Schonfeld & Housewright (2008) Set out a Blueprint for a Relevant , in Terms of the Academy

Ithaka’s 2006 studies of key stakeholders in the digital transformation in higher education, a report by Roger Schonfeld and Ross Housewright:

A critical review and implications for UK higher educational institutions and the library of the future

Richard Otlet November 2008

Critical Review

The Schonfeld and Housewright (2008) report is published by Ithaka, analogous with ‘accelerating the productive uses of information technologies’, which may ring alarm bells with ‘electrophobes’ and those agnostic to the notion of an increasingly electronic environment. However such readers need not look away now; this is not a ‘sales pitch’ eulogising the magic Information and Communications Technology pill. On the contrary this report delivers practical information and advice of relevance and importance to all librarians and higher education (HE) policymakers.

Schonfeld and Housewright set out a blueprint for a ‘relevant’ (in terms of the whole campus) library of the future. Schonfeld is well qualified to talk about the impact that new technologies are having on HE and advise the community on ways to respond strategically: he currently serves as a member of the US National Science Foundation’s task force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, he is a former Mellon researcher, and more recently his work has focused on the transition to an electronic-only environment for scholarly resources. Schonfeld and Housewright’s blueprint suggests ways for libraries to exercise leadership in the ‘transition to an increasingly electronic environment’ and supports the hypothesis that in order to remain ‘relevant’ libraries in particular must develop ‘a deep understanding of the information needs of the scholarly community’ (p. 4). Whilst there is a bias toward the academic view of a library of the future, the report attempts and succeeds in grounding its recommendations within the context of a whole ‘campus-wide’ information strategy.

The report considers the ‘starting point’ for researchers, which when stratified by disciplinary grouping reveals a dramatic difference between the arts and humanities and the sciences, with researchers in the sciences moving away from the library. Worryingly the library view does not reflect this finding. The authors usefully categorise the information functions or services of the library into three aspects – purchaser, archive and gateway – and examine the libraries’ changing role within each, highlighting the libraries’ lack of visibility and engagement in the workflow of faculty and, most importantly, understanding the needs of the user.

Does the report cross the water to the UK? Largely it succeeds and their recommendations concur with the views held generally in the UK. However there are some significant points of difference, notably concerning institutional repositories (IRs) and e-books. For example the UK is currently seeing a high demand from universities for e-books JISC (2008) and the boundaries between e-books and e-journals are blurring (Thomas 2008). Schonfeld and Housewright (p. 22) report ‘that librarians do not see IRs as having a role for improving and perhaps changing scholarly communication’, a view that is not shared by all in the UK. Further, whilst this report depicts the view that IRs are not about research papers, there is still a movement in the US that does support the view that they are – at Harvard, for example (Guterman 2008). It is unfortunate that the report fails to reference other viewpoints to support arguments such as these, as this somewhat undermines its authority.

That said, largely the report is a useful one, providing a holistic overview for anyone involved in libraries and strategic planning in HE. Drawing on data gathered from three extensive Ithaka surveys in 2000, 2003 and 2006 of faculty and librarians in the US, the report strives to strike a balance between detailed analysis of the data and a concise, high-level view. Again in this it succeeds, providing a useful tool for influencing senior management and policymakers alike.

The report delivers some stark warnings for libraries and it firmly places the responsibility upon the library to join forces and actively engage and collaborate to develop an institutional campus-wide information strategy. The perspective of the report is of the information environment and particularly e-resources as ‘apart’ from the library. This largely ignores the key contribution that libraries, certainly in the UK, have made in spearheading the move toward an information environment, a movement in which they continue to be involved. Organisations such as JISC, analogous with the electronic information environment, regard the library as one of their main stakeholders.

There are no real surprises for the library in this report; the real surprises lie in the mismatch between the faculty view and library view which clearly highlights libraries’ lack of visibility in faculty workflows as a serious problem; indeed, this may run deeper than the report indicates.

Implications for UK Higher Educational Institutions and the Library of the Future

The issues raised in Schonfeld and Housewright’s (2008) report have institution-wide implications for UK higher education institutions (HEIs) and in particular the academic library of the future, for ‘although librarians may still be providing significant value to their constituency, the value of the brand is decreasing’ (Schonfeld and Housewright, 2008, p. 30). The library of the future will need to look closely at key areas including: library visibility; the changing role and obsolescence of existing services; the need for new services tailored to the end-user; and developing a collaborative and ‘system-wide’ coordinating role to support the university of the future.

The report reveals that overall the importance of the library to faculty for the services it provides has not declined over the years, however the visibility to faculty has declined overall. Lack of visibility is an issue that threads through all aspects of library provision and services with the implication that it could undermine future funding for the library. The visibility of librarians as a part of the institution-wide workflow needs to evolve as electronic provision renders the physical walls of the library increasingly semi-permeable; Sir Muir Gray (2007, p.9), Chief Knowledge Office of the UK National Health Service, comments:

The most valuable resource in any library is the librarian, but they can be even more valuable outside the library.

A recent study of law libraries in the US also highlights visibility as a critical factor for the future of the library:

To retain their ‘market share’ and promote their value, law librarians must be visible and accountable to their parent institution and those who seek their services. (Bizub, Brunner et al. 2006, p.8)

Electronic Resources, Access, Support and Publishing

The report highlights that there are some discipline-specific variations in terms of dependence on electronic resources and the research gateway. Sciences are increasingly showing a declining dependence on the library which Schonfeld and Housewright attribute to their increased engagement with electronic resources independently. This trend was observed in the 2003 Ithaka data which revealed a dramatic difference between arts and humanities and the sciences, who were ‘much more likely to begin their research using specific electronic resources’. This is not surprising as science has a ‘well known dependence on periodicals literature’, much of which is now available in electronic form (Heterick and Schonfeld 2004, p.226). This highlights the need to focus on digital content for the arts and humanities as a priority for libraries.

Identity management solutions such as Shibboleth, delivered through the UK Access Management Federation, have now been introduced to most UK HEIs and are connecting users seamlessly to relevant content from interfaces such as Google; whilst many consider this to be a significant advance for end-users it further distances the library from them in visibility terms. The increasing use of tags identifying the library at point of access is important if the library is to maintain the visibility of their procurement function. Simpler search techniques demanded by an ‘information to go’ culture are mainstream interfaces such as Google as an academic research starting point for students and academics alike over the library gateway. Sykes (2008) also highlights the ‘interactive do-it-yourself capability of the web which is at odds with highly-wrought library systems’, commenting that libraries should perhaps not try to compete.

The heavy reliance on search engines, particularly Google, indicates that there should not be a division between search engines and educational digital libraries. (McMartin, Iverson et al. 2008)

Whilst information is not and probably never was their sole preserve, an important role of librarians has always been as information managers and specialists. The increased access to information is not without problems for end-users of all types which highlights why the role of library is still potentially so important. With the growth of commercial search engines the issues of information overload and reliability is a major concern and libraries need to work closely with end-users to support and develop good information skills. McMartin, Iverson et al.(2008, p. 65) highlight this problem:

locating high-quality, accurate, and truly useful educational resources is challenging for teachers and learners.

Brewerton (2007, p. 4) highlights that, in order to gain real advantages from the information, the end-user needs to make sense of it and a further role for the library is in contextualising the information. Heterick and Schonfeld (2004, p.226) point to another role:

improving the quality and finding aids for these materials, can offer value for faculty researchers.

The web has provided the means for researchers to make their research results highly visible, available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. However Schonfeld and Housewright (2008, p.20) highlight:

faculty decisions about where and how to publish the results of their research are principally based on visibility within their field.

This, they argue, leads academics to publish in journals seen to have a wide circulation and readership. Further, the research highlights that academics are far less interested in whether the journal is Open Access or free to the general public. However there is accumulating evidence that research articles made available through Open Access are cited more often than those that are not (Lawrence 2008; Kurtz, 2003). The research also reveals that many academics are not interested in copyright issues or think that they are too difficult or time-consuming to deal with, showing little interest in grappling with copyright on any level (Schonfeld and Housewright, p. 20). This highlights a critical role for the library both in terms of raising awareness of copyright issues and promoting Open Access in order to increase the reach of institutions’ research outputs.

Services and Collaboration

Preservation and resource management and provision continue to be greatly valued by institutions and the library continues to play a central role in the coordination of these activities. However Schonfeld and Housewright (p. 30) call for a ‘heightened understanding of the changing user base and meeting their increasingly diverse needs’, so that relevant services can be provided. This requires libraries to adopt a different strategic approach to service delivery for different disciplines, fully integrating their activity into the workflow of the organisation, moving from sole domain to collaboratively bringing change at a local level but also being prepared to provide ‘system-wide’ services. It will be important to support the evolution toward the library of the future by providing investment and giving library projects the space for ‘trying things out’ and turning the successes into services (Sykes 2008). This will take time as much of this is about fostering significant long-term change and not about immediate benefits. It is also important to ensure throughout this evolution that it is the needs of the user and not the technology that drive this change in library services.

The library more than ever needs to play a coordinating role, fostering partnerships across a range of stakeholders including management, academics, funders and public and private sector organisations:

We need to be working with colleagues outside the library. We need to be working more with other colleagues: academics, other support agencies, university management. (Brewerton, 2007, p. 5)

Finally the challenges facing the library of the future call for a range of new skill sets for the library of the future, from intellectual property rights, preservation and data curation to marketing, branding and business planning. This poses some important questions. As libraries are increasingly signing people up to meet these demands for skills from non-traditional library fields such as marketing and business, there is a danger that the ‘librarian’ will become obsolete; however a changing role is more likely to involve managing and overseeing these specialisms and in some cases the development of these skills themselves. Brewerton (2007, p. 8), in a study of younger librarians’ attitudes toward the library of the future, highlights this new flexibility:

You could be a researcher, collection manager, librarian, an information manager, a learning resource centre manager, a teacher and an academic all rolled into one, future librarians will need to be presenters, publicists, ambassadors, attention seekers!

References

Bizub, J.C., Brunner, K.C., Trotta, V.K. and Warren, G. (2006). IMLS Study on the Future of the Library Workforce – Panel on Law Libraries. Washington: Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Guterman, L. (2008). 'Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement', The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 4 October 2008 from:

Heterick, B. and Schonfeld, R.C. (2004). 'The Future Ain't What It Used To Be', Serials17(3): 225.

JISC. (2001). 'JISC E lib Programme'. Retrieved 21 October 2008 from:

JISC. (2008). 'JISC National e-Books Observatory Project'. Retrieved 21 October 2008 from:

Lawrence, S. (2008). 'Free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact', Web Debates. Retrieved 17 October 2008 from:

McMartin, F., Iverson, E., Wolf, A., Morrill, J., Morgan, G. and Manduca, C. (2008). 'The use of online digital resources and educational digital libraries in higher education', International Journal of Digital Libraries9.

Muir Gray, J.A. (2007). The National Knowledge Service Plan 2007–2010, National Health Service.

Nicholas, D., Rowlands, I. et al. (2008). 'Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future', London: JISC and the British Library.

Schonfeld, R. and Housewright, R. (2008). 'Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education', New York: Ithaka.

Sykes, J. (2008). Libraries Today. JISC Conference 2008. Birmingham, JISC. Retrieved 10 October 2008 from:

Thomas, K. (2008). 'Give me an "E"'. Retrieved 8 October 2008 from:

1

Richard Otlet