objectives and professional competence. 
    • The number of questions received at the service desk should not be confused with, or used to justify, the “value” of library services. A high number of questions relative to resource use are often signs of unresolved problems and poor customer service, not evidence of value.

Another motive for minimizing collections in favor of services within library quality assessment plans is the difficulty evaluating the impact of collections on students (in terms of measurable results which contribute to their “success”), whereas with library instruction, a some kind of test is possible to show that students 1. have attended, and 2. learned something. There is evidence of student impact. The emphasis now is to move away from passive support through resources to direct engagement with students to be able to better document how the library is directly contributing to student success.

However, student success is more often than not a euphemism describing the extent to which a student is progressing in his degree plan, not a measure of a student’s learning, extra- or co-curricular goals and activities, or his academic or professional growth outside of graded classwork.

The library profession—and historically, our professional commitment to access to information—has always supported a more holistic view of students and their education than the college or university administration: Libraries and librarians help students achieve their educational, intellectual and personal goals. We help them achieve success on their terms. If they want to read a book, we try to get it for them. We do not judge and refuse service if we think it is not part of a class assignment. And this is a good thing for a university.

We can’t pretend to know what the future holds in terms of career opportunities for our students. Nurturing the passions and interests of our students may ultimately be what leads to their success in lifenot necessarily their practical Nursing, Health Administration or Respiratory Therapy degrees. Perhaps they will prepare themselves in a career or a field of study not yet established. I recall a time when there were no degrees in Computer Science, and all programmers were self-taught through whatever books and resources were available.

We talk about promoting innovation and entrepreneurship. There is no better place to cultivate that spirit than the library, where there is real freedom to pursue individualized learning, knowledge and ideas.

The research library should not set as its highest objective “support for the curriculum”the minimum needed for students to complete assignments—but should express as overarching commitment to disciplinary knowledge and academic achievement.

Now, many believe that the application of similar sorts of “quality assessment/quality management” techniques to K-12 education, with performance indicators, outcomes, standards, testing, tracking and recording for the sake of reporting back into a system, has not resulted in improved educational outcomes in the classroom, because the curriculum and methods of instruction have been changed in order to meet the requirements of the assessment tools.

Assessing the impact of the library through some kind of matrix or rubric, where the only thing of value is what can be measured (what many university assessment plans require), is an impossible task for a library, but external pressures for greater accountability will ultimately transform it to become a remedial support or learning center, rather than a place people enjoy visiting, where they see themselves and their interests affirmed, nurtured and supported though a library’s investment in books.

We say that “Libraries transform lives,” but proving that is another story. Libraries offer intangible goods, very much like knowledge and educationwell, before education was redefined as a collection of discrete and measurable tasks tied to standardized test learning objectives so it could be “assessed.

the-library-of-babel1

Yes, we have usage stats, but one never really knows the full impact of the library, its programs and its collections on users, especially on students. This is obviously a big and troubling problem for a library when it comes to evidence-based assessment methods. Here are some questions to ponder:

    • Some students may choose to attend schools with a larger or nicer library, but we will never know whether the size or quality of the library factored into student recruitment. Did they choose that school because it offered a better library?
    • Some people may be motivated to change majors or go on to graduate school, some may develop a passion few people outside the ivory tower think about—like medieval semiotics, or “Is there really a Catholic literature of the South?” But we will never know the role of the library in terms of nurturing this passion, contributing (or not) to student success or “retention.”
    • One day, in a school library, a biography of Hamilton crosses a student’s path; years later, a Broadway musical is born. All the library may have to show in its assessment plan was that on that day a book circulated.

We can’t assess the impact of a library without assessing the impact of the collection on users, a task on par with measuring the subtle gravitational waves from the Big Bang or something out of Chaos theory. Collecting data demonstrating the impact of the library’s collection on students, especially according to “measurable targets,” is difficult, perhaps impossible.

In fact, academic libraries have never been able to arrive at standardized measures and metrics to determine if a library is “good.” We simply benchmark ourselves against peer libraries, comparing their usage stats to ours, and try to figure out their secret sauce.

We must now demonstrate through evidence that we contribute to the business goals of the university through a Rube Goldberg Machine of Quality Assessment planning. When we hit upon just the right metrics and measures, it will be bound to attract enormous crowds at ALA conferences curious to see how it all works.

rgm

Library Assessment Plans are often a Rube Goldberg Machine

Let’s resist the temptation to teach to the test, to so eagerly re-establish the roles and priorities of the academic library and its librarians based only on what is achievable through evidence, performance indicators and outputs, and what can and cannot be measured within the context of what is, essentially, a business model—whose relevance to education, teaching, research and scholarship has never been proven, and has already been placed into question by many (citations forthcoming).

Let’s not adopt as our goals and objectives those of other departments and other entities within the university to create redundancy, in an effort to more closely “align ourselves with them,” as ACRL SLHE advises, without at least considering the impact this may have on the our own customers and constituents, considering whether we are meeting the needs of the scholarly community we serve.

And let’s not be fearful of mission statements that are bold and visionary, making reference to things that cannot be quantified, such as “knowledge” and “creativity.”

Let us begin with the premise that libraries are intangible goods, offering intangible benefits to our community of users, rather than starting out with a management principle that if it can’t be measured, counted or assessed, then it is not a worth pursuing or has little value.

Consider that many goals in life are worth striving for, even if they are widely held to be unachievable: objectivity, beauty, wisdom, insight, truth and knowledge, to name a few.

Without consideration for the aesthetic and subjective element, libraries become boring, prosaic and perfunctory, a collection of what will be sure to be utilized in the course of a semester (or whatever time period is determined by “the plan”)—a collection of Norton anthologies, textbooks, course-ware, test prep study guides, and a standard set of online databases required for accreditation.

The pleasure of coming upon something new and unexpected but deeply meaningful to the user, the subjective human element to collections which defy a vendor’s institutional profile, or just sharing with a fellow reader, are what makes a good library good to present and future scholars.

Good library collections are (just a bit) gratuitous. The problem with managing the academic library strictly according to the numbers is that the library will fail to be a good library if ALL it does is pursue and measure only tangible outcomes.

We can and should gather stats on usage and solicit input from our users, and yes, we should compare ourselves to peers to try to continuously improve, but we (and the professional organizations who represent us) should recognize and proclaim the fact that the library’s impact on students and scholars cannot be ever accurately measured, reduced to data points or KPIs, or translated to a dollar value that would ever justify our cost.

It is an intangible, but intangible does not make it inconsequential.

A university library that is well-managed, stimulating and up-to-date facilitates learning and helps students grow independently, as self-directed scholars. It inspires research, which brings prestige to the university. It is what makes the university a university. It also attracts students, especially graduate students. But try as we might, libraries cannot be concretely or tangibly mapped to higher enrollments, student achievement, increased retention, improved graduation rates, the focus of most university strategic or quality assessment plans. 

The Library as a Place for Inspiration and Exploratory Discovery:
An Aesthetic Philosophy of Librarianship Explained

The most frequent, positive, and meaningful experience of academic libraries is through the user’s experience of a content-rich environment (i.e., a “library”) where independent learning, discovery, exploration, knowledge creation, sense-making and insight are likely to occur.

Although some librarians prefer to rationalize, intellectualize and objectify their own practice or contribution in terms of information servicesresponding to reference questions or providing instruction—scholars and regular library users most often think about the library is personal discovery.

What people experience and value about academic libraries are primarily their own responses to a collection of works which they perceive to be relevant and interesting to them. Academic libraries are, in essence, collections of research that inspire research. If there is no discernible collection (but simply an aggregation of content) and it does not inspire people. It does not inspire research. It is human nature to care about what others care about, which is why curation adds value and intellectual interest to a library. 

As much as some librarians may rationalize user behavior in terms of information-seeking and problem-solving—as if researchers are trying to be efficient, like mice running through a maze to get a piece of cheese—I believe that good libraries, those that people want to use, are inherently “aesthetic” in Kantian sense: if they are good libraries, they are places of insight, revelation, transcendence (time/place/culture) and self-discovery. If they are good libraries, people want to use them and are really in no hurry to get to the exit. It is the librarian’s duty to facilitate this experience called “scholarly research” or discovery, which is often deliberately inefficient and enjoyable to the person doing it—unless they must consult with a librarian to gain access to something they want, in which case they are already frustrated.

How John Leinhard (Engines of our Ingenuity, Episode No. 1089) describes the value of art museums applies just as well to how people experience a good library: They allow us to enter into a “liminal state” of mind where we are opened up to new ideas and possibilities:

We all live in need of ideas. We all have problems to solve. At some point, most of us realize that, when our problems need creative solutions, they cannot be attacked with purely methodical tools. Method takes us down familiar roads. Creativity means seeing the shrubbery-shrouded side roads that we ignore by habit.

The hardest thing in the world is to leave the highway and float above the land. Music, theater, sculpture — they all cut us loose from the road of method and common sense.

The so-called creative leap isn’t a leap in the dark — without antecedents or stimulus. Rather, it happens when we find a liminal state, on the very edge of awareness, where ideas arrive without order or hierarchy. In that mental world, cowpaths are as important as freeways. And one way to find that creative state is to give ourselves over to art.

Inside the museum, we lay aside our shopping lists of needs to be met. Art serves us when we leave our supermarket lives to wander the woods, eating the unexpected nuts, berries, and wild fruit.

The information model made popular twenty-five years ago, when library studies morphed into information science, was a very convenient but limited model of what a library is and should be.

According to that model, people come to the library to satisfy information needs—or get assistance fulfilling requirements for assignments—rather than seeking a kind of self-directed experience “wandering through the woods and tasting the unexpected berries.”

When taken literally, this pragmatic philosophy of librarianship—which defines patron motivation to satisfying some immediate need, and the role of the librarian to satisfying that need—has had repercussions in how libraries are managed, designed and funded today, such as a singular focus on doing while discounting the importance of having, e.g., the right titles, an exceptional collection, displayed in ways that are appealing to users.

No amount of “doing” on the part of librarians can compensate for not having, because “having” is a core function of a library.

Patrons don’t come to the library primarily for our services. Even before the Internet, a time which I remember, people used the library without asking for assistance. They come for resources relevant to their interests, and to keep up with what’s new in their field of study. 

It should be our mission as academic librarians to create that special place where people feel stimulated, inspired, supported, and encouraged to go beyond the curriculum to become whoever and whatever they want to be in life. Libraries help people realize their potential.

Even a small library with a small budget should strive to immerse students in a world of ideas. It should be content-rich.

One of the best academic library mission statements for a college library I have come across is this:

“Dedicated to enriching the life of the community through the expansion of knowledge and creativity.” (Woodbury University Library, Burbank, CA)

It is a beautiful mission statement for a beautiful library (scroll way down to see a picture, or click the link above to go to their library website).

This one is really good too:

“. . . advancing scholarship and teaching through the collection, creation, application, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge.” (Harvard Library Mission & Strategic Objectives)

Today, if one conducted a national survey of ACRL mission statements, many would mention Information, Information Literacy and Information Services, “empowering students in the Information Age,” but few would mention collections or knowledge, more durable goods than the commodity of information.

Building Content-Rich Environments. Many enrolled in academic programs today would rather browse for books on Amazon and Google Books than in the library catalog. They would rather search for articles and information on Google (and Google Scholar) than in the library’s electronic databases. Libraries must afford a better, more interesting, content-rich online browsing experience.

For starters, what if the library’s home page looked more like this, emphasizing our content:

Barnes&Noble

and less like this, emphasizing the librarian and library services:

uhlibraryhome

Make sites more about the content that our users might want or find appealing, less about us librarians and our services. Make it a site that appeals to scholars and scholarship.

Ideally, the library’s mission statement, and the goals and objectives stemming from it, should embrace strategies for actively acquiring and promoting resources, and for using technology to put materials before our users’ eyes, because that is an important part of what a library does—not providing access to materials if and when they are requested. We have an obligation to our users to maintain a library in anticipation of use, and to provide them with a quality collection.

At the college level, the library should expose students to core titles and authorities in their chosen field, to disciplinary knowledge, to key publications, not merely to information in the abstract.

By providing access to everything “on demand” but acquiring nothing, we are essentially abnegating our roles as librarians and as educators, and creating a bland environment that is neither aesthetically pleasing nor conducive to learning. Offering a quality collection is one of the most important ways librarians add value to their user communities. 

Putting the Library back into Librarianship.

Librarians may not be able to compete with Google or Amazon, but there are things we can do to make our libraries more appealing to our constituents:

  • Encourage browsing. Put books where users will see them. I believe that good libraries actively promote awareness of the significant titles in a discipline and knowledge of recent trends. This is a core function of libraries, not optional. You can’t sit back and subscribe to ebook Central and be done with it. Browsing the shelves and the online catalog of a good college library helps students learn about a particular discipline in ways that retrieving a random assortment of books documents in response to a query can’t.
  • Make the library stimulating to the senses and the intellect. Good libraries have never been merely a repository for books, any more than a museum is a repository of artifacts. Just as with museums, aesthetics is vital to our success—especially now that there are so many other places for users to find and access information. By aesthetics, I am not referring merely to the attractiveness of the walls or the furniture, but to the subjective user experience of the library as a whole, including how interesting, useful and significant the library collections are or appear to be when patrons walk through the doors or land on the library’s home page. By all means though, if your users like music, play music. Serve coffee. Make it smell good. Make the library a destination.
  • Stop treating all questions as “information requests.” If stats are up at the Reference desk merely because signs were taken down and never replaced, or because people can’t locate what they are looking for on the shelves (stacks and collection is not maintained), or don’t know where to go to search the catalog or how to search it when they get there, or because the printer is broken, well, it all may look very good on paper (we’re responding to all these questions!) but the reality may be something very different. 
  • Stop using “Information Literacy” classes to compensate for poor user interfaces and antiquated systems. Rather than concentrating effort and energy on Information Literacy to teach students how to navigate our antiquated and unintuitive systems, we should be conducting usability studies of our website and library and working towards making them more user-friendly to begin with. No one needs a class to know how to search Amazon or Google. Why should the library’s website be any different?
  • READ. Turn your users on to new things they might like. Librarians should never stop reading, never stop growing. You are the voice of the collection: familiarize yourself with it! Read, recommend, reach out. Learn what your faculty might be interested in, keep them apprised of new publications in their discipline.
  • Invest in New User Interfaces. Libraries must start paying as much attention to the architecture of their websites as they do to the architecture of their buildings. 21st century libraries don’t have 20th century websites, static pages of text and hyperlinks. Our websites are often an ad hoc assemblage of various competing vendor-branded resources, platforms, interfaces, tools (e.g., SFX, “classic” catalog, LibGuides, “Literati by Credo Reference,” EBSCO Host, STATRef! and JSTOR ) and proprietary applications that don’t work well together, causing needless confusion among our users.
  • Focus on Content. Create libraries physical and virtual that are content rich environments, fun for patrons to explore.

Putting the Library back into Librarianship means offering intuitive, content-rich websites and facilities (“libraries”) that people actually enjoy coming to, to see what’s new in their areas of interest, or to learn more about a field of study or discipline.

Information Literacy and Instruction. A large study of California college library mission statements in 2006 “Thinking Boldly!259 concluded that many library mission statements have replaced “building strong collections” with “teaching information literacy.”

Reference and other types of Public Service librarians have always taught students, and always performed instruction, formally in classes and informally at the desk. This is nothing new or innovative about that, except that over the years the name has changed from “Bibliographic Instruction” to “Information Literacy” to “Library Learning,” and these days we sometimes teach people about the use and evaluation of Internet sources. However, never before has teaching received such intensive focus by our professional associations and literature.

Many Philosophies of Librarianship today place exclusive emphasis on teaching, specifically teaching Information Literacy.

This is a pretty typical PoL:

I acknowledge that libraries as an institution have a broader purpose, but in every library, librarians exist to teach people how to access and use information. Our role as educators and teachers is what makes us unique. In short, I see the heart and soul of libraries in information literacy.— Kim, “Our Philosophies of Librarianship,” In the Library With The Lead Pipe. Oct. 17, 2012. 260University libraries who can afford it are hiring “Information Literacy Librarians” and “First-year Experience Instruction Librarians” to teach Freshmen the basics of how to find, evaluate and use information.

The emphasis on Information Literacy in the library profession can be attributed to many things: more good information available on the Internet, sense that books are going away, the decline of Reference services, and even a shift in emphasis in running libraries according to a business objective model, where the only thing that matters is what can be directly demonstrated to have had an impact on student achievement (student success as defined by the institution).

This sounds really good in principle, but we have no means of demonstrating the value and impact of our collections within this framework, because usage stats and circulation have never been able to be correlated with outcomes in any meaningful way. A business objective model is synonymous with undermining the value of the collection and everything the library stands for, independent learning, whose impact on student success cannot be meaningfully measured through this assessment model

Librarians must be able to demonstrate their relevance to the university or college in light of assessment plans and a common perception that everything—at least, everything that their students might need to complete assignments—is online. Library directors are under pressure to demonstrate the library’s impact on students in terms of measurable results, which places more emphasis on instructional services.

What is most interesting to me is how now so many older librarians (since I am one, I can speak freely) express utter disdain toward the traditional library and print, arguing that it costs x amount of money to “warehouse” each title/year “just in case” someone needs it. This warehouse/repository is a straw man to serve the purpose of ebook salesmen and people who have no use for books of any kind. The ebook “repository” is even more costly than the one that was just eliminated, but its use, or lack thereof, is invisible. The problem is with being a repository, not with the format.

Once treated with a kind of reverence as works, books have now become dusty, unclean and obsolete, a whole lot of trouble to keep on the shelves, and not worth the expense. They say that online and on demand is what the library should be in the 21st century. Books are a thing of the past, with only 0-13% of the academic library budget now going to them. 

One can easily anticipate a time in the near future when only the largest schools will afford their students with the rich intellectual experience of what we used to call a library:

LehighULeHigh_LindermanLib_UniversityPhoto

while others will offer a web page with links to databases and be done with it.

Bookless Libraries: Progress or Decline?

No one seems to have given much thought either to the visceral appeal, effectiveness or impact on student learning of a library without physical books, or more importantly, whether user experience of an online library provides comparable educational, motivational or psychological benefit to its users. We know that users often assign great personal meaning, often spiritual value, to their happenstance discoveries in the stacks, which they sometimes value more highly than what is retrieved systematically.

At this time, modern, very spacious minimalist libraries without physical books are in fashion, and those libraries that have books are drastically reducing their numbers and placing them on the periphery, into storage, or completely out of sight, making it more difficult for patrons to discover them, undermining the browsing experience, and reducing the learning and research opportunities which come about through browsing. 

The University of Chicago’s Mansueto library, pictured below, stores books out of view (books are stored in an underground bunker, retrieved by robotic pages), a return to a time when the call number was actually used to call for the book.

meek

The new Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago. Books are stored in an underground bunker, retrieved through an automated system.

This is not an isolated case. “How to re-purpose empty or underutilized space in your library” (since collections are shrinking and books will be gone) could be the subtitle of most professional conferences on the 21st century library. Now that print books are going away, research libraries are resembling waiting areas, such as airports or hotel lobbies, or modern open concept workplaces.

At the Mansueto Library, which serves as the primary research library at the University of Chicago for students in the sciences and the humanities, there are no works on display to celebrate scholarship, to stimulate interest when users walk through the door, to encourage independent learning, or help students and faculty keep up with trends in their field.

From this traditional librarian’s perspective, the Mansueto presents intellectually sterile environment, the antithesis of what a good library should be. Honestly, wouldn’t you rather be here, in a beautiful space with the weight of tradition at your back, without all that sunlight glare on your laptop, and still have access to the same online databases?

woodburyInterior

Woodbury University Library, in Burbank, CA. “Dedicated to enriching the life of the community through the expansion of knowledge and creativity.” What a wonderful mission statement.

Unfortunately, the highly acclaimed multi-million dollar glass facility (nicknamed “the blister”) named after billionaire donor Joe Mansueto (the founder of the Morningstar news agency), is what many in our own profession also believe a modern library should be: rational, efficient, impersonal and technological, glass and steel.

It also symbolizes a logical trajectory of the library profession from a focus on works and collections created and maintained by and for people—humanistic values—to “information in the abstract.” While ideas and works transcend time and place, information (like news) is inherently transient and continuously updated, it has no lasting value, so there is no need to preserve it for the future.

It is also the embodiment of a philosophy of librarianship encouraged by the library profession over the last 25 years which:

    • regards information services and libraries as interchangeable
    • defines services narrowly and in a reactionary way, merely responding to the information needs of students and faculty
    • stresses the function of librarians as existing apart from creating and maintaining exceptional academic and college libraries
    • fails to recognize that good libraries are conceptually much more about ideas and publications than information in the abstract.

After encountering so many philosophies of librarianship and academic library mission statements which offer nothing more than “teaching information literacy” and/or “providing information and resources to support the curriculum,” I realize I do have a philosophy of librarianship which has to do with my commitment to creating and maintaining an exceptionally good academic library.

My philosophy of librarianship began in 1987, the peak of publishing and of the art market boom, also about the time when library science graduate programs across the country were either closing down or else reinventing themselves as schools of Information Sciencetaking the “L-word” out of their names and course descriptionsand adding basic programming, SQL and DOS to the curriculum.

Over the years, “iSchools,” the new library schools, would continue to add more information theory and technical computing courses to the traditional library school curriculum, including object-oriented programming, data mining, data management, Information Retrieval, web development, “Ontologies and the Semantic Web,” digital asset management and health informatics, digitization and data visualization. But no matter how technical, relevant or cutting edge the MLIS curriculum at top universities, employers continued to associate the Master’s in Library and Information Science with traditional reference work, filing, or something anachronistic and entirely useless to the business enterprise. 

After completing a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science in 1990, I returned to graduate school and took courses in the burgeoning discipline of Information Science, and also MIS (Management Information Systems) in the School of Business. I returned again, this time to the community college, in the late 90’s and early 00’s to study computer programming, web development and database management, which is precisely what my cohorts in iSchools were learning. I was already programming in Perl and managed large library systems running on top of Unix.

However, when I first enrolled in Library School in 1987, my interests were traditional: rare books and manuscripts (RBMS), along with antiquarian prints, Reformation history, Christian Humanism, medieval scholasticism, Neo-Latin, 18th century philosophy, 19th century Romanticism, English literature, art and art history, illustrated books, history of printing, descriptive bibliography and cataloging. I loved antiquarian prints and book illustration.

In the late 1980’s and early 90’s I’d already studied a few years of Latin and Ancient Greek, was in graduate school, and was a part-time book scout for used and out-of-print book dealers. I subscribed to AB Bookman and tried to fulfill requests. I scoured library book and estate sales. I liked to see what books were in demand by collectors. I had been following the book and print market for a long time (an interest which began when my father took me to Samuel Weiser’s occult bookstore in New York City where I discovered the writings of A. E. Waite), and was eagerly attending antiquarian book shows in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco when I could. Of course, I collected books. Any new city I visited, I looked forward to visiting the used and out-of-print bookstores. I loved Lexington Avenue in Chicago, Printer’s Row, and Graham Arader galleries.

I went on to study more Latin at the graduate level and eventually moved over to Medieval and Reformation History, thinking I could put my Latin to use and it would give me an advantage in that field. I gravitated to Church history, medieval scholasticism and philosophy. I often hung out with seminary students whom I met in Classics Departments who wondered if they truly had a calling for the priesthood. We would talk philosophy and Neo-Thomism, mainly Bernard Lonergan. I wished I could have received a calling from God to tell me what to do with my own life, for I always felt I was born 50 years too late. I loved anything British and Classical (reading the Classics and Middle Ages through the eyes of Victorian scholars). I also discovered at big state schools that my academic interests were, by most people’s standards, conservative; but I was not actually aware of that fact, until I was confronted with something called “herstory” in History, which viewed everything through the lens of patriarchy and misogyny. What passed as “critical theory” was remarkably uncritical of itself. In my study of History, I did not want to set out to “blur the sacred and the profane,” or “divine women’s voices from the language of male denigration and misogyny,” for I didn’t see the point in doing these things. It isn’t that I was religious, but I wanted to pursue objectivity and truth, not use history for some political agenda.

At the end of the 1980s, History and English Departments were preoccupied with a Marxism, feminism, new historicism, deconstruction and post-structuralism. I didn’t care about any of it. 

Librarianship for me and many other academic dropouts may have been a career of last resort, but it just seemed like a more intellectually honest profession and better aligned with my scholarly interests, and I was always in the rare book room anyway, where as far as I was concerned, much of the real scholarship was being done.

divider

In Library School at the end of the 80s, I took my “Introduction to Information Services” class where we were discussing the role of libraries in society and their importance for delivering quality information to people. Libraries schools back then were interested in re-defining traditional library work in terms of information access and delivery. Whatever the type of library, we were told that the output of library services, whether public, academic or corporate, was information. It was a big lie.

Most librarians accept this as a plank of MLIS program, for it is a bridge that connects librarianship with something theoretical, relevant and modern“information.” The fundamental logic, or philosophy, of library services at seemed to hang on a self-validating, circular premise:

People go to the library to get information, to satisfy an information need—even if the need may not ever be fully or consciously realized by the library user.

The rational was that if people come to the library, they have must an “information need,” a question which needed answering. It was up to the librarian to translate their ill-defined, poorly articulated, and unconscious information needs into questions that could be answered quickly and efficiently using the library’s resources, which constituted a reference transaction. 

As a life-long user of libraries myself, I was never comfortable with this transactional model of libraries or its users. I was a regular library user, and this didn’t describe my habits at all. 

    • If the library is a good one, people come to be stimulated (and to stimulate their own creativity), to explore possibilities, and to stay connected with scholarship, and even to have the opportunity to discover new things, very often inefficiently and serendipitously, by the act of browsing.
    • If the library is a good one, people will enjoy browsing and seeing what’s new in areas that interest them.
    • If the library is a good one, books and journals are placed before the user in a way that is immediate, aesthetically pleasing, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally gratifying.

But only if the library is a good one.

Good libraries are not, fundamentally, about getting information the answers to pre-formed questions, something measurable, but about stimulating new questions, raising new possibilities, and presenting new ideas to the user

Good libraries should invite its users to explore and to grow. 

Library assessment models based on the transactional service model does not capture the way academics, educated people and life-long learners actually use libraries, that is, not to find answers to pre-defined questions, but to stimulate scholarly activity and their own creativity.

If the college or university library fails to deliver that kind of experience to its users, it fails as a libraryregardless of how many Info Lit classes are being taught, for example, how much relevant information can be pulled out of databases in a response to a question, or how many transactions there are at the service desk. 

Unfortunately, what passes as libraries today may meet accreditation requirements, provide abundant access to information on virtually any topic, provide ample resources to complete assignments, but if this is ALL they do, they will fail to inspire a culture of learning across a college campus.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526, by Albrecht Durer

The Importance of the Library as Place (and its Website as a Destination)

My philosophy of librarianship is to maintain a special place, a “library,” where people are delighted and inspired by what they find there. 

I believe that outside of a corporate setting, the physicality of the library is still important, because done right, it is affirming to individuals, and especially to students who may be struggling to get through school, and to seasoned researchers who may feel that no one cares about their passionate concerns in life except for the handful of scholars working in their same area. The academic library represents an ideal. It is the sanctum sanctorum which needs to exist apart from the mundane world.

It is sanctuary of intellectual and artistic endeavor, and it keeps students from becoming overly distracted by the mundane world—which too often tells students that what they are doing (pursuing that degree) is a waste of time and money, that they should be out there making money, pursuing short-term goals offering more immediate rewards. The physicality, permanence, commitment and material expense of books in collections, including the prominent space they occupy within the building, signifies respect (dignitas) for works so much more than anything conjured up out of a database in response to a user’s query. It signifies that other people care about academic pursuits. The illusion of permanence of a collection often forms an intellectual anchor into reality. 

Good libraries improve retention and encourage academic success. At my institution, I am amazed and impressed that students burdened with multiple jobs and small children and financial hardship and limited support systems, along with limited job prospects and mounting debt, can stay positive and focused on their studies.

I do not think administrators fully grasp the ameliorating effect that this glorified study hall of books, a palace to scholarship, a place unlike an office space or any other building “in the real world,” can have on students, particularly on at risk and disadvantaged students. The traditional library reinforces the values which keep students in school. It shows respect for students and for the scholarly enterprise. 

Far from being an anachronism, the library symbolizes in a tangible way opportunity and possibility and a better life. It also helps them connect with someone associated with the university when everyone else on campus has gone home (It’s 3am during finals week, but we’ve left the light on for you. . .).

The library not only allows people to connect with others in their field of study, past and present, but it affirms the value of scholarship: people wrote the books, people published them, people selected them and continue to care for them, each step along the way conferring value on the work in the same way a frame and layers of matting confers value and importance to a work of art.

Well-furnished libraries, with collections that appear to be grown and maintained by others with care, confer value, respect and dignity upon the academic endeavor and the people who were and are part of that process.

Bad libraries, on the other hand, convey that academic studies are a waste of time and money. Stacks full of dated materials, no books or new books, overly restrictive circulation policies, limited seating areas, empty and underutilized space, negative signage, broken computers and equipment never repaired, an ineffective and poorly maintained website, run-down facilities, “dead zones” and all other signs of benign neglect, serve to reinforce a student’s and faculty member’s sense of ambivalence and low self-worth as scholars.

While good libraries function as a hub or commons, reinforcing academic interests and pursuits and stimulating new research, mediocre libraries feel stagnant and lifeless, and drive students away—not just from the library, but from the university.

The library is a microcosm of the macrocosm of the academic quality of the institution.

Good libraries offer meaningful collections. A second tenant of my philosophy of librarianship is that library services are not primarily about providing access to information, but rather about providing access to good collections (knowledge) built with deliberation and care (these collections can be physical or virtual or a logical combination of the two).

Our users experience and judge the quality of the library by its collections, not by the discrete bits of information which can be pulled out of the chapter of an ebook or journal article on demand in response to a question. They judge it by whether the library has in its collections the key titles in their field of research, and if the library stays on top of scholarly trends in their field.

Above all else, libraries should be interesting places. Do patrons see titles of new books and on the covers of journals which stimulate curiosity and interest? Does the library provide services to make it easy for scholars to keep up with issues and ideas? Is the library a stimulating place for users to browse?

LibrariesFeed

So long as librarians continue to espouse an impoverished model of librarianship—where what we have to offer is “access on demand” to various “information resources”—or about some sort of customer service / collaboration facilitator—a library’s value to a school will continue to be put into question. 

Libraries are about creating and maintaining unique content-rich learning environments, both in person and online, where people can expect to experience “library goodness.”

  1. “Defining Excellence in Academic Librarianship at USC (DEAL at USC) / Your Philosophy of Librarianship.” University of Southern California Library. http://libguides.usc.edu/c.php?g=235091&p=1560270
  2. Kolowich, Steve. “Bookless Libraries? Technology leaders and librarians consider how the digital age changes the physical space and role of one of higher education’s oldest institutions.” Inside Higher Ed. Nov. 6, 2009. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/06/library.
  3. “Nation’s First Bookless Library on College Campus is Thriving at UTSA.” UTSA Today, http://www.utsa.edu/today/2013/03/aetlibrary.html. Accessed 27 Feb. 2017.
  4. Dwyer, Liz. “Are college libraries about to become bookless?” Web log post. The Daily Good. N.p., 13 July 2011. Web. <https://www.good.is/articles/are-college-libraries-about-to-become-bookless>.
  5. Riley, Sharon. “Academic: New Florida University Unveils Bookless Library.” Library Journal 139, no. 15 (Sep 15, 2014): 13-n/a, http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/08/academic-libraries/new-florida-polytechnic-unveils-bookless-library/#_.
  6. Hack, Husna. “‘Bookless libraries’ – has it really come to this?” Christian Science Monitor. N.p., 17 July 2012. Web. <http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/0717/Bookless-libraries-has-it-really-come-to-this>.
  7. Abadi, Mark. “A Major US College Is Moving Almost All of Its Library Books off Campus, and It Represents a Major Change in How Young People Learn.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 18 Jan. 2019, www.businessinsider.com/georgia-tech-library-books-2019-1.
  8. See for example, http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/10/managing-libraries/collaboration-for-hard-times/#_
  9. Lara Ewen, “Show Us Your Beautiful New Library.” American Libraries Magazine, 2 Jan. 2020, americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2020/01/02/show-us-your-beautiful-new-library-design-showcase/.
  10. Wilders, Coen. “Predicting the Role of Library Bookshelves in 2025.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 43, Sept. 2017, pp. 384–391. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2017.06.019
  11. Graziano, Frankie. “Yale Students, Officials Clash Over Future Of On-Campus Library.” Connecticut Public Radio, www.npr.org/post/yale-students-officials-clash-over-future-campus-library.
  12. Sabbas. “Round Tables.” About ALA, 11 Aug. 2023, www.ala.org/aboutala/rts. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.
  13. E-book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization, NISO RP-29-202X, Available for Public Comment: June 18-August 2, 2020, https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/23850/NISO_RP-29-202X_E-Book_Metadata_Draft_for_Public_Comment.pdf
  14. Fred Schlipf. Constructing Library Buildings That Work. ALA Editions, 2020, p. 5. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=2543387&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
  15. Stewart, Christopher. The Academic Library Building in the Digital Age: A Study of New Library Construction and Planning, Design, and use of New Library Space, University of Pennsylvania, Ann Arbor, 2009. ProQuest, http://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2048/login?url=https://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2084/docview/304980905?accountid=7093.
  16. Sasaki Associates Library Design Survey, 2015, http://librarysurvey.sasaki.com/
  17. Sasaki Associates Library Design Survey, 2015, http://librarysurvey.sasaki.com/
  18. I believe I borrowed this description of the collectionless library from Nicholson Baker. “Discard.” The Size of Our Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. New York: Random House, 1996.
  19. Gorman, Michael. “Five New Laws of Librarianship,” American Libraries, Sept. 1995, 784-785, https://thomasisaiahwest.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gormans-five-new-laws-of-librarianship.pdf
  20. Calhoun, Karen. “Supporting Digital Scholarship: Bibliographic Control, Library
    Cooperatives and Open Access Repositories,” file:///C:/Users/emily.tuck/Downloads/Supporting_Digital_Scholarship_Bibliographic_Contr.pdf.
  21. https://gallagherdesign.com/
  22. Demonstration can be found here: https://search.carrot2.org/#/search/web
  23. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  24. Baker, Nicholson. “Discard.” The Size of Our Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. New York: Random House, 1996, p. 158.
  25. Courant, Paul N. and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” http://www.leverpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CourantandNielsen.pdf
  26. https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Primo/Product_Materials/010_Primo_Next_Discovery_Experience_User_Interface
  27. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill
  28. A good article on the State Mandate in Texas can be found here: Dumonte, Paul E. “Library Resource Sharing: A Texas-Sized Challenge: Cooperative Efforts of Libraries. Part I.” Resource sharing & information networks 16.1 (2002): 133–144.
  29. Hernandez, Joe. “A Judge Sided with Publishers in a Lawsuit over the Internet Archive’s Online Library.” NPR, 26 Mar. 2023, www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166101459/internet-archive-lawsuit-books-library-publishers.
  30. E-book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization, NISO RP-29-202X, Available for Public Comment: June 18-August 2, 2020, https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/23850/NISO_RP-29-202X_E-Book_Metadata_Draft_for_Public_Comment.pdf
  31. Ross, Lyman, and Pongracz Sennyey. “The Library Is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution.” The Journal of academic librarianship 34.2 (2008): 145–152, p. 147, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133307002492.
  32. Fred Schlipf. Constructing Library Buildings That Work. ALA Editions, 2020. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=2543387&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
  33. Mark. D Lee. “The New Academic Home on Campus: The University Library is a Hub of Student Collaboration and Learning.” https://www.high-profile.com/new-academic-home-campus-university-library-hub-student-collaboration-learning/
  34. Karen Latimer, and Hellen Niegaard. IFLA Library Building Guidelines: Developments & Reflections. München: De Gruyter Saur, 2007. https://search-ebscohost-com.tsu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=259767&site=ehost-live&scope=site; Dorothea Sommer, et al. High Quality Design on a Low Budget : New Library Buildings. Proceedings of the Satellite Conference of the IFLA Library Buildings and Equipment Section “Making Ends Meet: High Quality Design on a Low Budget” Held at Li Ka Shing Library, Singapore Management University, 15-16 August 2013. De Gruyter Saur, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1204337&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
  35. The application of this to library science is elucidated in Gary P. Radford. “Trapped in Our Own Discursive Formations: Toward an Archaeology of Library and Information Science. The Library Quarterly. Jan., 2003, Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 1-18.
  36. The application of this to library science is elucidated in Gary P. Radford. “Trapped in Our Own Discursive Formations: Toward an Archaeology of Library and Information Science. The Library Quarterly. Jan., 2003, Vol. 73, No. 1, p. 3
  37. Van Hemert, Kyle. “900 Years of Tree Diagrams, the Most Important Data Viz Tool in History.” Wired, Conde Nast, 8 Apr. 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tree-diagrams-the-most-important-data-viz-tool-in-history/.
  38. HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, “New Rule: The College Scam,” June 4, 2021.
  39. The requirements are a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science; a teaching credential in a content area, which requires successful completion of an Educator Preparation Program, passing requisite exams and two years in the classroom teaching; and 12 hours of specialized graduate-level coursework in Library Science beyond the MLS degree. These are needed just to qualify to take the State credentialing exam.
  40. Nitecki, Danuta A. “Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 81, no. 1, 2011, pp. 27–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657446.
  41. Fred Schlipf. Constructing Library Buildings That Work. ALA Editions, 2020, p. 5. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=2543387&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
  42. https://www.gensler.com/gri/future-of-the-academic-library
  43. https://www.bdcnetwork.com/blog/future-libraries
  44. Sasaki Associates Library Design Survey, 2015, http://librarysurvey.sasaki.com/. This fascinating survey reveals the terrible disparities between librarian priorities and actual renovations done to library spaces.
  45. Fred Schlipf. Constructing Library Buildings That Work. ALA Editions, 2020, p. 5. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=2543387&site=ehost-live&scope=site
  46. Stewart, Christopher. The Academic Library Building in the Digital Age: A Study of New Library Construction and Planning, Design, and use of New Library Space, University of Pennsylvania, Ann Arbor, 2009. ProQuest, http://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2048/login?url=https://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2084/docview/304980905?accountid=7093.
  47. https://spaces4learning.com/Articles/2016/07/01/Academic-Libraries.aspx?Page=2
  48. Zarroli, Jim. “Some States Are Changing the Laws That Govern Community Libraries.” NPR, NPR, 21 June 2022, www.npr.org/2022/06/21/1106320865/why-states-are-changing-the-laws-that-govern-libraries-serving-communities.
  49. This has becomes a popular metaphor for 21st century learning environments which seems to have originated here: Thornburg, David. From the Campfire to the Holodeck : Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tsu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1426516, p. x
  50. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  51. Dumonte, Paul E. “Library Resource Sharing: A Texas-Sized Challenge: Cooperative Efforts of Libraries. Part I.” Resource sharing & information networks 16.1 (2002): 133–144. Print.
  52. Posner, Beth. “Insights From Library Information and Resource Sharing for the Future of Academic Library Collections.” Collection management 44.2-4 (2019): 146–153. Web.
  53. Library of Congress Classification, https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcc.html.
  54. Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. New York; Vintage Books, 2001, p. 257.
  55. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  56. Armstrong, P. Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, 2010. from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/
  57. Walters, William H. “E-books in Academic Libraries: Challenges for Discovery and Access,” Serials Review, 39:2, 2013, 97-104, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2013.10765501
  58. Daniel, Katherine, et al. “Library Acquisition Patterns.” Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R. 29 January 2019. Web. 8 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.310937
  59. Anderson, R., 2011. Collections 2021: the future of the library collection is not a collection. Serials, 24(3), p. 212. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/24211
  60. Association of College & Research Libraries, Standards in Libraries in Higher Education, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries
  61. McKay, Dana et al. “The Things We Talk About When We Talk About Browsing: An Empirical Typology of Library Browsing Behavior.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 70.12 (2019): 1383–1394. Web.
  62. McKay, Dana et al. “The Things We Talk About When We Talk About Browsing: An Empirical Typology of Library Browsing Behavior.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 70.12 (2019): 1384
  63. McKay, Dana et al. “The Things We Talk About When We Talk About Browsing: An Empirical Typology of Library Browsing Behavior.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 70.12 (2019): 1384
  64. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  65. I have been reaching out to the Catholic Library Association to see about getting some statistics or doing a formal survey of members. The University of St. Thomas in Houston has recently transitioned to more of an Internet Café model, but I have not seen it yet.
  66. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1980.
  67. This is due to the elimination of IP authentication in preference for Single Sign On. Vendors encouraged the implementation of SSO by IT Departments, often claiming security concerns with the library’s proxy server. Where IP authentication has been dismantled, it has had the often unintended consequence of limiting public access to electronic resources to only those who have current institutional credentials.
  68. According to Danielle Cunniff Plumer, Statewide Resource Sharing Administrator with the Texas State Library Association, who overseas TexShare: “Over, the past six years, we have made a conscious effort to make the TexShare Databases sufficient for SACS-COC library accreditation purposes for smaller libraries, because community colleges and others have come to us saying that their budgets can’t absorb the costs of anything else.”
  69. This has becomes a popular metaphor for 21st century learning environments which seems to have originated here: Thornburg, David. From the Campfire to the Holodeck : Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tsu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1426516, p. x
  70. This is true with aggregator packages but not with costlier publisher packages.
  71. E-book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization, NISO RP-29-202X, Available for Public Comment: June 18-August 2, 2020, https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/23850/NISO_RP-29-202X_E-Book_Metadata_Draft_for_Public_Comment.pdf
  72. Ross, Lyman, and Pongracz Sennyey. “The Library Is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution.” The Journal of academic librarianship 34.2 (2008): 145–152, p. 147, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133307002492.
  73. “The Star Thrower.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Thrower
  74. Lee College Library’ Collection Development Policy, https://www.lee.edu/library/about/policies/coll-dvt/
  75. https://libraries.uh.edu/about/collections/
  76. Gorman, Michael. The Enduring Library: Technology, Tradition, and the Quest for Balance. ALA Editions, 2003.
  77. Gorman, Michael. The Enduring Library: Technology, Tradition, and the Quest for Balance. ALA Editions, 2003.
  78. Gorman, Michael. Our Enduring Values Revisited: Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2015
  79. E-book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization, NISO RP-29-202X, Available for Public Comment: June 18-August 2, 2020, https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/23850/NISO_RP-29-202X_E-Book_Metadata_Draft_for_Public_Comment.pdf
  80. Association of College & Research Libraries, Standards in Libraries in Higher Education, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries
  81. Dugan, Robert E., and Peter Hernon. “Outcomes Assessment: Not Synonymous with Inputs and Outputs.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.6 (2002): 376-380.
  82. McClellan, E. Fletcher. “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: Three Decades of Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education,” PS—Political Science & Politics, 2016, p. 88, doi:10.1017/S1049096515001298.
  83. Adam Wood, “Disappearing School Libraries-Why?” Architecture and Education, June 10, 2018, https://architectureandeducation.org/2018/06/10/disappearing-school-libraries-why/
  84. Dugan, Robert E., and Peter Hernon. “Outcomes Assessment: Not Synonymous with Inputs and Outputs.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.6 (2002): 376-380.
  85. Adam Wood, “Disappearing School Libraries-Why?” Architecture and Education, June 10, 2018, https://architectureandeducation.org/2018/06/10/disappearing-school-libraries-why/
  86. https://www.bdcnetwork.com/blog/future-libraries
  87. https://www.higheredjobs.com/admin/details.cfm?JobCode=177459845
  88. https://houstonnewcomerguides.com/alvin-community-college/
  89. http://www.tsu.edu/academics/colleges-and-schools/colabs/index.html
  90. Michael Gorman, Our Enduring Values Revisited: Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2015, p. 154
  91. Prensky, Marc. “In the 21st-Century University, Let’s Ban (Paper) Books.” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 13, 2011
  92. Badke, William B. “Questia.com: Implications of the New McLibrary.” Internet Reference Services Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 3, Taylor & Francis Group, 2000, pp. 61–71, doi:10.1300/J136v05n03_09.
  93. Bell, Steven J. “Electronic Libraries Can’t Be Academic.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 52.6 (2005): B.14–https://www.chronicle.com/article/electronic-libraries-cant-be-academic/
  94. I owe the idea of using the term “brand” in the context of booklessness to a blog post by Christian Laursen, “Why Do they Come? Library as a Place and Brand. The Library Lab: Libraries, Leaning and Lego. https://christianlauersen.net/2017/10/17/why-do-they-come/
  95. Courant, Paul N. and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” http://www.leverpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CourantandNielsen.pdf
  96. Ross, Lyman, and Pongracz Sennyey. “The Library Is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution.” The Journal of academic librarianship 34.2 (2008): 145–152, p. 147, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133307002492.
  97. https://www.legat.com/harper-college-legat-architects-explore-academic-library-design-national-community-college-conference/
  98. Scherlen, Allan & Alex D. McAllister, “Voices Versus Visions: A Commentary on Academic Library Collections and New Directions,” Collection Management, 44:2-4, 2019, 389-395, DOI: 10.1080/01462679.2018.1547999
  99. Stewart, Christopher. The Academic Library Building in the Digital Age: A Study of New Library Construction and Planning, Design, and use of New Library Space, University of Pennsylvania, Ann Arbor, 2009. ProQuest, http://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2048/login?url=https://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2084/docview/304980905?accountid=7093.
  100. Wong, Alia. “College Students Just Want Normal Libraries.” The Atlantic. Oct. 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/10/college-students-dont-want-fancy-libraries/599455/
  101. McClellan, E. Fletcher. “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: Three Decades of Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education,” PSPolitical Science & Politics, 2016, p. 88, doi:10.1017/S1049096515001298.
  102. Closed robotic storage and retrieval systems have been built at the University of Chicago, North Carolina State University, University of Missouri Kansas City, Georgia Southern University and most recently at the University of Central Florida.
  103. https://library.ucf.edu/21st/arc/
  104. Prensky, Marc. “In the 21st-Century University, Let’s Ban (Paper) Books.” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 13, 2011
  105. Daniel, Katherine, et al. “Library Acquisition Patterns.” Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R. 29 January 2019. Web. 8 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.310937
  106. Allan Scherlen & Alex D. McAllister (2019) “Voices Versus Visions: A Commentary on Academic Library Collections and New Directions,” Collection Management, 44:2-4, 389-395, DOI: 10.1080/01462679.2018.1547999
  107. Daniel, Katherine, et al. “Library Acquisition Patterns.” Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R. 29 January 2019. Web. 8 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.310937
  108. The concept of library goodness goes back to a landmark article by R. H. Orr, “Measuring the goodness of library services: A general framework for considering quantitative measures.” Journal of Documentation, 29(3), 1973, 315-332.
  109. McClellan, E. Fletcher. “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: Three Decades of Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education,” PS—Political Science & Politics, 2016, p. 88, doi:10.1017/S1049096515001298.
  110. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  111. “Standards for Libraries in Higher Education”, American Library Association, August 29, 2006. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries
  112. Nelson, William Neal, et.al. “A Library Compliance Strategy for Regional Accreditation Standards: Using ACRL Higher Education Standards with NEASC Standards.” College & Undergraduate Libraries, March 2012, pp. 46-79, https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2011.624941
  113. Nelson, William Neal, et.al. “A Library Compliance Strategy for Regional Accreditation Standards: Using ACRL Higher Education Standards with NEASC Standards.” College & Undergraduate Libraries, March 2012, pp. 46-79, https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2011.624941
  114. SACS LIBRARY & LEARNING/INFORMATION RESOURCES http://www.sacscoc.org/cbaird.asphttps://sacscoc.org/app/uploads/2020/12/CS-153_Library_Standards_baird.pdf
  115. Walters, William H. “E-books in Academic Libraries: Challenges for Discovery and Access,” Serials Review, 39:2, 2013, 97-104, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2013.10765501
  116. Scherlen, Allan & Alex D. McAllister, “Voices Versus Visions: A Commentary on Academic Library Collections and New Directions,” Collection Management, 44:2-4, 2019, 389-395, DOI: 10.1080/01462679.2018.1547999
  117. Anderson, R., 2011. Collections 2021: the future of the library collection is not a collection. Serials, 24(3), p. 212. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/24211
  118. On the subject of bookless libraries and learning labs in Denmark, I have enjoyed Christian Lauersen’s blog, The Library Lab: Libraries, Leaning and Lego, especially “Is a Library Without Books Still a Library?” and “Why do they come?” https://christianlauersen.net/2017/07/07/is-a-library-without-books-still-a-library/
  119. Lynema, Emily, et. al. “Virtual Browse: Designing User-Oriented Services for Discovery of Related Resources.” Library Trends, 2012, Vol.61 (1), p.218-233. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/34605/61.1.lynema.pdf?sequence=2
  120. Anderson, R., 2011. Collections 2021: the future of the library collection is not a collection. Serials, 24(3), pp. 211–215. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/24211
  121. Schmidt, Janine Developing a Library Collection Today: Revisiting “Collection Evaluation, the Conspectus and Chimeras in Library Cooperation,” Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 47:4, 2016, 190-195, DOI: 10.1080/00048623.2016.1250598
  122. McClellan, E. Fletcher. “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: Three Decades of Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education,” PS—Political Science & Politics, 2016, p. 88, doi:10.1017/S104909651500129
  123. Dugan, Robert E., and Peter Hernon. “Outcomes Assessment: Not Synonymous with Inputs and Outputs.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.6 (2002): 376-380; also Peggy Johnson. Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. Vol. Fourth edition, ALA Editions, 2018, p. 284
  124. See my section Legitimation ff., and also ACRL SLHE, Introduction, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries
  125. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  126. Ilene Frank, “Second Life: A Virtual World Why Are Librarians There?”
    First Monday, Volume 13 Number 8 – 4, August 2008 https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2222/2010
  127. John T. Gantt & J. Randal Woodland, “Libraries in Second Life: Linking Collections, Clients, and Communities in a Virtual World,” Journal of Web Librarianship, 7:2, 2013. 123-141, DOI: 10.1080/19322909.2013.780883.
  128. Press release for Texas State University’s virtual campus launched in 2009 https://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2009/04/SecondLife042909.html
  129. Schultz, Author Ryan. “The Rise and Fall of Library Use of Second Life: What Happened to All the Libraries That Used to Be in Second Life and Other Virtual Worlds?” Ryan Schultz, 13 Oct. 2018, ryanschultz.com/2018/08/13/the-rise-and-fall-of-library-use-of-second-life-what-happened-to-all-the-libraries-that-used-to-be-in-second-life-and-other-virtual-worlds.
  130. Dougherty, William C. ” Virtualization and Libraries: The Future is Now (or Virtualization: Whither Libraries or Libraries Wither?)” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 35: 3, 2009, pp. 274-276, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2009.03.006.
  131. Cook, Matt. “Virtual Serendipity: Preserving Embodied Browsing Activity in the 21st Century Research Library,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 44: 1, 2018, pp. 145-149, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.09.003.
  132. Cook, Matt. “Virtual Serendipity: Preserving Embodied Browsing Activity in the 21st Century Research Library,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 44: 1, 2018, pp. 145-149, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.09.003.
  133. Cook, Matt. ” Virtual Serendipity: Preserving Embodied Browsing Activity in the 21st Century Research Library,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 44: 1, 2018, p. 146, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.09.003.
  134. Cook, Matt. “Virtual Serendipity: Preserving Embodied Browsing Activity in the 21st Century Research Library,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 44: 1, 2018, p. 149, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2009.03.006.
  135. Foster, Anita K. “Determining Librarian Research Preferences: A Comparison Survey of Web-Scale Discovery Systems and Subject Databases.”  The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Volume 44, Issue 3, May 2018, pp. 330-336. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009913331730438X
  136. Courant, Paul N. and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” http://www.leverpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CourantandNielsen.pdf
  137. Anderson, Rick. “Managing Multiple Models of Publishing in Library Acquisition,” Against the Grain: Vol. 22: Iss. 1, Article 6, p. 18.
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.5836
  138. Courant, Paul N. and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” http://www.leverpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CourantandNielsen.pdf
  139. This is a reference to a story called “The Star Thrower.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Thrower
  140. Schmidt, Janine Developing a Library Collection Today: Revisiting “Collection Evaluation, the Conspectus and Chimeras in Library Cooperation,” Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 47:4, 2016, 190-195, DOI: 10.1080/00048623.2016.1250598
  141. I am mainly thinking of ALMA Primo and OCLC WMS, but Marshall Breeding confirmed in an email that no academic library system he knows of supports ebook browsing.
  142. Peggy Johnson. Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. Vol. Fourth edition, ALA Editions, 2018, p. 290.
  143. Chan, Lois Mai. Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2007, pp. 309-310. Chan states that “In addition to shelving and display, classification is used as a tool for collection management, e.g., facilitating the creation of a specialized branch libraries and the generation of discipline-specific holdings lists. In online public access catalogs (OPACS), classification also serves a direct retrieval function because class numbers can be used as access points to MARC records.” Chan also mentions that seven functions of classification in libraries, identified by ALCTS, as location, browsing, hierarchical movement, retrieval, identification, limiting/ partitioning and profiling.
  144. Frederick, Donna E. Managing Ebook Metadata in Academic Libraries : Taming the Tiger. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Chandos Publishing, 2017.
  145. https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Content_Corner/Community_Zone_MARC_Enrichment%3A_Provider_Submission_Guide
  146. E-book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization, NISO RP-29-202X, Available for Public Comment: June 18-August 2, 2020, https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/23850/NISO_RP-29-202X_E-Book_Metadata_Draft_for_Public_Comment.pdf
  147. LOC E-books CIP Program, https://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/ebooks/
  148. Email correspondence with Janis Young, Senior Cataloging Policy Specialist at the Library of Congress, 9/1/20.
  149. http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/
  150. Frank, E. and Paynter, G.W. (2004), Predicting Library of Congress classifications from Library of Congress subject headings. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 55: 214-227. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10360
  151. Lynema, Emily, et. al., “Virtual Browse: Designing User-Oriented Services for Discovery of Related Resources,” Library Trends, vol. 61, no. 1, 2012, p. 218-233https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/34605/61.1.lynema.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
  152. Mingyu Chen, Misu Kim & Debbie Montgomery, “Ebook record management at The University of Texas at Dallas,” Technical Services Quarterly, 2016, 33:3, 251-267, DOI: 10.1080/07317131.2016.1169781.
  153. Carrot/Lingo here: https://search.carrotsearch.com/#/web
  154. Soliman, Sara Saad et al. “Semantic Clustering of Search Engine Results.” TheScientificWorldJournal vol. 2015 (2015): 931258. doi:10.1155/2015/931258
  155. https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Content_Corner/Community_Zone_MARC_Enrichment%3A_Provider_Submission_Guide
  156. Burton Fiona and Kattau, Maureen. “Building in the ‘e’: creating the virtual bookshelf.” VALA2012 proceedings, Melbourne, Feb. 16, 2012, p. 3 https://research-management.mq.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/17160948/mq-17841-Publisher+version+%28open+access%29.pdf.
  157. Burton Fiona and Kattau, Maureen. “Building in the ‘e’: creating the virtual bookshelf.” VALA2012 proceedings, Melbourne, Feb. 16, 2012, p. 3 https://research-management.mq.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/17160948/mq-17841-Publisher+version+%28open+access%29.pdf.
  158. Johnson, Michael and Traill, Stacie. “Classify All the Things: Enhancing LC Classification Data for Better Collection Assessment and Management”. In: ELUNA 2018 Annual Meeting, May 1-4, 2018, Spokane, Washington.
  159. Lynema, Emily, et. al. “Virtual Browse: Designing User-Oriented Services for Discovery of Related Resources.” Library Trends, 2012, Vol.61 (1), p.218-233. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/34605/61.1.lynema.pdf?sequence=2
  160. Databases must be configured to sort by LC classification rather than alphanumerically but this is not a big deal. Our systems do have the ability to generate a shelf list of print books by call number, but not ebooks, because they lack local call numbers; and the alternative field which has the Library of Congress classification number has not been configured for LC classification searching and sorting.
  161. Johnson, Michael and Traill, Stacie. “Classify All the Things: Enhancing LC Classification Data for Better Collection Assessment and Management.” In: ELUNA 2018 Annual Meeting, May 1-4, 2018, Spokane, Washington.
  162. Burton Fiona and Kattau, Maureen. “Building in the ‘e’: creating the virtual bookshelf.” VALA2012 proceedings, Melbourne, Feb. 16, 2012, p. 9 https://research-management.mq.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/17160948/mq-17841-Publisher+version+%28open+access%29.pdf.
  163. Wilders, Coen. “Predicting the Role of Library Bookshelves in 2025.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 43, Sept. 2017, pp. 384–391. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2017.06.019.
  164. Schmidt, Janine Developing a Library Collection Today: Revisiting “Collection Evaluation, the Conspectus and Chimeras in Library Cooperation,” Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 47:4, 2016, 190-195, DOI: 10.1080/00048623.2016.1250598
  165. Foster, Anita K. “Determining Librarian Research Preferences: A Comparison Survey of Web-Scale Discovery Systems and Subject Databases.”  The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Volume 44, Issue 3, May 2018, pp. 330-336. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009913331730438X
  166. Nichols, Aaron F., Emily Crist, Graham Sherriff, and Megan Allison. “What Does It Take to Make Discovery a Success?: A Survey of Discovery Tool Adoption, Instruction, and Evaluation Among Academic Libraries.” Journal of Web Librarianship, Feb. 2017, pp. 1–20. doi:10.1080/19322909.2017.1284632.
  167. Coleman, Jim. “The RLG Conspectus. A History of Its Development and Influence and a Prognosis for Its Future.” The Acquisitions Librarian. Vol. 4, 1992, pp. 25-43.
  168. According to Peggy Johnson, Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, a conspectus is a “comprehensive collection analysis tool intended to provide a summary of collecting intensities arranged by subjects, classification scheme, or a combination of both. The Conspectus is a subject hierarchy, arranged into divisions that are divided into categories, which are, in turn, divided into subjects. Subjects provided the greatest detail.” p. 292. She omits a critical part, that is based on the Library of Congress Classification, and second, that Collection Mapping is part of a Conspectus. I have used a modification of the WLN Conspectus to benchmark collection development for a large digital library.
  169. Karen Harker, Janette Klein, and Laurel Crawford, “Multiplying by Division: Mapping the Collection at University of North Texas Libraries” (2015). Proceedings of the Charleston Library Conference. http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284316279 ;  Harker, Karen; Klein, Janette & Crawford, Laurel. Multiplying by Division: Mapping the Collection at University of North Texas Libraries, presentation, August 7, 2015; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc802011/: accessed November 23, 2020), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu
  170. Johnson, Michael and Traill, Stacie. “Classify All the Things: Enhancing LC Classification Data for Better Collection Assessment and Management”. In: ELUNA 2018 Annual Meeting, May 1-4, 2018, Spokane, Washington.
  171. E-book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization, NISO RP-29-202X, Available for Public Comment: June 18-August 2, 2020, https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/23850/NISO_RP-29-202X_E-Book_Metadata_Draft_for_Public_Comment.pdf.
  172. https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/nlr/
  173. Johnson, Michael and Traill, Stacie. “Classify All the Things: Enhancing LC Classification Data for Better Collection Assessment and Management”. In: ELUNA 2018 Annual Meeting, May 1-4, 2018, Spokane, Washington.
  174. Bailey, Timothy P., Amanda L. Scott, and Rickey D. Best. “Cost Differentials between E-Books and Print in Academic Libraries.” College & Research Libraries. Jan. 2015, p. 8. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16398/17844
  175. Courant, Paul N. and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” http://www.leverpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CourantandNielsen.pdf
  176. Nitecki, Danuta A. “Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 81, no. 1, 2011, pp. 27–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657446.
  177. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  178. The concept of library goodness goes back to a landmark article by R. H. Orr, Measuring the goodness of library services: A general framework for considering quantitative measures. Journal of Documentation, 29(3), 315-332.
  179. Lynema, Emily, et. al., “Virtual Browse: Designing User-Oriented Services for Discovery of Related Resources,” Library Trends, vol. 61, no. 1, 2012, p. 218-233https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/34605/61.1.lynema.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
  180. Since the 1970s, the Library of Congress has provided publishers and librarians with free cataloging for all print books prior to publication. These records include an LCCN call number and typically three LC subject headings. They will do this for ebooks only if there is a print equivalent. https://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/ebooks/
  181. Reference to the popular book, Thornburg, David. From the Campfire to the Holodeck : Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tsu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1426516, p. x
  182. Nitecki, Danuta A. “Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 81, no. 1, 2011, pp. 27–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657446.
  183. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  184. The title for this chapter was taken from Neil Postman’s book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
  185. Stewart, Christopher. The Academic Library Building in the Digital Age: A Study of New Library Construction and Planning, Design, and use of New Library Space, University of Pennsylvania, Ann Arbor, 2009. ProQuest, http://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2048/login?url=https://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2084/docview/304980905?accountid=7093.
  186. Ibid., p. 85
  187. Ibid., p. 84
  188. Ibid., p. 88
  189. Morris, Keiko. “How Stairways Promote Collaboration-as Well as Having a Walk-On Role.” Wall Street Journal Online. 13 May 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/office-stairs-with-more-than-a-walk-on-role-1431511202. Accessed 19 Mar. 2020.
  190. Cohen, Dan. “The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 28 May 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/college-students-arent-checking-out-books/590305/.
  191. Anderson, R., 2011. Collections 2021: the future of the library collection is not a collection. Serials, 24(3), pp. 211–215. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/24211
  192. Sanborn, Lura. “Bookless library? I raise you the building.” eContent Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, p. 6+ Retrieved from http://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1490685978?accountid=7093
  193. https://www.spacesaver.com/portfolio-posts/modern-library-design-free-library-of-philadelphia/
  194. “Consultant: League City Needs Bigger Libraries.” Community Impact Newspaper, Bay Area Edition, Jan. 2020, p. 16
  195. Lara Ewen,“Show Us Your Beautiful New Library.” American Libraries Magazine, 2 Jan. 2020, americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2020/01/02/show-us-your-beautiful-new-library-design-showcase/.
  196. Reference to the popular book, Thornburg, David. From the Campfire to the Holodeck : Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tsu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1426516, p. x
  197. Moss, Michael. “The Library in the Digital Age.” Digital Consumers: Reshaping the Information Profession, edited by David Nicholas and Ian Rowlands. London, Facet Publishing, 2008, pp. 72-3
  198. Nitecki, Danuta A. “Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 81, no. 1, 2011, pp. 27–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657446.
  199. Daniel, Katherine, et al. “Library Acquisition Patterns.” Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R. 29 January 2019. Web. 8 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.310937
  200. Nitecki, Danuta A. “Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 81, no. 1, 2011, pp. 27–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657446.
  201. Dowdy, Clare. “Culture – Nine Stunning Contemporary Libraries.” BBC, 20 Mar. 2019, www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190305-nine-stunning-contemporary-libraries.
  202. Magee, Jake. “Without a library bond, League City staff assessing Helen Hall Library’s needs.” Community Impact Bay Area, Feb. 6, 2019. https://communityimpact.com/houston/clear-lake-league-city-nassau-bay/city-county/2019/02/06/without-a-library-bond-league-city-staff-assessing-helen-hall-librarys-needs/
  203. For example, in October 2015, the President of the American Library Association said as the opening statement of her editorial in American Libraries, “At ALA, we know that the future relevance of libraries and library professionals will depend on what we do for people rather than what we have for people.” Feldman, Sari. “The Future of the MLIS.” American Libraries, Nov.-Dec. 2015, p. 5
  204. Anderson, R. (2011). Collections 2021: the future of the library collection is not a collection. Serials: The Journal of the Serials Community24(3), 211–215. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/24211
  205. A good library collection in this context does not necessarily entail ownership, persistence, or format, but rather that items are deliberately selected based on their value according to objective criteria which would allow for transparency, predictability and consistency.

    What this means is that users should have a pretty good feel for what items are and will be included in the collection based on the other items that are there, and librarians should be knowledgeable about the collection, not just know how to summon relevant resources forth from databases when called upon to do so. Collections present users with knowledge of the publication activity and authorities in their discipline. Good library collections have an intentional feel to them: they are not ad hoc accumulations of materials, or passive aggregations of academic content.

  206. Anderson, R., 2011. Collections 2021: the future of the library collection is not a collection. Serials, 24(3), pp. 211–215. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/24211
  207. Sanborn, Lura. “Bookless library? I raise you the building.” eContent Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, p. 6+ Retrieved from http://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1490685978?accountid=7093
  208. Kenny, Brian. “So You Think You Want to Be a Librarian?” Publisher’s Weekly. May 3, 2013. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/57090-so-you-think-you-want-to-be-a-librarian.html
  209. Daniel, Katherine, et al. “Library Acquisition Patterns.” Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R. 29 January 2019. Web. 8 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.310937
  210. Wilders, Coen. “Predicting the Role of Library Bookshelves in 2025.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 43, Sept. 2017, pp. 384–391. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2017.06.019.
  211. There are several studies comparing usage of DDA with library selected materials, but I am not really referring to that so much. This is a very impressive study, though: Walker, Kevin W. and Michael A. Arthur. “Judging the Need for and Value of DDA in an Academic Research Library Setting.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, JAI, 31 July 2018, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133318301745. In there, effort is made to evaluate DDA vs. traditionally selected titles based on a number of criteria, and the conclusion is that DDA titles provide greater ROI than traditionally selected titles; however, one question I have is whether the faculty and graduate students who once collaborated with librarians on acquisitions are utilizing DDA instead.
  212. Sullivan, “Rebecca M. Common Knowledge: Learning Spaces in Academic Libraries,” College & Undergraduate Libraries, 17:2-3, 2010, 130-148, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2010.481608, p. 135 “. . . innovative partnerships” such as “writing and academic support centers, teaching and learning centers, disability coordinators, diversity centers, service learning initiatives, undergraduate advising programs, and digital centers.”
  213. Ellis, Lindsay. “Texas University Libraries Renovate to Keep Student Interest.” HoustonChronicle.com, Houston Chronicle, 13 Jan. 2018, www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Texas-university-libraries-renovate-to-keep-12462643.php
  214. Watanabe, Teresa. “Universities Redesign Libraries for the 21st Century: Fewer Books, More Space.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2017, www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-college-libraries-20170419-story.html.
  215. The Hunt Library Story, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okr78MUrImI
  216. Temple University. “Temple’s New Library Is on the Rise.” YouTube, YouTube, 14 Mar. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNYo3pE4LjU.
  217. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits.” Prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012, p. 16. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf
  218. “Library Design Showcase 2012: Collaborative Learning.” American Libraries Magazine, 28 Feb. 2012, americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2012/02/28/library-design-showcase-2012-collaborative-learning.
  219. Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 44, Issue 1, June 2017, Pages 118–138, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw076
  220. Crain, Caleb. “Twilight of the Books.” The New Yorker, 16 December 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/twilight-of-the-books
  221. See Sullivan, Rebecca M. “Common Knowledge: Learning Spaces in Academic Libraries,” College & Undergraduate Libraries, 17:2-3, 2010, 130-148, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2010.481608
  222. Digital School Library Leaves Bookstacks Behind” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120097876
  223. http://www.maschoolibraries.org/newsletter/reintroducing-printed-books-to-the-cushing-academy-library
  224. “How Hunt Library Redefined the Library for the Digital Age,” https://www.slideshare.net/duvalunionconsulting/how-hunt-library-redefined-the-library-for-the-digital-age, slide 5
  225. Sanborn, Lura. “Bookless library? I raise you the building.” eContent Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, p. 6+ Retrieved from http://tsuhhelweb.tsu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1490685978?accountid=7093
  226. Courant, Paul N. and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” http://www.leverpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CourantandNielsen.pdf
  227. I quoted from the pdf, but it originally appeared here in print: Courant, Paul N. and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book”, The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship. CLIR Pub#147. June 2010, p. 102
  228. http://www.newsweek.com/even-university-libraries-arent-keeping-hard-copy-books-364853
  229. an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.
  230. Barr, Catherine, and Karen Adams. Bowker annual library and book trade almanac. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2016. 360. Print.
  231. Lately, vendors of Library Management Systems have been concentrating on improving back-end functionality, workflows and analytics more so than enhancing the front-end user search experience, which has been hampered by inconsistent metadata and API restrictions by publishers. Publishers have more financial incentive to work with Amazon than they do with library vendors.
  232. The idea of the “Grand Narrative” was introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in which he critiqued all forms of institutional and ideological forms of knowledge.

    Social scientists have used this concept to refer to an underlying ideological belief which provides societal legitimization to certain forms of knowledge over others. Historically, the value of libraries was tied to larger legitimizing values—for example, democracy (the need for an informed citizenry), or a European model of higher education where students are expected to function as independent scholars and investigators, taking greater responsibility for their own education (therefore needing access to a research library) as they move up the ladder of higher education, rather than continuing along as passive consumers of instruction.

  233. According to Welsh and Metcalf, “The term ‘institutional effectiveness,’ promulgated by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, is interchangeable with a number of monikers for continuous improvement processes, such as ‘quality assurance’ and ‘quality enhancement.’ The specific initiatives included under these rubrics typically encompass activities such as student outcomes assessment, academic program review, strategic planning, performance scorecards, performance bench-marking, and quality measurement, each of which has numerous manifestations in academia. Despite variations in terminology, colleges and universities accredited by any one of the six regional accrediting agencies must demonstrate that they have designed and implemented acceptable processes of institutional effectiveness.” Welsh, John F., and Jeff Metcalf. “Faculty and Administrative Support for Institutional Effectiveness Activities: A Bridge across the Chasm?” The Journal of Higher Education 74.4 (2003): 445-68. Web.
  234. Lindauer, B. G. “Defining and Measuring the Library’s Impact on Campuswide Outcomes.” College & Research Libraries, 59(6), 1998, 546-570.
  235. The 2011 standard was revised in 2018.
  236. ACRL SLHE, Introduction, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries
  237. ACRL SLHE, Section 1.1 says: The library defines and measures outcomes in the context of institutional mission. 1.2 The library develops outcomes that are aligned with institutional, departmental, and student affairs outcomes. 1.3 The library develops outcomes that are aligned with accreditation guidelines for the institution. 1.4 The library develops and maintains a body of evidence that demonstrates its impact in convincing ways. 1.5 The library articulates how it contributes to student learning, collects evidence, documents successes, shares results, and makes improvements. 1.6 The library contributes to student recruitment, retention, time to degree, and academic success. 1.7 The library communicates with the campus community to highlight its value in the educational mission and in institutional effectiveness.
  238. Hernon, Peter, and Robert E. Dugan. Outcomes Assessment in Your Library. Chicago: American Library Association, 2002, p. 11
  239. LRCs provide remedial tutoring, curriculum resources (textbooks, study guides, and sufficient resources for student research papers), instructional media, collaborative study spaces, and computers. Their purpose is to assist students with the completion of course assignments and the mastery of specific concepts and skills—the achievement of “student learning objectives” tied to the curriculum. They are often associated with remedial, vocational and technical training, or the first year experience. See for example, Notre Dame’s LRC: http://firstyear.nd.edu/fys-resources/the-learning-resource-center/. Compared to libraries, it is much easier for LRCs to demonstrate impact with a lot less overhead.

    Although both libraries and LRCs provide resources to students, they have very different missions. Cost effectiveness and close alignment with institutional objectives are reasons why LRCs are encroaching upon, or altogether replacing, the academic research library at schools which serve large populations of academically unprepared students.

  240. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism
  241. Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: U of Toronto, 2016. Print.
  242. Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: the Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2011. Print.
  243. Gerber, Larry G. The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University. Baltimore: John Hopkins U Press, 2014. Print.
  244. From https://notnumber.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/a-definition-of-managerialism/
  245. The ACRL standards committee was guided by the idea that if we adopted the roles and missions of the institution and other business units, it would serve to “advancing and sustaining their role as partners in educating students.”
  246. For three years, my university experimented with incorporating formal information literacy instruction into the freshman experience, including the administration of pre- and post SAILs tests; but the impact of these efforts could not be correlated to improved completion rates or higher GPAs. It was my observation that showing students how to use the library’s catalog and electronic databases“library instruction”was more impactful than the prescribed information literacy curriculum, which exposed students to the concept of Boolean searching, broadening and narrowing topics, using concept maps, avoiding plagiarism, and evaluating information sources found on the Internet. Demonstrating how to use the library to conduct research using our electronic databases was the primary thing students and faculty wanted.
  247. Sarah M. Pritchard, “Determining Quality in Academic Libraries.” Library Trends, 44.3 (1996), 573
  248. Pritchard, 573
  249. Libraries are advised to rewrite their mission statements to reflect and conform with the mission statements of their parent institutions, and set goals accordingly.
  250. Rowena Cullen, “Measure for measure: a post-modern critique of performance measurement in libraries and information services.” Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences. Paper 10. http://doc s.lib.purdue.edu/iatul/1998/papers/10
  251. Crawford, Gregory A. Developing a Measure of Library Goodness. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 11:3 (2016): 117, https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/23875
  252. SACS, the accrediting agency for many southern colleges and schools, pioneered these techniques, and also developed more rigorous assessment and rule-based approaches than other institutional accrediting bodies. See Welsh and Metcalf.
  253. Dugan, Robert E., and Peter Hernon. “Outcomes Assessment: Not Synonymous with Inputs and Outputs.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.6 (2002): 376-380.
  254. Carr, Patrick L. “Serendipity in the Stacks: Libraries, Information Architecture, and the Problems of Accidental Discovery.” College & Research Libraries 76.6 (2015): 831-842.
  255. Larry, N. W. (2007). Unseen measures: The need to account for intangibles. The Bottom Line, 20(2), 77-84. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/08880450710773011
  256. ACRL, SLHE, Introduction, “Accreditation language, trends, and contexts also inform the Standards. Academic library directors surveyed by the standards task force in spring 2010 stressed the importance of relating library standards to accreditation criteria. Accreditation agency library reviewers were asked by the task force to identify characteristics of library strength and weakness within the context of institutional accreditation. The task force also reviewed guidelines from each regional accrediting agency and extracted concepts and specific language (i.e., outcomes-based language, and terminology such as “sufficient” and “effective”). Trends in the accreditation process affecting libraries include an emphasis on using assessment results for continuous improvement; full library integration into the academic endeavor; a move away from a separate library standard within the overall accreditation standard; a focus on outcomes and bench-marking; recognition of information literacy as the catalyst for the library’s educational role; the library’s support of all student learning outcomes, not just those overtly library-related; an alignment of library and institutional missions; and a need for multiple forms of assessment and documentation.”
  257. Elmborg, James. “Tending The Garden of Learning: Lifelong Learning as Core Library Value.” Library Trends 64.3 (2016): 533-555
  258. Elmborg 553-4
  259. Bangert, Stephanie Rogers. “Thinking Boldly! College and University Library Mission Statements as Roadsigns to the Future.” American Library Association, September 29, 2006. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/nashville/bangert Document ID: 1497510b-f35b-3224-5d15-5453a6cea87d
  260. Blog post. Retrieved May 3, 2014. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/editorial-our-philosophies-of-librarianship/

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