 Rebalancing the Investment in Collections. Remarks by Tom Hickerson and John Lombardi at the ARL-C&I Fall Forum, October 2011. Convened by Ann Kenney. So this morning, Tom Leonard welcomed us back to Planet Marriott. And as many of you may be taking notes on their little notepads, their one liner is Leave a Trail of Genius. So no pressure on the last two speakers here. I'm Ann Kenney. I'm the Carley Crock University Librarian at Cornell. And it is my pleasure to welcome you to this last session, Rebalancing the Investment in Collections. In this final session of the forum, we will come back to consider what research collections will look like in the future. How research libraries will respond to the changing landscape and readjust their resources, their time and management as a result of those changes. I would direct you back to the one pager on the landscape for 21st century research library collections, which includes four prominent features. Content, publishing, scholars, researchers and infrastructure. In this forum, we've heard from scholars about their research practices as they relate to the library or not. And from librarians who are questioning assumptions and moving forward in bold new ways. And now we're going to return back to consider what the research library in the 21st century will do with all of this new information. Let me introduce briefly our two speakers. First up will be Tom Hickerson, who is the Vice Provost for Libraries and Cultural Resources and the University Librarian at the University of Calgary. Tom has among his many accomplishments there, I think probably most significantly, has been his role in combining the University Libraries, the University Art Museum, the archives and special collections. And the Calgary Press into a brand new building, which is called the Taylor Family Digital Library. And does it also include the High Density Library as part of its name? A $205 million capital project. Which is incorporating a 21st century research library and learning environment with a museum, an archive, as well as a publishing program. Hickerson came to the University of Calgary after a distinguished career as Archivist, Technology Innovator and Library Administrator at Cornell University. His special collection responsibilities at Cornell included oversight of the library's principal rare book and manuscripts collections, which he had the real pleasure of unifying about 20 years ago into one program. He is the current President of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network. He is a fellow and past President of the Society of American Archivists and also served as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Council on Archives. In 2001, he was named by Computer World Honors Program Laureate in recognition of his contributions to the use of information technologies for the benefit of society. That in cleanup, continuing the baseball metaphor, is John V. Lombardi, who is the fifth President of the Louisiana State University System. As its Chief Executive Officer, he oversees ten campuses in five sites, as well as ten public hospitals located throughout the state. He is also a Professor of History at Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. Dr. Lombardi was born in Los Angeles. He received his MA and PhD degrees in history from Columbia University. He joined the faculty at Indiana and later became the Dean of International Programs and the Dean of College of Arts and Sciences. A little later he became Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Johns Hopkins and moved on to become President of the University of Florida and then Chancellor of the University of Amherst before moving on to his current position. He is a Latin American historian with a special interest in Venezuela. He is also one of the country's foremost authorities in higher education, serving as co-editor of the top American research universities. He is the author of numerous professional publications and along with his wife Catherine co-authored a teaching atlas on Latin American history. He has taught courses in history, intercollegiate sports and university management. When we invite people who are non-librarians to come and speak to us, they are often bringing their bona fides about libraries. And my hope is that this Chief Administrator will start off with some of my best friends or librarians. We'll see. Thank you, Anne. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to start off by reading the closing paragraph from James Galeck's new book, The Information, History, a Theory of Flood, which I think certainly applies. But my particular interest in this is the way in which his last paragraph identifies libraries as a metaphor for the information universe broadly and also librarians as the citizens in that universe. The library will endure. It is a universe. As for us, everything has not been written. We are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and the future, collecting our thoughts, collecting the thoughts about others, and ever so often glimpsing mirrors in which we may recognize creatures of the information. So from there, we'll turn to the research library collection of the 21st century. We've heard some great presentations, terrifically thought-provoking. And although I will say a few things about my views regarding the nature of tomorrow's collection, I recognize that many others have made these points. In my descriptive remarks, I'll describe information types that I feel are evocative of my general position that is not just the information, but that what, where, and how it can be used and how it is used also determines the value of tomorrow's collection. I will also talk briefly about the nature of preserved information and how this has contributed in shaping the research library collection of the 19th and 20th century. I'll then turn to the effort to delineate a new holistic framework for analyzing the aggregations of information presently available in our information sphere and suggest steps to assist in positioning us to make recent decisions regarding current and future planning. I hope to introduce a new prism through which we can view the information universe and the portions of that universe we make explicit efforts to support the use of. This holistic approach includes an understanding of the full spectrum of information available to scholars and students and the technological capabilities, rights of use, and services necessary for full utilization of these resources. Its raison d'etre is knowledge creation, from inspiration to information to analysis, synthesis, and dissemination. Concluding I will turn to John Lombardi to advise us on how this new framework and the other thoughts and ideas he has heard here can be best employed in serving the principal needs of our universities. He will also advise us on how to present this new vision to senior university administrators and how they made envisions supporting our transformation. First, a quick review of what the collection was and is. I suggest that the viewpoint commonly expressed regarding the comprehensive research library collection of the recent past fails to incorporate extensive shortcomings. Working as an archivist and special collections administrator for nearly 20 years, I'm aware of the extent to which our preserved record of the past is remarkably incomplete and that we have limited knowledge of how and why and to what extent it is incomplete. Sumerian archaic, cuneiform script is generally considered the oldest known writing system beginning in the early Bronze Age, circa 3100 B.C. But to what degree is this knowledge uniquely based on the survival of the clay tablets on which it was recorded? And since some of the tablets were reused rather than preserved and preservation was restricted to those that were fired either in kilns or perhaps sometimes when cities were burned by invading armies, what portion of the record do we hold? This paradigm can be applied often and how regional climates impacted the preservation of document forms. Many of our libraries hold medieval manuscripts produced in Latin by monastic scribes, but do we hold any of the 700,000 Timbuktu manuscripts produced in Arabic script or Africanized version of Arabic from as early as the 13th century? I know the Library of Congress has a few and there are an increasing number available on the web. In the modern day we are aware that in some places access to printing presses was restricted, thus shaping the early printed record. We are fully aware of the difference between the record of the conquerors and the conquered, the haves and the have-nots. Aboriginal populations, women, and the social history of gay men and lesbians was not intentionally collected by research libraries in North America until the 1980s. And of course we have almost no record of those numerous societies for whom their principal transfer of history, science, and literature was verbal. So what is the comprehensive research library collection? We thought we knew during the golden age of collecting building from the early 19th century to the last quarter of the 20th century. During that period we built and preserved marvelous collections, often through the work of the great bookmen and generous collectors, and then increasingly through routinized organizational structures, professional practice and processes of selection and purchase, conducted systematically and continuously supported through the expenditure of the collections budget. And the organized competition around the size of this annual budget or special collections endowments has been intense. And we have worked hard to convince our university that maintenance and growth of this sum was what guaranteed the quality of research and education in our universities. And for many years this was true. It remains true in part, but it is not the same. A prescient evaluation of the coming change was in an article written by F. Gerald Ham, then State Archivist of Wisconsin, Archival Choices, Manishing the Historical Record in the Age of Abundance. In this article appearing in the American Archivist in 1984 he identified that computer generated information would change the archival challenge from pursuing information to confronting a confusing wealth of information. In preparation for this session I spoke with Susan Bauman of the ARL office and my co-presenter here John Lombardi about two weeks ago. He referred to this change as to when the system broke. I countered that perhaps disrupted was a better word. But since our conversation, the word broke has stuck in my mind. As suggested by yesterday's speaker, Rick Anderson in his recent guest editorial in the Journal of Academic Librarianship. In spite of our embrace of the digital environment we hold many of our traditional organizational structures, practices and mindsets, and increasingly desperate death grip. Well that system is broken. John Lombardi knows it and we do too. So if we accept that our current collections model does not align well with the digital environment in which we and our users live, how do we reframe the dialogue? Several information types that effectively illustrate our dramatically changing environment have been engagingly described by previous speakers. I will speak to a couple of additional areas suggesting concepts instrumental to a holistic knowledge creation and use model. First the emerging field of visualized data and visual analytics. Dynamic real-time content dissemination makes demands on our capacity to offer real-time visualization. Today on our campuses students and scholars are investing in analyzing natural phenomena and human initiated activities as they are occurring in real-time. Disease outbreaks, political events, tweeded and tracked in social media. Astronomy events like sunspots, meteors and a war borealis. Particle physics experimentation, neural surgery, all these forms of research phenomena are being created, visualized and studied dynamically. Or in the field of cultural expression, live artistic and cultural performance visualization offers the potential for creating multi-site and interactive presentation. All of these forms of real-time interactive data challenge our current notions of information display. Capture, management, authenticity, ownership and preservation. Indeed the very notion of collecting. Data visualization will increasingly impact many areas of information use ranging from real-time financial trading data to the boundless universe of spatial research data. Value of which is often dependent on comparative data overlays. Describing this in a new environment in which we are a part, Natasha Singer wrote in the New York Times on April 3rd in the article when data struts its stuff. In an unchartered world of boundless data information, information designers are our new navigators. They are computer scientists, statisticians, graphic designers, producers and cartographers who map entire oceans of data and turn it into innovative visual displays and charts that help both companies and consumers cut through the clutter. These gurus of visual analytics are making interactive data synonymous with attractive data. Visual analytics play off the idea that the brain is more attracted to and able to process dynamic images than long lists of numbers. But the goal of information visualization is not to present millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more. I would also like to address special collections. Most of our collections funding is devoted to licensing electronic publications and most of these publications are academic journals. And most of what we buy is being bought by everyone. And this often extends far beyond the ARL libraries. In Canada, Canadian Research Knowledge Network Collaborative acquires a similar selection for every institution of substantive size. State and provincial cooperatives extend access to core journals even further. Approval plans address most selection for undergraduate study in most fields and they do it better and more economically than we can and we all achieve similar results. Our archives and special collections remain our opportunity for a distinctive role in documenting culture, science, industry, government and the human experience. Important changes in both curatorial practice and teaching and research interests have increased the educational value of these holdings. And digital technologies have provided a means to extend their impact worldwide. ARL has in recent time endorsed the value of this component of our collection and there has been an expressed interest in increased support within our institutions. This may not have yet have happened frequently. In part because traditional managerial autonomy and distinctive practice has impeded the kind of synergies to which we would aspire. Special collections can become an increasingly central element of our libraries, but special collections must become a central element of our libraries. A new alignment is necessary, incorporating special collections, staffing and expertise into the common asset base of the library. First, mission alignment, both with the broader library and with the university mandate as well as needed. Procedurally unified discovery is essential. Regardless of the description methods or systems employed, we owe our users the capacity to find related materials within our holdings, whether published, unpublished, art, artifact, digital collection or new media. This unified, broadly accessible information is also essential to library colleagues who should be knowledgeable in promoting primary resources in their liaison work, along with the newest licensed database. And I'll add here that surprisingly has not just our archivists and special collections librarians that have trouble stepping across existing boundaries. For that reason, new organizational structures may prove essential in bringing humanities librarians and archivists together to pursue common outcomes. And as the need to evolve policies and functional support for acquiring, managing and supporting the use of society's born digital records, differing aggregations of technology and archival staffing will be necessary. This will position archives and special collections in a role as an integral leader in shaping the evolving 21st century collection. But it will be as a component activity within outcome driven programs. Now turning to the challenge of reframing our thinking and shaping the collection of 21st century in an unbounded information universe in which the applicability of the previous paradigm is limited. Patron-diverance selection and innumerable other changes are rewriting the means, as Rick Anderson describes, the comprehensive and well-crafted collection is no longer an end in itself. We now must create a broadly inclusive framework that incorporates a dynamic environment of multiple interdependencies and expanding potential for collaborative action. How do we establish a new prism through which to evaluate the choices available to us today? We heard substantive suggestions yesterday and today. Another important step is to substantially alter the existing concept of the collections budget. The suggestion is not an explicit recommendation that any institution spends such funds differently and doing this is not a solution in and of itself. Reconceptualizing how we manage this funding is a means to remove one of the barriers to evolving a new way of looking at the collection that exists and that our users use. As opposed to viewing it only as the items we purchase via this budget. In an age of the Hattie Trust, Google Books, the Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America, open access and open data, digital special collections, Wikipedia and the other wonders of the open net, the collections budget can establish an artificial context compelling us to view success in a manner that may fail to realistically incorporate the way in which our users pursue information and the sources they employ. The collections budget began painting us into a corner nearly two decades ago and as a result some institutions began to spend these funds in ways we would not have found broadly permissible a decade earlier. I'm not criticizing those expenditures specifically, but it has led us to choose to make certain expenditures because they can be paid for from the collections budget rather than being subjected to the competitive light of day. More importantly, however, has it produced imbalances in our expenditures, reducing our ability to add new skill sets and to invest in technologies needed to enable 21st century knowledge creation? Has it established adversarial divisions among our managers? Does it limit our capacity to pursue cooperative solutions that have kept the capacity to enhance the resources of many universities? And perhaps most importantly, does it prevent us from being able to tell our university administrators how we could truly enhance our contribution to university success if we had appropriate funding? During this forum we have heard provocative descriptions of the information universe in which we live and bold suggestions regarding steps necessary in creating a 21st century environment for knowledge creation. Embracing collaborative solutions and involving a broad spectrum of expertise within and beyond the library, we have tough choices to make, but they are very exciting choices. It is a moment in which we can choose to serve our universities in new and critical ways. So how do we achieve resonance with the principal goals and aspirations of our university and exercise roles essential to tomorrow's success? Thank you. I come to these meetings mostly to get educated and the payment is I have to say a few words here at the end, but mostly I come to get educated and find out where the library world is going. I'm very old and so as a result I have passed through every stage of the library world there is from the smallest, most worthless little regional campus library all the way up to the biggest university libraries in the western world, not to mention messing around with the library of Congress from time to time. So I've seen them all and one of the things that always strikes me about the big time libraries, which is what you represent, is that they are sure big time library people. They're sure they're at the center of the universe. And of course, I know you are, but every now and then you should wander a little farther afield and chat with some other folks who also believe they are the center of the universe and they don't even know who the hell you are nor do they care. So they take you for granted to a large extent. Big research universities assume that the library is going to be there. They assume you people will do whatever it is you're supposed to do. They assume that the things they personally want they'll be able to mobilize enough political support to force you to do whether you want to do them or not. And so that's basically how they look at the library. Now one of the things that's happened in the library over recent years is that those of us who have previously depended on the real library, the one you touch and feel, we humanist types, we have become less and less engaged with your libraries. We don't go there very often. We don't go there very often. I used to go to the library all the time. I don't go anymore. I go online. I pull stuff up. I yank it out of the ether. I take it out of one of these subscription services that you pay a lot of money for and I don't care about. And I take it off of there and I read it and I archive it and I put it someplace and steal it like I'm not supposed to. And I do all of those things because I can get access to them. My most recent experience is I was going to try and get some ancient publications of mine that were done in an ephemeral journal. And I went to the library and by God they had it on microfilm. I was the only person in the place. Totally empty. Except for the children upstairs who were on their computers that you all put in there and call them learning centers, but they're actually just computer places. And so I went down there in a bowels and it was just me and all these endless microfilms, which I'm familiar with being a microfilm era technologist. And so I pulled them off the shelves and I put them in this ancient machine and I found the right one and I pushed the button and it made a crappy Xerox and I pushed another button that made a crappy Xerox and then it jammed and then the little kid came over and fixed it. I mean I did this for like a month and I got all my stuff together and I was feeling real proud of myself. So then I went home and I scanned it into PDFs and put it on my website. And I said, damn, I'm with it. And then I went to Google Books. That goddamn thing was on Google Books. Not only was it on Google Books, it was clear, it was precise, it was clean, it was beautiful. I was able to, you know, snatch it out and crop it and put it on my website and it was just beautiful. And so I got to tell you while Google is a big problem and Google I'm sure is destroying the universe as we know it and undermining all of our standards. For those of us who need stuff, you can find it on Google. Now you don't find it first, you don't find it right, you know, the ranking stuff is worthless. But if you persist it, you'll find it. And when you find it, it's there. And when you get it, some poor librarian has spent their fortune, you know, digitizing it, putting it in some place that I can get it. And I'm appreciative of you, but I don't know which one of you did it. I don't know which one of you did it. And so consequently when my librarian comes to me and says I need more money, I say, what did you do for me lately? I'm not knowing that what I just pulled off the web, they did for me lately. So I don't understand, we don't understand exactly how all of these tremendous efforts to put this material in a form that is accessible to everybody, how that is translated back into the institution. Now in the institution what are we interested in? Well, for one thing we're interested in surviving the budget crises that are all upon us. And nobody should forget for a moment that this cycle of penury, especially in the public sector, is going to be with us for some time. It will be with us for some time and it puts an extraordinary pressure on things that are part of the core business of the university because the things that make you famous often aren't on the core, they're at the edge. They're at the edge. They're new fancy stuff that's new equipment for biology, new equipment for physics, new equipment for somebody else. And here we have this infrastructure that sustains the quality of the institution that we all take for granted but takes a ton of money. And so you end up being in a form of what I call it sort of deferred maintenance, like your buildings. You can postpone fixing stuff in the buildings because you figure, well, they can survive another year, they can survive another year. So when a library needs money, we say, well, they'll be okay for another year, we'll put the money over here. Well, a library won't be okay for another year. So how do you approach that problem? Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to find a way to persuade me that what you do is going to make the university famous. Your research libraries, you represent research libraries. Research universities have only one purpose in mind and that is to be better than the next research university. And you think, oh, isn't that tacky and isn't that small-minded of them? They should be thinking of society and of God. No, they want to be better than the next research university and they want to show up in my ranking and everybody else's ranking as being better than the next one or improving against the next one or something else. So if what you're doing and you haven't found a way to explain to your administration that this will project the university as a research enterprise of significance at a higher level within the world that we are competing in, you're missing a bet because it looks to people like me that most of this stuff is toys. Looks like toys. Now, I know it's important in the serious business of the year. I got it. But on the other hand, it looks like toys. Right? Right, because they're very clever. They're all kinds of computer widget deals. We can see that they produce usefully interesting results, but we don't see so. Right? So how does that help? How is that going to attract the next best faculty member? How is that going to improve the quality of students we can recruit? How is that going to generate more research dollars from NSF and NIH? Those are the things we're paying attention to. How is it going to persuade our donors that we are more important than the next charity that's asking them for $5 million when I'm asking them for $5 million? How do I take this stuff that you say is so terrific and how do I sell it to the constituencies that might support it? Now, from time to time, we find people who want to buy it. We find legislatures who get excited. We find governors who want to say this is my signature piece in the digital age or something nonsense like that. We take money, and certainly for any reason we'll take it. But in the baseline, we want to be able to sell quality. And we want to know why these things that you're doing that are expensive and complicated and difficult, how come they are going to generate quality for us that we can sell to somebody? Now, if you came to me and you said, I have a donor that's going to give me $5 million to play with this toy, and I'd need $2 million from you, I'd give you the $2 million. Not because I think the toy is valuable, but because somebody out there thinks it's valuable enough to put $5 million on it. So if you're not selling these toys to people of significance who can reflect back to the university that some constituency out there thinks it's worth money to do these things, then we will be in a difficult situation because if I have to spend a million dollars on you or a million dollars to bring in the next best R01-producing biological scientist that's working with NIH, I'm going to spend a million dollars to set up the next scientist because I know the next scientist is going to make me famous. I know that that R01 is going to make me famous. I know that the research volume generated in that fashion is going to show up in every way in which we evaluate universities. And so I'm going to say between your million dollars in which you're going to figure out how to solve the digital knowledge of the western world and nobody cares and nobody's paying and requires me to pay instead of you giving me something back. I say, well, that's really wonderful. Go back and play and I'm going to give the money over here to somebody who's doing something that has an audience that will pay. Now, I know this is Philistinism of the highest order. And I'm famous for that. So you really have to pay attention to who cares and who will pay and who will argue on your behalf more than what is the right thing to do for the history of the western world. I mean, the western world's been a long time than the eastern world and other worlds. We had a chart that showed we weren't the smartest ever at the beginning and we're just catching up in so many areas. I listen to this stuff and I say, well, I was at the middle of the beginning of the computer revolution, the micro computer revolution. You're all young out there, but I did punch cards. That's how old I am. I did punch cards. I did counter-sorders. I did drum distrust. I was, you know, I even know what CDC means. None of you do. But I know it used to be the best computer company in the western world. It's dead now. I was there for the micro computer revolution. What did we learn in the micro computer revolution? We learned that the first adopters got killed. That's what we learned. We learned that all of those wonderful word processing programs that we all fought about for about a period of three to five years, we fought over those word processing programs to the center of the universe. Everybody was all excited. People were spending money here and elsewhere. And then they all died. And who's left? We all got Microsoft Word. Is that better? No, not necessarily. Was it the best program? No, not necessarily. But did they figure out how to sell it? Yes, they sure as hell did. And did they figure out how to monopolize the world around it? Yes, they did. And so I'm listening to all this, and I'm thinking out there, amongst all of you experimenters, there's going to be the thing that ends up as the main thing, and we're all going to adopt. I don't know what it is. But if I'm a university person, I say, well, I'm going to wait until you people, you know, figure out what the stable center is, and then I'll invest in it. Then I'll invest in it. Okay? I'm not going to rush out and invest in open source software immediately. I'm going to wait and see. Those guys don't actually get along. You're absolutely right. Right? They all fight. Okay? All those people fight. They fight over Linux. They fight over all this stuff, you know, and I keep waiting. I keep waiting for the open source thing to give me my office suite. They don't quite get it. They don't quite get it, almost, but not quite. I keep loading it up and waiting. It's almost there, but it's not there yet. So I'm waiting. So I want you to think more about what the value is to the university as an institution of the things you want to do, rather than what is necessarily the value to certain micro-constituencies that we all serve. Now, where do I think we're going to end up? I think we're going to end up in this form, since everybody here is guessing too. You know, I can guess because the rest of you. First of all, I think that the research library is always going to be the place that you have stuff nobody else has. So those that you have special collections that are things nobody else has, those things are going to continue to remain valuable and important and significant. So if you have these archives of stuff that nobody else has, then you should rush out and digitize the hell out of them so that everybody knows your name because you're the only ones that have it. You're the only ones that have it. And I can understand that. So if you come to me from your special collection of the most wonderful manuscripts of Simone Bolivar, and you're the only ones that have them, and you digitize them, I'll remember you forever. I'll remember you forever because every time I want to do Simone Bolivar, I have to go to your place and you will have a big logo and you'll brand it and it'll be important and we'll all know that. On the other hand, all the general stuff that's out there, all the general stuff that's out there, what you really want to do is you want somebody else to digitize it and make it available. All that generic stuff. That's why we like the Library of Congress. They're going to do Twitter. Thank God we don't have to do Twitter. Somebody's going to do Twitter and it ain't going to be us, the university doing Twitter is insane. We don't have those kind of resources. We don't have that kind of base. We shouldn't be touching anything like Twitter. And if you have a great idea to digitize something that is in the general flow of life, the thing to do is to work really hard to be the last adopter. The last adopter so that somebody else did all the work first and they made all the mistakes and they made all the errors and they got the wrong software and eventually they figured out how to deal with this stuff and then you say I'll subscribe. I'll subscribe. After somebody else, one of the others of you in this room, has gone to your reward because they fired you at the university because you overspent the budget on this project that didn't turn out to be worth a damn. Somebody else tried it and somebody pretty soon said somebody's going to figure it out. Somebody's going to figure it out. And one of you will be that person but those of you who don't have infinite resources may want to encourage your colleagues to experiment while you watch. While you watch. And I think this is an optimizing activity that the saver metrics people can figure out how to do. You just want to pay attention to where the flow is and you say okay here's the flow. Now do I have a comparative advantage to win in that flow? Whatever the game is. Do I have comparative advantage? And the answer for most of us is no I don't. I don't. I don't have the base. I don't have the computing capacity. I don't have the budgetary flexibility. I don't have this. And so instead of rushing in and participating as a player in a game where you don't have the muscle. You want to stand back. You want to stand back and provide good service and build your support group and make sure the faculty are happy and make sure administrators think you're serious and real. So when the moment comes that you need to buy in to some kind of a service or a project or an activity that's been digitized out there in the real world you can buy into it and you know it's stable and you know the administrators are like yeah these people were very serious they did a thorough analysis. And then you get the money because it will be something that's proven by somebody else. So I know this isn't what I'm supposed to say I'm supposed to say you're all supposed to get out there conquer the world and do the universe but actually you're not supposed to do that you're supposed to be very, very cautious about diving into new technologies that will be extremely expensive and for which you may not have the expertise and everybody underestimates the cost of innovation. Everybody underestimates the cost of innovation. So you say this is a clever idea I need a half a programmer and a small computer. No, no, no, no, no. It's going to take 25 programmers and it's going to take a bigger computer than you've ever seen and by the time you get done you'll be broke and the project will be 80% done. 80% done because the last 20% costs you twice as much as the first, right? 80%. So you really want to focus on that kind of optimizing. Now let me just conclude and come back again to what is the key thing that people like me look for. The key thing we look for is whether or not what you propose is going to make us better in competition with other research universities around us and if you think for a minute that we are for the greater glory of God you're not going to get the money, right? Because we're not for the greater glory of God we're for the greater glory of our institution and so if you can't persuade me that the work you're doing is going to make us more famous either because it attracts famous faculty who will make us famous or because it makes us famous you're famous, one of the two, right? We're not going to be interested in investing you because other people are asking for the same money. You never want to forget that anything you want somebody else in the university wants to, right? So for example, just to take a trivial example, right? If I have to choose between helping out the library and making sure the football program stays number one who do you think is going to win, right? They stay number one, they're in the news 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day. Now is that wise and profound and good? No, it's stupid, okay? But that's the way it is. That's the way it is, right? And so if I have to pay a million dollars to keep us number one or pay a million dollars to make sure the library stays number one and a chance of snowballing hell you'll get the million dollars. Not a chance, okay? So I mean that's an exaggerated sort of moment but it's not as surprising as you think because I suspect that at 85% of your universities the football team has allowed, the sports program has allowed to run a deficit on the order of three to eight million dollars and you're not. So you put that in your pipe and smoke it. Thank you very much. Surely, surely there must be questions. I have been lucky in my, the five universities I've worked in, only one of them had big time football and I didn't know it because they did so bad while I was there. So from division three, what you said about competition is so true, we all know that. And yet the odd, the anomaly for librarians is that the way we do things really well that make our researchers better is by collaborating. And so many of us do this below the radar. In my state I helped fund a consortium that I didn't really talk much about on campus because people would say to me, why would we work with that lesser institution? And one dean did say that to me so I never talked to him about that again. But we discover in a consortium where at least one library has an entire budget smaller than my salary. My university is the biggest user of that and every time I mention the name in front of faculty I'll smile and nod because it really brings wonderful things to everybody. So here we are working according to one standard of principles to meet goals which are another standard. It's interesting. Well, let me just say a word about collaboration. I think collaboration is in fact a success strategy from two points of view. The first is you can always sell to university administrators the notion that you're doing something they know you need to do but you're doing it in a way that's cheaper than it would be otherwise because you're collaborating. So there's an efficiency and effectiveness story there. Second, the thing about collaboration also is that often you can mobilize faculty support behind the product that is the collaborative result. So in a state of Louisiana which is poor as dirt we have actually a very good collaborative library system in which everybody has access to everybody's catalog and stuff flows around more or less seamlessly as these things go and when they cut back the budget on it all everybody came out of the woodwork on the institutional basis to support it and so I think collaborations are good. The other thing about collaborations is that it provides people like me and others even less expert than me with a sense that if you have a collaboration there are other people who are doing it who know what they're doing in addition to the self-interested librarian who's in your face. And so you can get the sense that there's a support group for this of people with not necessarily aligned objectives who have all agreed this stuff is worth doing so that's another helpful argument for collaboration. So has my strategy been wrong all along which is I wanted to send the most distinguished scholar to your door to say how important the library is. Is it better that I get a big donor to come and talk to you or the football player? No, I don't want to talk to football player. It's likely he won't know where the library is. So this is probably not a strategy. But I think both of those things work. I think from the point of view of university prestige high quality faculty members are very, very powerful advocates because those of us in the business know that while we're all very important the only people who really matter in this competitive world are the highly researched productive faculty members. These are the people that drive the institutions that you represent to be competitive in all of these ranking systems that we all are worried about. And so the word of high powered faculty is very significant. It's very significant. The purpose of the donor is not so much because the project is significant. Often you can get a donor to agree to do a project that is peripheral, right? I mean because they just think it's clever. Oh, it is cute, you know? I'll put five million bucks behind it. What the hell? I got an extra five million, you know? Not like the rest of us. So we will nonetheless put some money to get the five million because if the project isn't stupid, right, it may just not be central. But if it's not stupid, it's a good thing to have. Somebody else is paying five million for it. We'll take the five million because probably on the margin you'll be able to accumulate some resources. That will support other activities of the library while you spend the five million or whatever the heck it is that the donor wanted to do. So the donors are very, very important. Very important because they give you five million and as successful they might give you another five million. So, you know, we are pretty financially focused. Any other brave souls out there who want to ask a question? One final question for you, Tom. You talked about reconsidering the collections budget. But there's another big chunk of change we hold on to which is personnel budget. You know, on average ARL libraries spend 62% of their materials budget on licensed material, electronic resources. Yet I would venture to say that our library staff is still very much engaged in the business of managing the print materials we have. Comments? Well, it's all about money. So, obviously the point of this discussion this morning is really about what the 21st century collection should be. But the holistic framework that I'm talking about should in fact look at everything and look at them in a synergistic fashion. And in a fashion the break off of the collections budget in fact influences the same kind of constrained thinking about the budget as a whole. So we need to really look at it as a common pool and make tough decisions. And the decision over here should absolutely impact the personnel decision over here. We should not, you know, we're going to invest in getting these resources or we're going to have a visualization wall. But we actually need someone to run that visualization wall rather than someone to bind journals. A funny story that Helen Clark, a collections officer told me the other day which tells the story so clearly and just almost makes me hurt is that we decided that we would ask student employees where we should be putting our classification numbers on our journals, on the physical journals, the shelf and all of them gave considered answers but all 10 of them told us that they never used print journals. So, you know, is there a disconnect here? And of course there is and we really have to take responsibility for changing that paradigm. And I think that if we in fact opened up the kinds of divisions among our budget across the scope of the library as a whole then in fact we'd be able to look at all of those things in a co-dependency in the sense of realizing what he says is most important for the university. President Lombardi, a lot of the innovations we're making in our libraries have to do with improving and listening to and improving the work for students. We've heard about donors, the importance of donors, the importance of high-powered faculty and distinguished faculty but students grow up into generous alumni often and I wonder where you see the focus on students and their experience of libraries. Thank you. I think the student issue is big. I mean, obviously the students are faster to adopt any technology than anybody else. On the other hand, they're not very good at it. I mean, they adopt it but they don't use it very well. And we've taken sort of the idea that because they can dive in and make these things work that they're actually using the resources effectively but I think many of us who teach students with electronic stuff, we find that they actually, while they can get access to everything and go everywhere and do everything, they don't actually do it with a lot of smarts. I mean, you know, they take the first thing that pops up on Google, take the first thing that pops up here, take the first thing that pops up there. They're very indiscriminate about what they do except for things that are personally of interest to them, you know, dating sites, stuff like that but academic stuff, they're not. And I think we have perhaps relied more on technological tools under the assumption the students will adapt and use them effectively in a way that previously we thought we had to educate the students on how to use the library and we used to work with them on how to use finding aids and we used to work with them and have seminars on what to do and the research and on and so on and so on. Now we say, well, you know, we got this, we got that, go touch it, you're okay. I think probably we're going to have to circle back and invest some more in educating the students on how to use these resources that are very poorly mediated and very poorly curated, if you will, because we're able to get at everything. And so I think most universities will respond well to programs that are designed to enhance student performance, to enhance student engagement in some way that might well be measurable in terms of their success or in terms of their employer's interest in the skills that they actually have, because now it's not unique that a kid knows how to manipulate the digital universe. I mean, this is no big deal. Everybody knows how to manipulate the digital universe, but do they know how to manipulate it? Well, do they know what to look for? Do they know when to look for it? Do they know how to sort things from, that are of some value to things that are no value and can they tell the difference? Well, I don't think they can tell the difference a lot, actually. You know, I teach this class, I got 140 students in it. They can't tell the difference. I mean, they're seniors. They can't tell the difference between what is a serious thing and what is some trashy journalism, because I put these things on my reading list. I put the trashy journalism and I put the serious things side by side and they treat them identically. They treat them just identically as if they're the same values to them, the same serious and the same reliability and sort of a test case for me. And so I think programs that address student needs are going to become more important now that we have passed the computer literacy stage. You know, and we're now in universal computer literacy, so what are you doing with this literacy? What the hell, you're reading comic books or you're reading real books? Are you reading things that people did work on and validated or are you reading junk? And how can you tell the difference? And so I think librarians may well be the people who will come back around and create programs that address that issue on behalf of the teaching faculty, which I think would be well received by everybody. Very, very quick question. Very much related to your last answer, President Lombardi, given these changes and this is not directly on collections, but we're looking ahead, what do you think the impact of the online learning systems and online learning is going to have on your kinds of universities? Well, what's going to happen in the higher education marketplace is it's going to continue to fragment. As you know, there is no such thing as higher education. There are higher education sort of layers and each of these layers has different kinds of vulnerabilities to the distance at online education movement for profit education and so forth. At the top level of research universities and elite institutions, the impact will be the least. It will be the least because those people are selling, in addition to prestige, they're selling a certain level of quality engagement one-on-one that is not provided in that other fashion and that's why they're expensive and that's why people pay for them and they think they're valuable. So I think they're going to be okay. I think that the bottom tier, of course, is going to be extremely impacted by online stuff because they are going to have to be providers. They're going to have to be dealing with itinerant students who've drifted in and out. They're going to have to be working on all that. In the middle, there are a set of what, when we're feeling nasty, we call want-to-be institutions. Want-to-be institutions are institutions that are in the most part state universities, something on the order of 15 to 20,000 students who have a small research portfolio on the order of maybe 5 to 10 million dollars of federal research expenditures per year. They're trying to move into the category of people who have 30 or 40 or 50 million and above research expenditures per year. Those people are the ones that are most vulnerable to these changes in the marketplace because what will happen is, in order to survive the marketplace, they will have to have fewer full-time tenure-track faculty and more itinerant contingent faculty in order to make their budgets work. And as you get fewer full-time faculty, you have less capability of sustaining a research environment. You can't do that unless you have a lot of full-time research faculty because, as you all know, probably, although you don't want to admit it, of 100 faculty we give tenure to and say they're all going to be great researchers, 20 of them have a career of great research. Only 20 have members and 85 to 90 of them do a great job of teaching for their entire careers. So the risk when you hire faculty and give them tenure is huge on the research side. That's why you need a lot of them because you can't predict which of those 100 are going to be the 20 who are research productive for 25 years. You can't predict that. No matter how good you are, you can't do it. And so, as a result, we hire a lot. We give a lot of tenure and we hope that the volume of teaching they do will pay for the ones that don't turn out to have 25 years of research ability. If you shrink the number that you're giving tenure to because you're using the adjunct faculty because they're cheap and using the adjunct faculty because you can move them around in different places and do different things, then your pool of tenureable faculty is smaller and your 20% success of that will be a smaller number and therefore your ability to generate research volumes above the 20 to 30 or 40 million dollars a year will be more difficult and those people will fall out of. They will fall out of the competition for prestige research visibility. Jay will make this a real quick glass question. He knows too much about me, so... Okay. Quickly we've been talking about reallocation and I'm glad to see Louisiana hasn't worn you down at all. They ain't even started. We've been talking about one of the ways we can resource ourselves is reallocation. Sometimes this is very controversial on campuses if we try to take money from things that have traditionally been funded and try to do new things with them. Can we count on you as an administrator to back us on this? No. No, you have to understand, but from the point of view of the university administrator, the budget crises that we deal with are very real and they have a tremendous impact on every part of the university. There's nobody exempt. So all the decisions you make about the money are bad. They're all bad decisions. People come to me and say, why don't you just pick the good projects and fund them? I say, look, everything we have here is good because the bad stuff we got rid of a long time ago. So the only things we're looking at are good things. So the only questions we have is how do we arbitrage between the good things that we have to either support or not support because anything we don't support is a good thing that's gone by the wayside. So the notion that we're going to be able to tell what's good and what's not good is nuts. So instead, what we have to say is, what does it take to sustain the enterprise? What is critical for sustaining the enterprise? And so we postpone what isn't critical for sustaining the enterprise. I mean, that's what you do under the kind of pressure that especially public universities are under these days is that you say, what is it that I have to do? And then you say, what is it that I surely need to do? And then you say, what is it I should do? And the should do often doesn't make it. At least this round, it'll maybe come up next year but you have to postpone it. And so those are the kind of decisions you have to make. And being inside of what we must do is important especially for libraries. And that's why I gave you this spiel about not being too far out on the edge if you can't afford it because one of the things we should do are the things that are on the edge. They wanted they should do. We have to have the major journals. We have to buy the major journals online or whatever and it costs too much and you guys are supposed to knock down that your job and get that price down. And we're going to have to see the major databases we have to have and we have to have certain other things to sustain our mainline business and that comes first. And so yeah, these other things are terrific but the farther you go out on the innovation curve the higher the demand for some explanation of how it's going to pay back in a relatively short term. And far beyond that because we all know on the innovation curve the farther out you go the less likely you are to be successful because that's been the story of technology all the way through this cycle. Well, I'm glad you all stayed for the last session. Please join me in thanking Tom and John. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org.