Core Chapter Concept: Academic libraries proactively speed the scholarly conversation.
Part of, or aligned with, institutions of higher education, academic libraries tend to acquire comprehensive collections, do little weeding of them over time, and seek to accelerate the pace of scholarly dialogue in research and teaching.
These libraries are already part of a culture and community dedicated to learning and founded on the principles of knowledge creation through conversation. Textbooks, journals, symposia, and lectures are all conversations. They may be sequential, rigid in format, or plodding, but they are conversations nonetheless. Peer review is a form of discipline-based conversation about what is acceptable and what is not. The recent adoption of web-based scholarly publishing channels (institutional repositories, open-access journals, and academic social networks) by many disciplines shows a resurgence of the conversational aspects of scholarly publishing and the alignment of librarianship to the larger mission of a college or university.
Still, many more colleges and universities are devoted to teaching than to research. Here again, academic librarians are well positioned to highlight the shared mission of knowledge creation and learning to their faculty members. As pressure increases in all forms of university-level teaching to adopt more participatory forms of learning, academic librarians have a great opportunity to lead the way.
The proposed academic library activities that follow will not all be appropriate for every academic library. That’s because academic libraries, like all libraries, must shape themselves and their services to the specific communities they serve.
A college is an institution of discovery. From physics, to religion, to mechanical engineering, the academy seeks to push the bounds of what we know and how we do things. An academic library is no different.
Academic librarians and staff should engage in an active research agenda and seek resources and leadership around the issues of scholarly publishing, information literacy, preservation of records and metadata, and how knowledge creation and information shape higher education and society. I was once a part of a conversation on the future of scholarly publishing at an academic library. The assembled faculty and librarians went through a litany of new platforms for the dissemination of new knowledge: blogs, open-access journals, video, digital preprints, apps, and so on. At the end of considerable discussion, one librarian remarked, “We at the library are waiting to see what the faculty choose in terms of scholarly output so we can support it.”
Relying on faculty immersed in their disciplines and research to imagine new forms of scholarly communications is, at best, optimistic. What’s needed to lead the way to these new forms is a cross-disciplinary set of experts on scholarly records and impact dedicated to the invention and implementation of new and better means of knowledge dissemination. What’s needed are librarians who can shift from being caretakers to being curators, and from being curators to being activists.
Not only should academic librarians engage in these conversations; they should also actively seek grants to support their work. They should host visiting scholars and postdoctoral positions from across the globe; they should build a coherent research agenda in advancing and speeding scholarly discourse and discovery. Academic libraries should become the places to watch on matters of scholarly metrics, knowledge dissemination platforms, and the use of digital networks for scholarly collaboration.
Students in different disciplines can gain invaluable real-world experience applying their classroom learning to real problems in a fully functioning academic library. Students should work shoulder to shoulder with academic librarians in exploring how what they learn in the classroom can change industries and disciplines.
Learning theory and advances in instruction have shown us the importance of fusing research and practice. Although the ideal courses are combinations of practica and symposia, where can university students get access to real problems—particularly, the most meaningful problems that cut across the boundaries of classes, colleges, and disciplines? The short answer can be the academic library.
Through internships, independent studies, work-study, hourly positions, and class projects, students can work with librarians on production teams. A scholar needs a website? The production team takes control. Not only does the team produce code (computer science students), images (illustration students), designs (design students), and such, but the team’s librarians (information technology services and home departments) ensure that projects meet quality standards and can be sustained and preserved over time. Students learn, faculty excel, librarians facilitate, and authentic, measurable learning takes place.
Academic librarians should play a unique role in spanning disciplinary boundaries to identify, understand, and disseminate innovative educational models. These include massive open online courses (MOOCs); continuous education; alumni teaching; intensive programs to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; the flipped classroom, online education, and hybrid courses.
Just as the academic library’s mission of speeding the scholarly conversation creates a natural research agenda for its librarians, so, too, does it make the academic library into an ideal incubator of instructional experimentation. By understanding new methods of instruction online and in person (and most often in hybrid settings), academic librarians should advance their own curriculum of information literacy. They can also serve as valuable partners with faculty and college technology services in areas such as distance education.
That said, the real potential for library-based instructional innovation lies in continuous education. Rather than looking at the university as a sort of commencement provider (starting people in careers with education at the bachelor’s level, adding management and depth at the master’s level, or depth and research skills at the doctoral level), what if the university was able, after educating people to whatever degree level they wished, to sustain them throughout their life with continuous education through access to faculty, graduate students, staff, and other alums? Imagine a knowledge hub where alumni and others regularly interact with their college to increase their skills, certify new learning, and teach the next generation of students.
Across colleges and universities, faculty are struggling with new modes of instruction. From the flipped classroom to online education, these efforts need to be brought together. Creating a hub for this innovation allows the academic library to adequately support new forms of instruction, but, more important, it speeds diffusion of innovative practices to all corners of the campus. The world of higher education is rapidly changing, and colleges and universities are ripe for disruptive change. Rather than wait for this to happen, they should foster it to force other institutions to respond.
University presses used to be selective imprints—focused on a thin slice of a university’s scholarship. This system worked well when there were a lot of academic presses. As the number of these outlets has decreased or consolidated, what is left is a disconnected series of islands.
Imagine a new library-owned university press that worked directly with faculty across all the disciplines to develop new forms of publishing. This new university press could produce apps, courseware, and podcasts in addition to monographs. It could be an innovator in self-publishing and in developing new platforms to turn scholarship into action and benefit for society.
Academic librarians can create a fertile field of scholarship and instruction by creating a robust platform for scholars, instructors, students, and staff to disseminate their ideas, and engage the larger domains and society in conversations. But this platform must not simply move from printing books to producing e-books; it must also dip deeply into the academic ferment that precedes studies and publications. It must provide a forum for sharing, discussing, and refining new ideas for grants. It must provide a mechanism to gather, store, and share the data and insights of funded research. And it must both archive finished projects and continuously relate them to new efforts, building a long, clear map of progress and success.
The new library-owned university press is a community publisher. Managing and maintaining the community’s illustrations, lectures, books, data sets, this publisher can take the most exciting part of scholarship—the debates and investigations—and make it accessible to the world. But it must not only publish academic articles; it must also marry them to a forum, and courseware, and ongoing research.
Because tenure is one of the most expensive and long-lasting commitments a college or university can make, it should be granted making use of the best information. Academic libraries can assign librarians to all faculty members being considered for tenure in any given year. These academic librarians can provide intensive citation analysis of the members’ works, using the latest in new and alternative metrics to measure impact. This service can provide all involved in the tenure decision with objective and in-depth data. A natural extension of an agenda in scholarly communication, a robust university publisher, and librarians embedded in research is the ability to tell a more accurate and compelling story of a university’s scholarly achievement. By tasking academic librarians with upcoming tenure cases, the university can directly inject real measures of impact and best practices into the tenure and promotion process.
There are other benefits of tying academic librarians into the tenure process. They can create a real and up-to-date inventory of the academy’s scholarly output. In learning more about the work of faculty, they can find better ways to support this work. A university’s preprint archives can move from serving as a simple document repository to becoming a living open-access journal available to the world, one that highlights the strength of the university’s research to other institutions.
Gone are the days when academic libraries were simply repositories of books and other materials, set off to the side and not actively serving the missions of their universities. What’s needed today is a commitment by university administrators, faculty, students, and librarians to reinvent the whole concept of academic libraries.
To be sure, the transformation of academic libraries won’t happen overnight, nor are all academic librarians ready to carry out this transformation. They need motivation, support, and a vision to drive them forward; they need continuous training and a culture of innovation and exploration.
I’ve seen some impressive academic libraries in my time, from those with soaring ceilings and Gothic vaults to those with brutalist towers full of rare treasures, and from those with walls of marble to whole edifices of steel. An academic library can make you feel both smart and unworthy in a way that spurs you on in your quest for knowledge. But the most impressive of all these libraries are the ones that are filled with students and scholars working with their librarians.
In the Syracuse University Library, you’ll find cuneiform tablets thousands of years old but they’ll last thousands more because the library worked with faculty in the College of Visual and Performing Arts to fire the clay tablets into stone. What makes this and other academic libraries great, however, is not the age of the materials in their collections, but their dedication to learning. They see the missions of preservation, access, and inspiration as joined; indeed, they believe that the value of an original sixteenth-century manuscript lies in how much it can inspire, not in how much it would bring at auction.
Academic libraries were once the province solely of scholars and the elite few. As a college education has become ever more important in today’s society, the barriers of gender, race, and class have been broken down. Academic libraries and the librarians who run them need to be in the vanguard of this expanding access to higher education and to the scholarship and knowledge that make it possible. They must help guide the academy in providing not only sources for scholarship, but scholarship itself to the world.