 IMPACT of Demographic Trends on Library Services remarks by Jorge Chiment and Kathleen DeLong at the 2012 ARL Fall Forum, convened by Joan Giseke. Well let me add my welcome to the first program of the Fall Forum which as you know is entitled THE IMPACT of Demographic Trends on Library Services. I'm Joan Giseke, Special Assistant to the Chancellor, Dean Emeritus and Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And I am pleased to introduce our speakers and to moderate this session. As you note from the program, our speakers are going to explore both U.S. and Canadian demographics as a way to sketch a bit of our future for libraries. There will be touching on the kind of people that work in our libraries as well as looking at what kind of changes will be seen in our library users. And understanding those impacts and of those trends are going to be important to us as we make decisions about the future of our own libraries. Our speakers' biographies are included in your packet, but let me just make a few introductory remarks. Jorge Chiment is with us, Dean of the School of Communications and Information at Rutgers University. He is a professor in the Bolston School of Public Policy and in the Department of Latino, Hispanic, Caribbean Studies. And he has authored numerous articles and books on these trends and communication studies. Kathleen DeLong joins us as the Associate University Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She's been a frequent guest lecturer in the Master's in Library Science program at the University of Alberta and is one of the people who teaches in the leadership and management courses and is a recent, has just recently finished her PhD from Simmons. So we are very pleased to have both of our speakers with us today. Jorge plans to highlight the demographic data and changes he has seen over time. What populations are using our libraries? What does this mean for our workforce? Kathleen will be talking about the research that has been done on the Canadian workforce and what's been learned since an initial study in 2003. And she will also share some data on the current workforce trends in Canada. I will do a very brief summary at the end and then we will have plenty of time for audience questions. So let me turn it over to Jorge Schmidt. This year marks the 36th year, I think, that I've been an academic. And whenever I'm introduced, the same thing happens. I get nervous and then I start sweating. So about 22 years ago, an older colleague, who I respect that a lot still do, said, that'll go away after about a year or two. So thank you for inviting me, first of all. I'd like to spend a short time discussing three trends that have been converging. I think you're aware of all of them. They've been converging now for some time. In some cases, as long as I've been an academic, they've been converging and converging with consequences that are now becoming so clear that even people on talk shows are mentioning them. But I'd like to discuss the impact they have on us, on schools like mine, on the university as well. So the first is an economic trend, the tendency, that I synopsize by saying basically the states are just getting out of the business of higher education, and they're doing it exactly the way any business would do when they get out of the business. They cut back spending and they sell off assets. And that's exactly what's been happening. What's interesting about the tendency is that it's first noticeable in the data around 1985. So it's been going on for a very, very long time. Now it's only become really visible to my colleagues, myself as well, in the last five or ten years. And the reason is that we framed the phenomenon differently for the first 20 years. We saw the phenomenon and every year we said, okay, it's going down. But if we do this or if we do that and if we work Trenton, Austin, Sacramento, whatever it was that we had to work, it'll come back. And so we'll just pull our belts a little tighter and in a couple of years or so it'll come back and we'll be able to expand and do whatever we need to do. And of course it just didn't happen. So I want to show you a little bit about why it didn't happen. First of all, what you see on the left is an example from New Jersey. And while the states varied considerably, all of the arrows point in the same direction. It wasn't a case that the state budgets went down. The state budgets in most states actually went up at the same time that they were cutting their support of higher education. Secondly, what you see is you see that in states that have lots of different tiered universities, the flagships, that is the research universities, did not necessarily get the lion's share of the money. That even as the money was being cut back, they were being cut back even more. Now that was a very hard thing to say 10, 15 years ago. It's very difficult to stand up among colleagues from universities in my case like Montclair State or the College of New Jersey and say you guys are getting more money than we're getting really and we ought to be getting more money than you're getting, right? So that argument, of course, wasn't going to go anywhere. And in some states, including New Jersey, the state budget also covered a number of private universities. It wasn't all that long ago that Princeton was getting money from the legislature as well as all that they have. In fact, this November, we the citizens of New Jersey will be voting on a bond issue for building in universities and when the bond issue was first announced, Princeton with its $2 billion plus endowment was on the bond issue to get about $125 million for presumably scarce buildings on their campus. And I don't want to knock Princeton per se. We get very good students from them and we send them very good students. But the point is that the states weren't even clear for most of that time where to put their priorities. Their priorities were all over the place and the presumably rational notion that the research university is where the greatest value comes back to the state. Therefore, that's where you put your investment wasn't necessarily on the table. Another thing that was happening is that tuitions were going up. We have there that you can see I really been at it for 36 years. I can't even read the slides. So this is a percent chart, but tuitions have been going up during that period. Now, what's crucial to understand when we see tuitions go up is two things. They go up most rapidly during recessions and the argument has been all along. You know those universities, if they'd run their universities better, they wouldn't have to charge as much tuition. And they are responding to inflation in irresponsible ways. They're just jacking up their tuition. And at times when everybody is hurting, that's when they jack it up the most and that doesn't make any sense. So I'm going to show you why it makes sense. And that is that as state support goes down, tuition goes up. And it's that way across every state in the United States. It's not about inflation. It's not about irresponsibility during recessions. It's not about universities trying to do all kinds of new stuff and then putting it on the backs of students. It's basically in the case of state universities of the state getting out of the business and getting out of the business in a very interesting way. Typically in public discourse when money is cut from some program, those who are connected with the program tend to speak up and the beneficiaries from the program tend to speak up. I'm a veteran and on many occasions I have made it clear that I don't like cuts to veterans even if I'm not necessarily a recipient of it. Sort of the way we do things in public discourse with one exception, this one here. For 25 years this pattern has been in place, longer than 25 years actually. The pattern has been in place but roughly that long and nobody spoke up. And the fact that nobody spoke up can be interpreted in a number of ways. One way of interpreting is to say, okay, nobody spoke up. We academics are so cowardly anyway that we didn't have the courage to speak up and what we saw was happening. But as I said earlier, we saw what was happening but interpreted differently. We gave it an interpretation that put a positive spin on it, framed it differently from the way we could have framed it. But what about the constituents? Did they speak up? Yes, they spoke up. And who did they point the finger at? They pointed the finger at us for raising tuition. So they spoke up against us. And when they spoke up against us, who did they not speak up against? And that was their legislatures. So the legislatures did not experience criticism. When legislatures experience criticism, they oftentimes respond. If somehow the story had been framed differently, if the recipients of the direct value of an education had perceived it differently and spoken of differently, it's possible that this conversation would be a very, very different conversation, except for one thing. And I would suggest that Americans just don't do well with long terms. This is a long curve. And we just don't notice long curves because we don't value history. And if you don't value history, you can't plan for the future. So we don't grab on the long curves. We grab on really well the short ones. And we oftentimes interpret them as a huge crisis. It's always seemed to me that every American who ever lived lived during America's most dangerous moment, at least from their perspective. So if you live in that kind of culture, the long curves just aren't very visible. So I would argue it's probably not realistic to imagine that we would have stood up sometime in the first 10 years and said, hey, what you're doing is going to have really serious consequences. There's one more added component of this trend, and that is at the time when a number of state universities have fallen below 10% in the state support that they're getting, and a whole bunch of them have fallen below 20%, my own included, we see an increase in every state except for a couple of kids wanting to go to school. And I say kids, it's not just kids anymore, right? It's adults, it's returning veterans. It's people who got credits 10, 15 years ago and now want to get more credits. It's all kinds of people who are now creating a demand for higher education and that demand is coming as tuition rates are the highest in real dollars that they've ever been, and in being the highest in real dollars that they've ever been, they are also encountering huge demand. And that demand we should see as positive, but it's not playing out in a positive way. It's playing out negatively in two ways. State universities are not expanding the number of, let's call them, desks that they offer in ways to meet the demand. And secondly, the increased demand is fomenting a criticism and that criticism is aimed at who? It's aimed at us, right? We're not providing enough educational opportunities for the students of our state. Why should we get more support? We're not even doing a good job. Right now is the frame that is currently there. So in the first tendency, I would argue there were a number of narratives that were developed over time. All of those narratives saw us as the villain in the narrative rather than seeing us as the solution in the narrative. And the key actor in the narrative was never even in the narrative, was sort of left out of the narrative and therefore the opportunity for a public discourse that was a little more rational just did not come around. So trend number one, or tendency number one. Tendency number two, our 21st hour, in Mexico I'd say the North Americans, but of course I can't say that in English. So U.S. population is going to alter traditional notions not only of who is an American, but it's going to alter the self-image of what we do and who we offer it to. I arrived for the second time, my second hitch, so to speak, at Rutgers in 2008, which was the year that the percentage of white undergraduate students fell below 50% for the first time. And it stayed there. It's going to stay there until after I retire easily. But it was also the year that the percentage of women went above the percentage of men for the first time. And at Rutgers it's a long curve, right? We're going to be 250 years old in a few years. So it's the very first time that those two happen. Nobody that I talk to and none of the data I see says that's going to change any time soon. Is it having an effect? Yes, it's having a big effect. I know we are. It's having an effect on how we teach because they process information differently. Sometimes they come from a different set of assumptions and premises when we encounter them in the classroom. A whole bunch of things change that are not necessarily quantifiable but that affect the quality of delivery of higher education. So this is a very quick picture of New Jersey and the reason I put it up is that it is a window into what the United States is going to look like in the next 10, 15 years. So we have the third largest, Indian and Korean populations, fourth largest Chinese and Filipino populations. After New York we have this percentage of population. We have the largest Jewish population. We also have the largest Muslim population, right? And that doesn't appear to be an issue either in our schools nor in our communities. We also have what is now the largest of the two ethnic minorities that we identify in the U.S. as big ones. Latinos now constitute 16% of New Jersey's population. African Americans I think constitute 15%. So let's say they're the same. The largest population of Peruvians and Costa Ricans in the entire United States, more Cubans than outside of Florida, and of labor force growth in the next 10, 15 years this says five years, but even longer than that they're going to constitute 66% of the growth which tells you something about both immigration to the state and birth rates, right? And which of all the groups I've got up here which group has the highest dropout rate from high school, that group, right? So the challenge for the state is you're growing the fastest among a group of people who also take their kids out of school before they graduate which takes them out of the pipeline for a university education. And what could easily happen to New Jersey who already happened in California which has the same issue is that over time as that happens those people become voters and taxpayers and they don't want to support higher education because they're not getting it. They're not entering it. Why should they have to pay for it? And it becomes a really difficult situation to come in contending with one's own population. Nationally the trend data is fairly clear although it evokes a number of very interesting contradictory if you will theories. One is that by the time that this happens in 2050 although some of us think it's probably going to happen a bit sooner than that maybe as early as 2040 in the 2040 census that's largely going to be unnoticeable because America is such a powerful assimilationist culture that it's going to draw those people in in the way that it has drawn people in before and these just aren't going to be issues that we have to deal with. The other theory says, yeah if you look at the literature people said that in 1890. They said that in the 1830s and in each case what happened was that these groups entered American society they became a mainstream but American society was transformed by them as well. So it isn't as if one absorbs the other without exhibiting some kind of transformation. My favorite story these days is Nancy and I were recently with a nephew and our son and some other kids camping in the Adirondacks and we went into a grocery store and these tiny little, if you've been up there these little tiny tunnels, little tiny grocery stores we walk into the grocery store and while they're shopping I'm wandering around and across the entire back row are a whole row, the entire store of piñatas all on the top row so I thought well this is pretty neat and came down and I said gosh you must have a big Mexican population here somewhere thinking in my mind where is the next taco stand that we can go to and she looked at me like I was from Pluto and said there's no Mexicans that live here and I said what about all those piñatas back there because everybody uses them for their birthday parties so society absorbs and changes at the same time and this is a real tiny little example but it happens in a lot of other ways so that means we have to change as universities and have to change in a way that we're aware of how we're responding and how we ourselves are changing that change is not going to be uniform these are metropolitan areas that also have a number of universities in them, they're all university towns and in every case they're not one university town they're multiple university towns and every one of them is going to look somewhat different from the other in terms of who the demographics of its population are and as that happens those universities are going to have a choice they can either engage or not engage if they don't engage they may be following a kind of interpretation that says we're a national university we serve the whole country we don't really have to be concerned with exactly what's happening in our town that's not a new theory or they can choose to engage if they engage they will be engaging somewhat differently across the state so one prediction would be if our universities adapt they're going to become more dissimilar from each other in significant ways and that has direct implications for their libraries as we go forward okay so that's trend number two demographic changes are underway they have consequences some of which are easy to see but some of which are not so apparent they all have implications not only for our universities but for our university libraries so the states are indeed rethinking their relations I shouldn't have rethinking in there because I don't think much thinking has gone into this at all actually they're activating but they're not necessarily thinking very hard about it but the combination of withdrawal from higher education and equivocacy toward public libraries which I'm going to show you in a minute is going to challenge how we think the ideals of public education are so I've got this up here to make the point that it's not only universities that are experiencing state support or public support withdrawal right what we have across the United States is either stagnation in funding or decline in funding in some way somebody's here from Nebraska right we've got somebody from Nebraska okay alright so they're increasing their libraries but nobody else is doing anything like that right all the others are cutting back and it used to be that the concentration per hundred thousand, libraries per hundred thousand in the U.S. was early on most evident in cities throughout the 20th century that changed so that it was most evident in rural areas and what we're seeing now is a withdrawal in rural areas as well that's about the profession so let's think a little bit about these first two tendencies and the third in how it affects the profession okay so against that population in New Jersey which will soon be minority majority population those who are there in effect intellectual servants don't look like that we talk a lot about diversity we talk a lot about the value of diversity in my faculty we talk about it I know Mary Ann is very keen on pushing as much many diversity policies as possible in the library but in the end we have to look at who are we and where are we and what can we do to create a future force of librarians that doesn't look like this I think that is a very very difficult and emotional challenge to take up to say okay I'm in my mid 60s it's time for you to step aside you're bald you're old you're fat get out of the way let some young hungry athletic kids step in and do the job for you that will probably do better that's one thing to say that and I can't deny anything any of those if I look in the mirror and I don't see it my daughter will certainly remind me whenever she comes over to say let's find somebody who's not like me let's find somebody who doesn't think like me let's find somebody who has a whole different cultural experience and have them step in and run my institution and have me step out of the way I think that is very very tough I see it on my faculty as much as they try it's a very tough thing to do I've seen it on other faculties it's just very difficult but I'd say there is we have to confront the past and the future at the same time these two slides are about change what I'm doing is I'm condensing a whole lot of data and when you condense a whole lot of data it sort of gets a little funny sometimes because I'm only I'm only doing four slides I think here in this nonetheless what you see is a the only group that's had any kind of increase in percentages now I go back here and you can see increase in percentages does necessarily start with a big base increase in percentages have been Latino librarians I'm not sure why you know as a Latino who's an academic I'm not not quite sure why that is but I do see the data and I find it intriguing especially when you look at the others and see what's happening at the others total numbers are probably not up as most university libraries and public libraries have tended to do the same thing there was a time when the director of HR had an MLS the director of HR in a lot of places doesn't have an MLS now the kind of professionalization has taken place that has shrunk the percentage of professional potential librarians that's changed the work force maybe that's had something to do with this I don't really know that's the direction the age group is going so it's not only 90% of the work force is white it's also a rapidly aging work force so how many of you here consider yourselves rapidly aging absolutely and you know when you're a male you know you're rapidly aging when the hair starts not growing here but growing out of the top of your nose or from your ears or some place like that which makes you a really old man as my daughter calls me so nonetheless there's the change there's the demand of the change there's the time when we would be here and let out all of these concerns that one day there just weren't going to be any librarians that doesn't appear to be the case most of us are deadly afraid of retiring anyway it doesn't appear to be the case but that transition is going to take place and when that transition is going to take place somebody is going to step in and the question is are we managing the pipeline of who's going to step in I run a library school and I would love to stand here and tell you that my library school has been able to recruit all kinds of diverse students and I can tell you they have and they've tried but our percentages probably aren't any different from what you see there the percentages going to library school are smaller than the percentages in the population or in the university population even we're not attracting even our share if you will of the crowd so without and I'm going to talk about bringing people into the profession here for a second and suggest some strategies which have been circulating for some time without aggressive recruitment among diverse students we don't get them and aggressive recruitment doesn't just mean grabbing somebody by the lapels and say go to library school damn it it means thinking about what it is that motivates them differently one of the characteristics that makes it very difficult to recruit Latino students to go away to college is they come from communal large families and those clans stay together by keeping people together and so when a Latino student drops out of high school we see them as a failure they see them as a hero because they're helping the economy of the clan so unless we engage that and come to terms with it and work it in somehow we're not going to have particular success if we bump up against that and that's just one example of all kinds of examples of different ethnic groups of how to bring them in that we probably haven't thought about a whole lot so I'm going to say first tap the pipeline I think the key really is in the pipeline we have to expand the potential tool if we're going to change the profile of who's going to be around this table 10-15 years from now and if we're going to increase the numbers coming in and I'm going to suggest that that pipeline starts with what got you into the profession and what got you into the profession in something like 90% of all the interviews that we've conducted is you experience working in a library being part of a library at some point when you were young either in high school or in college or something like that and you made friends with some of the librarians you found out how fascinating it was you really liked it and you decided to pursue it that's going to work with those other kids as well they have to be brought in through the same pipeline that created you and the pipeline that created you didn't start the day you went into an M&L program it started much earlier than that and it started in a very emotional affective way so recruiting students into internships and libraries bringing them into the research library making them part of the whole process turns out to be very important we can do this with faculty too reaching into the pipeline also works with faculty but that's my problem those experiences make a big difference and it isn't just bringing them in you have to engage them the kid who's just putting books into shelves isn't necessarily discovering the magic of the library somebody has to engage them and bring them in and talk to them and let them see other aspects of it as well that's not just a matter of cheap labor we can engage undergraduates especially so I think for research libraries it begins with undergraduates who come into the research library and see that it's not at all what perhaps they thought about we also have to confront graduate school and that turns out to be pretty tough ALA has a spectrum scholars program which works magnificently for a very small number of people we've got to figure out a way to increase the volume and to do so in a number of ways that brings those folks into graduate school in a successful way the hardest thing to overcome is a cohort of students who weren't successful and then tell others that the place stung that's very hard to overcome it takes decades to overcome that kind of repetition our research libraries have to change those spaces that increasingly are crowded with students I walk into Alexander Library and I'm amazed that I haven't heard anybody yet because I step over people when I'm walking around not only that but avoiding putting my foot into pizza containers and all kinds of stuff there are just a lot of kids in that library we have to go from study hall to collaborative space that library also has to become the place where students come and do work and collaborate have the technology have access to all kinds of information that enhances what they're experiencing as undergraduates number two we have to in the era of big data which is the era that we've entered I would suggest that research libraries should become the places where that huge amount of data that's being put together is not only housed and distributed and managed but is also taught that we can add value to the university by saying we know you got big data here and big data there if we bring it together not only can we gather economies we can create more creative opportunities for people to think about this and we'll teach even more people how to take advantage of it we can do that we've done it before we can certainly do that and then third the humanities of the 21st century are only going to be as good as the unique collections you find you put together university libraries have been putting together unique collections for a long time but the value of university library in the future I'm going to suggest is no longer going to be ranked by the number of volumes it's going to be ranked in different ways and one of the things that's going to be ranked in is by the unique and valuable character of the collections that it brings together and what are they I don't know but I know that the humanities depend on that finally three realities I want to quote from Phyllis Dain who some of you may remember at Columbia she said at an Elise meeting in 1990 university is no longer a quiet place to teach and do scholarly work at a measured pace and contemplate the universe that's the university actually I thought I was joining when I became an academic in 1976 it is big, complex, demanding competitive, bureaucratic and chronically short of money and within about a year I figured out that's the kind of university I had actually joined Jane Jacobs said city areas with flourishing diversity sprout strange and unpredictable uses and peculiar scenes but this is not a drawback of diversity this is the point I'm going to suggest that regardless of what happens at the Supreme Court diversity is important because that's just the way we are and it is our fundamental human asset and we ought to be doing something with it and then finally Alfred North Whitehead what he said in 1938 is true 80 years later and that is that our task as a university is indeed to create the future thank you very much thank you very much good afternoon everyone I'm going to start with a story about how my professional career and research interests were shaped by demographics in 1996 I was fortunate to attend an ARL Institute on Human Resources Stanley Wilder was a keynote speaker and he presented to us the results of his research into the aging patterns of our profession his most memorable quote in demographic terms librarianship in North America is a profession apart librarians are as a group substantially older than those incomparable professions and they are aging at a much faster rate he went on to to know that at that time 63% of librarians were over 45 years of age versus 39% incomparable professions and all of this was very interesting however Wilder had also analyzed the Canadian ARL data separately from the American and he went on to stress that the Canadian ARL population was conspicuously old even by ARL standards and so it became a little joke at the HR Institute for American Colleagues to walk up to me and say something like gosh Kathleen you don't look any older than the average ARL librarian as I wasn't at that time anywhere near the age range that Wilder was talking about it was great fun for them and not so much for me they made me think I went home to the University of Alberta started looking at our demographics locally and talking to my colleagues about what this meant for us and also for the Canadian Library workforce and we decided we needed to examine this workforce at a more granular level and collect data to act as a benchmark for the future this became the ADAR's research study of course future thinking is what this forum is all about what should our organizations be like what are we preparing for as this fall forum acknowledges staffing is the most important factor therefore I would argue that it is vital to keep a prize of labour market information as well as more local demographic factors as we well know we don't have the luxury of creating new organizations or deciding who is recruited into the profession as Jorge was just saying the key is in the pipeline or completely hiring a fresh so the seeds of our future staffing are already germinating and I believe that the ways in which we pay attention to the emergent workforce as well as our current staffing complement its composition, its skills and development are key to the 21st century library workforce I'm going to do two things this afternoon to follow up on Jorge's talk first I'm going to talk about our ADAR's research that I was involved in which was a look at supply and demand of the library workforce labour market information essentially that included demographics this was the work that was inspired by the wilder story I related a few moments ago and then I'm going to talk about how we use demographic information and knowledge of our own staffing needs at the University of Alberta to develop a new vision for service and to change our public service and staffing model I would like to acknowledge at the outset that the work I'm talking about I was deeply involved in but also included the thinking and participation of many others and including the chairmanship of Ernie Ingalls who is in the audience today in that vein when we were in the middle of our study about 2004 we talked to Dr. Jose Marie Griffith and Don King who were embarking upon the IMLS funded study the future of libraries in the workforce I've never seen their data or final report but if any of you have any information about it I'm really glad to hear it because it would be interesting to do some comparisons between Canadian and American data and see if we have a common structure to our respective workforces I suspect that we do especially with regards to large research libraries and it would be interesting to see the commonalities as well as the differences and the reasons for them so this was our starting question what demographics and labour market trends do we need to explore so that we can better understand the needs and staffing composition and also develop strategies for planning and decision making we were thinking pretty big by 2003 there was a lot of crisis talk and hype in the literature about workforce shortages in libraries in Canada as well as in the US for example an article that appeared in 2000 in the Canadian Quill Enquirer indicated that 48% of librarians could retire by the year 2005 so this engendered a lot of crisis talk but the ADARS team didn't just want to study projected retirements we wanted to reframe the discussion and so instead our focus became labour market trends and the whole of the Canadian Library workforce in the process we learned that there wasn't a clear succession crisis but there were some issues of urgency recruitment rather than retirement as I've said needed to become the focus the conversation needed to change from questions about numbers of retirements to defining the positions, the skills and abilities we need in our organizations and the strategies for moving into recruitment as soon as we had the opportunity to do so competencies, particularly management and leadership competencies were defined as key within library organizations workloads and job stress needed to be monitored given the budget problems and resulting laws of positions through most of the 1990s it wasn't unusual that library staff would feel the results of a retrenchment role overlap between librarians and paraprofessionals was increasing and this continued to need some thoughtful oversight and finally the diversity of our Canadian Library workforce was also an issue that needed some attention through discussion with many colleagues from different library sectors this then became our objective this comprehensive investigation of issues around the ADARS now recruitment, retention retirement, I'm sure you would all have a sense of what those were about as well as remuneration it was Ernie Ingalls who coined the term repatriation this was the question of whether or not we could repatriate those library school graduates that we had lost from Canada during the 1990s many of our graduates went to the states and other places reaccreditation did we need some formal way of recrediting professionals at points in their career rejuvenation what were what was happening in terms of professional development and finally restructuring so when positions became vacant in libraries were those positions filled as they had been in the past probably not there was probably a lot of restructuring that was going on and we wanted to probe that as well the project scope it was a three year study that we undertook we ended up with a number of data tables I'm going to summarize some of that data for you this afternoon over 900 variables and a report that we published that you'll see the URL for a little bit later and a number of analyses of our data by library sector and by sub sector because remember this was the whole of the Canadian library so it also included other library sectors such as public libraries and special libraries we used a variety of methods including analyses of existing data stats Canada, statistics Canada and library school graduate data telephone interviews with senior library administrators focus groups with representatives from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and the Canadian Urban Libraries Council these are the largest employers of library workers in Canada with the exception of the federal government we had print surveys for library institutions and web based surveys that professional librarians and paraprofessional that were directed to professional librarians and paraprofessional library staff both of our surveys employed multi stage random sampling strategies to ensure representation from all library sectors and geographic areas sample sizes and response rates were sufficient to allow confidence in our findings let me turn now to some of the things we learned about the Canadian Library workforce first of all workforce demographics and perceptions of work we collected information about age, gender number of staff in supervisory management roles which turned out to be 62% of librarians Union density 67% of librarians 29% of paraprofessional staff are represented by unions in Canada longevity and career and employment status along with other many other characteristics it's no surprise to us of course that we are a female dominated profession with 80% of librarians and 90% of our paraprofessional staff being female in Canada our visible minorities and Aboriginal peoples make up very small percentages of our population of library workers Canada's employment equity legislation defines four designated groups in employment women, visible minorities persons with disabilities and Aboriginal peoples recruitment of women into the library workforce is obviously not a problem but we found that the other groups specifically visible minorities and Aboriginal peoples were underrepresented across all types of libraries with disabilities were almost non-existent library workforce additionally we found that few libraries recognize the credentials of immigrant librarians looking at age of library staff a little bit more closely at the time of our study about 25% of all librarians and 20% of all paraprofessionals were age 55 or older compared to 11% of Canadian workforce as a whole are indeed an older workforce and just as Wilder found librarians are older than comparable professions examined as a whole our entire library workforce is much older than the Canadian labor force so it's evident that we are in competition with other sectors for a supply of workers and we can also see that it's likely that all types of libraries are in competition for workers at the same time the study also looked at a number of variables associated with job satisfaction and workload manageability and other stress factors overall job satisfaction for both librarians and paraprofessionals is fairly high this can and should be used as a promotional element to help attract individuals to the profession and to the library workforce these satisfaction levels also hold by career stage as I mentioned we analyzed our data according to a number of elements most of the data we broke down by recent entrance mid-career and then senior senior staff or senior librarians so with satisfaction level 78% of recent entrance 75% mid-career and 81% of senior librarians are satisfied or highly satisfied with their jobs a multivariate regression analysis of the major contributors to job satisfaction revealed that the two single most important factors for both professionals and paraprofessionals are that they are treated with respect by their superiors and that they work in a job that allows them to grow and learn new skills the respect factor was really significant in in the findings and in fact at one point I remember we mused whether or not we should go back and make a 9th R which was respect and do more probing about that that it is so important to library staff to be able to develop professionally is a very positive finding since it fits well with the dynamic trends of a changing library sector having seen high satisfaction levels library administrators and supervisors need to carefully watch both workload and job stress which appeared to be increasing for both librarians and paraprofessionals now these are perceptions and we did not measure workload over time but when asked to compare to 5 years previous 55% of mid-career and senior librarians agreed that they were having to work harder and 67% agreed their job was more stressful and as we will see in a few moments and a few slides on library administrators stated that an important and difficult to fulfill competency in recruitment is the ability to handle a high volume workload so it seemed fairly clear that administrators recognized that workloads were very demanding with respect to recruitment to the profession we found that positive exposure to libraries and librarians is the best predictor of librarianship as a career choice and there were no significant differences in the original motivations for choosing the professional librarian career between new professionals and senior librarians there were many kinds of motivations bringing people to libraries many respondents indicated reasons for choosing the profession that are in alignment with the values of librarianship such as an appreciation for learning research and serving the public good turning to recruitment in the various library sectors we found that carl libraries in particular were not experiencing any problems in recruitment but this was in contrast to the academic and public libraries who did feel that they were in competition with the carl libraries and other academic libraries we looked at three different scenarios of retirement distribution for our supply and demand equation assuming static retirement ages of 60, 62 and 65 respectively if librarians retired younger this would have meant a spike of retirements by 2009 and then 2014 however if librarians on the whole delayed retirements the number of retirements would be spread out over a longer period of time and this is what we believe we see happening now as we suspect that the average age of retirement is near to 65 or more and our data had shown that most senior librarians or those nearing retirement age really didn't feel strongly either way about their age of retirement and that they would be influenced by personal financial factors as well as organizational policies and practices these predictions of future supply are based on our age of retirement at 62 scenario it assumes that the library environment remains completely static so no expansion or decrease in library school seats or in positions within library organizations no loss of graduates to other labor markets no increased demand for library workers it's an artificial situation but it does illustrate that the supply to 2009 of new librarians to replace departures due to retirement was predicted to have the capacity to fill 98% of current librarian positions and the capacity to replace library technicians at 99% the longer term supply to new librarians to replace departures due to retirement is predicted to have the capacity to fill 89% of the current librarian positions and the capacity for technician positions is identical so assuming that the scenario of retirement age 62 was holding supply and demand should have been pretty much in balance and as we see today we find what we might turn an oversupply of new librarians so clearly the age 62 scenario did not hold that was our best guess at the time labor force supply and demand isn't just about numbers however there are questions around what competencies abilities and experience are lost when senior librarians retire we asked a series of questions about what administrators thought they would lose when librarians retired and a list of 23 competencies was given to respondents asking the competencies that were most important and most difficult to fill of the 23 competencies that respondents were asked to review the highest ranked of the most important and difficult to fill competencies when recruiting were leadership potential managerial skills ability to respond flexibly to change environmental high volume workload and innovation overall libraries said they experienced greater difficulties in replacing leadership qualities lost than technical skills and knowledge as well 46% of libraries stated their current pool of internal candidates was inadequate to replace lost leadership qualities which was a pretty poor reflection of recruitment practice in my books we had a number of questions that probed level of interest in leadership management functions and we found some interesting inconsistencies though the current and predicted future demand are high for librarians to perform managerial functions and those 6 out of 10 librarians stated that they were currently working as managers or supervisors only 44% of librarians indicated that it was important for them to be able to manage a service or department and even fewer 36% provided the same response for supervising others luckily interest in leadership is more apparent 62% of librarians expressed interest in performing a leadership role it's also interesting to note that in response to the open-ended question about motivation for choosing librarianship no responded indicated interest in managing libraries or supervising others as their reason for joining the profession given the demand for leadership and management competencies it's also interesting to turn to a graph on the type of training provided to librarians it's evident that the numbers of libraries offering training in management and leadership skills doesn't match the demand for these roles most training is for technology and job related skills we found that traditional librarian duties are being taken on in an increasing capacity by paraprofessional staff about 78% of institutions reported that paraprofessionals have taken on more of these responsibilities over the past five years and 77% of libraries said that paraprofessionals would have to take on more traditional librarian duties in the future so role shift between the two groups is you know it's happening and it's predicted to continue in the future so in the end we could see a number of challenges arising from this study recruitment to our profession of course isn't just solely about numbers it is about qualities and competencies that question of who we want to be in our libraries retirements offer a great deal of opportunity but can we capitalize upon them can we change sufficiently to allow our libraries to encompass all of the things that they the new things that they need to and the we also need to recognize that shifts in workload as well as the potential of staff workload is is going to continue to be a factor and we need to redesign services and processes in order to better meet the needs of faculty and students so there are also a number of implications arising from the study at the time that the study was published we couldn't see any imminent crisis in library staff supply and demand and we hope that we redirected the discussion from that of retirement to one of recruitment and need the competencies of all staff obviously we want to attract the best and the brightest to the profession and to individual libraries and again just to repeat what Jorge said earlier you know the key really is in that pipeline we need to ensure that strong candidate gets strong candidates get leadership and management development opportunities and that there is understanding that these are necessary roles within our organization and we need to focus on competencies and skills development of all staff and how are we going to predict what those competencies are I know there's a great deal of work been done on competencies certainly we've done a lot of work at the University of Alberta on our standards and competencies but the question is you know how well are we calling those and are we how are we forecasting the future and what we need this whole question of shifting roles I think myself that it's probably more so one of segmentation of responsibilities rather than paraprofessionals taking on librarian roles but we need to continue to pay attention to that and we need to really think about succession planning holistically right from the bottom to the top of the organization including you know the new roles and responsibilities that we need and acknowledging that we need to plan for that more diverse workforce and how do we get that diversity that we need and that our institutions need this is some of the sources that you can turn to to learn more about the data that we collected and published as you will see when you look at the reports most of the forecasts go to 2014 and we are currently looking for funding and I'm looking at my Carl colleagues as I say this to resurvey key variables and see if our predictions about what might happen have been born out and also what lies ahead I'd now like to turn briefly to talk about how our demographics impacted our thinking on library services at the University of Alberta and I would stress that local demographics are an important evidence base for making staffing and institutional decisions again a number of people were part of this effort you'll see listed some of the colleagues that joined me in the original thinking but it began with one library and we moved the model to all of our libraries so again many others were involved in this work in 2006 we were looking carefully at our staff demographics on average the average age of our staff was hovering around 53, 54 and we could see that we would be facing retirements over the next 5 to 7 years and this would be particularly not exclusively but certainly would be impacting our public service areas we knew this was an opportunity to rethink the composition of our staff complement our professional staff were telling us that they were experiencing pressures to do more liaison work as well as more instruction and many of them were experimenting with embedded services in academic departments they wanted to continue to do reference work but there were activities that were taking them away from the reference desk for long periods of time as with all academic libraries we could also see that the volume of our transactional services whether it was reference or circulation was changing just to give you an example in 99, 2000 our circulation stats were over a million transactions by 2006, 2007 we did slightly over 650,000 in a new service scenario we could also see a very viable place for self-service technologies and we also saw from live call comments that our quality of service was uneven it could vary depending upon the time of day and the service point that was approached all of these factors led us to begin a discussion of how we could fill positions how we should fill positions as he became vacant the current service model and how we might change it to provide better service overall and we called this situation the perfect storm just a word about us to give you a sense of the size of the University of Alberta in case you're not familiar with us around 36,000 students overall and as you can see we have about 82 professionals around 200 support staff and a number of casual student workers 11th in the ARL investment index and eight libraries with two libraries so we're a large and fairly decentralized in terms of our public service a fairly decentralized system this became our service vision that each library would have one service desk open all hours that the library was open so when the library was open service would be available there wouldn't ever be a situation where you would walk in and not find someone available to you services staff, librarians and paraprofessionals would provide information, technology and library use customer services so at that one service desk all questions would be focused the desk would be staff to meet user demand to ensure a time they respond so we looked a lot at our service peaks, our scheduling and really tried to ensure that that students, faculty whomever came through our doors weren't waiting for students to come to the desk there was someone there to aid them and we also redeveloped a group of staff that we called our access services staff to ensure that processing and handling of library materials continued during all open hours so just because you came into the library in the evening that didn't mean that something couldn't be retrieved for you if you needed it so this single service desk model involved both paraprofessionals and integrated circulation reference and technology support service to all users implementation was critical we put major effort into recruiting high level paraprofessional workers and providing the necessary training we also developed standards and competencies for all staff working on the desk and procedures for referral and expert consultation now librarians spend approximately half the time on the public services desk that they did previously but are still contributing training and mentoring the other desk staff they are also available for expert referral and consultation these are some of the outcomes that we have achieved just going to let you look at them for a moment as we wind up here and one final note if you want to think more about managing demographic risk I would point you to an excellent article that appeared in the Harvard business review that talks about the dual threats of capacity risk and productivity risk which is mostly what our service desk intervention was about and how we can strategically deal with these risks so that's the end and time for questions before we head to questions let me just summarize very briefly a couple of other statistics as we're thinking about the changes we're seeing and what our 21st century library workforce will look like given the background that we have just heard I decided to take a look at the median ARL library the one that only exists in our statistics and in the last 10 years the median ARL library has gone from 262 to 242 positions and we have been working with ARL with automation but we are certainly have decreased the size of our workforce we have also on the other hand our institutions have been increasing the size of our student enrollment and so we are serving more students while we have fewer positions diversity as we have mentioned has remained rather stable in our libraries 14.1% and 0708 and 0.2% in 2010 years of experience we know that massive retirements did not occur we do have we have fewer people a little bit lower percentage of people with more than 20 years of experience but we also have fewer people with less than 3 years of experience and so our population is centering somewhat as for I pointed out there is a disconnect between our students and our workforce we have fewer positions fewer retirements fewer new hires potentially and yet we are dealing with a changing national student population that is going to impact the kinds of services we have to provide and one of the things that we haven't touched on but will be a part of the discussions for the rest of this forum today and tomorrow is that our undergraduates are changing and if you have read academically a drift we are going to be on college campuses which just came out last year the study that was done based on the collegiate learning assessment that is a test that is given every two years so you are dealing with freshmen and end of their sophomore or beginning of their junior year 45% of the students across the US in higher education showed no improvement in learning for critical skills including critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that is a very scary statistic out there the highly selective schools taking really bright people they are still bright people two years later that's a good thing but as we expand who is coming into higher ed in some ways we are finding that our education may not be getting the results we want students see themselves as consumers we all know that and according to the authors they are as we know seeking the benefit they can get for the least amount of effort I don't think that's really new seems like students have been doing that for a very long time but they are having fewer interactions with faculty outside of their classrooms they are not as challenged academically on the undergraduate level they may be writing less than 20 pages a semester and a course and so as we mentioned our faculty are rewarded for their research productivity in many places teaching they may be undervalued and yet we are trying to create our future workforce in higher education so our challenge that we are facing that we will be talking about is that our undergraduates may be coming out without necessarily having the skills that we want them to have but they also are spending less time on research and academics we know there is a decrease in traditional library services as we just mentioned and one of the scary things that employers are noting in a 2006 survey only 16% of new graduates excelled at writing and 28% excelled in critical thinking and this is where we are going to draw our workforce but there are opportunities and we have already mentioned them library spaces are very important on our campuses we know they are well used our 24x7 access is very important we know people who are accessing the materials electronically we know teaching information literacy skills is going to be crucial particularly as we look at those statistics of students not learning writing or critical thinking skills and we know we are moving our staff from a collection center to a service center perspective so with that very brief summary it has gone to its own little thing let me open the floor for questions and see what kinds of comments or questions you have based on what our speakers have said to us the microphones are in the centers of the room and on either end I'm Ron Larson from the University of Pittsburgh and I wanted to reflect a little bit on Jorge's comments in particular Jorge I always enjoy the perspective you bring on issues like demographic and you do extremely well but what most people may not know is that Jorge and I have a competition each year around trying to hire diverse faculty at our respective schools and the bad news is he usually wins and I think this is actually a real serious problem not that he wins but that the pool is so hugely small there's a couple typically African American and Latino PhDs that graduate in our field each year and we're all kind of a food fight to try to get them to our campuses meanwhile my provost continues to remind me that I need to recruit more diverse faculty and more diverse students and as I would love to do that but I think we need some more creative approaches than to just identify the problem and so I'd like to kind of get some thinking about that when I was walking in here this afternoon I happened to come in at the same time that Don Waters from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation was coming in and Don's been a very strong supporter of the information schools efforts to expand diversity so one thing we're trying to do in fact before I get into that I think a minute to go back when I look at our own schools history of success in recruiting diverse faculty and students many of you will recall a gentleman by the name of E.J. Josie Pittsburgh many years ago he was a phenomenal person at bringing in African American students into our program because he was out there passionately recruiting them we thought this was kind of a natural state of affairs until he retired and then our student body immediately went white again it really needs some kind of an aggressive proactive effort so thanks to Don Waters he has been sponsoring the information schools now a process program we call the iSchool Inclusion Institute which tries to get at this problem from a very long term perspective we try to recruit undergraduate students from Hispanic and African American populations to a year long process of mentorship at summer institutes with the idea of trying to ultimately show them that they can succeed in graduate school and they can become faculty themselves and they can draw students into this effort as well but as Don has mentioned and his colleagues at the Mellon Foundation have mentioned that's a program that maybe has a 10-year possibility of modest success and this evening we need a whole lot more programs like that and perhaps other ones that we haven't thought about that are more creative so Corey you're great with numbers you're great at bringing the student or the faculty that I would love to bring to Pittsburgh to Rutgers and I would like to hear some conversations some of your thoughts about other things we might be able to do to address the dramatic demographic issues that we're all going to be confronting the best competitors I think are worthy competitors Ron is a very worthy competitor there are two things in a faculty that genuinely has good will and a desire to bring in more diverse colleagues and that is faculty have a tendency to want to hire people in a very mural sense they're looking for people to do certain things and when they do that they shrink the pool and when you shrink the pool the likelihood of finding minorities and it becomes even smaller so they inadvertently tend to shrink consider applicants and that makes the pool of minorities even smaller so one solution to that is recruit broadly convince your faculty, convince your colleagues that even if they don't fit a particular spot but having them on the faculty is still beneficial and recruit broadly and keep in mind that these same faculty and colleagues are people who will tell you that the more mixed up our thinking group is the better our ideas are and it isn't as if they don't understand the value of diversity it's that they tend to look quite narrowly when they look the second thing that happens is the candidates identified you start negotiating to hire faculty to get wind of it and they come in and say how can you pay that person that much money because we're not making that much money and they are fundamentally mixing up qualifications with the nature of special labor pools when you're looking for somebody regardless of who they are and they have something you want you've automatically taken them out of the general labor pool and put them into a special labor negotiation and in that one the rules are different so because you really want to bring that person in so when you really want to bring that person in our experience is you do what's necessary to bring that person in and you try to work with faculty around it there was a time since I've been around for a while when that happened faculty would take it out on the candidate and they would do things that were appalling to the candidate. I don't think we're there at this point in our in our history but we're still where faculty don't necessarily understand why you're going so aggressively after somebody and that's got to be, got to be explained we want to change our workforce we got to do it so part of it, the other part is what Ron said is absolutely true he comes down and says I see you had a hiring you hired some people this year and you didn't bring in any minorities what's the matter you know and you got to explain when you explain that you tried or whatever well if you don't do any next year maybe you won't get to hire so many people because I've got other people over here who do want to hire and I've only got a limited number of lines so performance is also connected and that's also hard to communicate to faculty you know most faculties performance concerns are about themselves not about the dean and deans come and go as far as they're concerned so those are issues I think we need to be more alert to and you know as aggressive as we are maybe we need to be more aggressive Kathleen did you have a comment yeah I would just like to say that in terms of our data as I mentioned we found that positive exposure to libraries and librarians was the best predictor of librarianship is career choice so I would like to suggest that we really need to ally with our school and public library colleagues and ensure that they are talking to students from you know from diverse populations and encouraging them as well as it being you know something that all of us can think about doing but you know getting people you know into that pipeline is really key and positive experience is going to keep them there Jay. Jay Schaefer you Mass Amherst Kathleen I was interested in your discussion about paraprofessionals taking on more professional duties and I think that was true at a time but now at least in our institution we have more downsizing of paraprofessional and clerical positions and a greater need for new professional positions librarians and other kinds of professionals to do new kinds of 21st century library work and so I see the trend as being the paraprofessional and clerical side going down and the professional side growing I don't know if that's just us or a trend. Yeah I think that there is something that's happening there and I agree with that I also you know you always wish when you have a data set that you could go back and probe further and ask the questions a little bit better. I suspect myself that what was primarily happening was around segmentation of responsibilities so you know if you are looking at a function whatever it is acquisitions perhaps you know the paraprofessional staff are taking on more higher level responsibilities but in the end there is still that portion of responsibilities that professional staff need to perform so I think that that's what was happening rather than just kind of this wholus bolus you know role shift and I do I do agree with you I think that because of some of the changes in post-secondary education Jorge talked about you know big science and big data and all of those other things that we are looking at you know very different professional positions than we've had in the past so I think that that is more of an emphasis now and yes something that deserves further exploration I agree Ruth Jackson from the University of California Riverside in terms of recruiting the best and the brightest into the field there hasn't been very much mention of the salary challenge in the data that you collected for a book chapter that I was writing last year I surveyed members of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the salary challenge was one factor that was listed I think it was the second highest factor in terms of why African Americans are not coming into the field the way they did at one time they have other opportunities and when they are looking at salaries they like to go into a field that pays more when you have the master's degree and I really think that I'm not quite sure what the solution is but I do know that historically in the early stages of our field the major professional associations did do salary surveys to make comparisons of other disciplines that required the same level of education as librarians and it may be time to do that again I know we've been working on salaries but just looking across the board we do pay fairly low for someone with a master's degree when you compare that degree with some other areas like social work I'll just mention one and at that time a survey was also done of librarians in terms of the best and the brightest and at that time our IQ the typical IQ of a librarian was equal to that of an engineer you know I don't know if that still exists but I just think we need to do more work as a field to look at the issues preventing minorities from coming in Thank you, any response? Yeah, a couple of thoughts I'm glad you brought it up for one thing We've, when I talk to our vice president for admissions who is very concerned about African Americans especially using a lot of experience with that but also other minority groups entering college he mentions a couple of things and that is that undergraduates make decisions on the basis not of data but urban myth right, they tend to choose a college on the basis of who sweatshirt they like the best they tend to choose a major on the basis of what their friends tell them is either easy or hard or fun or whatever the variable that they are choosing they tend to recognize certain majors above others when those majors produce public intellectuals so when they go on TV or the parents are watching a program somebody comes on and says I got an engineering degree at such and such a university people think, 18 year olds think they know who engineers are they think they know who scientists are they think they know who business people are they're not so sure about everybody else on top of that in regards to minority access to undergraduate education a large number of at least those that we experience are the first in their family to go to college when you're the first in your family to go to college college isn't a place where you come and find yourself college is a place where your parents are putting a lot of expectations on you and one of them is you better goddamn well make more money than I put into sending you to college, right that already shifts the playing field it shifts the playing field in the direction of the majors that kids push themselves into later when they find they're not well suited for they're not happy in it, they make a change and that change can be a life crisis because their family may not necessarily have been tracking it and being very sympathetic so there is a tendency for a lot of minority kids to gravitate to majors that they either that they and their parents understand or think they understand or they think they understand the income drawn in where they think they're going to be able to have a long lifetime in terms of making making money now, so one lesson I think for us is we need public intellectuals out there who say I'm a librarian, I do need stuff and these are some things to learn about it and not just showing up on PBS no disrespect intended but showing up on PBS to tell you what books to read to some, you know that's important but it's also important to show up and recognize all the different things we do and project members of the profession as public intellectuals who will speak about that in public, so who's talking about big data computer scientists are talking about big data well they shouldn't be the only ones talking about big data not the only ones engaged in dealing with big data we're engaged in dealing with big data and we ought to be out there so we need to produce these public intellectuals and support them and when we do more kids coming in we'll say oh yeah I could be that be that as well the part that you said about IQs absolutely true there's no data that shows that better IQs do this lower IQs do that once they're in college the distribution is different that's all people just spread themselves out in all kinds of different ways what we do see though is that middle class kids experience university life much differently from working class kids the risk of failure is far, far higher for working class kids the expectation of success is far, far higher for working class kids so if those are the populations we're drawing from it would be good to have counseling available to have librarians talking to kids about that to talk the language they're talking and engage the subjects that they're engaging in the way they perceive them yeah I would just like to agree with that we are never going to be able to compete in national labour markets on the basis of salary that's I just don't think I'm going to be something that we're ever going to see but you know just going back to something I said previously our job satisfaction levels are very, very high in this profession and that's the word that we need to get out that this is a great profession you can have a great career and do all of those exciting things that Horia was talking about so I mean I think that's our attractant right there Brian Brian Schachlender from UC San Diego question for Kathleen maybe I'm the only one in the room maybe I'm not I was interested that you didn't comment on this to have been struck by what seems to me like a fairly obvious correlation between the relative longevity of those in the profession and their relatively free of satisfaction doesn't that sort of seem like a no-brainer yeah I guess I guess it does as I said when we looked at the data we always segmented it by you know stage of library career and certainly we found those same high levels of satisfaction at all levels so I would say that yeah you know it isn't no-brainer but it's something that is that is characteristic of all levels of number of years in the profession so let me just ask the corollary then so did you do any analysis to see whether the converse is also true in other words in professions where there's a relatively lower degree of job satisfaction is there more churn yeah no we didn't but that would be an interesting you know an interesting comparator for sure Richard Berg Boston College again I do special collections so I was really struck by where his third point about continuing to build unique resources in the humanities and I think where you're going with that is a lot of collecting and special collections is about making connections with communities so I'll say again I'm Richard Berg I'm from Boston College I do okay with you know the ladies ancient order of hibernians we're really good on the Irish-American humanity not so good on say which is actually the largest growing population of Catholics in Boston so I think it has a real implication for collections if we do not recruit diversity in special collections because then we do not reflect in our collections that diverse American experience and I think RBMS has been really really active with its diversity group in trying to push that issue forward so it's another bullet point under collections. Well absolutely I mean special collections unique collections establish value in a number of ways the way we think of them establishing values they establish value to our colleagues who are very interested in these and come and study them but they also as you said established value to the larger community beyond that we need to support us so the fact that we go out for example and collect the literary works of regional authors and bring them in and establish a collection around that is also a way of saying thank you but universities don't do a very good job of saying thank you to communities that are out there and reminding them that we have something that also also connects with them university administrators rarely look at their university library as an ambassador beyond because they tend to see it as providing service within but the creation of unique collections as we go forward in an era of diminishing resources is one I think very visible and important way of saying thank you and establishing value to constituents. Great and with that join me in oh I'm sorry did you have a question? Go ahead we got time for one more I'm glad I didn't turn fast enough. Jim from OCLC research one of the things I was hoping you'd reflect on is both of you mentioned the significant shift in the nature of library work of information professional work within the academy particularly most of the conversation I've heard from folks here about their hiring is there it's the rarity to find them hiring a traditional library information school graduate they're hiring domain professionals they're socializing them in some sometimes very structured ways other times leaving it to the wisdom of their colleagues to bring them in it just strikes me that doesn't that change the nature of the pipeline crisis don't we have to re-examine that based on the form of professional the type of skills and competencies that we want and I'm sure you think about this within the context of the school but I would also think you've encountered this as you restructured the work at Alberta I'd just be interested in your thoughts yeah when we were engaged in our research we were just beginning to see some of that and we did have some numbers we did have some data it was very just very small indications at the time but I do believe that there's that whole other labour force if you will that we can tap into and I think that that is something that we need to we need more research about talking about the abilities that people can bring and what does that mean for our organizations great question and we need to know more yeah a quick note on what I think of as a paradox we get a lot of advice from professionals on how we should educate our students for the profession I would say the main themes of that advice are they need to learn all the basics they need to learn to be able to do this they need to learn to be able to do that and we teach them to do that and then our colleagues go out and hire people who are professionals in other fields and send them to a library school after they become established so what's the disconnect the disconnect is the pressure we're getting from the profession should be train leaders, train people who can connect to other professions and go out and do that but we're not getting that message we're getting the opposite message and what we do in terms of urban myths we get the opposite message very deeply they resist anything that has to do with building beyond what's going to get them their first job because that's all they hear about so the discourse has to change you change the discourse we'll change the students we can't change the students we're going against the urban myths excellent and that is a wonderful way to end this panel so thank you join me in thanking our panelists thank you for listening music was provided by Josh Woodward for more talks from this meeting www.arl.org