Tag Archives: collections

Libraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan Dempsey

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There is no argument even from traditionalists that the library role is changing. But there is a great deal of confusion and sometimes fear about what that means, and what the future might look like.

On 3 June, Lorcan Demsey*  came to speak to staff at Cambridge University Library about how the role and purpose of libraries are changing. The slides from his talk are available on Slideshare.

The one sentence headline from the talk was that research libraries are moving from licensing published content to managing workflow and research outputs – which means the print collection needs to be managed down to free up resources for the new roles. The subhead is – if we don’t do this, the publishers are waiting in the wings to take over.

Modern libraries in research environments

The Library role is distilling from owned materials to facilitating access to many things. Changing focus to ‘discovery’ in the collection means there must be a loss of some of the items.

Lorcan noted that his sense is that there is still a low uptake of this concept. As someone who has been working in scholarly communications for over a decade. I agree.

The collection as a means to an end rather than an end it itself – in some ways this is obvious but in others it is a huge psychological shift. 

  • In a print world, researchers and learners organised their workflow around the library. The library had a limited interaction with the full process.
  • In a digital world the Library needs to organise itself around the workflows of research and learners. Workflows generate and consume information resources.

In libraries there is a separation of the discovery and the collection – library users are on the global level. The library will make some available and own some of those.

Change of focus

The research endeavour has moved from a focus on outcomes to begin to think about a range of activities around the process and the aftermath.

The traditional role of a library – outside of special collections and manuscripts – deals with outcomes like the books and journals. In this model students and researchers interact with the books and journals and then turn it into classically published works that come back into the library.

But we live now in an online world and the Library is interacting with the content in many different ways. There is interest in the process of research –methods, evidence and research data. There is also interest in the discussion around research through pre-prints, working papers and a variety of prepublication activity. This involves revision, derivative works and reuse. Copyright is important in these cases to let people know how things will be used.

This means that ‘collections’ from a library perspective now include the process, methods, discussions and outputs as well as books and journals.

From curation to creation

Mediated access to licensed material is becoming more streamlined, and other items becoming more available. Libraries are supporting creation, not just consumption.

Libraries need to be seen as a source for collaboration. There needs to be a partnership between the Library and the Faculty. The library is a partner in terms of the creation activity. The mediating role will continue.

Managing this transition is often done opportunistically – when people retire they are replaced with new skill sets.

The repository was seen by the Libraries initially as something in relation to artefacts but now it is seen as part of the workflow of the research lifecycle. There is less attention on what is coming in and more focus on sharing material back out.

Show me the money

There is a question around how much of this activity will be supported by the institution? And how is the resource shifting occurring in the libraries?

Lorcan said that while libraries talk about a growing interest in special collections and archives, there is no evidence from a budget perspective that this is being supported.

Publishers are trying to muscle in

Managing online identities

There is considerable interest amongst researchers in having a carefully tended online presence. This is time consuming, and would appear to be important to the researchers. This process is becoming intimately tied to publication – it is where people are announcing their publication.

Lorcan mentioned a study in Nature which was a survey of 3,000 scientists and engineers. They found 6% used Google Scholar, but more than half were using ResearchGate more regularly than LinkedIn. Not surprisingly this behaviour can be broken down by discipline. The social sciences tend to use Google Scholar, and academic.edu has low use by engineering and sciences. There are many solutions to the workflow to help researchers. Many of these will go away, but some are quite heavily used.

Thinking historically, a catalogue covers the material a library owns. The library has a discovery layer and a license. However this activity will have to shift to support creation. We have repositories, Google Scholar, ResearchGate etc. The incentive to use the repository is very low compared with these services.

A gap in the market?

Workflow is the new content – managing identity is where a lot of the focus is. Publishers are trying to position themselves as the service provider in this space.

Many libraries do not see their role as managing evolving scholarly records – the research and learning material. The curation of identity for researcher profiles is a big interest. This is often currently managed by research offices.

However this is a space into which publishers are moving. Several big publishers are now trying to be part of the full cycle for researchers.

For example Elsevier has two products – Pure is a content management system for research reporting and Mendeley is an academic social network. It is no coincidence that the word ‘solution’ is in the url thread. Similarly, Macmillian (publishers of Nature) recently bought Digital Science the company that created the equivalent products Symplectic and figshare. Digital Science was not included in the Macmillan Springer merger, possibly because they still need substantial investment. Lorcan noted that people see them as ‘plucky start-ups’ but they are owned by big publishers. There has been a big take-up of these services.

Lorcan showed a quote from Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillian Publishers about ‘A publisher’s new job description’.

Her view is that publishers are here to make the scientific research process more effective by helping them keep up to date, find colleagues, plan experiments, and then share their results. After they have published, the process continues with gaining a reputation, obtaining funds, finding collaborators, and even finding a new job. What can we as publishers do to address some of the scientists’ pain points? 

As Lorcan observed – you can take out the word ‘publisher’ and replace with the word ‘library’.

Managing down collections

Libraries are increasingly wanting to organise their space around the student experience not around collections. Lorcan used a grid to illustrate the changing focus. The two distinctions were:

  • Whether items are in many collections or are rare or unique.
  • Whether items require stewardship. Items that are high stewardship items are looked after and resources are spent on them. Items that are low stewardship don’t get looked after in Libraries.

At one extreme is licensed materials which are high stewardship/many collections. The opposite corner is research materials which are only available in a few collections and are low stewardship.

Lorcan said he thinks in the future there will be a focus on distinctive collections. There needs to be a lot more money to do this. So licensed purchased material will be more streamlined. Management attention 15 years ago was on highly managed, licensed items, but now the focus has shifted to items of low stewardship.

Inside out library

Market materials: licensed/purchased stuff. Library as broker and telling users that these things are available in a special way.

Distinctive collections: Library is provider and want to maximise discoverability. Want other people to know about faculty expertise, and research data. Putting into own discovery layer doesn’t help there. Think about metadata and which aggregators are important. Been slow to realise that discoverability is vital.

These have very different dynamics. We want to share material held within the library with the rest of the world. The licensed stuff is external and libraries bring it in to share internally. This is inside out.

Traditionally libraries deal with published, purchased material (including special collections). However there is a shift away from acquisitions to demand. This means that libraries need to redirect their resources towards research support. One way of doing this is to manage down the print collection.

There was an explosion of publishing after the Second World War. In the same way that baby boomers are all retiring at the same time, we are now faced with the challenge of managing these collections down.

Challenges for identity

The managing down of print collections coincides with the push to repurpose space in libraries. There are many discussions with architects – managing down print means there must be refurbishment.

One of the issues emerging for libraries is: Without the books, does the campus see this as the Library? Is the space needed for the Library – could they be replaced by learning commons or the student union?

We can see the identity discussion about libraries emerging now. If we are managing down collections, what is the space for? What are the new services we offer? Lorcan mentioned media stories where librarians are being attacked by historians who see this as managerial, technocratic activity.

Lorcan described some of the shared collection activities happening in the USA.

Conclusion

We used to think of the Library as a collection. Now we need to think of the Library in terms of the user and their workflows.

We must move to more facilitated access to items, also move to the management and disclosure of curated materials. The print and digital scholarly record needs curation and co-ordination at a conscious national level.

The job is about restructuring the means but we need to make decisions about moving resources or bets on the future. Libraries must shift from an organisation where the end was known to one where we must take some risk.

Published 6 June 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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* Lorcan coordinates strategic planning and oversees Research, Membership and Community Relations at OCLC. He has worked for library and educational organizations in Ireland, the UK and the US. His influence on national policy and library directions is widely recognized. He is on Twitter – @LorcanID

 

Evolution of Library Ethnography Studies – notes from talk

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Today Susan Gibbons, the University Librarian & Deputy Provost at Yale University came to speak to the Cambridge Library community about her work for more than a decade on the ethnography of library users.

The premise of the work Susan has done in collaboration with anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster is that libraries should get to know their users better rather than assume that ‘we know what they need’. They recognised that often we base our assumptions of what students experience and need on our own experiences as students which are clearly dated.

The reality of a rapidly changing world is that we need to adapt to the changing needs of the students. It is easier for the library to change than to expect our users to change.

I should note that I have followed Susan and Nancy Fried Foster’s work for many years. I based the design of my empirical work for my PhD “The effect of scholarly communication practices on open access: an Australian study of three disciplines” on their early studies. I am a bit of a fan.

Ethnographic research

Their work began on 2002 and 2003 with analyses of ‘faculty’ (academics’) work practices, before moving to undergraduates, graduate students, analysing how people search for information, asking what is the point of science library buildings in the electronic age, before most recently returning to the undergraduate student body.

There is a circularity in this type of  ethnographic research:

  • Start with a basic question – such as what are the barriers to completion of a PhD, or why do people still use the buildings in science when the content is all online
  • Methods – These can vary wildly from photos to observations, and analysis of academics diaries
  • Data Gathering – these first three constitute the ethnography
  • Findings – which is getting into user design. Analyse the data to start looking for patterns.
  • Change – you can only do this process once maybe twice, and if you do not make a change that is visible to the patrons then they won’t engage. There is a huge investment of time and trust in the process. This needs a commitment from the top down not just the bottom up to have the changes.

At the end of the process, there needs to be an analysis of whether the change has worked and if not, start again. Susan noted that they do not presume to know what the answers were when beginning the process. The area is so unknown they would not even be able to create a survey to ask A, B or C.

We need to embrace experimentation. Libraries have to have a tolerance for failure and change – otherwise the whole process will not work.  We need to have R&D thinking – try it and see if it works. We should not worry about every contingency because then we have lost the opportunity because someone has stepped in and started something. Don’t worry about scale until you find it is an appropriate method.

Changing role of the library

Once of the big messages from the talk was that increasingly the literature and the technology re intertwined. As librarians it is not just good enough to know the literature. If supporting social sciences then you need to know statistical packages and data visualisation. If the librarian can’t help with that then there is a break in the service. There needs to be a fluency with the digital tools as well in the library staff. Libraries are defined by their services but not by their collections. If we don’t have the services to support those collections then we may as well not have them.

This observation raised the question from the floor – do we employ specialists or employ librarians and train them up? Susan responded by saying increasingly Yale University was employing more people who have a PhD in the specific area. That way there is no expectation that everyone is an expert in every tool but there can be a go-to person.

However there has been a push to training people up in the library to be ‘librarians as teachers’. There is an emerging program to teach librarians on how to be teachers – very focused on professional development.

Increasingly the university is asking librarians to have outreach as part of their role. Professional assessments ask if they have created any subject guides, how many classes they have taught. Outreach is valued in the evaluation process. For some existing staff this was not comfortable – they wanted to be curators. The feeling for these people was they ‘changed the rules on me’ – so the university helps them make the transition. Some have come along the outreach path, others have moved somewhere else – and the university helps them with that move.

Studies at Rochester and Yale Universities

Susan did describe two examples  – one from her current institution Yale University and one from her former, the University of Rochester. She prefaced these descriptions with the disclaimer that all institutions are different – these findings are not translatable. That is why ethnography is so important – it is very locally focused. The questions that can affect the outcomes include whether students live on campus or off campus.Are students full or part time? Is it an engineering based institution. In addition weather and climate impacts behaviour.

The question behind the undergraduate student study was: “How can we improve the experience for the students?” That behind the graduate student study was “What are the barriers to the completion of a dissertation?”

Despite her findings being fascinating I won’t go into detail here partly because of the specificity of the findings to her institutions. Susan did note this was not a talk where we should take her group’s solutions and adopt them, rather we need to undertake our own research to determine what we need to do. However for those who are interested there is a considerable body of publications about the various projects:

However the methods are instructive and some of what emerged from the work is universal.

Findings

With the undergraduate students they undertook a ‘retrospective study’ of students who were responsible for writing a big paper. They ‘followed’ the students by contacting them one a week or fortnight and asking basic questions on how they were going. Then the day they handed the paper in they interviewed the students. This produced two outputs – a transcript of the interview but also during the interview the students were asked to draw the process out as they were explaining their experience.

The graduate students were asked to do an in-situ interview – in the place they do most of their work. Sometimes a lab, a coffee shop, where they lived. Then they were asked all sorts of information like showing us when they decided to print out an article and how did they keep track of them, about the books on the shelves – how they decide whether to buy one or take it our of the library and how are things filed on their computer. Other questions included the tricks of the trade of how they got through the writing process, what software they were using and the time of day and when they work.

Findings that spanned both studies included what Susan described as ‘the magical summer’. This is the time between finishing their bachelor degree and start the graduate school. The researchers asked professors what they thought the abilities were of those that leave as bachelors, and what the expectations were of new graduates, which was much higher. Hence the magic of the three month summer – how did the students manage this raised expectation? They knew they could not change those expectation of the professors. But we could help the students reach their expectations and help them through the process. This was a good time for the library to say ‘we are safe, work with us and we can help you’.

Another question is what is the best time to introduce research tools? People working on a thesis will need to use some sort of research tools – but when do you introduce that into their toolkit. The group found that once the student’s dissertation prospectus was approved their toolbox was locked – they were not able to ‘take a risk’ at that stage. So the introduction of tools has to be early in the process. The library had to ensure that professors were encouraging students to use the library services when they were writing their shorter papers.

They also found the importance of the human network – learning from other students, following other researchers – people texting information or attending a conference and seeing a book that is perfect for a colleague so they take a picture and send to their friend. So the question is how do you get the relevant librarian into that social network so they see the librarian as another resource?

Summary

Susan summarised the talk by saying there are so many things that drive the students away including physical and other barriers. Barriers can include use of acronyms, the scattering of collections and not knowing  how to get access to them. The Library needs to ask of itself is this barrier still necessary? If not change it. Some things are necessary but if we can’t change it we should explain it.

There is a continued importance of libraries as physical spaces – when the students want a place to go to get their work done they go to the library because it is a place of intellectual gravity. There are important symbolic aspects of libraries. They had asked students to circle a map of the university where you don’t feel welcome. Students answered ‘I’m not an athlete and that’s a gym’ for example. But the Library is a place where we all feel welcome. There is neutrality there.

Published 18 March 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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