Library-IT Partnerships: New Services for New Campus Demands
- By Stephen R. Acker, Michael D. Miller
- 10/26/04
The roles of central information technology and library organizations
are being transformed by demands that new campus services be delivered more
effectively and efficiently. Both organizations have reasons for paranoia and
reasons for optimism as they look into the future. Properly conceived, library-IT
partnerships can reduce threats and increase opportunities.
Nicholas Carr's Harvard Business Review article of May 2003 ("IT
D'esn't Matter") argued that information technology is moving rapidly into
commodity status, and prudent managers should look to control costs rather than
attempt to innovate services. The Library community has concerns that the value
of their physical presence may be lost in the rush to networked access to electronic
resources (Prinsen, 2001). These are but two voices framing concerns about the
roles that information technology organizations and libraries will play in higher
education's future.
To proactively address such concerns, universities have begun experimenting
with such innovations as "information commons" and "digital unions."
These projects recognize a need for new working relationships and organizational
structures to continue to deliver on services that have been heavily funded
in the past. In this article, we discuss several of the strategies that Ohio
State and Michigan have undertaken to build the trust and coordination needed
to succeed in the re-forming academic landscape. Both approaches focus on "living
together" as the best approach to understanding and valuing each organization's
traditions and contributions to campus learning needs.
In the summer of 2002, Ohio State began a systematic evaluation to identify
a new course management system to meet exploding student and faculty demand.
We identified "integration with library services" as one of our important
CMS selection criteria. At the same time, national and local architect teams
were competing to renovate Ohio State's iconic William Oxley Thomas Library,
scoped as a $100 million project with a 100-year lifetime. In those competing
architectural designs, information and learning technologies were acknowledged
as important but treated only as requiring "flexible space." This
seemed a rather weak directive on which to plan a project of this magnitude.
The director of libraries and the CIO agreed to co-sponsor a project to better
understand integration of instructional technology with library resources on
one hand, and how library space allocation and services might change on the
other. The result of this shared need to "envision the future" was
a project called The Digital Union. The project is an experiment in organizational
collaboration toward meeting new end user needs and establishing new roles for
delivering library and IT services in combined spaces.
After about ten months of planning, resources were identified to build a technology-rich
"test bed" in the Science and Engineering Library, an inviting physical
space that had been experiencing a reduction in foot traffic because of the
network-based research habits of the science and engineering faculty and students.
A 2,000-square-foot computer lab previously dedicated to rows of word processing
and e-mail access stations gave way to a space with all furniture on wheels,
wireless and wired access from anywhere in the facility, robust external networking
and storage, and collaborative staffing (http://telr.osu.edu/digitalunion).
The mission of OSU's Digital Union was defined as meeting faculty and student
needs from idea generation to final presentation, using the research skills
of the librarians and the production skills of the information technologists.
Because both librarians and instructional technologists planned, resourced,
and staff the facility, it offers a microcosm of what the two organizations
might become in the future.
While both the library and the CIO organization committed funding for space
renovation and technology, external partners also contributed substantially
to the project. We presented this facility as a usability lab in which to evaluate
new ways of conducting instructional and research practices. As the faculty
and students use the technology, they respond to surveys and in focus group
settings about their preferences, successes, and frustrations in the new academic
work environment. Technology vendors and architectural vendors donated, or offered
their wares at greatly reduced costs, to help frame the questions and hear their
answers. We garnered the support of central administration by offering these
same data as protection from, or at least mitigation of, the financial risks
facing the university concerned with supporting new academic practices. For
example, the Digital Union is evaluating media production technologies, the
creation of electronic theses and dissertations, ePortfolios, and institutional
repository requirements. We realize that each of these areas requires cross-trained
information technologists and librarians to coordinate and improve such services
for our patrons.
The University of Michigan's Media Union was founded in 1996, offering a unique
combination of resources including: audio and video production studios, a 3D/Virtual
Reality Lab, teleconferencing suites, hundreds of computers in a wireless environment,
and one of the most technologically enabled libraries in the country. It is
home to three diverse units: the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library
(AAE), the College of Engineering's IT group (CAEN), and the Media Union Programs,
UM's digital media and courseware development groups (CHEF, Sakai). The environment
offers ample opportunity to explore the linkages and potential of IT/library
partnerships. Over the years the Media Union partners have gone through multiple
organizational phases in an attempt to better deal with the many issues that
arise from sharing the same facility and attempting to collaborate on projects.
More recently the UM campus has developed a philosophy of IT stewardship that
it calls the IT Commons. The IT Commons approach is intended to build community
and relies heavily on the personal commitments of the people "at the table"
with the vice provost for IT working on behalf of the whole university. The
strength of the IT Commons approach has been to create a new sense of energy,
creativity, and cooperation among IT units across campus. By eliminating duplication
of effort and fostering a climate of collaboration it is also more consistent
with today's economic reality.
The Media Union has adopted the IT Commons approach as a means of refocusing
and renewing its efforts.
The impact has been dramatic. Using professional facilitators
to guide the process, the staffs of three Media Union partners participated
in a series of "Intensives" to vent history, share information, and
generally develop a new appreciation for each group's abilities and concerns.
Many opportunities for mutual support, cooperation, and collaboration have since
been identified and initiated.
On March 19, 2004 Michigan's Media Union was re-dedicated as the Duderstadt
Center, honoring President Emeritus James J. Duderstadt. After eight years of
operation and much organizational transition, the Duderstadt Center has found
a renewed sense of purpose and more opportunities for collaboration as a result
of participation in UM's IT Commons initiative (http://www.umich.edu/itcommons/).
The partners jointly sponsor a "technology innovators" speaker series
to attract the hottest minds to campus to inspire students. The library and
CHEF worked closely together to move eReserves into the CourseTools environment.
The three partners have collaborated on improved adaptive technology access
and are currently in the process of designing new "collaboration stations"
to support student study teams. The Usability Lab and the library have worked
together to do user testing of the AAE library's new Web site and on the organization
of the forthcoming University Library's LMS Web pages. Better understanding
of the goals and limitations of each of the partner groups has led to more realistic
expectations and a greater willingness to support the university through shared
expertise and resources.
Information technology and libraries are enduring infrastructure providers
in higher education, yet both feel uneasy about their future centrality. IT
is concerned about becoming a commodity and librarians wonder if their current
resources and services are becoming irrelevant. If a partnership based on shared,
incremental experience can be built, this alliance and its exchanged wisdom
can greatly assist the university in these investments and visioning of university
support needs. If instead, IT and libraries oppose one another in budget deliberations
and infrastructure advocacy, both organizations, and the university at large
are the losers. We argue for the importance of taking small pragmatic steps
with which to inform new organizational thinking, and for collecting quantitative
and qualitative data to track and fine tune the development of collaborations.
Both the Digital Union and the Duderstadt Center are environments conceived
to help their respective universities "make learning happen" (Bennett,
2003). If we can keep thinking centered on this objective, we should be able
to overcome the different perspectives that IT and the library bring to serving
this common goal.
References:
Bennett, S. (November 3, 2003). Libraries Designed for Learning. Available
at: http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub122abst.html.
Retrieved from the Web January 16, 2004.
Carr, N. (May, 2003). "IT d'esn't matter." Harvard Business Review
(81) 5, 35-42.
Prinsen, J., (November 2001). "A Challenging Future Awaits Libraries Able
to Change." (7)11. D-Lib Magazine.
