When I was an undergraduate, the college library was more important to my education than anything except for my relationships with professors.
But even 20 years ago, I could see that the library was underfinanced relative to the dorms and athletics facilities that seemed to draw unlimited resources. I was a commuting student, so I never really participated in the proliferating luxuries of residential college life, which seemed to constitute a separate world of privilege outside of, and even hostile to, the academic program.
So the library was my home on the campus. It was a quiet place to study (and sometimes nap), but I also spent many hours browsing the collections, reading anything that interested me. Eventually, I became an English major, and I used the stacks for dozens of research papers on, say, Frankenstein and arctic exploration, Macbeth and post-Reformation witch hunts, and Dante's Inferno and the politics of Italian city-states.
Apparently, I had a Gothic sensibility as an undergraduate, but I still regard those years in the library as a golden time in my life. I was discovering how much there was to learn beyond the received knowledge of textbooks and the banalities of popular culture. And I was making those discoveries in the context of relationships with accessible faculty mentors who could guide my reading.
My undergraduate research projects were not particularly original, but I did learn that there was a continuing conversation on almost any subject that I could listen in on through books and—in those days—printed journals. The library taught me to take responsibility for my education and to question anyone who claimed to possess the one-and-only correct interpretation of any subject.
Now that I have taught undergraduates for more than a dozen years, I find that they often think of the humanities—as I once did—as a static body of knowledge: an unchanging anthology of canonical works, an established chronology of historical events, or a timeless sequence of ethical debates with which one should become familiar (though the "should" is fading rapidly). One of the hardest tasks I face as a teacher is getting my students to understand the contentiousness of all those seemingly solid things when so few of them have the kind of relationship with books and libraries that I took for granted. A significant percentage will probably leave college having never visited the library once after their first-year orientation session.
Undergraduate libraries have never been revenue generators, but, if this pattern of declining use does not change, many of them may soon seem like costly anachronisms. I imagine that librarians at small colleges live in dread of the Sauron searchlight gaze of administrators. Libraries cost so much to maintain, to heat, and to staff; the cost of journal subscriptions is going off the charts; and then there are all those books that are being purchased, stored, conserved, and not read.
Sooner or later, someone powerful will ask: "Why do we even need a library anymore? Why not simply teach students to rely on a portfolio of online resources that they can pay for directly so the college can recapture all those lost expenses? (The tenured librarians—before their services are outsourced entirely—can be moved into a windowless bunker where they can be on call 24/7 to answer questions about research papers that are due in 40 minutes.) And then we can make our obsolete library into a gorgeous new student center, with climbing walls, a food court, and a bowling alley. It will look great in the online campus tour on our new Web site, and it will attract hordes of new students. The donors are already lined up! It's practically a done deal!"
How can libraries counter such modest proposals?
For one thing, it is worth recognizing that a library is not just a warehouse for books; it is a physical representation of a set of cultural values that have accumulated over thousands of years. Libraries salvaged and preserved Western civilization; they have been a hub for intellectual exchange, a ladder of social mobility, and a promise of continuity from one generation to the next. It is not mere courtesy that causes people to become silent in the library, as they do in a church: Libraries are sacred places. That reverence for learning embodied in a physical space is not something we should squander lightly, even though what's inside that building may have to change and adapt to new conditions, much as churches have adapted new music and styles of preaching without abandoning the core values of their traditions.
For undergraduate libraries, those changes might include, for example, offering even more online resources, providing more-flexible work spaces for students, offering more extensive digitization services, providing local expertise on copyright and intellectual property, training faculty members and students in the use of new media, and, perhaps, providing food services in a collegial atmosphere.
Experimenting with such changes does not mean that libraries need to capitulate to the worst tendencies of collegiate consumerism and techno-boosterism. None of those changes is inconsistent with the traditional mission of college libraries, and all of them can be done in the context of the preservation and study of books and other research materials. In fact, I want to argue (though not in this column) that hands-on, archival research—the cultivation of traditional scholarly sensibilities—should be at the center of the undergraduate liberal-arts experience.
Of course, in making such adaptations, libraries will face many challenges, not the least of which is finding money to support them, but the greatest challenge from my perspective is the separation of faculty members from the undergraduate library and the professionals who staff it. There needs to be a stronger alliance between content experts and information managers, between the professors and the librarians, in order to achieve our allied goals in a rapidly changing technological, economic, and cultural context.
Professors and librarians are socialized into different professions with different values that can make us mutually incomprehensible: One emphasizes individual scholarly productivity; the other looks to provide the context in which that work can take place. The two professions are also separated institutionally by different chains of administrative accountability, separate reward systems, and separate budgets. Librarians sometimes seem remote from the usual politics of faculty life, and, increasingly, there are fewer opportunities for collegial exchange between faculty members and librarians.
When it comes to research, professors are more like our students than we might care to admit. As much as academics of my generation and older may love books and libraries (see "Stacks Appeal" and "Red-Hot Library Lust"), we do not use them the way we once did. Thanks to the library's online services, I can access most journal articles online almost instantaneously (a miracle of ease compared to the hundreds of hours and dollars I once spent copying them from bound volumes).
Moreover, at this stage in my career, I own nearly all the books that might be relevant to my research, and, if I don't, I can find them on Google Books, buy them (used or new) from Amazon.com, or, if they are newly published, download them onto my Kindle. Fetching books from the library (or worse, waiting for them to arrive via interlibrary loan) has become too much of a hassle to be bothered with. I have passed whole semesters without setting foot in the library, even as I urge and require my students to do so.
Housed in separate buildings, with fewer occasions for interaction and mutual understanding, faculty members and librarians may develop a weak sense of solidarity regarding their complementary roles in the institutional mission. My experience is that librarians are working hard to reach out to the campus community. Orienting new students, playing host to training sessions on research, and coming to classes to talk about Banned Books Week, the librarians are on call all the time.
Faculty members, on the other hand, apparently need to make a better effort to incorporate librarians in our collegial networks instead of treating them, as we sometimes do, as mere support staff: "What do you mean, I can't renew 50 books over the phone? Do you know who I am?" No doubt, some librarians come to feel the cumulative effect of those kinds of encounters, and retreat into their fortresses of silence, order, and continuity, making it even harder to cultivate institutional teamwork in a period of rapid change.
Apart from finding ways to foster collegiality, we as faculty members can work more effectively with librarians to design research projects and to develop collections that support the undergraduate curriculum. We can design assignments in consultation with librarians so it becomes impossible for students to pass through college without learning how to write a research paper, produce an educational video podcast, or accomplish any other goal that requires the critical evaluation of sources. If we can reconceptualize our teaching as collaborative research with students and librarians, then the library could become analogous to the laboratory in the sciences, and it would become impossible to imagine the future of any college without it.
By working more closely together, and responding to new technology while preserving the traditional culture of scholarship and books, I am convinced, professors and librarians can put the library back at the center of undergraduate education, where it belongs.
And the first step, for me, in the coming academic year, will be to reconnect with my undergraduate "home." I plan to move into an office in our campus library, become more familiar with the library staff and the way a library works, and teach at least two of my courses there. My hope is to create something that could be called "a laboratory of collaborative learning in the liberal arts" that capitalizes on traditional resources as well as new technologies. The outcome of that experiment—the failures as well as the successes, if any—will be the subject of future columns here.
Comments
1. 22167800 - August 07, 2009 at 07:09 am
I've probably authored in excess of a dozen blog posts (at ACRLog), columns, articles and yes, even a Chronicle essay ("The Infodiet" 2/20/04) in which I've encouraged faculty to collaborate with their library colleagues. Academic librarians can - and already do - leverage the exact strategies suggested by Benton to entice undergraduates to make us of the campus library. But librarians cannot direct undergraduates to read books nor can they communicate heightened expectations for quality research papers using smartly chosen and well evaluated sources that demonstrate effective research skills. Only faculty can do that. Benton's article is evidence that faculty have paid little attention to anything that I or my colleagues have written or discussed about the growing irrelevance of the academic library, and the ways our faculty colleagues can partner with us to combat this challenge. I hope that Benton's commitment to get himself and his students engaged with the academic library at his institution and in his courses is an experiment that succeeds. Perhaps those future columns he writes will do what no academic librarians seems capable of accomplishing: stimulating productive collaboration between academic librarians and faculty that does put the library at the center of undergraduate education.
2. jweinheimer - August 07, 2009 at 07:49 am
While I agree with the author and comment #1, I still believe that in the long run, it is up to the librarians themselves to show how they are not only relevant, but vitally important, in today's information climate. Otherwise, we risk being considered nostalgically and added to those growing lists of endangered species such as the spotted owl, the rhinoceros, and the tiger. Future trends point to a rather disturbing fact for librarians: libraries as physical entities are less important as "the place to learn" and more as study hall cum cafeteria. Although it may hurt to accept this, we all see it and it is only after we acknowledge it that we can proceed. I believe it is absolutely vital for librarians today to stop conceiving the library as a physical place, and consider that librarianship is much more a vital service where we can "assist in the process of scholarly communication." If we insist on libraries as physical places, librarianship will come to resemble more and more that of museum curation, where an interested populace comes occasionally to come and gaze at the stacks where all the digital information once lived.
3. 11893310 - August 07, 2009 at 11:42 am
In a 2003 report to the Council on Library and Information Resources, Scott Bennett, Yale's Librarian Emeritus, noted several times, in strong language, librarians' seemingly deliberate ignorance of teaching and learning, especially in the design of library spaces, which his report was addressing. When I incorporated his remarkas in a presentation I recently made to a national library associaiton meeting, a presentation on why libraries--undergraduate academic libraries--needed to be established on a foundation of teaching and learning and situated in the curriculum and not in "informationism," the response ranged from cold to angry with a few attendees approaching me afterward, surreptiously, and acknowledging I was correct and implying it was worth their professional reputations to publicly agree with me. Pannapacker has hit the olde proverbial nail on the head and my library faculty and staff will be following his future columns on the subject with intense interest, as we try to wear ship in our library, learning center, and with the university's faculty at large. I like to think that Evan Farber, B. Lamar Johnson, and Harvie Branscomb, names largely menaingless to today's library "information" votaries are cheering on his effort from wherever in the afterlife thay may now be situated.
4. eesc2009 - August 07, 2009 at 12:11 pm
We just posted an blog article about this topic called, "Social Networking, the Library of the Coffee Shop." I think this is a timely opportunity to reexamine the place of the library relative to a student's epistimology and information management behavior. http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/instructionaldesign/2009/07/27/social-networking-%E2%80%93-library-or-coffee-shop-part-i/
5. abelvadi - August 07, 2009 at 12:22 pm
I appreciate everything the author said, but as an academic librarian who has watched not one, but three different libraries I've worked in lose physical office and other floor space for non-library services, I urge him to consider carefully if the library can afford to provide him the space for an office (is he forcing a tenured librarian into an inadequate cubicle to make room for him, or staff to struggle in an inadequate space with awkward book carts to manage?) and if his classes might be displacing library instruction space that the librarians badly needs. If he can suddenly take up that much space in his library without even a full year's planning, then his library maybe hasn't been using its office and floor space very efficiently in the past. None of the libraries I've worked in could have accommodated such moves so quickly without significant interference with library workflows and services.
6. rlibrary - August 07, 2009 at 02:18 pm
As an academic librarian who has also taught as an adjunct professor, I understand the tension that can be caused by a lack of adequate library space. It is true that we cannot afford to have library spaces canibalized for other purposes, whether grotesque, banal, or erudite. However, the professor who wrote the article makes a very important point. His presence in the library isn't necessarily at odds with the library's mission--provided that there is adequate space for him and his classes. In fact, it's important to the future of the library. Libraries should be filled with students, professors, books and other collections, networked computers, info gagetry and equipment, librarians, cafes, exhibits, rooms for group and individual study, offices, writing centers, media labs, and classrooms (am I missing anything?) There should always be classrooms for sessions taught by librarians, but why shouldn't there also be classrooms that can be reserved by a faculty member for more intensive use of the library, wherein a librarian would likely participate, but wouldn't need to dedicate the whole class session unless it makes sense to do so)? Even when the library is fairly handsomely staffed, there is often a need for more research-intensive course sessions than are possible in the time librarians have to give (one could argue that we need more staff, though that's not looking likely any time soon in this economic crisis). So often, when I review what I want to teach students about conducting research, I realize that as a librarian, I need to work with the faculty in order to help students make more intelligent, thoughtful, and creative use of quality information resources. I can't do it alone. It's very labor intensive to examine the resources that students are discovering and help them to evaluate their choices and revise their search techniques, then start the process all over again. This type of learning needs to be infused in courses. Thus, it would make sense that some courses could benefit from meeting in the library for multiple class sessions. As a professor and a librarian, I brought my students to the library for rigorous, collaborative discovery sessions. They had the run of the building, and brought books, articles, DVDs, and journals back into the library classroom to share with their partners. As a group, we talked about the research process, about what worked and didn't work. It was a luxury to have that space. If I weren't a librarian, I may have been able to book the room and involve a librarian (which I highly recommend doing), but I may not have dared let my students "loose" during the session--not because the librarians would have been opposed, but because I probably wouldn't have had a clear sense of "ownership," as a partner with the library. It's not an ideal world, and space is hard to come by (and I do acknowledge the threat of a slippery slope), but if it's available, it may make sense to allow some of the lines to blur, just enough to amplify the natural synergy between the library and the classroom. A final word: I keep reading that we need to stop focusing on the library as "place," because librarians are needed more now to help people connect all the disparate digital threads of scholarship. We are needed for that purpose--I agree. However, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. We are embodied beings, and there is a place for community building in person, not just online. As long as people still like to touch books, magazines; as long as people like to sit down together, or plan a group presentation together, approach a helpful reference librarian for guidance, or find a bit of respite, the library as place will thrive.
7. vfichera - August 09, 2009 at 06:55 pm
Perhaps what we are re-discovering in the States, in the era of online accessibility to so many library resources, is that the traditional German university model (embedding the libraries with their physical book collections into the same buildings with the departments/schools) might better serve faculty and student needs. In Germany, many specialized libraries are located in the same building as the classrooms and the faculty offices, with lounge space and vending machines in the vicinity so that formal and informal learning and consultation are part of the architecture of the "Fakultaet" itself -- a word and concept far more encompassing than the English word "faculty." Of course, in my own experience, the German faculty were not in their offices as much as their American colleagues often are, and thus the advantages of this physical set-up were not explored to the fullest. Indeed, one late Friday afternoon, while I was a Fulbright professor in Germany, when representatives of the German state education department came a'calling they could only find one professor of "Amerikanistik" on-site: the Fulbrighter.
8. 22213708 - August 10, 2009 at 04:11 pm
Looks like a terrific library to me. http://www.hope.edu/lib My guess is Bill will get one of the faculty study carrels...
9. rmcochran - August 11, 2009 at 04:20 pm
I'm very glad that faculty members and librarians alike continue to seek ways to work together. While other commenters here have mentioned Earlham's Evan Farber, one needs to look eastward from Hope College to Detroit's Wayne State U. for an idea of teaching faculty-librarian collaboration that Evan himself drew upon -- Patricia Knapp's Monteith College Library Experiment, formulated in the late 1950's and executed in the early 1960's. Knapp's efforts were not the first (and fortunately not the last), but regrettably are not well recognized today by many faculty, even those working in her own home state. A nice survey of the movement that Knapp was a part of can be found at: http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/6472/librarytrendsv18i1k_opt.pdf?sequence=1 It's time for a revival!
10. vfichera - August 11, 2009 at 05:04 pm
"The Library College" describes the German model of physical quarters and interaction to which I referred in my earlier comment. Moreover, in this country librarians are considered faculty in many university systems (e.g., SUNY), a concept the AAUP has, I believe, also traditionally fostered. It would appear, however, that often faculty hesitation to involve themselves closely in collaborations with the physical library and librarians today stems more from the faculty's own feelings of inadequacy before the virtual library's resources and the integration of such resources into their own research and teaching -- where librarians are "masters" of both resource venues/modes. Clearly, "sage on the stage" models of teaching do not lend themselves well to collaborations of any sort -- but especially not to those where the potential shortcomings of the sage might be encountered. Indeed, it is precisely these close interactions between the faculty (of which the librarians are part), the students, and the library (physically as well as "virtually" conceived) which will preserve and protect "the idea of the university" from the "distinctions" between research and teaching which threaten its very core.
11. rick_povero - August 13, 2009 at 03:29 pm
** death by a thousand (well-merited) cuts Too late. For many of you, it's too late. The sandbars upon which you've taken your last stands will soon be submerged. A thorough devaluation of an over-priced market in the intangibles of higher education is underway. Your higher-Ponzi-scheme cannot be sustained. Your defrauded investors are numbered in millions; your fraudulent take in billions, enough to make Bernie Madoff envy your wiles. "The idea of the university" died more than 40 years ago. It was among the first of America's self-delusory myths to die in Viet Nam. John Henry Cardinal Newman was no democrat. His ideal never fit an American landscape. Success for academia now lies in how well it acquires creative audacity in action based on very untraditional strategies. And, given your in-breeding practice of elevating to "management" cosseted academics with no training or experience in modern business practices, I rate the likelihood of meaningful change as nil. I've been sickened by the dolorous spectacle of the "blind mouths" of academic oversight and governance fattening themselves while our children's budding moral and aesthetic sensibilities wither and die from intellectual infanticide. Your moral bankruptcy antedates your fraud perforce. Haven't you yet realized why Dante remains "relevant" -- 700 years are as yesterday in the annals of corruption. Powerful new tools and models for knowledge creation must remake the arts and humanities. Where else will a just demand for cultural pluralism be satisfied if not first in the infinite space of the Internet and not a nutshell of red brick and mortar? And, there needs to be a total redirection of the academic mind-set towards a broad undergraduate education. One cultivated by teacher-scholars, not by struggling TA's as ill-paid servants of highly paid researchers-as-sports-heroes. New worlds of learning require no connection with higher education. Getting academia first to deconstruct itself in order to reconstruct itself -- that's the pressure that governments and the Internet are bringing to bear at long last. The basic message to higher education? Reform quickly or be reformed perforce by the death of a thousand cuts. For most of you, the uncreative majority, it's too late.
12. profmax - August 16, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Test.
Someone said we can now actually add paragraphs.
True? (Yes, if three show up here.)
13. vfichera - August 18, 2009 at 12:33 pm
[Off-topic comment removed by moderator.]
14. 11188056 - August 25, 2009 at 09:19 am
With all the new technology providing access to electronic journals and books, nothing can replace the enjoyment of having a book in one's hand on a long leisurely weekend.