Culture Morph

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The Digital Library

Culture Morph

6/1/2007

By Susan D. Heid

Today, nearly a decade later, the library and IT cultures have changed distinctly. Isselmann relates that recently, when the growth of the technical staff prompted administrators to move the help desk out of the library, Rollison protested. Isselmann laughs, "We put our IT folks in the library and they're all joined at the hip now."

Rollison calls the relationship between the two groups a natural fit. "Librarians have become very tech-savvy. They've had to be; the students they're working with have become tech-savvy, and expect it. So the librarians understand how to use the tools, but don't necessarily understand [all the technology behind it]." The IT staff and the librarians don't "step on each other toes," he says; "we're complementing each other."

By way of example, Isselmann points to the school's move to the SirsiDynix library catalog, and the early talks about migration to that system. "The CIO was on that committee. Certainly, the librarians knew what they wanted out of that system, in terms of the library processes," she says. "But the CIO knew what kind of server we would need to put it on, and what other institutional systems would need to interface with it." And when Immaculata began serving offsite students, the library wanted to make its databases accessible to distance learners. Yet, in order to respect the licensing requirement that the software be accessible only by its own population, the campus had to set up a firewall and password access, which was created by the IT staff.

"Today, everything librarians want to do--in terms of service--requires some back-room, deep-in-the-interior work done by the tech folks," says Isselmann.

But the librarians often are driving the search for new ways to provide learning to students. For instance, says Rollison, they were the ones who saw the need to handle reserved materials in a different way. "Faculty put their materials-onreserve on paper, which is fine if you live on campus, but difficult for students who don't." So the instructional design team was called in to create an online reserve system that could work through the campus' WebCT system. Now faculty make articles available through their course shells on WebCT via a scanning-and-documentdelivery service, and the library has extended that service to include other articles it owns in physical form.

Conversely, though Immaculata librarians are not technicians, they routinely head to any of the campus' 50 "smart" classrooms and command the control podia, in order to instruct faculty members and students on the use of a new library or research resource. Isselmann maintains that the librarians at Immaculata are no longer considered simply guardians or custodians of information, but technology-enabled educators.