Academic libraries

Essential parts of the “intellectual infrastructure”

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Academic libraries are an essential part of our “intellectual infrastructure,” and if the nation’s future is going to be idea-driven, libraries have an increasingly important role to play in supporting student success and faculty research and productivity, all of which are critical to stimulating the knowledge economy, says Erika Linke, president of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL).

President Obama’s stimulus plan and his 2010 budget proposal expand federal support for students and their families as well as institutions of higher education.

But even with stimulus funding, the economic downturn is sending a tidal wave through academic institutions and their libraries, Linke says, and belt-tightening may be inadequate in addressing the economic challenges. Most universities, colleges, and community colleges are grappling with these serious financial threats; some institutions are reducing library hours and/or staff, Linke says.

Lack of funding also affects collections, and “library resources of all types, paper and online, will be reduced,” Linke said. “I don’t know if, in a tightened economic climate, institutions will opt for less face-to-face instruction and more teaching online. This represents another challenge for academic libraries: How do we support faculty teaching in this new environment in a Web 2.0 world?”

Linke cited the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate on open access and the complex Google book settlement of October 2008 (see section on scholarly communication, below) and wondered what impact these developments might have on scholarly publishing.

Academic librarians are making significant progress on understanding how students learn and how libraries can best serve undergraduates—and how their use of the library fits into how we think about the future. Linke cited a 2007 study conducted at the University of Rochester that sought to answer the question, “What do students really do when they write their research papers?”

“We are educating people to learn, and so we have to ‘know how to know,’” Linke said. “That learning has to continue, and lifelong learning skills in information technology are going to be more important than ever. Academic librarians teach students to use information resources ethically as a stepping stone to develop their own insights and ideas—abilities that are highly prized in our entrepreneurial world.”

Finally, Linke said, “2009 will be a year of economic and political changes with new priorities, and new issues. Change brings the opportunity to re-envision the present and to create the future.”

Research librarians’ salaries outpace inflation, but recruitment is still an issue

Research librarians’ salaries outperformed inflation for the fourth consecutive year, according to the Association of Research Libraries’ Annual Salary Survey 2007–08, and telecommuting, which once seemed impractical for librarians, showed signs of becoming a viable option for employees in both technical and public services, according to an article in C&RL News.

Still, recruitment and retention continued to be major issues for academic library managers, Teresa Y. Neely and Megan K. Beard said in an article in C&RL News. Accordingly, the ACRL established a recruitment and retention wiki that brings together resources that describe best practices for keeping new staff and providing an atmosphere for professional growth.

Mean Salaries Paid, Academic Libraries, 2007 and 2008

Source: Bragg, Jamie. “Many Academic and Public Librarian Positions Face Wage Decline; Inflation Erodes Salary Gains for Many Others.” ALA-APA Library Worklife, Vol. 5, No. 10, October 2008.

The evolving world of scholarly communication

As 2008 began, the NIH started requiring grantees to deposit final manuscripts of their peer-reviewed research articles in the NIH online archive, PubMed Central, within a year of publication in a journal. The move means any interested individual with access to the Internet can read the results of research funded by taxpayer dollars. The NIH is the world’s largest funder of non-classified research, public or private, and its research grants result in 80,000 peer-reviewed articles per year. Its $29.2 billion budget for 2008 was larger than the gross domestic product of 124 nations.

The NIH requirement is emblematic of the evolving ways in which scholars are communicating their research findings. Open-access journals and repositories proliferated faster in 2008 than in any previous year; the Directory of Open Access Journals grew by 812 peer-reviewed journals, or 27 percent, in 2008. Worldwide, more than five new repositories per week were launched during 2008. Still, opposition to open access remains fierce. A sweeping, publisher-supported bill—the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which would amend copyright law to overturn the NIH policy and ban similar measures—was shelved in September after being introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

On the plus side, experiments in scholarly communication are flourishing. For example, in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), all the partners who support publishing in particle physics, including libraries, are being asked to redirect subscription monies to make the literature of the discipline fully open to any researcher. Academic libraries support these new models, in some cases becoming publishers themselves.

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in February 2008 to give the university permission to post its peer-reviewed scholarly articles in an institutional repository—and requires faculty to retain their right to do so when signing publisher agreements. Key aspects of the policy are that scholars and institutions should have more control over how their work is used and disseminated and that they have a responsibility to distribute their scholarship as widely as possible. Especially significant, this was the first such university mandate in the United States and was adopted by the faculty— the vote was unanimous—rather than by administrators.

The Harvard Law faculty followed suit three months later, and in June, the faculty of Stanford University’s School of Education voted to pass their own open-access mandate, based on Harvard’s policy. More colleges and universities are considering open-access policies and are expected to follow suit this year.

Academic research libraries in general are offering more publishing services and starting to view publishing as an important part of their mission. A report written by Karla Hahn, director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at the Association of Research Libraries, showed that 44 percent of the 80 responding ARL libraries offered publishing services and another 21 percent were in the process of planning such services. A University of California task force has recommended establishing a university-based publishing program to blunt the effect of commercialization and to better serve scholars, especially in emerging disciplines.

The library as strategic investment

•  In this era of increased accountability, particularly given the economic downturn, academic and research librarians consider it imperative to demonstrate the value of their services and resources to the educational mission of their institutions in terms of supporting both student success and faculty productivity. A soon-to-be-published study commissioned by the ACRL found that information literacy is now accepted as a key student success outcome by post-secondary institutions and accreditation commissions. Indeed, information literacy outcomes are among the specific metrics most often cited by academic administrators to show that libraries have a critical role to play, itself evidence of a notable shift in awareness.
• It is important to have data to demonstrate the value of library resources. In a pioneering study, Paula Kaufmann, of the University of Illinois, published a widely discussed attempt at developing a “quantitative measure that recognizes the library’s value in supporting the university’s strategic goals.” This study sought to “confirm the benefits of using electronic resources and the resulting impact on [faculty] productivity over a 10-year period.” In the study, a return-on-investment (ROI) calculator tool was developed to “help evaluate the role that the library plays in their [faculty] research and grant processes,” and comments from survey respondents indicated “a strong dependency on the library for their research and grant proposal needs.” This study should generate additional research in this area.
•  In the past year, assessment activities have only increased in their importance relative to the academic enterprise, and librarians are actively engaged in developing new measures and metrics to demonstrate quality, value and effectiveness. An assessment conference held in 2008 attracted 70 percent more attendees than the one held in 2006.

Academic libraries address issues of environment and sustainability

An opinion piece in C&RL News asserted that the current rate of environmental consumption within academic libraries cannot be maintained and that library consumption is becoming economically unsustainable, threatening the core library mission of providing free and open access to information for all users.

The writer was not a voice in the wilderness. An ACRL “OnPoint Chat session” in May 2008 addressed issues of the environment and sustainability on campuses and in communities, and a blog, Going green @ your library, lists ideas, practices, tools, and techniques to help libraries become more environmentally friendly, save money, and possibly even raise money for their library in the process.

One small sign of progress: The Ames (Iowa) Public Library and the Iowa State University Library, which are only about two miles apart but had long exchanged interlibrary loan materials by mail, which required packages to be routed through Des Moines, 31 miles away, decided to reduce their carbon footprint by using a bicycle delivery service. (For examples of “green” libraries built in 2008, see “Library construction and renovation,” later in this report.

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