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August 13, 2006

Ever-changing landscape adds new dimensions for librarians

“Now is the best time to be a librarian,” said David Bishop, University Librarian at Northwestern University. Bishop will be retiring as the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian later this summer.

“When I first came into the field, about 40 years ago, the environment was 100% print. There were no photocopies, no fax machines and certainly no readily available electronic information. Now the environment is predominately electronic. Users' expectations of information have changed dramatically. For example, at home if I have a question, I go to my computer and use Google and get an answer. It just happens naturally without much thought on my part. The driving force in finding information is time and effort. We want it to be quick and easy and it is. The wide availability of this approach to finding information has dramatically changed the behavior of people who use libraries. The World Wide Web and Google are the driving forces making this happen. Librarians are in the process of figuring out how to change library services as a result. This is wonderfully exciting work and I am sad to be leaving.”

I asked Bishop what advice he would give to library leaders. He said, “Be prepared to be flexible. It will be a vastly different job in 10 or 20 years. The biggest job librarians will be facing is changing the expectations of libraries. Society will respond to libraries as they exist now and it will be a societal decision. For example, in the academic library world, provosts control academic libraries. Provosts talk to each other. Provosts will make funding and resource decisions based on what they know of libraries. In other words, my successor, Sarah Pritchard, here at Northwestern can be doing an excellent job of making the library relevant to our students. But if the prevailing opinion among provosts is that libraries are not relevant, it would take a strong provost to invest in the library if his/her peers did not share the view that libraries are worth the investment. My concern is that many libraries have to change and change quickly in order for provosts, and the general public to see the relevance of libraries in the age of Google.”

“At Northwestern we are already making the change to relevancy. First of all we are acquiring electronic information for our faculty and staff. It's expensive, something like five to six million dollars per year. This is proprietary, in depth, guaranteed information. Our researchers and our students can depend on it—not like Google or the Internet, generally which can be wrong or often is not available in the depth that is needed. No one else is going to provide this kind of information for our constituency. It used to be in books and in paper journals. Now it is electronic but we still have to buy it just like we did 20 years ago. This is the heart of what a university library does.”

“Second, we have provided a community space in the library. The university gives every single student at least one network connection in their dorm room and the students all bring computers to college. But students don't want to stay in their dorm rooms all day. They long for a place to be in a community, a place to come together. A senior class project in the School of Engineering did a study and found that students wanted group work space in a pleasant environment... They want a café close by, too. This is particularly true of undergraduates.”

“Third, our library has become an integral part of teaching. No professor stands in front of the class and lectures without any technical assistance. Most use Blackboard, software that enables faculty to pull in electronic resources and to teach remotely. Students prefer this type of instruction, as revealed in their evaluations and faculty members who resist using Blackboard tend to receive lower student evaluations. Our library is a big part of this; it's library resources that make Blackboard the rich resource that it is.

The fourth and final new role for the library is support for faculty and students in this new way of working. It means we help students remotely, we help faculty learn to use the new software and show them the possibilities. A common response is, ‘I had no idea….'”

“We have watched whole professions go out of business as a result of changes in technology. Libraries are not immune. Change must happen soon and across the board if libraries of all types are to remain viable.”

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