 21st Century Research Library Collections Remarks by Barbara Dewey, Thomas Leonard, and Wendy Pratt-Louget at the 160th ARL membership meeting Convened by Deborah Jacobs So, saving the best for last and it's always a challenge to get people to come to the final session so I'm delighted to see some of the people here It's my pleasure to introduce this program on 21st Century Research Library Collections My name is Deborah Jacobs I'm the Reader D.G. Alamardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University and co-chair with Tom Leonard of the Task Force on 21st Century Research Library Collections The Task Force was formed in the fall of 2010 which was quite some time ago convened during 2011 and presented its report to the Transforming Research Library Steering Committee this past January As I mentioned, Tom Leonard was co-chair and the following colleagues have served on the Task Force Sharon Farve from UCLA Fred Heath from the University of Texas at Austin Tom Hickerson from the University of Calgary Wendy Louget, University of Minnesota Rick Luce from Emory Greg Rashke from North Carolina State University Jay Schaefer from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Chris Avery who was the ARL visiting program officer for this group and of absolutely central value to our work Sue Bachman and Judy Rutenberg were staff liaisons All of you have received a copy in your packet of the report and additional copies have been made available If you were expecting a long white paper on the future of 21st Century Research Library Collections obviously you've noticed that is not what this is This, as we began our work we realized that the topic of 21st Century Collections really bleeds into every area of libraries and as you can tell from the report we tried to highlight certain elements of the topic not as a kind of prescriptive document but more as a suggestion of some of the areas that we're going to have to be paying close attention to The program, well our goal was to present what we see as a general landscape and then collectively define the actions we need to take The program this morning is designed to engage all of you in a clicker exercise which you have heard so much about and I know you've been looking forward to First by looking at some key issues and then we'll hear from two of our colleagues who will speak on rather different topics that are related to this overall issue of 21st Century Collections and share their perspectives and a call for action I'll go ahead and introduce them briefly and then we'll get to the audience participation part of the presentation Wendy Leger is the University Librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities She'll talk about her experience balancing the local portfolio of investments related to content and collections and developing multi-institutional models for collective decision making These two themes are converging and they prompt us to develop a new model for conceiving of and articulating our roles as stewards of content The University of Minnesota Libraries is restructuring and rebalancing resources to position itself for this new context Barbara Dewey, Dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications at the Pennsylvania State University and also a member of the reshaping Scholarly Communications Steering Committee will focus more deeply on the report's contention that new pricing models and new metrics for measuring and valuing the contributions of authors, editors, and reviewers will create opportunities for ARL intervention to move the market in a more advantageous direction for our community Now, before we get into the actual audience participation Judy Rutenberg is going to give you your instructions They're not very difficult, so... Okay, you should all have a clicker For this next part Deborah's going to show you a series of slides The statement is drawn from the report and asks you to vote on a pretty likered scale In the context of kind of our collaborative and collective action whether these statements are urgent, important, or desirable There's no opportunity to say they're not important at all So, one, two, and three across the top When Deborah finishes reading the statement a 10-second timer will start If you click in advance of that if you pre-click, it will still be recorded If you click more than once only your last vote will be recorded So, the test... Do you want to do the test vote? And the test question And, the test question is Would you like to read it? Go ahead, you read it The importance of this session ending on time So, a scale of one to three Which is one and which is three? Which is one and which is three? One is urgent Yes, our speakers are We can't see this Oh They are Okay Alright, calm down everyone Calm down So, just so you know there are nine of these statements There aren't 30 or 50, something like that There will be nine of these statements and at the end we'll have a kind of summary before the speaker we'll show a summary before the speakers Okay, number one Coordination and new strategies are needed to balance demand-driven acquisitions with continued need for broad and deep collections Interesting Okay, number two Local and shared investments to support management and preservation of data and digital assets are needed Oh, okay Very good Okay, number three The enduring need within the library for deep subject expertise will increasingly be met by teamwork and cross-institutional partnerships Yeah, it's hard to digest it all so we'll make this available to everyone after the meeting Okay, the data that live on the digital device of the scientist or humanist today is moving to the library server tomorrow You mean R? Okay, alright Next one Pricing output will continue to increase and publishers will experiment with new publishing models that recognize the contributed value of authors, editors, and reviewers Pricing models What did I say? Did I say that? The natives are resting More choices Okay In the middle of the road Okay Next statement Collections resources will increasingly be allocated to the development of discovery tools People are thinking too hard just need to respond Okay From the gut Alright I've lost track of where we are but two more Alright table 15 Share it with the whole class Libraries will incorporate sophisticated data analysis and cost modeling techniques into their operations Okay, the open content movement will continue to challenge the commercial market More collaboration is needed to transform scholarship and reshape the marketplace I think surprise Is that the last one? Is that the last one? Stewardship of an institution's unique assets is an increasing priority Preservation of born digital materials will create a new dimension to special collections Zero Okay I think that's the last one Okay, so realizing that this could open up a can of worms Are there any questions? We want to start our speakers at 10.30, no later than 10.30 I mean we can start anytime but we thought we would give you some time to react or respond So there are a few minutes Stun silence, okay Alright Yeah Oh yes Is there a summary Craig? Oh, top three Okay Local and shared investments to support management and preservation of data and digital Open content movement and special collections Okay, any surprises? No? Oh yeah, surely An observation It's been only 11 years since ARL focused on special collections and at that point the special collections librarians wanted our attention and once they got it they weren't quite so sure that they really wanted it David Stam told them about how he'd like them to work differently but it is obviously a prime responsibility for all of us and we're all focusing on making a much higher priority and much more central to what we're doing I just want to reinforce that that often when we talk about special collections our folks in special collections think it's just about them and when I look at our special collections it's about managing all of our unique collections across the entire corpus of the library and I think as we grapple with that that's going to be an interesting continuing discussion many of our special collections folks think it's totally within their realm and we've got to figure out some way of sort of blowing that more open comment okay any other comments was this useful interesting any surprises I was surprised by the responses to number one where coordinating new strategies didn't seem to be urgent strikes me as more than urgent that got only 36% urgent I think though it may be the narrowing as the statement was continued that may have driven some of it as well the tables near where I was perching were grumbling about why don't we have a four or five vote and that might have made it more difficult to tabulate but I heard that is important okay Wendy what are you baggage so the baggage joke was serious actually and I think what I want to talk about and never mentioned that we're undergoing some restructuring and it's not dramatic but it is all about some changing and we bring a lot of baggage to the concepts that a lot of talk about so I'm going to be doing kind of an overview of the report in a way but trying to get at some of the fundamental shifts that relate from westerns that relate how we make decisions and above all relate to how we strategize in that strategy and to keep in mind throughout that these sort of conceptual changes are very profound they have election budgets how we define the collection how we think about the roles and autonomy of our staff so it's going to be super promising and also the skills that are needed especially working in a collaborative environment so what I talked about was with my staff both women they get really scared they think somehow we're diminishing the importance of the collection so I have to repeat over and over again that our collections are a core asset we're not changing that you have a fundamental role with respect to the current and providing content but what's changing is that context and how we think about the strategies for decisions and investments yeah the report there is this statement that is really at the heart of what we're trying to do but we have to shift our thinking from currently focusing on collections as we used to know them to thinking about as products to think about as a component they're much broader the impact of knowledge resources and that to do that to remain a shift in thinking about multi-institutional models so that's fundamentally what I want to talk about if you begin to work in a multi-institutional model what has to change and I want to focus on two elements and in the task force I made a mistake of saying it was a paradigm shift and I would quickly inform that was not the case I'm just probably sure it's not a paradigm shift of that magnitude so I'm going to use the word rubric but we need a way of thinking about new customs new rules of engagement and maybe injunction to all of us to think about operating a new model so the two things I want to talk about are first of all how to get our local house in order to prepare for multi-institutional work and then secondly how we think about operating in that global context and how those two things come together I'm going to draw on to start with some slides I really love from Morgan Dempsey about a lot over time but he proposes these four quadrants of the kind of information space so in the upper left hand you have our traditional collection we purchase things, we inquire things we increasingly license things in the lower left hand we have special collections we're uniting the right hand at the bottom we have the institutional access and then finally we have the open web and you'll see he has these two axes of things held in lots of collections of things held in view and then the level of stewardship lower product so that's pretty much the traditional model if you will where we put our assets and where we seem most important but he predicts that in five years time and of course he started this model he put the gold box but we see this shift from what we purchase to licensing and they're done that right then when it talks about our special collections and the comments earlier are really a point for this shift that we're seeing much more importance given to high stewardship for those special collections with the unique things that we would contribute to the economy the institutional assets and the lower right we're increasingly calling on to be stewards of that content we didn't acquire it but they would like us to steward it whether it's data whether it's personal collections that might be shared whether it's learning objects research materials library being called upon to steward manage our whatever will be offered and then when it comes to the open web the policy yesterday that we see increasingly enough this is on libraries trying to understand how we can distribute that responsibility with the stewardship move it into the high stewardship now lordman takes his model and talks about it's not enough to make these shifts you have to be able to declare those shifts to others if you want to work collectively so he talks about discovery in two ways you acquire you're bringing them in to your environment and adding them to your discovery services the discovery layer we're all building right but with respect to what's unique he suggests that we have a really strong responsibility and stewardship whatever you want to call it to push it out to position how we have this meeting whether it's personal collections or data or learning objects you made it those things that we're set of components of the knowledge environment that we have a responsibility to ensure they are discoverable for the future so that is a different dimension to come to that collective not only the shifts but what our role is so from a local perspective and this is overdone a lot of them perhaps restating the audience we see collection development moving much more to a new genre on our commission types we see this expansion of procurement strategies you know, cater for an acquisition but also new forms of getting onesies when they're needed a whole range of things we also have then the challenge of with this myriad procurement options how to create a customer discovery environment so it's sort of the old attitude you know if you have it and nobody knows about it can't be discovered you really have that kind of question and with respect to pleasure management we're talking about expansion of stewardship but there's another important shift here and that is to say if there's not always a one-on-one correlation between development of management or stewardship and if there are any members of our task force in the audience who'd like to make any comments or come on up that would be fine I have a question for Wendy you said that you've been introducing these ideas in your institution and you've been doing some reorganizing to reflect them I assume could you tell us a little bit about the nature of that reorganization sure, it's not terribly dramatic on paper we've we've essentially taken what used to be called cataloging and it's been redesigned as part of IT as a data unit thinking about that so much of the data that fuels discovery we don't create anymore yes we do some but a good deal of it we don't but very much at the heart is thinking about positioning our collections and that has to be done with the data and inserting our data in the right recovery systems so that's one piece of it and we had the usual portfolio of someone in charge of collection development and someone in charge of collection management and preservation and resource sharing so there's going to be a new division that will include acquisitions and e-resource management that is all about sort of the efficiencies of procurement including resource sharing seeing resource sharing is just one more form of procurement and there will be a new AOL overall of that and we're intentionally including a content development functionality or capacity that's not really publishing per se although it may do that but it's coalescing all of the consulting work we do for people who are creating content so I think those two elements have a lot to do with the content and collections concepts I think what's been interesting recently though is we were merging two libraries and we realized and we tried to use a collective model to make decisions and it was damn hard for a couple reasons not just the politics of it and lots of angry letters over that but things about the quality of our data so if we want to determine the scarcity of our forestry collection guess what we all have created some pretty lousy data and we can't match to find out if it's scarce or not or if it's uniquely held or not so that was one thing but then realizing the kind of portfolio that I talked about and how do we now make a commitment that we're going to keep forestry resources around for the long haul and yes you can declare it in the OCLC record with your intention for retention but trying to make explicit decisions at a macro level about a collection I think is the next front here so part of what we're talking about here is how to help people make understand the collective and help go towards macro decision making as opposed to onesies as we deal with the challenges of space the challenges of a deteriorating collection and you could fill out the list what do you say anything about the reorg steps you took well in addition to moving the oldest eastern puma which is now extinct out of the library that was one thing I did the first year that we did do a reorganization we had a retirement and at Penn State when I got there the organization was based on geography more than anything so there was an associate dean over all of university park which is the flagship and then an associate dean over all of the campuses and so with this retirement basically I didn't have as many philosophies as Wendy I had some practical philosophies one of which was we were facing a major budget cut and so I didn't think it was a good time to expand and fill the position but having said that we decided to focus on our one library many locations vision and so there's four associate deans and one of them who had campuses now works with undergraduate services our new knowledge commons campuses but has the able leadership of Chris Avery to do that and then we have associate dean Mike Furlough rising star in this area for research and scholarly communications and his portfolio includes digitization and also special collections because there's a direct link there there's so much digitization that's going on as well as the relationship with university to address and data curation repository services and then our other associate dean has responsibility for access collections and more of the higher level research services with subject librarians she also has acquisitions and cataloging and information technology and other reasons for that so I see this is definitely a work in progress and we're doing an assessment of the organization in terms of how it serves the users and how it moves us forward strategically and so that's going to happen this summer and if any of you have some good ideas about organizational assessment I would really love to hear about it thank you Rick and Jay are in the room do you have collections that under the influence so to speak have worked on this that you did thanks Tom actually there is but I want to speak not as a member of the committee but more as an independent agent if you will first of all I really appreciated Wendy's ability to sort of take something that's been very murky we've struggled with and put a model up that we could start to relate to I thought that was very helpful and I think that the the task force quite frankly the collections group task force whatever we want to call it has really struggled with this question and so it's left me with a sense very much that the final report produced or the report we have in front of us is quite frankly a watered down document and so I'm kind of scratching my head asking I think a larger question which is the role of these task force task forces how much of that role really is about leadership versus how much of the role is kind of reflecting a consensus of where the organization or some part of the organization of ARL is at any given point in time kind of case in point so it was fun to have the clicker exercise if we thought about that as a vector in terms of the issues prioritizing the issues and which ones we might use to put attention to or resources toward you start to stand back and say so do we get 50% we get 70% what percent do we need before we really get engaged as an organization around a particular issue I want to contrast that with the report we heard from Jim Williams yesterday Jim got up talked to us about some problems that are very serious and said definitively we're going to have a plan we're going to call on you and we're going to move forward and you know what I believe they're going to have a plan they're not going to wait for 70% of us to agree that we've got an issue before we decide to call congressmen or whatever it is we're going to get heads up and we're going to work hopefully we're all going to move very quickly in that area so the question I'm trying to raise I think is more of a question about how we take difficult issues like this and what is the role of organization and as if you will sub-components in committees in the organization in terms of providing leadership and direction versus really trying to echo kind of this is a consensus of where we're all at which really doesn't take us very far but perhaps or perhaps not as useful in terms of being a measuring stick for where we are today so I'll wind up this monologue just by saying I don't think the report pushed us far enough and I think there's challenges that still remain on the table thanks Other members of the team might want to respond to that I think At one level understand what you just said I think there's an interesting conundrum here in that we all have different local situations at home right so part of my concern and trying to articulate the local versus the collective is that you got to get your house in order at home and we may each have very different constraints you know I used to have a provost that said thou shalt not touch the collection budget for anything other than content you know that's that's a that's an injunction that really is a deal breaker I find it fascinating that the statistics survey is now going to ask us to declare how much we put in collection support in those surveys before and people will say don't quote me on it and you know pretty scared about it so one level I think it's very hard to give a mandate to us collectively until we can deal with the diversity and complexities and heterogeneity we all have at home that said I mean why I like the word rubric is that it does include not just a framework but an injunction or a call to action which I think is very much what Jim gave us yesterday maybe we didn't say it as boldly enough but I think we have an opportunity given some of the challenges ahead of us we're probably all doing instances shared storage or shared you fill in the blank but how do you think about it as a whole so I I see your point but I think there's enough there that's meaty that can get the conversation going I think something that perhaps was missing in our discussion so far this morning but came up in the RLLF session which was excellent and that is that and it relates to the work ARL does in helping us articulate with the University Central administrations that we all work with these concepts these models, these rubrics and the issues that we all face and so I think in that sense we can really move forward the other thing that really struck me too in the scenario meeting this morning was a real focus on helping us communicate with our librarians and staff about the changing expertise we talked about that yesterday and so I hope that in any of these task forces we get at what is needed from a human resource point of view not just in our profession but in partnership so those were a couple of things I wanted to reflect I wanted to offer a response to Rick and I'm going to overstate the point in order to make it I think that calls to action are a lot easier to make when you have a common enemy outside of yourself so somebody is about to open 108 we must stop that it's a lot easier than what the hell are we going to do about this collective collection thing it's like really complicated and it is us so the rubrics cube model is I mean it's cute but it's also useful because it's really complicated and there are so many moving parts and we're the ones moving them so I think that's why associations not just this one adopt different modalities for dealing with different kinds of issues and the rubrics cube which is a child always hated and the reason I hated it is the damn thing was never over you know that's why I don't like to play chess either I mean it just goes on forever same with the rubrics cube so the modality for dealing with that kind of a problem is a very different modality from the modality with dealing with a kind of problem Jim and Jimmy were telling us about yesterday and each of them are appropriate under varying circumstances now to Rick's point I do think at some point you need to realize when you've exhausted a particular modality and maybe choosing a different one is appropriate and maybe that's what Rick is giving a certain amount of voice to because you know those of us who've been around for a while have been talking about the collective collection for an eternity or a seeming eternity and we still are but you've got a kind of verbalizer just keep verbalizing it keep verbalizing it and get it more and more right as you do that which is why your Rubik's thing is not bad I gotta say one thing but just a weird little story at Michigan I can't remember who had a Rubik's cube on their desk and never could solve it but every morning we would come in and somebody overnight had solved it the university put in a video camera to see what was happening and they played the video in the morning and you saw these hands we didn't know who did it that's great Rick I respect what you've said and I understand and we had discussions about that in the task force meetings I think also that kind of echoing what Brian said the point of issues we're dealing with are I mean it's like a tapestry that you pull on one thread and things start to unravel you don't control all the pieces I mean to really mix metaphors and and so it was intended as a report to call attention to the issues and call for collective action much as we tried to do with the Fall Forum the urgency of collaboration so Suzanne Thorn from Syracuse having been at Indiana University and Syracuse two very different institutions in size we also have issues in how large our collections are and who our peers are and who we compete with and they're all these things as well as the Provost who offers an ultimatum that is difficult but going back to Rick's point I think I like Wendy's getting ready getting our own house in order and I'm wondering if that might be a place to start a call to action in elements that we could we could begin to assess and get statistics for etc for our own houses that wouldn't get into some of these other nasty areas. Tom Hickerson University of Calgary and I'm also a member of the committee and I want to speak in sympathy to the points that Rick raises and I I think in some ways and I really don't accept the dichotomy of the enemy out there because I think to some degree we have the enemy within and that we are actually doing things that we shouldn't be doing that in fact this paper tells us that that's not the image we should be driving for and yet we're doing things that are actually perpetuating that image and so I think it's called action and to some degree turning on ourselves in the sense that because we are the ones that can correct it that's our job and we need to charge ourselves that. Speaking from a more practical standpoint perhaps than philosophical this spring we have run a series of focus groups among faculty talking about these very issues and in fact I took the liberty of using the earlier paper that this committee produced as sort of prompts to converse with faculty as well as having internal discussions and it was interesting to me that almost without exception whether the faculty were humanist or scientist, social scientist and maybe it speaks to the regardless of the discipline it was the people who were interested in the library maybe others would have a different perspective but almost without exception the responses and the level of conversation was related to you haven't purchased what I need or the depth of the collection is not what I need or you've moved my books off campus into storage so I think there is this huge disconnect locally and maybe collectively between where libraries believe we need to be and actually where things are going regardless of whether we believe it needs to be there or not and where faculty are and we have to find a way to bridge that gap so I wonder if other people have had similar or different experiences in talking with faculty just a similar experience maybe it's a little funny too we had a series of University of Oregon series of focus groups with faculty very similar to what you had at Brown and we've been trying to build this collective collection for several years now and one of our objectives was to establish a threshold of duplicate copies within the collective and I brought this question up with our faculty and they said oh we can totally accept a threshold of copies as long as we're one of the ones who owns the book so I think we are finding that to be true one of the reasons why I really like this paper is that it gives us an opportunity to kind of rethink our professional identities which have up to this point been very tied into what we can do for our own faculty and I think by thinking about a we're actually making we're entering into a much more complex decision making environment that will be more challenging and I think once our subject specialists begin to think about it from that perspective perhaps they will begin to develop a new sense of professional identity that will be an incentive for us to move in this direction and that's why I really like this paper and I like the dialogue today If I can say something about the moderation of the Fort Nature Court I would point out that I don't think there really is anyone in ARL who is arguing for a position that we might call radical we might compare what you believe about collections and use of Liszt and Rousin a major philanthropist and a friend of libraries many institutions she would like us tomorrow to revise the Byrne Treaty to of course change copyright to very soon have a national licensing scheme so all material can be shared in her view and I'm sure you know the public view you know JSTOR is as evil as Elsevier and we're part of the world around information Liszt is a wonderful friend of libraries and she should be invited to ARL to speak then we would hear a radical view we just had her at Berkeley and it was stimulating and wonderful and I encourage all fishing along that line however, when we go home to do our job year after year we can't all do this in a certain sense if I can be allowed a little more minutes two more minutes why don't we take the two last people stand thank you so okay so on a totally different topic not in terms of the dialogue we've just had David Ferriero raised a point I don't think David is in the room today and so I wanted to repeat his point from the committee meeting the other day is that while we reference discovery for museum and archival holdings this actually is assuming a collection that is actually very sharply defined by a fairly traditional vision of libraries and in fact our users have a much more holistic view of the whole range of doctor and mineral resources that they use in their research and knowledge creation so that's a different point I think collective collections are inevitable I think getting your local house in order doesn't necessarily mean that there's going to be a good synergy between the local needs and the collective needs however I also think that our faculty are very conservative they don't like change and so when we moved to this selector and a combined collection for Slavic and East European studies and that selector was at Columbia it pissed off the faculty at Cornell I mean they really felt that this collaboration was about less than more a year later and Rob has been just stunning as reaching out to the Cornell faculty engaging both Cornell and Columbia faculty in new forms of information that are being provided on both campuses we did a survey of their satisfaction with it and to a person that they were very high in their praise now that requires stellar folks like Rob Davis to be there but if I think about the preparation for Cornell to really move toward a collective collection I'd spend all of my money on agriculture and on industrial labor relations and things that complement Columbia's holdings and there's not a chance in my lifetime that that will happen so being able to think not only collective collections but collective services on top of that will be key so that as we expose our agriculture collection to the Columbia faculty as they think about sustainability that kind of collective services there is really an important thing for them while I walk this gavel over to Waston and speculate about what he's going to do with it whenever it has come yeah we this is all reminding me of our collective collection with UNC Chapel Hill which we've had for 90 years collectively developed collections we've had a shared South Asia librarian for 8 or 9 years and but I want to raise the issue of faculty recruitment when you have shared collections and we've had some cases where the faculty member comes to interview at Duke or UNC and is told well you know we have this great cooperative thing your collection is in Chapel Hill and they say what no in my field so it can be a recruitment barrier or it can be we've had the other experience of that's great what a wonderful use of your resources I'm glad you can collectively have a much richer array of things so but it's still the issue of status and how regarded that particular field is by the library and by the university thank you for listening music was provided by Josh Woodward for more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org