Top Trends in Academic Libraries.

Wil Weston

The ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee identifies the ACRL “top ten trends” for release every two years.

The 2012 top ten trends in academic libraries.

• Communicating value “Prove the value libraries provide to the academic enterprise .”• Data curation “… helping research communities design and implement a plan for data description, efficient storage, management, and reuse.” • Digital preservation “… long-term planning for the preservation of digital collections.” • Higher education “Shifts in the higher education will have an impact on libraries in terms of expectations for development of collections, delivery of collections and services for both old and new audiences, and how libraries will continue to demonstrate value to parent institutions.” • Information technology “Our patrons desire for information anytime/anywhere; acceptance and adoption of cloud-based technologies; more value placed on collaboration; challenges to the role of higher education in a world where information is ubiquitous and alternate forms of credentialing are available; new education paradigms that include online and hybrid learning; and a new emphasis on challenge-based and active learning.”• Mobile environments “… increasing number of libraries provide services and content delivery to mobile devices.”• Patron driven e-book acquisition “…Patron-Driven Acquisition (PDA) of e-books is poised to become the norm.”• Scholarly communication “…new publishing models are being explored for journals, scholarly monographs, textbooks, and digital materials, as stakeholders try to establish sustainable models.”• Staffing “We must develop the staff needed to meet new challenges through creative approaches to hiring new personnel and deploying/retraining existing staff.” •User behaviors and expectations “Libraries usually are not the first source for finding information.”

Communicating value

• Increase understanding of library value and impact in relation to various dimensions of student learning and success. Research on student retention, for example, reveals the importance of academic intimacy in the student’s academic experience. Instructors and coaches are often cited as examples of adults who contribute to academic intimacy. Librarians have frequent one-on-one exchanges with students, and possible correlations between this type of contact and student learning deserves further exploration. My own research on library student worker persistence in college revealed that the library was frequently the location for a variety of informal and formal academic interactions between faculty (library and teaching), staff, and other students.

• Articulate and promote the importance of assessment competencies necessary for documenting and communicating impact on student learning and success. There is a significant need for incorporating outcomes into library planning and evaluation. Applying knowledge of assessment data, including the different roles of quantitative and qualitative data, sources of data, and the analysis and interpretation of data. And training, not just at the Administrative level , but at all levels. Outcomes and assessment is not about measuring failure; it is about trying to improve the quality of an academic program, student learning, and student success based on real evidence.

• Create professional development opportunities for librarians to learn how to design and initiate assessment that demonstrates the library’s contribution to institutional mission and strategic goals.“One size doesn’t fit all.” “Campus cultures and missions and goals vary from institution tot institution.” However, to meet the strategic needs of our institution we must build a community of practice to engage and sustain professional dialogue about library value.

• Expand partnerships for assessment activities with higher education constituent groups and related stakeholders. Work with others groups, both internal and external, to develop assessment opportunities and promote models that expand and integrate multiple academic and student service units in library space. The library is well suited to dwell between these two student needs, the Academic and the Social (Student Services). <Vincent Tinto’s model of student retention.>

• Integrate the use of existing ACRL resources with library value initiatives. ACRL has developed a variety of tools that can be used to advance assessment practices in libraries. Standards for Libraries in Higher Education and Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.

In June, 2012 the ACRL released a white paper that was the direct result of the intense pressure academic and research libraries are under to clearly align their priorities with the overarching institution’s goals and also to provide data-driven documentation of the library’s impact. These were the 5 recommendations that were suggested in this report. Brown, K & Malenfant, K. (2012) Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summit.

http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_summit.pdf

Higher education• Libraries partner in the educational mission of the institution to develop and

support information literate learners who can discover, access, and use information effectively for academic success, research, and lifelong learning. ( from ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education) This is done through information literacy (LIBY courses here as CSUEB), through Reference (online and in person), through partnerships with other units on campus to create unique, relevant services, and through acting as an “Engine of Creativity” (Labs & software to reconfigure, to repackage information, establishing creative work spaces, creating connections through lecturers and exhibits and performances.

• Faculty research and curricular needs are constantly state of evolution and change. The library needs to ensure that its collection moves to meet the immediate needs of it teaching faculty. At SDSU I established a data-driven model of collection development to best tailor the independently subscribed collection to the changing research needs of the SDSU faculty. There is obviously no way that most institutions (perhaps, Harvard or Princeton) can subscribe to all things that ‘might’ be needed. However, through an annual analysis of online usage of journals, interlibrary loan statistics, and citation analysis of the faculty publishing at SDSU it is now possible slowly tailor the collection to those needs. At renewals, in a three year cycles, we evaluate the usage of the journals to see if they might need to changed.

Information technology• Online – online – online. It is desired by our ‘non-traditional student’ (working and going to school), but now to a

certain extent is the expectation. But, it is empowering any space is research space, any space is a learning space, and any space can be an opportunity for creativity. I am never one to get overly caught up in format; but the power of online allows us to think of those spaces in the library in new and creative ways.

• Cloud computing Cloud computing will see continued growth, with a high proportion of new library automation projects deployed through software as a service rather than on servers housed in the library. There are many new generation products intrinsically designed for implementation as cloud-based services (streaming movies. Ex Libris ALMA cloud based management service), many libraries running traditional products will contract for hosting services from the vendor. The library automation economy will continue to evolve away being from one driven by up-front license fees and will become one based more on annual subscriptions.

• Online/ hybrid courses. Online, information, and computer services to support these courses. We are there already in many ways. SDSU on-campus population takes asynchronous online courses to fit their schedules (I suspect there is some of that everywhere). The library has a role in providing research assistance by ensuring that library services can be navigated to easily from the online class platform (be it Blackboard, Moodle, or LORE). Additionally, within the CSU there is also the Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) initiative to improve the choice, affordability and accessibility of educational content for CSU faculty and students. (A good and easily implementable example of how this initiative might be implemented was demonstrated by Susan Kendall at SJSU.

• SJSU library compared the library-owned e-books with the textbooks required for SJSU classes from a list of textbooks came from the SJSU bookstore.  They then posted those e-book titles that matched the course books on the library home page.  SJSU library then looked at statistics and found an increase of about 1300% between these dates:

− Feb/Mar 2011, these titles (about 200) had 2126 page /section requests. 

− Feb/Mar 2012 (as of 3/26), these titles had 30,016 page/section requests • Embracing the Remix Society: Read-Only Culture vs. Read/Write Culture. Information Literacy (Finding,

evaluating, responsibly using) and Media Literacy (specifically using the technology to remix information/images/sounds in a postmodernist sense favoring personal preferences and variety, to create and recreate, by using the parts to add an additional layer of commentary or to create something entirely new.)

• Competition with other sources? Not really… this is more of a perception issue an understanding issue, a communication issue. Engineering Student (4yrs… “When I am rushed and do it alone I get a ‘B’, when I come and see you, I get an ‘A’.”

Staffing• Continuing education and professional

development. Generally, data curation, digital resource management and preservation, assessment, scholarly communication, and support for faculty instruction and student learning are growth areas where new skill sets are needed. What are the interests of the existing faculty? Are they currently the best match? Can we grow expertise?

• Strategic and creative approaches to hiring for vacant or new positions. Perhaps, there are opportunities for group hires by a research emphasis or institutional priority. I think some of the more traditional library roles may have to be redefined to make them a better fit for the institution. However, this has to be strategic and comport a long-term vision for the library.

• Retooling existing positions, and retraining the staff currently in those positions are some of the ways libraries can “grow” the staff they need. The questions that you pose here are similar to the questions that you have for faculty. Workload, pay, and compensation issues are also of concern. Notification must be sent to the CSUEU if the changes involve the classification of bargaining unit employee .

• What we are perceived as…

• What we frequently are…

• What we think we are…

User behaviors and expectations.

Questions & Comments