There are three aspects of the functions of the research library that can be seen as providing potential scenarios. The library as a learning centre focusing on the provision of learning materials and support for learning processes. The library as a knowledge centre being a co-creator in the production of knowledge closely connected to active research groups. The library as a meta-knowledge institution working as a catalyst for knowledge synthesis, the organisation, evaluation and consolidation of knowledge.

As well as exploring this typology in greater detail, the report The future of research and the research library also describes a couple of more concrete and familiar scenarios.

Firstly, one that might have benefited from a deeper exploration in the report:

… up-to-date physical locations where the students can study with other students and in that way get a sense of a working day and a working community. In that way, the library will become more of a social zone, instead of the quiet room for lonely absorption which it is traditionally known for.

And secondly, one that is very much informed by the information literacy role of modern university libraries:

“’The touching library’, i.e. a research library which can touch and move its users through its competence to select and qualify knowledge, and which is touched and moved by its users in order to deliver the best possible product.”

What about the report itself?

It’s ambitious. Very ambitious. It’s also universal in its scope – only occasionally delving into Denmark-specific structures and scenarios. I can’t hope to do justice to the richness of its content in one single blog, so I can only present a subjective take.

Essentially, the report seeks to answer the following questions:

-          Does the research library have a future?

-          What future roles are open to the research library?

-          Would a roadmap be useful?

Instinctively I draw away from the idea of a roadmap. There are simply too many variables and broad forces over which we have so little control, notwithstanding the excellent framework that this report has provided. I’m unsure after reading the report twice whether it has answered these questions, Certainly no roadmap is forthcoming. Nevertheless, for those of us who spend time pondering over the future of the university library, it provides excellent food for thought.

Seismic change and disruption

It’s especially useful in terms of the material it presents for understanding the scale of disruption that the research library is undergoing.

Massive technological changes in the area of research, knowledge production, publishing and communication are influencing the way research is done and the functions of the research library in supporting and facilitating research and learning. Digital technology in its many forms is at the centre of the changes. The old functions of the research library are thus served in new ways. New forms of research emerge and new ways of learning too, and consequently not only new ways of serving old functions but also new functions serving new needs.

On the historical value of the research library, the report states:

The original form of value creation of the research library was based on minimising expenditure for acquisition and availability of books and journals. By having a central store it was possible to acquire fewer entities and by making these available it was possible to maximise their use. Books were expensive and few could afford large private libraries.

The report goes on to make the point that this cost-effectiveness is found today in licensing of e-journals and database, but the value is surely diminished where the number of users is factored into the cost of the licence, in a way that was not the case with a printed monograph.

There are also broader changes in terms of the research and educational systems, not least the expansion of higher education which is a global phenomenon, and the role that digital technology is perceived as a means of resolving the resultant problems and tensions. In research too there is much change – more collaborative styles and the ascendant trends towards interdisciplinary research being two obvious examples.

I know that one bright and joyous day I will pick up a report that talks about the impact of cultural relativism on an institution (the library) that has served as an absolutist custodian of authoritative artefacts. Sadly, that day is not today, and I just have to live with that (or write my own).

What history tells us

By and large, this isn’t an easy read. It’s highly theoretical and enormously broad as I’ve said. However, the report does present a very digestible history of the research library. Space constraints preclude even an attempt to do this justice, but what I will say is that it clarified in my mind many unanswered questions about how precisely the research library model has been disrupted. As is so often the case, it is not simply the case that the Internet has somehow thrown a deadly missile into a centuries-old static model, and instead should be seen as the latest and most disruptive change in the history of the research library, following on the heels of other catalysts such as the shift away from books in favour of scientific journals.

Research library and the innovation economy

The other interesting thing about the historical narrative of this report is that it presents a degree of historical continuum in the relationship between the research library and more focused problem-driven innovative activities in the broader economy. The report notes that a massive amount of research is being done in the knowledge-intensive private sector. It makes a very valid point that the limitations experienced in terms of access to digital resources (being mainly restricted to academia) is problematic, especially for SMEs.

What about curiosity driven research?

The report states that:

The British sociologist of science Steve Fuller has made a distinction between two ways in which research and universities create value. One is the direct creation of knowledge that can be used in making processes and products available in a market. This is the role of research in innovation. It contributes to the creation of financial capital. In this knowledge is seen as instrumental. The other way is through the creation of degree programmes and public education and making knowledge publicly available.

It wasn’t clear to me when reading the report where curiosity-driven research sits in this model, and indeed in the report as a whole. Yet it is surely of vital importance, even in today’s instrumental thinking around research and economic innovation. You could even argue that it assumes an even greater importance – we surely need to make huge leaps in our thinking to achieve the necessary scale of economic restructuring in most Western economies, and thinking needs to be as unrestrained as possible.

The central dilemma of the intermediary

The report provides some valuable pointers in terms of the role of the librarian and the competences that will be required. Our old friend disintermediation plays a major role in the discomfort that librarians have experienced for many years now:

New players are appearing as important and can take over some of the functions or parts of these. Publishers can provide access to journals on-line via their own servers, and universities and scientific groups or societies can provide access to digital repositories of papers and books.

As one interviewee said:

The dilemma is that you on one hand do something for the user and make yourself indispensable, and on the other hand you create the user in your own picture [sic] and thus make yourself dispensable.

This quotation surely goes to the heart of the pain of disintermediation, and reminded me forcibly of my days as a special librarian in the metals industry.

To my mind, the most optimistic statement in the whole report was this one:

Our belief about who we are does influence what we perceive as possible.

It really is true that even in adverse conditions, a little bit of self-belief can make a lot of difference, and this report has at least delivered some clarity to a highly complex landscape.

The Perceptions series of surveys is three years old now, and is part of Marshall Breeding’s armoury of library technology commentaries, the most well-used of which is Library Technology Guides. Meanwhile, Perceptions 2009: An international survey of library automation,  like its predecessors, aims to ascertain levels of satisfaction within libraries with their library management system and suppliers thereof. Despite disruption in the library software arena, the library management system (LMS), or integrated library system (ILS) as it’s known to Marshall Breeding in the US, remains important:

The integrated library system (ILS) for most libraries represents the most critical component of its technology infrastructure and can do the most to help or hinder a library in fulfilling its mission to serve its patrons and in operating efficiently.

Interest may be waning in open source

One of Marshall’s central aims this year is to gauge interest in open source ILS products, which he describes as “one of the major issues brewing in the industry”.

A key overall finding was that companies supporting proprietary library management systems tend to receive higher satisfaction scores than companies involved with open source library management systems. Marshall notes explicitly that LIbLime received particularly low marks in customer satisfaction, whilst libraries that undertook to implement Koha without external support were highly satisfied with this arrangement.

Respondents who had made use of other support firms such as PTFS, Nusoft and ByWater Solutions (it should be noted that support companies servicing open source products are still not prevalent in the UK) were not sufficiently numerous to be included in the report’s summary tables. Likewise, Talis only had 14 respondents and therefore does not figure in the main tables, although as a UK supplier, we are happy to be positioned in 10^th place in terms of satisfaction with LMS in an international survey.

As Marshall told the audience at the SCONUL conference here in the UK in June 2009, there are low levels of interest registered in open source library management systems apart from the community of libraries already using one. Even those libraries that are dissatisfied with their current proprietary system fail to demonstrate interest in open source.

But Software as a Service is top of the pops

Biblionix, described by Marshall as a relatively new company, gained the top satisfaction scores in the following categories – ILS product, company, and support for its product, Apollo. This is interesting not just because it’s a relatively new entrant in the library software marketplace, but because the product is offered exclusively through Software as a Service. As Marshall comments:

The responses for Apollo were overwhelmingly positive, the only product to receive 9 as either the mode or median response. The comments offered gave effusive praise for the company, the product, the ease of migration and for support.

It should be noted that takeup of Apollo is currently limited to small public libraries in the US.

Although UK suppliers don’t feature strongly in this international survey, it remains an important source in terms of looking at the key trends in our world.

Interesting though that finding may be, this survey is far from being the most meaningful that we’ve seen in the library world recently. The sprawling scope gives no real sense of representation. Together, the US and the UK represent 75% of respondents. At a time when economies such as China and Germany are firmly back in positive growth mode, whilst the UK and US remain obstinately stagnant, it’s a shame that this survey can’t give us more useful international comparators. The survey also attempts to cover just about every library sector in existence, making it hard to take away any useful insights that might support decision-making in a specific library service.

Key findings include:

37.4% of institutions expect to cut spending on information resources over the next two years, 28.3% expect to cut staffing budgets and 18.1% their spending on services and infrastructure. These figures are based on absolute figures and do not account for cost inflation: publisher costs, labour costs or general inflation.

On a more constructive note, and echoing another recent survey of the impact of the economic recession (but on that occasion specific to UK university libraries), librarians see the opportunity for a review of the fundamentals of the service they’re offering, over and above the usual operational efficiency gains:

Library managers see the current difficulties as being an opportunity to rethink what ‘library’ means in the twenty first century. It is clear that we have to go beyond measuring activity (through benchmarking and performance indicators) to thinking more about the positive impacts of formal information provision on student learning, research performance and other key aspects of organisational missions.

A trade-off analysis methodology was used to determine how much weight librarians attach to strategic issues, affording insights into those areas where librarians may cut their budgets. This is where we discover the marked preference for information resource cuts rather than staffing reductions. However, academic libraries are likely to be hit by natural wastage, and the larger European (particularly UK) institutions, are seen as very vulnerable to job losses.

The recent report How college students seek information in the digital age may have told us that undergraduates consult a very narrow range of information resources, but academia as a whole is likely to be impacted by a reduction in the availability of information resources. Not surprisingly, printed resources look more vulnerable than electronic, accelerating the format shift. Only e-books are described as being “relatively sheltered from the coming storm”.
Capital projects such as new library buildings seem to be safer than ongoing operational costs such as lighting (will students sacrifice their eyesight for a university degree?) and opening hours.

Academic libraries in particular are more likely to be badly hit than other sectors, and for 6.9% the pain is expected to be “very severe”. UK academic libraries expect to be “in a significantly worse position in two years’ time than they are today.”

This report is above all a victim of its own ambitions. In trying to cover too much territory, it has ended up telling us very little. It is vague in quantitative terms – being unrepresentative in both geographical and sectoral terms – and extremely superficial in qualitative terms, with little attempt to capture any depth of thought in the responses it has attempted to aggregate.

How college students seek information in the digital age

The report introduces a useful typology of students’ research activities:

1. Big picture: Background information on a specific topic
2. Language: Finding out more about the words and terms around that topic
3. Situational: Judging the extent to which an area needs to be researched
4. Information-gathering: “Finding, accessing, and securing relevant research resources.”

… and points out that students experience needs in all these areas on a frequent basis.

So here we are deep in the digital age, characterised eloquently by the report as “a fast-paced, fragmented, and data-drenched time that is not always in sync with the pedagogical goals of colleges”. Since the “digital native” archetype has been all but discredited, what can we say about the online behaviours of that generation in this confusing and sometimes overwhelming landscape?

First of all, I was impressed by reference to broader forces (i.e. those that transcend technological advances), as articulated here:

… today’s students have defined their preferences for information sources in a world where credibility, veracity, and intellectual authority are less of a given – or even an expectation from students – with each passing day.

So it’s not just the technology that is a catalyst for change in the scholarly environment.

At a general level, librarians will be struck by the gaps identified between the students’ conceptualisation of research and that of instructors and librarians. The librarian approach is broadly characterised by thoroughness – advising students to move from the general to the specific when information searching, using scholarly resources to that end. Students surveyed, on the other hand, used a whole range of resources that delivered large numbers of results early on in the searching process, irrespective of their scholarly status.

The quantitative findings are interwoven by quotations from students’ interviewed, and all have a ring of authenticity, such as this one:

When I’m doing research, usually it’s the material that I have from the class, or the stuff I’m looking up from the library databases. But if I don’t understand something from those things like a word or a concept, then I’ll go [sic] a search engine, or if I just need quick facts or something like that, I’ll use a search engine to find them.

“Information overload”

Students in all institutions used Google to complement scholarly resources found with a much larger result set, although they did not always use Google first or exclusively. The resulting “information overload” gave rise to considerable frustration:

In general, students reported little information-seeking solace in the age of the Internet and digital information. Frustrations were exacerbated, not resolved by their lack of familiarity with a rapidly expanding and increasingly complex digital landscape in which ascertaining the credibility of sources was particularly problematic.

“A risk-averse and predictable information-seeking strategy”

Another key finding is that

… nearly all of the students in our sample had developed an information-seeking strategy reliant on a small set of common information sources – close at hand, tried and true. Moreover, students exhibited little inclination to vary the frequency or order of their use, regardless of their information goals and despite the plethora of other online and in-person information resources – including librarians – that were available to them.

This, coupled with findings around “information overload”, suggests that students are dealing with the immensity of the information landscape by creating some kind of self-imposed walled garden, or what the report calls “a risk-averse and predictable information-seeking strategy.”

Scholarly databases

Students valued the “credible content, in-depth information, and the ability to meet instructors’ expectations” of scholarly research databases such as ProQuest (sponsors of this research). They were used in all of the research activities of the typology outlined above.

Most students used such databases for 3 reasons:

1. Quality of content
2. To meet lecturers’ expectations of resources consulted
3. Perceived simplicity of search interfaces.

The 24/7 availability of those resources was surprisingly less important.

Course readings

Almost every respondent turned first to course readings for course-readings for assignments, because these resources are “inextricably tied to the course and the assignment”, as well as being readily available and sanctioned by the lecturer.

Contact with lecturers and librarians

Lecturer availability was most important to students for answering questions submitted by email. 76% also found the setting of standards for resources consulted to be useful. Lecturers, then, unlike librarians, were seen as an integral part of the research workflow.

This contrasts sharply with contact with librarians. The report goes so far as to talk of a “student librarian disconnect”. So even though 78% of respondents are still using the OPAC to find books and other library materials, and 72% are making use of library study areas in the course of their research activities, only 12% made use of “on-site, non-credit library training sessions”, and 20% consulted librarians about their assignments.

As one student said:

Generally, it is not necessary to talk to a librarian – if the library is well laid out, you can search for material online, once you find it, you can request that they put them on hold for you and then just go and collect them. Or, if you know the physical location, you can just go and collect it yourself. When those ways fail, I’ll go bug a librarian. But otherwise, it just seems like there are resources to be used, rather than taking up someone’s time.

Finally…

This is an exceptionally useful report for anyone interested in student searching behaviours and student engagement in academic libraries more generally. Its sophisticated and rigorous methodology enables it to transcend received understanding and offer some really valuable insights. Academic librarians will justifiably be concerned about this “student librarian disconnect” which manifests itself not only in an ever-lessening of direct contact, but also in students’ own search behaviour. I believe that librarians are responding to this by making themselves available at the point of need, and working closely with academics to improve information literacy among undergraduates. I don’t believe that the findings of this report will be altogether surprising to the UK academic library community, but it’s an exceptionally valuable report all the same.

The discomfort had nothing to do with either the organisers or the participants, or indeed with the concept of mashing itself. The problem is that the same forward-thinking librarians who celebrate the advent of electronic resources and innovative technologies for discovering them, are the same people who, in a mashing context, are forced back into the world of print. And this has to be about ownership of data. Bibliographic data is much more “ours” than electronic resource metadata, that has traditionally been proprietary, locked away in abstract and index databases, available only in academic institutions and certainly not mashable by a bunch of librarians with a strange predilection for creating more exciting experiences of scholarly information.

Mashing the reading list

Like many people at the event, Edith Speller from Trinity College of Music was concerned about her institution’s reading lists. She felt that they were getting too static, and out of date, and, like many Talis Aspire customers, wanted to raise awareness of all those expensive subscriptions to e-resources among academics who would then be more likely to include them on resource lists. However, the solutions arrived at seem to be very book-specific, involving the following:

• Using the ISBN of a book on a resource list to look up recommendations (along the lines of “people who bought that also bought this”) using Amazon Web Services.
• Using the Mosaic API to:

• Perform an ISBN look-up to find the courses associated with the people who have borrowed that book.
• Use course codes to look up what other books were borrowed by people on those courses.

Paul Stainthorp at University of Lincoln is using RefWorks to create embeddable lists of new titles and communicate them to users, by sharing folders within RefWorks publicy and creating RSS fees on that folder. He’s also used Yahoo! Pipes (the mashup panacea du jour) to pull in the book cover image and description from Amazon. Because their academics prefer notifications by email, as opposed to running their own RSS feed, an email now comes in when a new book arrives in their subject area.

No doubt academics are availing themselves of current awareness services provided by publishers to find out about new e-journal articles, but it comes back to the disintermediation of the library from e-resource metadata. Owen Stephens from Open University reflected in the pub afterwards on the decisive break that occurred with the electronic journal, when the library no longer owned the item, but merely licensed it. Tony Hirst concurred that the library world had never challenged the proprietary nature of abstracts and indexes.

Mashing the library floor plan

Owen ran a workshop in the afternoon to develop his idea for mashing library floor plans with Google Maps. We used the University of Sheffield library floorplan as a working example, and it was fascinating to hear about how Open Layer (an Open Source mapping tool) works. Apparently maps are divided into tiles of 256 by 256 pixels, and then some javascript asks for each tile as needed as the user navigates around the map. And as the user zooms in, the map simply moves to a more detailed set of tiles. The exercise of converting a floorplan into a zoomable map forces the library to consider how granular and practicable their floorplans – is there enough detail to establish on which shelf a book is located? Maintenance is also an issue and Owen suggested augmenting the shelving workflow, so at the end of shelving, the librarian records the start and end classmark of the shelf. We also considered separate scenarios where the user wants a particular book, on the one hand, or books on a subject area on the other.

University of Sheffield plans to use heat maps to analyse how users are navigating the library. With the Ranganathan maxim in mind (positioning the stock to minimise the need for users to move around the library) they would then be able to optimise the library layout.

Sure it’s funky, but I just want to renew my books

Earlier in the day, Mark Van Harmelen from Hedtek Ltd. based at the University of Manchester, urged us all to listen more to the student voice, through focus groups and other mechanisms. I know that Owen Stephens and many other Middlemash attendees are making every effort to engage with students in the idea and design stage right now. It will be interesting to see whether we’re expending too much energy on over-sophisticated solutions for the dying format of print. As Chris Keene from University of Sussex stated, the response of students to tag clouds and other features at the discovery layer is, “Sure it’s funky, but I just want to renew my books.”

Personally, I’d love to see more focus on work-level data. The published works of an author or indeed a subject area plotted against an appropriate timeline could be tremendously useful – the works of Dickens plotted against key social legislation of the 19th century springs to mind. But the approach would come into its own with non-fiction, where there is a more direct relationship between published literature and real world events. That would really add scholarly value to bibliographic data, and would enable us to break out of transactions such as reservations that are rooted in the past not the future of scholarly life.

Karen kindly agreed to spend some time in a follow up conversation so that listeners could get to hear her thoughts on a couple of further questions I asked, including one about the future for library metadata formats. 

In addition I also gained the opportunity to ask her reflect upon the presentation she gave on that day.  The slides for which are available to view from the OCLC site.  The other benefit being that we were not competing with the music, staff, and hotel guests during the recording.

I took the opportunity to talk to her about the last twelve months since the announcement about changes to the OCLC record reuse policy.  We then moved on to discuss how new entrants, Biblios and SkyRiver, in to the record supply sector may alter that landscape.

As well as discussing the themes for her presentation later that morning, we also explored the blurring of the boundaries between OCLC’s traditional record supply focus and the ILS vendor community offering library automation software.

Conference Chair, Adrian Dale, joins me in conversation to discuss these trends an to explore his hopes for the highlights of this years conference.

Based on books in the public domain, the agreement enables Complutense to offer universal free of charge full-text access to a large number of books. So I, for example, a former student from a Spanish university, can now explore a rich vein of Cervantes books without having to endure the punishing euro-sterling exchange rate.

In digitising Complutense’s public domain books, Google assumed all the costs of digitisation and transportation. Google also created an interface, something they do for all their library partners. In return, Complutense selected and provided the books, as well as technical staff.  The overarching aim was to offer access to the university’s library heritage. It was also perceived as an important part of selling the Spanish language abroad – providing access to the vast number of Spanish speakers in the world.

The process started with an analysis of the collection to determine how many books were out of copyright. They then catalogued 70,000 books and established selection criteria – publication year and physical condition – and formulated workflows and logistics for digitisation. Using PDAs, for example, the selection team stored details of the physical condition of books against the book barcode.

As a result of this herculean effort, thousands of Complutense’s digitised books are already accessible in Google Books. It’s possible to navigate directly to the full text from the catalogue record. There are also links enabling users to buy the book. This is truly how to extract optimal value from materials that were formerly languishing in the library. And even in the short time that they’ve been available, 34% of the materials have already been used.

Meanwhile, Jason Hanley, one of Google’s partner managers who spoke immediately after Manuela, seemed anxious to dispel a number of myths about Google and its work with libraries. On the predominance of English language materials, he pointed out that of all Google’s library partners, 8 are outside the US – 2 being in Japan and the rest, such as Universidad Complutense, in Europe. He also believed the predominance of language, linguistics and literature over STEM subjects to be surprising – I’m not sure why.

The question and answer session at the end, involving both Manuela Palafox and Jason Hanley, may have inadvertently answered the question of Google’s motives in this. It’s not the library world that should be afraid of Google – it’s the competing search engines. Google’s longstanding mission – to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful – has clear benefits not only to library partners such as Universidad Complutense, but to the library world as a whole, and to bibliophiles like me. But Google will be imposing limits on the availability of digitised materials for indexing by other search engines for a certain (undefined in this session) period of time, although Hanley denied that Google was trying to be exclusive (which came across as being more than slightly defensive).

The session was a clear window into the aims and experiences of a library partner, and maybe into Google’s motives as well… As one speaker from the floor noted, what are the chances of any other search engine being able to compete fully with Google in the foreseeable future?.