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CREATIVITY AND LEADERSHIP
Growing needs and limited budgets: The challenge of supporting print and electronic resources
C&RL News, April 2005
Vol. 66, No. 4
by Joan Gotwals
Funding college and research libraries has never been easy, but today it is especially challenging. Supporting the hybrid environment of the print and the electronic worlds and the multiple needs this creates, as well as keeping up with rapidly changing technology, requires increasing library resources. At the same time, our institutions of higher learning are struggling to meet overall costs of higher education. After years of significant tuition increases, there are growing concerns about the affordability of higher education in the United States. In a recent study cited in the New York Times, only one state, California, was highlighted for affordable higher education opportunities.1 Colleges and universities without question are under substantial pressure to slow the pace of rising costs and, in many cases, restrict or cut budgets. As responsible citizens of an institution that asks all units to exercise restraint in expenditures, librarians must ask serious questions about what and how they do things and seek to find the most efficient ways of supporting institutional priorities.
With this as background, let me first touch upon the many needs and challenges of the hybrid library and, secondly, explore funding sources and strategies to support such a library. Clearly for most libraries, needs go well beyond the capacity of the operating budget provided by the institution.
As librarians understand and college and university administrators often do not, the role of libraries and librarians is ever more important in assisting users in the hybrid world to navigate the dizzying universe of electronic information and relate these sources to print and archival materials. It also requires greater subject expertise and, I believe, will likely result in a need for more Ph.D.s on the library staff, especially in research universities. Because of recent discussions and publications about student use of the Web, online learning, and “empty libraries,” it is necessary to always keep the library’s role “front and center” for all to see its value and centrality to the success of the institution as a whole.
Because of content knowledge and experience with information resources of all kinds and formats, librarians need to be actively involved in the support of classroom teaching and the development of interactive courseware. They need to perform as liaisons to academic departments, teaching effective search methodologies so students and faculty find and use the full range of available print, archival, film, video, audio, and Web resources. Librarians need to help faculty develop the best ways of conducting research projects when digitization is involved, so that the digitized research results can be preserved and made readily accessible and usable for future generations of scholars.
Challenges of the hybrid library
In the hybrid library, the technology needs are costly and difficult to sustain. Keeping current with changes, replacing equipment, acquiring new systems, obtaining network connections, paying for furniture and peripheral supplies, as well as providing the essential training for staff, all necessitate substantial expenditures. Securing sufficient funding requires real ingenuity. In my experience, allocations for technology have been the most inadequate and least realistic of all the areas in the budget.
Space also remains a major need in the hybrid environment, not only for growing print collections but also for accommodating and supporting new and evolving service and staffing needs in the electronic world. While much is available electronically, print material continues to be essential, especially in supporting ongoing academic programs in the humanities and in many parts of the social sciences. With the cost of print publications worldwide continuing to rise, libraries can expect to acquire, house, and support both print and electronic collections for the foreseeable future.
While exploring all possible funding sources and strategies, librarians must continue their never-ending efforts to educate those in the central administration about library concerns and challenges. In addition to what has already been said about teaching and research, librarians need to stress how the library helps define the profile of a university or college by its areas of strength and in key ways assists in attracting faculty, students, and visiting scholars. In all of these educational efforts directed towards the administration, librarians need to carefully and thoughtfully enlist the support of faculty and students, so that faculty and students can explain in their own way how importantly the library affects and touches their studies and research. I found that positive support on the part of the faculty was much more effective and valuable than a confrontational stance or an angry protest about the administration’s treatment of the library.
No matter how well budget negotiations go, librarians need realistically to explore all sorts of possibilities for funding sources beyond institutional allocations. Such possibilities include partnerships, collaborations, private funding sources, foundation and government grants, individual donors, estate planning, corporate giving, and all sorts of imaginative fundraising initiatives. Early in the process, it is important to explore potential partners or collaborators on campus, something the central administration usually encourages.
Working collaboratively
Libraries can benefit greatly from collaborative efforts to work with the campus information technology unit in providing services in the electronic realm. Working together in offering services not only helps contain the institution’s costs, but, best of all, it offers more seamless service to the end user. Some institutions choose to integrate the library and the technology unit in a new kind of organizational structure, most often seen in smaller liberal arts colleges. Others favor close working relations between the library and the technology division but prefer to maintain separate structures.
The campus offers various other possibilities for partnerships or collaborations. A collaboration of great benefit to all parties is a library fellowship program, which we were fortunate to establish at Emory University. In Emory’s case, the key collaborator was the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, although it could just as easily be one of the other schools.
Each year the graduate school funds about five library fellowships for PhD students to work on library-defined projects.2 These fellowships provide the students with valuable working experience in their subject areas and help the library accomplish major projects that it could not otherwise fund. Most of all, they enrich the students’ total educational experience and serve to open PhDs to the possibility of future careers in libraries, which some fellows have elected to pursue.
On a different level, there are many opportunities for partnerships between librarians and faculty members on grant-funded projects. For example, at Emory we had a joint faculty/librarian project to study the effect of a library skills course on student exam scores in an anthropology class. I might add that faculty members teaching the anthropology course also reported that classroom discussions were much richer in subject content after the skills course. There are various examples of digitizing projects, which include staff from the library and staff from the university press, all working with faculty in a mix that enriches the research process and the final electronic products, as demonstrated in the electronic material produced at the University of Virginia and Columbia University.
Storage facilities for growing collections
In addressing space needs for growing print collections, many libraries elect to use storage facilities, which are typically much less costly to build and maintain than a full-service library and do not require prime campus space. In many cases, off-site storage facilities are built, maintained, and funded by libraries in a geographic area working together. Some have experimented with the use of automated retrieval systems, which greatly reduce the footprint required for the facility and substantially increase its capacity. Especially interesting are experiments with on-site automated retrieval systems now operating in a few locations. On the subject of print journals, a regional or central repository seems like an appropriate and less costly longer-term strategy when electronic versions of the journals are available. JSTOR is currently working with a university library on a pilot project to maintain a repository for print copies of journals that are available in electronic format. Progress on this project will be important to follow.
The importance of fundraising
Grant funding and library fundraising activities are for most college and research libraries a real necessity in the ongoing effort to obtain adequate resources. Fundraising has become a significant responsibility for library directors. In building a database of potential donors, many librarians find it helpful to keep records of persons attending its sponsored events. By doing this, librarians are also able to identify alumni supporting their activities. This creates an opportunity for subsequent contact with these alums for development purposes. Without this demonstrated interest, the library cannot easily target alumni for initial cultivation purposes; institutional practice usually limits alumniaccess to the school that the alum attended. Whenever possible, librarians should seek to find a campus fundraising partner with a shared interest or funding need. Joint campus projects or initiatives have advantages for fundraising. They enlarge the potential donor possibilities and frequently gain more attention and assistance from the campus’ central development department.
Fundraising itself takes considerable time and effort and requires an appropriate level of library staff devoted to supporting the library director in identifying funding possibilities and actively representing the library’s interests within the context of campus development. Among many goals listed for fundraising, the creation of an endowment fund for technology needs to be considered a priority. It is important to have an ongoing funding source for this major area of library need, just as libraries over the years built endowments for collections. Library staff as a whole need regular updates on development activities and should be encouraged to think about possible grants, donor projects, and prospects for gifts and endowments. It is useful to have staff members think of themselves as the “eyes and ears” of the organization and pass on any useful information to library fundraisers.
Grant partnerships
Through activities in networks, professional organizations or consortia, a library can many times find a partner for a joint or multi-library grant proposal or grant-supported projects. The Digital Library Federation offers many ways to contribute and benefit from joint efforts, as does the Research Libraries Group. Regional networks, such as SOLINET, provide opportunities for libraries to join others to accomplish what they could never afford to do alone. Of course, partnering with commercial entities is also a possibility, of which the biggest example is the recently announced digitization venture of Google and five major research libraries.3 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, and the Delmas Foundation are just a few of the various sources that offer libraries excellent grant opportunities.
The rewards of these partnerships, grant projects, and various innovative initiatives are great not only in providing funding for specific needs, but also for providing an important learning experience for staff. The experience helps to develop new staff skills and expertise to better support learning. As a result of these initiatives, the library cannot help but attract growing recognition from the campus community for all that it does to support the institution’s mission.
Success for the future
Over the years, I have had serious doubts and worries about the sustainability of college and university libraries in the complex hybrid environment. However, as I recently reflected on all the accomplishments of the last decade and the resourcefulness of librarians, I find myself feeling somewhat more confident about the future. Remarkably, librarians have found ways to address many needs and challenges. In looking towards the future, I believe that library staff members as a whole need to be actively involved in discussions and encouraged to think creatively about how the library’s role will be evolving in the future and what impact this has on needed resources. Creativity and innovation are key elements in the library’s success in years to come. It is my belief that librarians will not only find ways to meet the needs and challenges of the hybrid library, but also will define and create an exciting, new interactive learning environment with a range of rich resources readily accessible to faculty and student users.
Notes
1. National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, “Measuring up 2004: The National report card on higher education,” San Jose, California, 2004.
2. The number can actually vary from year-to-year depending on the length of the student work schedules, covering either the whole academic year or two semesters.
3. Harvard University, the New York Public Library, Oxford University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan are the five institutions working with Google.
Joan Gotwals is former vice provost and director of libraries at Emory University, e-mail: libjig@worldnet.att.net.
© 2005 Joan Gotwals
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