Lunch Discussion: What is Unique about the Library on Today's University Campus?

At our library retreat lunch table, the conversation ranged across a number of topics, but we seemed to return often to these questions:

"Why does the university need the library? What does the library do that matters, and that no one else can do as well?"

The following are a few of our ideas with the discussion that followed:

• Library as place--Recently, we have heard a lot of discussion about libraries creating inviting and collaborative workspaces for students. Study space is available in lots of places, both on and off campus. Should the core purpose of libraries be to provide study space?
  
• Help from a real person--Reference help from a real person is now a service not entirely unique to the academic library. The internet search service Cha Cha allows you to chat online with a real person if you don't find what you need. (On a side note: Although I have not used Cha Cha myself, my husband tried it once when he was looking for the technical term for a web programming problem. The person he chatted with was not able to help, because he wasn't familiar with the terminology either.)
• Access to materials--Libraries provide their patrons with free access to materials. Some of this access is available online for a fee, and the amount of free information is ever increasing online. This traditional library service is also facing some threats from the online environment.
  
• Instruction--Libraries provide instruction in a number of different formats, including face-to-face, about using our resources and collections. We are experts at targeting searches and making information more "findable" and relevant. But, will we be needed to provide this assistance in the future, as search tools and other technologies become more and more efficient and intuitive?
  
• Organization of information.
  

One other note about the reference help from real people idea: The traditional role of librarians has been to connect the person to information. Now, it seems, computers connect the person to information. What does this mean for us?

We briefly discussed how to measure the library's success. Statistics reporting our activities (including instruction, reference, etc.) can be used to justify what we do. Does the size of a collection matter? We concluded that it does not to the person looking for information. In today's climate, libraries need to measure our activities in terms of efficiency--we need to do everything quickly, cheaply, and provide an accessible format.

We all agreed that the changes facing us will be relentless--and if we do not respond well, we will become irrelevant.

Lunch Discussion

Our lunch table of eight consisted of a mix of librarians, administrative staff, and collection development staff from UofU and BYU. Our primary discussion was in response to David Lewis' "Parts of the Puzzle" strategy number 5 for keeping an academic library relevant in the early 21st century: Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content.

We focused on the many benefits and hurdles currently associated with this strategy. One "luncher" brought up the recent report at UofU that about 50% of the books purchased from 1999 to 2004 had not circulated in their first five years on the shelf. This led to a discussion about moving from approval plans to purchase-on-demand. It was suggested that libraries need to have a conversation about which subject areas they want to purchase "just in case" titles and which "just in time" (on demand). At the UofU, for instance, we perhaps should focus on President Young's initiatives (as mentioned in his inaugural speech and others since then).

Which libraries will work together to decide who collects in which disciplines? In other words, is it state-by-state? Regional? By classification (Research I, Associates Colleges, Master's Colleges, etc.)? By continent? Also, which schools will collect in prestigious, money-generating disciplines (science, medicine and business) and which will focus on less-profitable areas fields (arts, humanities, and social sciences)? How far do collaborating schools overlap in collections? Does this strategy apply equally to serials as it does to monographs? Finally, how will this affect ARL standings (and will academic libraries commit to a distributed collection model before ARL changes how it ranks libraries)?

Further questions and hurdles arise when technology is added to the equation: Will there be a model for ILL'ing e-books and streaming video subscription content in the future? If not, then how can distributed collections work to benefit patrons at all the participating libraries?

As for "curating content," academic libraries are already doing this. One luncher noted that for this strategy to work, there would have to be less emphasis on commercial publishers. Special Collections, Institutional Repositories, Digital Technologies and University Press departments/divisions need work together (or be one entity) to make their unique content more accessible through online portals.

Ultimately, this strategy raises many feasibility questions and quandaries that we need to address before it can be fully employed.