Comments on Reviving the Academic Library

• Neem is right
• Posted by CTMathewes on November 19, 2009 at 8:30am EST

• Neem's absolutely right. An excellent article. Good libraries--the one at my institution--understand that their peripheral tasks must stay peripheral. But there is an inevitable institutional "mission creep" and faculty must be alert to their increasing marginalization in academia. Part of that is our fault but part is simply due to increasing numbers of rival centers of power.

• Posted by Andrew Shuping , Learning Commons/Emerging Technologies/ILL at Jack Tarver Library on November 19, 2009 at 8:45am EST

• I'm curious...what led you down this path to think that libraries have abandoned their mission? Why is it that students are only supposed to connect and collaborate in the classroom? I'm not trying to attack in any way, even though I'm one of those types of libraries that you refer too. I truly want to understand what led you to this path?

  I've been a student, I've watched students, both of my parents are educators and I've seen that connection doesn't always happen in the classroom. Sometimes its in the professors office during office hours or sitting at a table with friends talking about some random point when the connection happens. What the library offers is a place for them to have that connection and collaboration with their classmates after the class is over. To delve deeper in that material and find out what makes it breathe...what makes it work. It's in no way a poor reflection on their professors that they don't see this happen, instead it is a testimony that the students are seeking to find knowledge outside of the classroom. That they are engaging in their world. The library is a part of this, by providing the space, the coffee to keep them awake, the computers to do their research, and the librarians to help guide them to resources. The library hasn't abandoned its mission, but changed it to keep up and meet the students needs.

• Redefining Academic Libraries
• Posted by Deborah Lee , Faculty, Professor, Librarian on November 19, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• Grrrrr.......where to start? The redefinition, the refining of academic libraries is part of the broader evolving nature of the academy itself. The very nature of scholarship is changing, along with the users we (as librarians) serve. How can any institution pretend the 21st century is not happening---and with it changes in how we interact with information, the assumptions and abilities of the faculty and students involved in higher education, and last but not least, the funding basis upon which public higher education is founded. While preserving the knowledge from previous generations through both physical and digital archives and collections is a vital role of the modern academic library, it is not correct to say that "The library is a means to an end: enabling students and faculty to access archives." That is but one (important) aspect of the modern research library. We serve multiple constituencies with a myriad of needs in a climate of rapid technological change and significantly reduced real spending power. Comfy chairs and coffee shops are not preventing libraries from providing the print and electronic resources necessary to support the learning and research needs of our community.

  On a personal note....I am a 21st century librarian: I hold the rank of professor on my campus (a designation I earned through teaching classes, publishing research and participating in service). I teach workshops on topic as broad as plagiarism, research skills, specialized databases, and even how to draft a CV. In a typical day, I've talked to an engineering faculty member about how to spot plagiarism in her class using Turnitin, I've worked with a history graduate student trying to use EndNote with his dissertation, I've taught an English professor's composition class about using research resource (and not Google) for their first college page, and taught a workshop for graduate students and faculty on the academic publishing proces---all activities that I hope I ground within the field of librarianship. By participating in the "emerging field of librarianship" I am able to work as a partner with other faculty in the educational process that occurs both within and outside a classroom. I am a librarian, an educator, and a faculty member.

• Library Mission
• Posted by Scott Bennett , University Librarian Emeritus at Yale University on November 19, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• Guilty! But not quite as charged. Learning undoubtedly begins in the classroom, but it succeeds only when students take responsibility for their own learning through “curiosity, intellectual rigor, critical thinking, and creativity,” along with “a life-long passion for learning” (to quote from the mission statement of Professor Neem’s university). This transformational trajectory of learning happens in many places and in many ways on our campuses, not least in the library. Accordingly, I believe the business of libraries is to enact institutional mission, which surely begins with learning--and then goes on, as Professor Neem says, to teaching and the production of new knowledge. Professor Neem asserts that librarians are abandoning their core service responsibility of providing access to information resources. It is hard to see how this is true, with library buildings often filled to overflowing with books and with the unprecedented expansion of access offered by digital resources of all sorts (including archival materials). We face, for almost the first time in history, a superabundance of information. The key service role of librarians now becomes the key pedagogical function of helping readers to navigate this new information world. Librarians seek to do this in deep collaboration with classroom faculty, with information technologists, and with other academic professionals (such as tutoring staff) charged with fostering the academic success of students. The call to return to “traditional” purposes fails to engage with the transformed environment for information. The call for librarians to enact institutional mission, and for library space to be designed to help enact that mission, springs from that transformation. It implies no abandonment of the service role. It asserts, rather, that the service role becomes futile if it is not meaningfully embedded in the learning mission of our colleges and universities. Scott Bennett Yale University Librarian Emeritus Library Space Planning Consultant

• Hubris
• Posted by R D VanZandt on November 19, 2009 at 9:45am EST

• It is appalling how frequently professors (and often administrators and students) deem it acceptable to tell librarians and library professionals how the library must be run, how to meet its mission, and how best to serve its variety of constituents while managing increases in supply, demand, cost, and accessibility to knowledge. A librarian without any experience in history who ventured into Neem's area of history and told him what he should focus on, how he should present his material to his audience, and challenged his interpretation of 17th century events would be summarily dismissed -- and rightly so. Yet so many faculty like Neem have absolutely no compunction about weighing in with grand, pithy pronouncements about how to manage a library's physical space and the intellectual resources that run through it -- and do so without having had any experience whatsoever in managing physical space or intellectual resources, much less both simultaneously.

  As stakeholders in the educational process, it is certainly fair (and, indeed, welcome) for faculty to suggest solutions to a multifaceted issue. It is unwelcome, irrational, and idiotic for professors like Neem to pronounce solutions without any shred of experience, evidence, or empirical process or data. In doing so, they show their ignorance, unprofessionalism, and disconnection from reality.

• Stealing from Borges
• Posted by Lisa N Johnston , Associate Director/Professor Libraries at Sweet Briar College on November 19, 2009 at 10:00am EST

• I have always thought of the library as a type of classroom.

• Those nefarious library scientists
• Posted by Marcel LaFlamme , Director of Library Services at Independence Community College on November 19, 2009 at 10:00am EST

• What a bizarre article. I have never met an academic librarian who espouses the views that Professor Neem attributes to the profession.

• "Emergence" of library science?
• Posted by Michelle Hahn , Music Catalog Librarian, Central University Libraries at Southern Methodist University on November 19, 2009 at 11:00am EST

• The comment that really made me question the validity of this article is Neem's mention of the "emergence of library sciences". Library science is certainly in no way a new field. The first textbook on the subject was published in German in the early 1800's, and the use of the term "library science" in the English speaking world has been around since at least the 30's when a text by S. R. Ranganathan was published.

  Library science is not a new-fangled concept devised by librarians to give us an excuse for keeping our jobs in the economic downturn of this century. It is a field in which we constantly explore collections of information, ways in which to share that information, and how that information is being used, then determine the best methods for meeting the needs of those information users.

  As a librarian, I would never say that the library is the *only* place for students to "connect, collaborate, learn, and synthesize", and I would certainly not expect a professor to say the same about a classroom. I would say that all buildings on a campus serve that purpose in different ways, being responsible for working collaboratively to ensure the learning and success of students, both during and after their time on campus.

• There's no going back
• Posted by Jill Gremmels , Library Director at Davidson College on November 19, 2009 at 11:15am EST

• Professor Neem’s back-to-the-future prescription for academic libraries fails to take into account vastly changed and changing information delivery mechanisms. Libraries’ print collections, even the largest and finest, have always encompassed only a portion of the total archive.

  But factors are converging to render that portion minuscule: the Google Books Project, Hathi Trust, and other mass digitization projects; print-on-demand; widespread grassroots digitization efforts; and institutional repositories expand recorded knowledge that is readily available to an extent that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Thorough scholarship will require searching this entire universe of information, which scholars and budding scholars will have to do electronically because the Web will be the only place it’s “collected.” Confining one’s awareness, beyond the very beginning of the search, to the print materials in one’s local library is inadequate when the realm of available information is orders of magnitude more vast. What is the meaning of a library’s collection when information is everywhere? With electronic searching the only access point, searching can be done anywhere a user has access to the Internet and an appropriate device; smaller, more powerful netbooks and smartphones and ubiquitous wireless mean that many people can search almost anywhere. Who will create the search tools?

  Like it or not, it probably won’t be libraries. Google, Microsoft, and their as-yet-unknown competitors and descendents have far more R & D money than libraries have. Already, many students are doing just fine using only Google and, in truth, Google sometimes works better than the interfaces libraries subscribe to. Students and faculty will not need the library’s assistance or support in accessing archives. What is to keep libraries from becoming the academic equivalent of European churches: beautiful, traditional, and iconic but with a handful of people participating in an active worship life? Or will libraries develop into Daniel Greenstein’s scenario, covered on September 24 in IHE?: “The university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas.” Librarians, dismayed at the prospect of serving merely as content licensers and keepers of a smaller and smaller warehouse, convinced that we have more to offer the academy than has traditionally been tapped, and, yes, concerned about the future of our profession, have been offering different visions.

  I believe that the future of academic libraries is not in collections but in teaching and learning. Although information literacy is and should be an across-the-curriculum endeavor, librarians have the disciplinary expertise to lead and coordinate this component of students’ education. We can also be partners with classroom faculty to facilitate out-of-classroom learning, as well as reinforce classroom learning. As “safe” people to ask, who are available on evenings and weekends when faculty are not, librarians have a long history of serving as assignment interpreters and guides. This works better when classroom faculty and librarians work together toward the same ends, something librarians are happy to do when relationships and communication with faculty are collegial. Neem wants the classroom to be the primary, even the only, place on campus where students “connect, collaborate, learn, and synthesize” (borrowing Richard Luce’s language), but, of course, this is not true. Surveys of students routinely reveal their perception that much of their most important learning in college occurred outside the classroom. Nor, in my opinion, is it even desirable. Residential colleges and universities have invested millions in infrastructure not just to keep students housed, fed, and occupied during the hours they are not in class, which constitutes, of course, 80-90% of a week’s hours. These colleges are built with the understanding that students do indeed connect, collaborate, learn, and synthesize in many places and contexts. Scott Bennett, Yale University Librarian Emeritus, who wrote his own excellent response to Neem, recently encouraged librarians to “treat students as intentional learners rather than as consumers, [and] view the library building as one of the chief places on campus where students take responsibility for and control over their own learning….I have been a librarian for more than 30 years. I have worked at institutions where parts of library buildings were strongly influenced by the reader-centered design paradigm.

  Primarily, however, I have worked in building where books reigned supreme, and it must be said that I have done my part to fill these buildings to overflowing with printed information resources. But it has been my extraordinary good fortune to be a librarian at a time of technological change comparable in its revolutionary impact to the changes introduced in the Western world by Gutenberg and the Fourdrinier machine. Changes in information technology have only recently catalyzed the conditions in which a third design paradigm, focused on intentional learning, is possible. This possibility will best be realized when librarians cease to think of their mission as primarily one of supporting the academic work of others and, instead, come to see themselves primarily as educators, accepting the very considerable challenge—amounting to a paradigm change in profession—of joining with students and faculty as collaborators in enacting the learning missions of our institutions.”(portal: Libraries and the Academy 9(2), 181-197) Professor Neem is probably not alone in wanting a bygone era in libraries, but the world has changed. Libraries can change, too, or die. Either way, there’s no going back.

• Too Busy Working on Core Mission To Say Much
• Posted by stevenb on November 19, 2009 at 11:15am EST

• I'm too busy fulfilling my academic library's core mission of making sure all of the books are on the shelves in their proper order to comment. After all, is there really anything else to an academic library beyond offering a good warehouse for the books?

• Library downturn goes back decades
• Posted by Albert Henderson , retired at n/a on November 19, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

• The academic library, particularly the hundred or so collections that support most grant-financed research, will not revive until science policy pays attention and includes more than lip service for libraries. Some years ago I published a study of library spending by a set of research universities compared with academic R&D income. From the time of the Space Race, Sputnik to the Moon Landing, the curves matched fairly closely. After the Moon Landing, library spending hit the rocks while academic R&D continued its exponential rise. Huge cancellation projects resulted in outlandish complaints blaming publishers and authors for flooding the market with papers generated by academic research!

  When librarians become administrators, it seems they forget who they are and where they come from. Since 1970, the profitability of higher education institutions rose approximately as much as library spending dropped while library heads became the Mortimer Snerds of cost-containment hawks.

  The evidence of administrative animus posing cost-savings against educational values goes back much further than 1970. Veblen, Higher Learning in America 1918; Eisenhower Farewell Address, 1961; Nisbet, Degradation of the Academic Dogma, 1971; Shils, Academic Ethos under Strain, 1975; etc.

• I Beg to Differ
• Posted by Gary Fitsimmons , Director of Library Services at Bryan College on November 19, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

• This opinion piece completely ignores the indispensible teaching mission of the library in information literacy, which is increasingly important as information resources continue to multiply and sources from "Joe's Medical Page" to scholarly journals proliferate. Not only have librarians been the ones to organize the world of knowledge and store it so that specific information can be found, their help (translate that "teaching mission") is needed for students and, yes, faculty members, as well as others to learn how to navigate this information maze and evaluate information for it's credibility. I will agree that some libraries have abandoned their historical function as the warehouse of information, but that mission is completely superfluous if people are not taught how to find it and interact with it, which is what librarians deal with on a day to day basis.

• Warehouses?
• Posted by Edward , Assitant Proffessor at Large Public University in NE on November 19, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

• Were academic libraries ever just warehouses for books like Neem suggests they go back to? If so, why do most older university libraries have beautifully designed, grand reading rooms? Were the "vague learning environments?" The sofa and coffee shop model is just a modern version of these reading rooms. There is no change in core values or core mission. Methods and tools are different, sure, but I see no evidence in a change in core mission. If Neem has some, why doesn't he present it?
  
  While I obviously think that Neem is short-sighted and ill-informed, he does have one point. Library leaders, at least in some cases, do need to make a better case as to why they are important. But so do professors that spend more time researching than teaching. With competition from online, (some for profit, some not), universities the value-add of researchers is not going to remain self-evident. Yes, I believe they are, but tax payers (for any University recieving public funds which is all but a very small minority), donors, potential students (and their parents) will need to be convinced. Trying to role back the clock, starting with the academic library, is not a way to convince these constituents. All information-based fields need to adjust to changes in information availability. Libraries are. It is obvious, at least on this topic, Neem has not.

• unsettling some information scientists
• Posted by Frank F. Conlon , Professor Emeritus at University of Washington on November 19, 2009 at 1:30pm EST

• Professor Neem perhaps has erred in assuming that the emergence of library science--or information science as seems now preferred--is linked to the phenomena he describes. It seems that the responses would suggest that he has touched a collective professional nerve. And that is regrettable inasmuch as it diverts from the other issue he raises--the gradual transformation of academic libraries from being primarily or exclusively storehouses of information available for access by scholars toward being multi-task oriented centers of study including aspects of student lounges and coffee bars. I would not "blame" the librarians--in a period of budget cuts and the emergence of new electronic technologies, libraries are tugged in somewhat contradictory directions. They may be called upon to continue collection of print materials while being urged to pursue digital resources. Many undergraduate students today are so computer-oriented that they assume that anything worthwhile must be 'on line.'

  I share an anecdote told me by a friend who is on the library staff of a major private east coast university. A student was requesting bibliographic guidance for a research paper. My friend produced a fairly lengthy list of citations. "Where are the URLs?" asked the student. "They don't have URLs" replied my friendm "they're articles in printed journals." "Oh," replied the student, "I don't do paper."

  Academic libraries do not exist only for the faculty, but the faculty are significant stake-holders in the library universe. It is galling for librarians to be treated as service staff,--I used to encounter this in my area studies program where some social scientists thought that our language and literature colleagues' "real" mission was to train up social science graduate students to conduct field work. So, let's agree that a lot of people just don't understand other folks. That insight did not arise along with Library Science.

  But to return to the original post--I think it is troubling to find library administrators more excited about their new coffee bar than about the need to make a 4% cut in the serials budget. I can also report that not long back I read in a college town newspaper that the major state university library was opening up a game room so that students--whilst cramming for their finals--could "relax and escape the boredom." As Dave Berry likes to write, "I'm not making this up."

• Transformation in the Library as Metaphor for the Academy?
• Posted by Joanne Schneider , University Librarian at Colgate University on November 19, 2009 at 2:00pm EST

• James Duderstadt, president emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, in "Envisioning a Transformed University," Issues in Science and Technology (2005) http://www.issues.org/22.1/duderstadt.html , writes the following about libraries:
  
  In a sense the library has become the poster child for the impact of IT on higher education. Beyond the use of digital technology for organizing, cataloguing, and distributing library holdings, the increasing availability of digitally-created materials and the massive digitization of existing holdings is driving massive change in the library strategies of universities. Although most universities continue to build libraries, many are no longer planning them as repositories (since books are increasingly placed in off-campus retrievable high-density storage facilities) but rather as a knowledge commons where users access digital knowledge on remote servers....

  In a sense, the library may be the most important observation post for studying how students really learn. If the core competency of the university is the capacity to build collaborative spaces, both real and intellectual, then the changing nature of the library may be a touchstone for the changing nature of the university itself.

  It is true that the library supports learning, teaching, and research, much of which has been originated by faculty. However, the unique qualities contained in what I call "transformed libraries" -- those with learning commons -- that provide a holistic environment containing information, technology, and research expertise, have become successful incubators for undergraduates to enter into the community of scholars and for graduate students and faculty to obtain curricular, research, and pedagogical support in a rapidly changing information environment. For those libraries that can make this transformation the rewards are great since it has become clear that learning occurs both inside and outside the classroom.

  Since opening in 2007, Colgate's Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology's attendance rate, materials checked out, and items borrowed from other libraries have increased, respectively, 83%, 24%, and 27.5% in 2008-2009 over use in the old library before construction began. Teams of librarians and technologists work with faculty and students on projects that have lead to enhanced student engagement both with the topic at hand and with each other. We have many faculty who support us in this change.

  These changes involve varied information formats, new technologies for searching and access, and evolved pedagagy involving how people learn. They are based on the belief that optimal learning is immersive, participatory, social, and reflective.

  From my perspective as a librarian for 35 years, while pedagogy has changed, the core values and principles of American academic libraries have not. They are based on the core library values such as the right to privacy, freedom to read, intellectual freedom, and the right to literacy (or information literacy). Also, since the early twentieth century, librarians have championed the Ranganathan (the father of modern librarianship) principles related to the core library values: --Information is for use. --Every user his/her information. --Every piece of information its user. --Save the time of the user. --The universe of information is an ever growing organism.These are the traditional principles and values behind the success of learning commons, resulting in enhanced student and faculty engagement with knowledge in an array of formats.

• Nostalgia
• Posted by Rick Provine , Director of Libraries at DePauw University on November 19, 2009 at 2:00pm EST

• Nostalgia.

  I too miss things from the past. Local merchants for instance. Many things have changed on college campuses over the years, some more significant than coffee shops in the library. We have coffee shops because we are a place everyone goes. And sure, we try to make it comfortable here for our residential population. We are their study, their living room and their library.

  Not that this conversation should ultimately be about coffee shops, but I see more student-faculty interaction in ours than almost any other place on campus.

  Previous commenters have done a great job of sharing the glaring biases and inaccuracies of Neem's missive. Kudos to librarians for keeping their libraries vital and relevant in a truly dynamic and changing environment.

• Libraries Past, Present, and Future
• Posted by Michael , Academic Librarian on November 19, 2009 at 2:15pm EST

• The history of libraries shows that library collections and functions have evolved and broadened over time—preserving and providing access to “archives” is an increasingly complex enterprise. The present is an important period of transition for academic libraries, characterized by both continuity and change, and one would expect more informed commentaries on the subject from Inside Higher Ed.

• 1st Law of Library Science: Books are for use
• Posted by Jim Nichols , Center for Access to Scholarly Communication [Library] on November 19, 2009 at 3:15pm EST

• I am loathe to respond to paper tigers and displays of ignorance. Libraries have never been mere rooms for keeping books. Librarians contribute far more to learning than dusting the shelves, and always have.

  At the same time, college education has always involved more than sitting in a room with talking head up front.

  The walls of the libraries have come down, and so librarians are focusing on the core processes of learning from scholarly sources that will carry us forward to the future. The walls of the classroom are coming down, too. What is Neem going to do with that? The instructors I work with are focusing on the core processes of learning from scholarly sources and disciplinary inquiry that will carry them forward.

• roles of libraries
• Posted by Keith Swigger , Professor of Library Science at Texas Woman's University on November 19, 2009 at 3:15pm EST

• Librarianship is practiced locally. What makes sense on one campus may or may not make sense in other institutions. For some academic libraries, a traditional role is appropriate. For others, where functions such as study space and coffee and computer labs etc. are not readily available, the library might be a good site. For either librarians or faculty to declare unilaterally what the role of all libraries should be, or even what the role of a particular library should be, would be to ignore the needs and imperatives of specific situations and to disregard the importance of communication and planning between faculty and the academic support services such as libraries.

• False dichotomy
• Posted by Professional Librarian , Reference and Instruction Librarian at Large public university library on November 19, 2009 at 3:45pm EST

• I guess Neem is saying that academics (e.g. historians) should be running libraries - in his mind the "professionals" (e.g. librarians) are driving things into the ground.

  Clearly he has done little to no research into what library and information science is - and this piece just serves to provide fodder and misinformation for his own views. Perhaps he should have come to the library (either physical or electronic) to seek help at the reference desk. Perhaps he should read the literature of our field or even (gasp) talk to some real "professional" librarians.

  Librarians continue to be schooled in the areas of information storage and retrieval, archival theory and appraisal, management, collection development, user education, information seeking behavior theories, bibliometrics, reference, specialized reference (law, music, art, etc.), primary source literacy, digital curation, open source, scholarly communication, information literacy, on and on.

  I am saddened that the author has developed such a poor understanding of the academic library. We are here to serve the needs of current students and faculty as information conduit; and we aim to serve the needs of future users by collecting, preserving and curating material.

• Get rid of the actual books, physically,
• Posted by DFS on November 19, 2009 at 3:45pm EST

• And then, human potential being what it is, we can then perform the actual electonic 'book burning.'

  I'm sorry if my idea about physical presence is 'quaint,' but unless there is actual evidence to the contrary, we would become quickly enmeshed into the supreme battle of "he said, she said."

  I'm also sorry that I don't trust academia on the basic issues, past or present. Somewhere, there must remain the evidence.

  Libraries are much more than this.

• Laughable
• Posted by Leonard , Librarian on November 19, 2009 at 6:15pm EST

• Excuse me, Mr. Neem, your ignorance is showing. I can't help but notice that in the stacks picture next to the title, there is no one there. Here's why: Students don't use books anymore. There is a reason why libraries are changing, and that's it. When students view the internet as the ultimate source for all knowledge, libraries have to adapt. How most libraries do this is bringing in more stuff (coffee shops, sofas, etc.) to get the students to the library, then we have information points and commons to get students involved and hopefully we can point them to viable information sources. If libraries stick to your neolithic idea of what a library should be, then the library will become useless. Evolve or die.

  Also funny is that Neem, in paragraph 3, tries to make an argument that librarians are somehow not academic, or at least, less academic than professors. Further proof he clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

• Another Perspective
• Posted by John Webb , Librarian Emeritus at Washington State University on November 19, 2009 at 11:00pm EST

• I shall not repeat the many excellent comments already made. I'm a retired librarian who spent earlier years of my career as an archivist, and Dr, Neem is a member of an academic discipline some of whose members played a unique role in the lives of archivists. No meeting of archivists, local, regional, or national, was complete without at least one keynote or luncheon or dinner or closing speech by a historian, sometimes all of the above. Every one of those speeches repeated the same ardent message: "Save Everything. There is no way to know what might be important some day."

  The physical, logical, and practical impossibilities of following that advice never seemed to cross the speakers' minds.

  The professional training of archivists, like librarians, begins, logically, with evaluation of the vast resources available and selection of those which fit the institutions' missions and are significant enough to be preserved and made available in perpetuity. These represent a small percentage of the total materials available. Naturally, evaluation and selection criteria change with time. Naturally, the numbers and types of the total corpus of the historical record change with time. The archival profession has changed just as the profession of academic librarians has changed, but both remain true to their fundamental professional and societal missions and values.

  It is highly likely that Dr. Neem has been or will be invited to speak at a meeting of Northwest Archivists, the professional association for the Pacific Northwest. It is highly likely that he has or will tell the archivists assembled to "Save Everything." We should therefore cut him some slack, as it were. My chemist daughter has served on a faculty library committee. I cannot imagine in my wildest dreams her telling the library how to accomplish its mission, but historians have been invited for generations to lecture archivists how to do just that.

• Remaining Relevant
• Posted by Michael Pasqualoni , Librarian for Communications & Public Administration at Syracuse University on November 19, 2009 at 11:00pm EST

• The core mission of academic libraries has rarely been about accessing archival materials alone. The academic library role has long been intertwined with social and instructional interaction, with and between students and faculty and between librarians, students and faculty. Of course, the relationship between a reader and a book author is also a social relationship, one whose "off-line" nature tends to make that socializing go more easily unnoticed. The most cavernous and ornate academic library reading rooms of old accommodated those forms of interaction. Some still do. The values expressed in the design of those grand interiors rarely followed principles one might see in a storehouse or warehouse. Those various social relationships are also a vital contributing element to an informed approach to developing library collections and keeping them relevant.

  Of course, the college "classroom" itself is also just a means to an end on any campus. Maintenance of tradition does not insure excellent educational outcomes, nor does it insure an excellent library. That notion of "classroom" should not be overly lionized nor held in stasis. Plenty of students can share stories of traditional classroom based approaches being alienating, discriminatory, confusing, inflexible, irrelevant or worse. Adjusting one's library methods and facilities when social and economic realities suggest this is wise, and possibly highly relevant for student educational outcomes, does not diminish professional dignity. It adds to it.

  I do share the concerns stated by Professor Neem about academic administrations across the U.S. pushing a very few vanilla version spatial implementations that turn out to be hollow copycat arrangements, or consist of amenities that underwhelm. So if cafe environments have some role to play that contribute to enhanced collaboration and learning opportunity, one might endeavor to implement them not as a late in the day imitation of a Starbucks, but as a far more transformative re-invention of what an "academic cafe" should be. Print collections at the leading research libraries have been known the world over as beyond compare. And these same libraries should strive to uphold that high bar in their physical facilities and service standards. Most importantly, they should avoid the danger of lapsing into copycat cookie cutter implementations that end up not being reflective of the diversity of voices and knowledge traditions commonly found on any college campus.

  One unfortunate change in academic libraries is that traditional approaches that built highly diverse world class print collections, based on collaboration among large numbers of rather independent librarian subject specialists, now tend to be homogenized into just a very few points of view, especially whenever one is dealing with library facilities implementation or technology services. There can only be one type of IT for the entire library organization. Only one furniture arrangement and ratio of open space to shelf space for the entire library. But why? We should be grateful books were rarely acquired according to such strictly homogenizing principles.

  Surely academic libraries are also part of a much wider social system extending beyond the ivory tower, one that serves enormous populations of students who are frequently driven by values tied to their future employment prospects. For most of those students, that employment will take place within primarily non-scholarly environments. In this sense, commentary critical of academic computing and its growing role in academic librarianship and higher education is sometimes far too glib.

  Academic libraries have a crucial role to play as partners in educating students within a world in which immersion in electronic information environments defines lives, careers, organizations and even perhaps helps define nation-states. Joanne Schneider's posting that quotes James Duderstadt seems to suggest this aspect as well. Certainly, academic library enhancement of student and faculty access to IT immersion opportunities and related social immersion leads to far more than just enhanced venues for observation of these same students. It can also immerse those students in technological environments we know have dark sides.

  U.S. digital infrastructure for electricity and all manner of computing could be the next ground zero for cyber-terrorists. Newer digital media, like older forms of analog "mass" media are known to attract swarms of hate-speech and hate mongering political groups. On the sunnier side, community organizers routinely use online networks as a basis for pro-social grassroots activism. And even humanities students and faculty concerned about the future role of print monographs in academic libraries turn to social networks like Facebook to exchange information. Increasingly robust, open access knowledge networks are potential platforms for scientific breakthroughs and political discourse that can help find disease cures, stem the tide of pandemics, develop alternative forms of non fossil fuel based transportation or brainstorm a society toward solutions for a warming planet.

  The citizenship education Professor Neem so rightly admires also takes place in an environment where ascendency to political office, along with political, economic and social communications of all stripe, not to mention corruption, propaganda and censorship, are often achieved thru online means and within various online media networks. The notion put forward by some that students and faculty should assess these developments based primarily on print on paper technology is highly questionable.

  None of this in anyway argues for academic libraries to turn their backs on useful collections of printed books. Academic librarians invest countless hours and dollars into the effort to make books available. Given the overall lifespan of the World Wide Web and the ubiquitous reliance on electronic journals and online news by so many students and faculty these days, it is actually surprising so much emphasis still remains at academic libraries on print title provision.

  Those who do not invest their daily labor into the details of academic library collection development tend to also have a less visceral sense of the parallel importance to libraries and campuses for print items and other formats to be selectively withdrawn from library collections in a timely fashion.

  A perceptual rift may exist between those with more sentimental notions of visiting libraries and those working behind the scenes inside those libraries. The former frequently see a collection as a highly fixed "destination." Librarians would not disagree. But most librarians who manage these collections know a collection has never been only a destination. A collection is a "process," just like learning in a classroom is a process, even in that older library world comprised of mostly print materials. Now the shifting nature of collections is simply more immediate, and sometimes more transparent, in an Internet age. In this sense, Professor Neem's pegging library outcomes assessment to depth and breadth of "holdings" really fails to have the same meaning it did in that offline, print only environment. In fact, academic librarians know all too well, that the information environment we inhabit routinely challenges us all with depth and breadth of a scale that may actually be impeding knowledge discovery.

  Therefore, instead of characterizing the emergence of information sciences fields as a disruptive storm, I suggest we need to view that emergence as a positive evolution. Whether it is game rooms in a library or proliferations of television video monitors or personal computers, it should not be so easy to dismiss with a broad brush a facility or format as not worthy of higher education. Meanwhile, colleges and universities educate, among others, future journalists for a marketplace where print on paper news may no longer exist. Serious scholarship and in-depth professional study takes place in fields like recreation and leisure, hospitality, sports management, gaming, and audiovisual media studies of all types. It is just far too easy to trivialize these pursuits, perhaps until one discovers that a crucial political or military leader lacks the sort of strategic thinking associated with competitive gaming or has none of the social graces needed for personal, managerial or international hospitality and negotiation. Then such trivialization seems misplaced.

  In gradually transforming themselves, some academic libraries have doubtless touched a raw nerve for those who hold alternative notions of education and learning. And within some of those alternative viewpoints, a small minority (excluding Prof Neem) toss into the mix a view of education necessarily involving a type of sparse and quite lonely austerity. That also tends to be a view that sees education linked to a deprivation of most of the physical senses of the human body, and even a rigor to the point of pain and failure. I am not so certain we all should not more often question some of those harsher pedagogies and the implications they present for a nation where pursuit of happiness is a founding value.

  This may resonate for those who decry the transformation of many colleges and universities away from thoughtful institutes of the mind and consideration of the humanities toward greater emphasis on the narrower job placement goals I mentioned earlier. In doing so, we might even make some valuable societal contributions relevant to the entire notion of what work itself now represents in our culture and economic life. In all these regards, I think academic librarians are to be complimented in their flexibility of approach.

  Of course, I also think academic librarians should never shrink from discussions involving concepts of "cheaper and better."

  This is a challenge for the entirety of the higher education establishment, writ large, which increasingly does not come out so well when that cheaper and better litmus test is employed in a manner that extends beyond ivory tower gates. But of all the knowledge and interaction centers on a college campus, I believe students and faculty continue to get incredible bang for an investment dollar at their academic library. Countless instances of scholarly and professional value added service take place that go over and above expectation and formal description all of the time.

  Now, a labor unionist might claim it actually benefits cash strapped university administrators near and far to buy into a more limited characterization of academic libraries as a mere storehouse only, because then academic library professionals can readily be remunerated at rates more typical of a blue collar warehouse laborer, or even downsized out of their jobs, rather than view them and their complex enterprise as on par with the many other highly educated academic specialists and professionals with whom they share a campus.

• Posted by Barbara Fister on November 20, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• Oddly enough, I was just looking at final edits for a Library Journal column when I read this piece (and linked to it).
  http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6707986.html?nid=2673&source=link&rid=1105906703

  My argument is that if librarians ignore the views of people who love libraries and think we're out to destroy libraries, we're missing an important perspective and failing to find the genuine common ground that actually exists or serve needs that are deeply felt.

  Unfortunately, my argument isn't much helped by the combative tone of this piece and the understandably defensive responses. (Historians would probably be a trifle offended if anyone pointed to their discipline and said "that's when everything started to go to hell, when those upstart historians messed it all up; why, kids today can't even tell you the date of the Battle of Hastings. They should get back to their core mission.")

  When faculty treat librarians as clerks who should do as they are told, it's unlikely that there will be much fruitful discussion of what a library is and should be, particularly when those scholars are rarely seen in the library. Librarians end up interacting most often with students who, I think, would sometimes be happy if learning did begin and end in the classroom because then they wouldn't have to spend so many hours in the library trying to figure out what the professor wants. But we - and I suspect most humanists - want learning to happen in and because of what's in libraries.

  This essay seems to suggest that faculty and graduate students use libraries in order to create the new knowledge that they can pass on in the classroom. My undergraduate education would have been impoverished if my teachers had felt that way.

  As for the core mission - providing access to archives - these are now are mostly tollgated subscriptions or pay per view articles for the researchers creating new knowledge, and that is largely what got us in this mess. I would like colleges and universities and their libraries to get back to their core mission of education and discovery. And maybe if scholars would stop producing increasing mountains of new knowledge that only six or seven people in the world and the tenure committee care about, giving it to corporations to publish so it can be sold back to libraries, we would be in a better place.

  And don't pin all the blame on scientists. A lot of humanities scholars produce narrowly focused research to prove their credentials that does not get us much further in understanding the world or in helping those outside our narrow fields figure out how to live in it.

• Thank you all, especially VanZandt
• Posted by Jim Carmichael , Professor, Library and Information Studies at The UNiversity of North Carolina at Greensboro on November 20, 2009 at 10:30am EST

• I am going to have a ball teaching academic libraries this spring. I still use hoprrible old lecture metyhod, and don't let students dictate the agenda. I use John Budd's textbook, and I teach face to face. God bless whoever said that libraries had become the poster child for IT. That is the truth, and I am so sick of hearing about it that in 2001, I threw away my television, got rid of my home computer, and am holding out against retirement so I can be a thorn in the side of all who are so enamoured of paradigm shifts that they confuse them with Facebook posts. All of these comments will provide fodder for my arch comments. Van Zandt has it right on. How dare Professor Neem, and all the others, again and again and again.

  As Ed Holley once said, years ago, the smaller the stakes, the bigger the fight. If corporate America had its way, students would learn every thing they need to know the old fashioned way, without alkll this intellectual folderol. I suggest everyone go read the brilliant article in this week's London Review of Books about why Maynard Keyenes was right, and why the field of Econmomiocs is operating on totally different premises than realpolitik. We have more bad software programs on our campus right now than I can count, all shoved down outr throats by some university mandate.

  The one thing that all of us lack is humility. Less talk, more work!

• Plank in the eye...
• Posted by Trip Wyckoff , Business Subject Specialist at Florida State University on November 21, 2009 at 12:30pm EST

• Dr. Neem-
  I'd really like to know when the last time you actually entered a library. I'd be willing to bet money that it's been years. I'm sure your library, like our library, has made in increasingly easy for faculty not to ever step foot into the library.

  Libraries, especially the type you pine for, have not been funded properly due to the vast increase in the "library sciences" but rather the vast increase in specialization of academia. Libraries have to meet the needs and desires of more constituents than you have in a lifetime. It's easy for you to say as you sit comfortably at the top of the food chain.

  As Matthew so eloquently put it: "And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own eye?" Dr. Neem, look to your own eye.
  Regards
  Trip

• Proof is in the comments
• Posted by Teacher Scholar on November 22, 2009 at 10:15am EST

• The comments above prove Professor Neem was correct! While he may have been a bit more nuanced, no comment has denied that libraries are moving in the direction Neem claims. Instead the debate is whether it is good for libraries to move in that direction. Clearly, Prof. Neem thinks not, because he believes libraries should be libraries. Others think libraries should be something else, something sparkling and new! That's the essence of the debate-- and to the extent that these new ideas about what new libraries should be are coming from the library sciences, yes, they are to blame (or to thank) for the changes.

  As to Plank in the Eye, yes, you are correct: specialization is part of the problem, but at least academic specialists are continuing to do their job- teaching and research. Let's hope our libraries continue to do their job too rather than changing to become something we don't need..

• "Closing the distance between classroom and library"
• Posted by Gary F. Daught , Director of Library Services at Milligan College, TN on November 22, 2009 at 10:30pm EST

• Back in 2005, shortly after becoming Reference Librarian at Milliagn College, I wrote an open (email) letter to the faculty reaching out for greater collaboration in what I viewed a shared task of teaching and learning between the classroom and library. (I posted this letter on my blog a while back <http://wp.me/paqNp-aj>.) I didn't presume upon the classroom as the professor's "domain" (much as suggested by R. D. VanZandt above), though I never believed learning only happens in the classroom. I made an appeal that we work together to close the physical and metaphorical distance between the classroom and the library for the sake of our students—who no longer view the library as the place where they have to go to access information resources, but who more than ever need help navigating an increasingly complex information environment.

  I would like to hear from more professors about their perceptions of the role of the contemporary academic library in the task of teaching and learning. Is Dr. Neem's view in any sense representative? When I encountered resistance from faculty it was typically that they 1) were reluctant to divert limited class time from content delivery to have an instruction librarian come in to help students learn how to think about the nature of information; 2) assumed that students already knew how to find, evaluate and use the information resources for research appropriate to their discipline; or 3) were themselves unfamiliar/uncomfortable with the electronic information environment. I am happy to report that on our campus, at least, the collaborative relationship between the classroom and library has never been better, and is getting better all the time because the faculty have begun to understand what librarians (at our initiative) have to offer in this arena.

  Why would Professor Neem begrudge the opportunity to engage with the competencies of academic libraries and professionally trained librarians who are seeking to make an active contribution to the educational enterprise, beyond merely keeping the shelves stocked with books and (print) journals? His definition of "reviving the traditional mission" sounds a lot like a call for the library to return to being that ubiquitious but otherwise passive (and quiet!) support agency for the classroom. And even if that were the extent of our mission—which Dr. Neem suggests we shouldn't feel badly about because it is a noble enough one for us—I know of no library that has opted for coffee bars and comfy couches instead of assuring students had access to vital and relevant information resources.

• Biggest threat to libs is librarians....
• Posted by Glenn Storbeck , Refernce Librarian at PCLS on November 23, 2009 at 9:45pm EST

• Libraries have thrived for 5,000 years, literally. Two threats have appeared to the future: funding, which is a threat to every public service in the US (especially you financial aid); and library leadership itself. The author is correct, there is no need to change the misson. We have patrons and materials and buildings, that is not going to change in our lifetimes. Tough indeed to find organizations run so badly. If only librarians were aware of the concepts of "diminishing returns" and "opportunity costs".......

• Posted by Gabe Gossett , Librarian for Extended Education at Western Washington University on November 25, 2009 at 9:30pm EST

• I think that a well-functioning library inevitably sets itself up for the type of criticism that Professor Neem puts forth. Libraries, when they are doing their job well, are heeding the fourth and fifth laws of library science put forth by Ranganathan: "Save the time of the reader" and "the library is a growing organism" respectively. When librarians do this well it makes it harder for patrons to understand what we do and why we do it. That is why libraries get involved in outreach and instruction.

  I would have to respectively disagree with other comments in this thread by librarians (in most cases I think) claiming that Professor Neem shouldn't have a voice in how the library operates. To the contrary, he should, as should all of our patrons and constituents whether they set foot in the library or not. It is precisely because we have listened to our patrons that libraries are embracing the fifth law mentioned above and evolving to meet our user's needs. I think it is great when people express their opinion of libraries in a respectful way, even if we don't agree with them. Weighing all of these opinions is how librarians work towards quality service. This dialog also gives us an opportunity to educate our users on why we are doing what we do.

  Professor Neem's commentary is, in the end, not incendiary or impolite and I give him credit for that, though I disagree with his argument.

  One reason why I disagree is because he makes reference to a "traditional library." When he does so I assume that he is referring to the libraries of the industrial age. A much broader perspective on the history of libraries, and libraries worldwide for that matter, would reveal that there is hardly such thing as a traditional library. In all instances libraries adapt to the conditions they find themselves in or they wither away. Libraries take many forms, from the library in Mongolia on camel-back where books come with vaccinations to the academic library were students can engage books in the stacks or over a cup of coffee between conversations with their peers in the cafe.

• Reviving the Academic Library
• Posted by Bill Richards , Professor of Library Science at Georgia College & State University on November 29, 2009 at 3:00pm EST

• While Professor Neem's notion of the "traditional" library may be somewhat old fashioned, I think he has touched on a valid issue. As a member of the library profession for over 30 years, I've always been aware of a lack of self-confidence generally among colleagues. To some extent this is understandable, since in the academic world the coin of the realm is credit hours. Anyone not directly generating creadit hours is a second class citizen. No matter how good library instruction classes may be, academic librarians have never and likely will never be viewed as "real" faculty. I, personally, have no problem with this, but way too many members of my profession apparently do. So they go lurching after whatever trendy new information technology comes along, not necessarily because it will enable us to do our jobs more effectively, but because maybe THEN we will be loved and respected. If that doesn't work, we create "learning commons" to demonstrate how vital we are to student learning. If that doesn't work, aw heck, let's just open up a cyber-cafe/snack bar/lounge. We are even somewhat embarrassed to use the "L" word and the "B" word. The foolishness of lusting after a digital holy grail was demonstrated last year in my state when academic library leaders--faced with a serious budget problem--decided to discontinue the state's high speed inter-library loan book delivery service. After all, printed books are so "old school." Everyone just wants digital, right? The firestorm of criticism for this decision by students and faculty forced the academic library gurus to quickly reinstate the inter-library delivery of books. How could the academic library leaders have so badly misread the needs of their clients?

• discussing the academic library
• Posted by Donald Beagle , Director of Library Services at Belmont Abbey College on December 4, 2009 at 7:30am EST

• I suppose I may be one of those devilish "library scientists" excoriated by Dr. Neem since I have published and lectured fairly extensively on the transformation of the academic library by way of facilities like Information Commons and Learning Commons. These facilities may look superficially like "computer labs," but I can assure Dr. Neem that a great many of them are becoming far more significant than that. Let me quote Dr. Valerie Ross, director of the critical writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, who describes her students' use of the Weigle Information Commons (in its first Annual Report): "I am astonished to see how the space and its services are transforming my teaching and my students as they continue to take greater control of the process and production of knowledge. At home in the library, increasingly prepared to avail themselves of the many resources and experts available to them, my students are becoming scholars." Dr. Ross' phrase "at home in the library" is critical, because her students, like most modern students, are coming to our campuses with new skills and experiences in media and technology. Faculty like Dr. Ross recognize this, and work with librarians like those who run the Weigle Information Commons to fashion pedagogies that challenge and engage those students.

  I speak as one who treasures printed books, and my own scholarship puts my theories to the test, as I also publish original historical research. My most recent book (Poet of the Lost Cause, University of Tennessee Press, 2008) about the Civil War poet Abraham Ryan, was based on five years of research in archives, library print collections, and most importantly, aggregated digital databases accessed through a state-of-the-art library Learning Commons. Just this month, reviewers in the Journal of Southern History and the Catholic Historical Review praised my book for "breaking new ground" and "delving more deeply" into its subject than any previous scholarship. I can assure Dr. Neem that the single most crucial factor that empowed my research to break new ground and delve more deeply than previous "paper-based" Ryan scholars at institutions like Princeton, Vanderbilt, Georgia, and Chicago was the wealth of digital content coming available through Google Book Search, READEX databases, and years of familiarity with leading-edge search methodologies tailored to online sources. As librarians, we would be shirking our vital duty to empower our students to similarly delve more deeply and break new ground, if we did not create new spaces and venues where this wealth of new scholarly technologies can be fully explored and exploited in close proximity to trained research librarians (not IT student assistants at typical computer labs). I applaud Dr. Neem at least for his deep and apparently passionate defense of libraries. But he errs if he holds to a definition of libraries that does not leave room for a new generation of spaces and services. For faculty who still believe that libraries must always remain entirely, or even primarily, warehouses of printed books, it is time for them to "wake up and smell the coffee."

• The Changing Needs of Students
• Posted by Nicolle , Library Drone on December 4, 2009 at 8:00pm EST

• Gentle Readers, academics all,

  Neem's article talks about libraries, but it is not about libraries. It is about something much larger. Libraries, inside and outside the academy, have always represented the love of learning for the sake of knowledge. Libraries gathered print and media materials so that knowledge would be preserved. People came to the library to partake of knowledge.

  And so, for a very long time, students entered academia for the love of knowledge. The degree earned was not a requirement to their daily lives. It was a pleasure and joy sought on its own.

  Times have changed. A degree is now a requirement of life and students enter academia to advance their careers. Professions that as few as five years ago required a high school diploma, now require a college degree. Students no longer seem to care about the love of learning and for the massive debt they assume for the degree they need, all they want is the knowledge particular to their desired profession. The classroom is no longer a place of learning, but rather a means to an end. Students expect the specific knowledge they need and no more. Learning for the love of knowledge is expensive.

  At a loss as to how to stem this tide, the academy looks to the library, the bastion of tradition, and is dismayed to find it sailing along with the tide. They see coffee shops, computers, mini living rooms, leisure reading sections, and they weep. What they don't see is that the library is doing what it has always done: preserving knowledge and making that knowledge accessible. The difference today, as opposed to the past, is that we have to advertise our services. We draw students into our buildings with the coffee shops, reading rooms, and computer labs. We get them to stay by showing them the fruits of our primary mission: immediately accessible, high quality knowledge that is specific to their professional goals.

  Neem's disparagement of the library is really just a red herring. A deeper issue is involved and the appearance of a chameleon act is disheartening and makes the library an easy target.

  This is not to say that libraries do not have issues with our primary mission in a world of digitization. We do. We still haven't found the proper response to Google and its descendants to come. Perhaps we should start cataloging them.

  But, the assertion that students don't read books is preposterous. Until the textbook publishers buy the proverbial farm, students will be reading printed materials for a long time. In fact, the cost of those books drives students who otherwise wouldn't use the library right up to the circulation desk. This scenario is good and bad, but I'll take it if it lets me share my love of the library with the uninitiated.

  The fact of the matter is that the needs of students have changed. We do not have to change our primary mission to serve them. We only have to change how we apply that mission to their needs. I sincerely hope, that in that application, we build life long librophiliacs who go on to greatness in their chosen professions and then become loving donors. Amen.