STATE OF THE LIBRARY, 2007
September 4, 2007
Good morning! Thank you for joining me once again for my annual “State of
the Library” talk. It’s really wonderful to see so many of you here to help me mark
the start of my 9th year as University Librarian. Some of you have joined our
Library family during the past year. Would you please stand and introduce
yourselves briefly. Welcome to all of you! You join a group of extraordinary people
at an extraordinary time in the Library’s history. We’re very glad you’re with us.
This last academic year has been unusual for you and for me. While I spent
nine months at CITES as the campus’s Interim Chief Information Officer, the
Library was in Karen Schmidt’s very capable hands. Last May, just after I returned
to the Library, Karen provided a very rich overview of all the notable things you had
accomplished since August 2006.
And I spoke about our future directions, as I
also did briefly in early August at our All-Staff discussion about this year’s budget.
Because we did this so recently, I’m going to deviate from my usual “State of
the Library” practice of reviewing the past year. Instead, I want to provide you
with the changing contexts in which the Library operates so that you will
understand more clearly the nature of the transformative changes we will make
over the next few years. And, yes, we will be undergoing transformative change.
It should be no secret to any of you who have been here for more than a
short time that the Library has made significant changes over the past eight years.
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Our culture has become more – but not entirely - open and transparent. Resources
have become more precious – although we must remember that we have access to
$35 million or so, which is not an insignificant amount of money. We’ve created a
much more digitally intensive environment in the contents we provide, the services
we offer, and the materials we reformat, and we work in social networking
environments that didn’t exist eight years ago and in much more diffused and
infused ways in all the places in which we interact with our faculty and students,
most of whom now are ‘digital natives.’ Through IDEALS, we offer digital services
that have, in part, an analog in our traditional print-based past but that in part go
well beyond our traditional models.
We have increased greatly our emphasis on instruction and our
collaborations on campus have strengthened and multiplied. We have an increasingly
robust program of stewarding, preserving and providing access to all the formats of
content for which we have responsibility. I have made it clear that I do not think
that our monolithic department library model is as useful or as effective as it once
was in serving a campus that has become increasingly marked by its
interdisciplinarity, and we’ve made a number of changes by consolidating some
libraries, closing a couple, and creating a more infused presence in some venues in
which other faculty and students work. We have recognized the changes in the
ways students learn and work through our Learning Commons and focus on space,
and we have identified emerging needs of faculty and advanced students by
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launching our planning activities for a Scholarly Commons in the Main Library.
Fewer and fewer faculty at Illinois work purely in the core disciplines that ironically
are still denoted by the traditional department and collegiate structures we find on
campus. It is incumbent upon us in the Library to emulate and support this
flexibility and growth in which our colleagues on campus are engaged.
The rise of interdisciplinarity is only one important change we’re
experiencing in higher education. The university of the future likely also will
include broader swaths of the population than it does today and it will be more
actively engaged in issues that concern those sectors. It also will work much more
closely with the communities in which it is situated, providing more services and
access to its resources than it does now. We see that reflected here at Illinois in
the increasing emphasis placed on public engagement. Globalization and
internationalization will also continue to hold universities’ interests, not only for the
promise of improving educational experiences for all students but to help achieve
the multiplicity of goals to which each is committed. And, like it or not, the
university of the future will be more open to commercial influence.
There are many other issues with which universities are concerned today,
among them campus safety and security, financial aid, leadership, and diversity. I
don’t have time to explore these and other important issues this morning, but there
is a rich body of information about each of them just waiting for you to explore. A
little later in my remarks, I’ll touch on the issue of scholarly communication, which
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is of special interest to many universities, including this one, and of special interest
to me.
I want to take a minute or two now to explore issues of government
interference and support for public universities. Today, universities are being held
to stricter standards of accountability than ever before. The struggle between
current accrediting agencies and the U.S. Department of Education about the role
of the federal government in institutional accreditation processes is indicative of
the threat of becoming subject to ‘no child left behind’-like standards and policies.
Our Provost’s focus on metrics to measure our progress on our strategic goals and
the Library’s increasing focus on assessment tools to gauge the effectiveness of
our efforts reflect good management, our need to account for the resources with
which we have been entrusted, and growing societal pressures on higher education.
It is no longer acceptable to continue to offer services we’ve always offered just
because we’ve always offered them, or to continue to do things in traditional ways
if new ways of doing them will allow us to save money to invest in improving and
developing other services and content.
No university can accomplish its mission and goals without sufficient
resources used efficiently and effectively. I’ve mentioned in my previous talks the
decline of state support as a percentage of total support for this University. We
are not atypical. The University must increasingly rely on tuition (which brings
increasing scrutiny from those who pay our not insignificant rates), grants and
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contracts, and donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations to achieve
our goals. No matter how clever we are, Illinois will not achieve its goal to be the
preeminent public research university without a sufficiently large financial base,
and we won’t achieve this base without hard work, bold thinking and risk-taking - by
all of us.
There is general agreement that the University has experienced financial
stress in recent years. Although resources have been inadequate for the demands
placed upon them, there has not in this recent period been a year when total
budgets have not exceeded those of the previous year. However, while overall
resources have grown, there has also been significant growth in institutional costs,
the most significant drivers of which are salaries, general price increases, utilities
price increases, library cost increases (and remember that Library materials price
increases were once provided annually by the State), IT infrastructure costs (for
example, the network upgrade that’s now underway), faculty start-up and retention
packages, University Administration support costs, and societal demands, such as
diversity, energy research, and economic development.
The University’s strategic plan is very ambitious; it both guides our
strategic decisions and invites our participation. As you know, the campus has
articulated 5 goals:

Leadership for the 21st Century

Academic Excellence
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
Breakthrough Knowledge & Innovation

Transformative Learning Environment

Access to the Illinois Experience
Although the Library is an important component of all of these goals, there are two
on which I want to focus just a bit this morning. First, the goal of creating and
sustaining a vibrant, dynamic learning environment, essential components of which
include world class facilities, a culture that embraces diversity, and enhancement of
public good facilities. Because there is no more prominent or important public good
than the Library – inclusively defined - we have a special responsibility to help the
University meet this goal.
The second goal that is particularly important to us is the one that seeks
breakthrough knowledge and innovation. In particular, the initiatives to increase
the Illinois presence in Washington, DC, Chicago, Singapore, China, and India, and to
partner with local constituencies to make the Champaign-Urbana area a vibrant
environment present us with exciting challenges. The four interdisciplinary
programs that are emerging from this goal are strategically important to the
Library’s future success. These four - Illinois Informatics Initiative, Integrated
Sciences for Health Initiative, Illinois Sustainable Energy and the Environment
Initiative, and Humanities and the Arts Initiative - are where much of the action
will be over the next few years. These initiatives will set new standards for
interdisciplinary work, create new organizational models, and generate excitement
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and reputation for Illinois, all of which is critically important to achieving our goal
of preeminence. The Library not only must track what’s happening, we must be an
integral part of all of it.
I know I don’t have to tell you about the tremendous changes we anticipate
experiencing - and making – over the next 5 years. I am very impressed and very
pleased that so many of you have embraced change with such enthusiasm over these
past few years; it is this perspective that will enable us to fulfill our goals.
Let’s
take a look at what some of those changes might be.
I’m not a digital native (I’m not even a television native), but I knew when I
negotiated for my first pc as part of a new job twenty-five years ago that new and
exciting possibilities were on the horizon. I am even more excited about the future
today, when nearly all of our students, and a growing portion of our faculty, are, in
fact, digital natives. We must operate in their world and in the flows of their
work. So, even though I don’t have a personal entry in MySpace or FaceBook,
(although I do have a SecondLife avatar), I know that the Library has to be there –
and we are.
Digital natives are infusing academia and influencing scholarship and
teaching, and thus influencing those of us who are part of the system that enables
and facilitates scholarship, teaching, and learning. Although we cannot overlook the
importance of our traditional methods of serving traditional scholars, neither can
we underestimate the importance of these new trends. Google, YouTube,
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WorldCat, Amazon, Digg, and others all play important roles both in academia at
large and within specific disciplines. Tools such as wikis, blogs, and SecondLife have
changed the pace and possibilities of collaboration, enabling community building in
ways not even dreamt of a few short years ago. New collaborations are springing up
in all sorts of disciplines. There’s QWIKI (no – it’s not what you think), a quantum
physics wiki for practicing scientists, SCIFIpedia, WikiMedia, well you get the idea.
There are also new kinds of collaborative partnerships, and they’re not all in the
sciences. One good example right here at Illinois is the History Cooperative, which
is a nonprofit humanities resource that offers free access to high-quality online
history scholarship and is spear-headed by the UI Press in partnership with the
American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the
National Academies Press. Community-built content, such as Wikipedia, is creating
new kinds of scholarship – and outside of academia is creating new kinds of
journalism. And tagging is a rather new way to mark content as you want to mark it
and share it with others. Our teaching colleagues can now think about collaborating
across institutional boundaries – but, can the Library support these new teams with
services and access to content?
We certainly know that the tools we offer today are still quite primitive.
Our online catalogs present barriers to many of our digital natives – and non-natives
– who are used to easier, more faceted ways of finding needed content. New
systems that offer more effective tools and that link to other tools are emerging
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not necessarily to replace our online catalogs but to sit on top of them and make
the search experience easier yet richer for our users. WorldCat Local, in which we
are a pilot participant, will offer yet another approach: a potentially rich expansion
of our traditional catalog into a very different tool for the 21st century, a tool that
will provide access not just to books but to content in all formats located literally
everywhere. We won’t be successful if we don’t continuously offer new tools,
services, and content that enable our faculty and students to be successful. And,
let me comment that we cannot consider ourselves to be successful until we make
all those uncataloged and uncontrolled items we’ve acquired over the years
intellectually accessible or until we properly curate all those rare and special
materials we have scattered throughout our locations, sometimes in quite
abominable conditions.
So what will happen if we ignore even some of these trends, these user
expectations and user demands? On one level, I suppose we could cede this
responsibility to Google and its competitors and just say that users will find their
own way. However, if we want to help our faculty and students be more successful,
we need to take account of these new trends and needs, incorporate them into our
portfolios, and keep alert for the next important trends. After all, we’re only at
web 2.0! And you know as well as I do, that resource growth – if in fact there is a
growth in resources over time – will not keep pace with our need to invest in these
new things. So, our only choice – and one that is mandated by the Provost – is to
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reduce or stop doing things as we have traditionally done them. We have a good
start on this, but we’ve not been nearly as bold as we need to be. But we will.
A few years ago Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC introduced the concept of “in the
flow.” It is no longer effective to assume that our users are going to continue to go
out of their way to fit into our flows of work; as I hinted at a moment ago, they’ll
go (virtually) to another source. And in so doing they’ll miss our superb expertise,
specialized services, rich collections of tangible materials, and our magnificent
special collections. We must figure out how to get into our users’ flows of work.
And by looking carefully at those flows and where we engage in them, we should be
able to identify gaps, niches, and opportunities that will help guide our priority
setting and use our expertise to best effect.
Looking ahead to the next five years, one can imagine a digital library of
millions of objects of content, but to make all that information accessible and
functional we must build the tools and applications. New disciplines and
interdisciplinary groupings pose new questions and require new ways of doing
research and scholarship; vast digital collections must have an architecture that
facilitates repurposing and reconstituting what today seems like an unprecedented
amount of data while supporting the discovery of new knowledge. Our focus on
preservation as a critical component of our information system highlights the
ephemeral nature and versatility of digital representation. If we organize and
maintain data properly, it will support future research projects. As Amy
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Friedlander of CLIR noted recently (CLIR Issues, July/August 2007), this
conceptually renders more porous the boundaries between raw data compiled during
the research process and the end result.
New models of scholarly communication and publishing continue to be the
subject of heated discussion and debate; our quest to build new models of scholarly
communication is driven in part by the continually rising costs and the business
models of traditional publishing but also by the need for different models of
scholarly argument and presentation that we recognize will be engendered by large
multimedia repositories and libraries. Clearly, cross-disciplinary convergence on the
issue of cyberinfrastructure indicates that researchers in almost every field
cannot begin to achieve the highest level of intellectual productivity without an
investment in the networks, visualization tools, search engines, databases and
indices, content management applications, and analytical tools necessary to create
an accessible and user-friendly space. Together with our CIC colleagues, and
perhaps NCSA, we have a rare opportunity as part of our commitment to build a
shared repository of digital texts to create a content-rich resource with perhaps
an endless array of service applications and tools that will give our faculty and
students unprecedented opportunities to discover, create, and communicate new
knowledge. I hope this prospect is as exciting to you as it is to me.
For many years, the term “digital library” has been used to describe the
increasingly complex collections of one kind or another. Today, we must think about
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cyberinfrastructure, which defines a more intricate, complex, and interoperable set
of systems and content that transforms the concept of a digital library into a
virtual work space characterized by an architecture that creates a systemic
permeability that interrelates these digital objects and tools. Conducting research
can entail searching data in text, image, and numbers simultaneously. It can require
the extensive federation of once-local repositories, ontology-based database
integration, the application of fundamental tools such as GIS, and fast and
efficient retrieval of digital objects, which in turn requires the thoughtful use of
metadata. When these digital elements are effectively interworked, conditions for
a new virtual environment for the comportment of research are attained. (Chuck
Henry, CLIR Agenda)
It’s not hard to believe that the future will be significantly different than
what we might have imagined even a decade ago, but it’s harder to know exactly
what that future will be. When I was a young librarian, I could easily envision that
online catalogs of our holdings would eventually supplant card catalogs (ok, so we
haven’t achieved that entirely here – but for all practical purposes we have). Today,
specifying the longer-term future is much murkier business. Think about this:
According to reports, Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s communications minister, has
announced that his government is hard at work on a newer, faster, stronger, and
generally better looking internet by 2020. According to Suga, the new network will
deliver more reliable data transfers at higher speeds, be more resistant to viruses
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and crashes, and will be 60 percent more charming – yes, charming. (Engadget
8/20/07)
So, let’s take a speculative look out to 2020. I’ve been influenced deeply in
what I’m going to speculate about 2020 by work that was done at CITES during my
time there as well as by listening to Provost Katehi. I want to share several
scenarios about changes we might see in the long-run. I hope one or more of them
prod your thinking.
Let’s assume that Illinois has fulfilled its goal of becoming the preeminent
public research university. We attract the best students, both physically and
virtually, from around the world in all fields.
Supporting cutting edge research in
all areas of scholarship requires us to have much deeper understandings of the
research, teaching, and learning methods used on and off campus; it also requires us
to offer customized content and services that differ – sometimes dramatically –
among different parts of campus and that are integrated deeply with other campus
services. Integration with COMPASS is just a baby step to where we are in 2020.
As researchers explore new frontiers we value our creativity and bold approaches
to making limited resources stretch to the limits. As researchers in all fields
amass large and small amounts of data we curate some and coordinate and support
the curation of others, whether that curation is provided by others on campus or by
disciplinary or other groups external to Illinois. Out-of-the-box thinking, risktaking, and acting boldly characterize our 2020 Library.
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Next scenario: Let’s assume that the Illinois Informatics Initiative’s virtual
organization has proven successful. The field of informatics has advanced
significantly and I-Cube has evolved into another virtual organization that’s on the
cutting edge of whatever comes next. The campus’s traditional collegiate and
department-based structures are beginning to give way to new flexible virtual
organizational structures that reflect the ebb and flow of new interdisciplinary
approaches to scholarship and problem solving. We are involved in creating and
participating in many of the virtual campus organizations that come and go. As
interdisciplinary areas ebb and flow, we keep on top of emerging fields with more
than just passing acquaintance so we can provide content and supporting services
and – even more importantly – help diverse groups speak a common language. This
requires us to build new strong collaborations with other organizations on campus.
Rather than working within the strict disciplinary boundaries defined by traditional
department libraries, we have had continuous iterations of organizational
structures. Librarians and staff work together in continually refreshed groupings
to meet the Library needs of the changing interdisciplinary groups.
Interdisciplinary research is not confined to Illinois faculty, but seamlessly
embraces scholars around the world. As librarians and partners we have found ways
to support the entire team. This requires us to collaborate with other research
organizations and create new models to support research team members who have
no institutional affiliations.
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Next scenario: Let’s assume that by 2020, as external funding has
decreased and societal pressures have increased, the university has chosen to act
more like a traditional business. At the same time, the business world has
developed lifelong learning and training centers for their employees. It is hard to
determine what is in the public good space. The Library holds true to its
responsibility to preserve and make accessible – to curate -the content it has
acquired since its beginnings, regardless of the format or type of content. The
Library has accelerated its relationships with trusted partners in all sectors to
meet our users’ needs in the most efficient and effective ways possible. We have
backed away - really and not just in my words - from the tenet that perfection is
desirable and attainable. While restrictions imposed by the State or the Board of
Trustees, coupled with University Purchasing capabilities, make navigating this new
environment increasingly challenging, the Library has developed strong
collaborations with other support units on campus to help forge new, acceptable,
approaches to doing business. Because we knew we were not going to accomplish
this on this campus alone, we strengthened our already strong collaborations with
the two other UI libraries and built new ones with other organizations at UIC and
UIS to create a credible force in dealing with UA structures and functions.
Here’s my final scenario, at least for now: Let’s assume that lifelong learning
is the norm, with increased needs to learn for one’s job juxtaposed against learning
for learning’s sake. Universities have adapted by becoming centers for lifelong
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learning. The Global Campus and OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, are
just the start of the University’s investments and attention to lifelong learning.
People have developed ‘tribes’ of co-learners interested in similar, though not
necessarily parallel, paths; these ‘tribes’ may be life-long. The social network in the
tribe is as important as the classroom lessons learned. The Library enables tribal
aspects via its social networking and other services. Faculty, students, and staff
are spatially and temporally diverse. All services need to be usable and supported
at any time from any where. Our e-resources and the new extended hours in
Grainger and Undergrad are just the beginning of our approach. Library faculty and
staff may be working at any time of the day or night from any where. We staff our
physical libraries, which are still very important, with permanent faculty and staff
when those physical spaces are used most heavily, that is, for the convenience of
our users, not ourselves. We have people available to provide services in our spaces
– physical and virtual - around the clock if needed. Our Gateway offers more
integrating and intermediating services and our online catalog has moved from an
intermediate stage in which an application layered on it improves search and
retrieval enormously to become a fully integral part of our approach to search and
discovery. Autonomous agents react to various scenarios to adjust services to
meet specific service levels. The Library – with all its functions – is literally
everywhere.
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In these scenarios, the Library has developed into a much stronger partner for
teaching, learning and research, with a much deeper understanding of our users’
needs. We are in everyone’s work flows, both physically and virtually. Library
faculty and staff are frequent contributors to and co-principal investigators of
many research projects across campus, playing a strong consulting role as new
teaching, learning, and research initiatives are designed. Looking back, the I3
Initiative will be recognized as the watershed for this concept.
Some of you must think I’ve gone astray in some or all of these scenarios. I
don’t, for no matter the details, all of these scenarios hold true to the fundamental
purposes of libraries, which remain the same despite changes in our environment.
Libraries connect people with ideas. To do this, we librarians have to understand
how ideas are produced and documented, we have to understand what our specific
community needs, and we have to construct interfaces and mechanisms to connect
peoples and ideas. This can be as simple as arranging books on a shelf or as complex
as building the cyberinfrastructure tools I’ve just described. I don’t see us
abandoning our old models so much as I see us transforming them for the
environments in which we do and will operate. No one model will be applicable for all
needs, as many of our old models were, nor will there be one “pure” or “right” model.
And few if any of our models will remain unchanged for very long. These new
models will offer each of you the opportunity to use your skills in new ways, perhaps
in new places. It’s important that you each have the opportunity to do work that is
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significant, fulfilling and challenging. This will require us to provide you with new
kinds of support as you plan and carry out our future.
So, to recap briefly, we are seeing enormous changes in higher education, in
our University, and in the ways in which our faculty and students carry out their
teaching, learning, and research. We’re experiencing new pressures to use our
resources more effectively and to be accountable to numerous organizations in
society. We’ve been given a set of clear messages from the University: what its
aspirations are and what it expects from us to help it realize them.
Provost Katehi has had a very positive impact on the University since she
arrived here less than a year-and-a-half ago. Her approach combines vision with
realism and rigor as she seeks to make the significant changes necessary for
Illinois to reach the preeminence for which it strives. I want to read you a large
part of her letter that accompanied our FY08 budget information, a letter, by the
way, which is the first of this sort I have received in my 20 years as a research
library director, and a letter that I welcomed and value deeply.
“The Library has developed a compelling strategic plan that presents an
exciting vision for the future….it will be critical that you do all that you can to use
resources to optimal strategic advantage, to strengthen your resource base to the
extent possible, and to continue to strive for excellence in all of your programs….I
will expect you to align your resources toward your strategic priorities and those
areas highlighted in this memo. The targeted strategic investments allocated to
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the Library will not, by themselves, enable you to make the progress necessary in
achieving your unit’s nor the campus’ goals.”
Provost Katehi continued: “I think it is critical to develop a plan for change
over time. You and your staff are moving forward with many important efforts, in
areas such as digitization, gaming, and new communication venues. As libraries and
services change, it is important that we are also able to change the ways in which
we invest. I look forward to talking with you over the next year about areas that
we can de-emphasize, as we move towards new opportunities. In the annual budget
meeting, there were preliminary discussions about whether small unit libraries can
or should be sustained in the present environment and about how to evaluate the
relative importance of maintaining print collections in certain areas, as new services
and activities are supported. These are complex discussions but important ones.”
She concluded: “(I)n order to move forward with plans to implement new
activities in the University Library, I hope that you will consider how internal
realignments of resources can allow you to invest in important new activities and
improve quality in specific target areas….All units will be asked to provide a
progress update to the issues mentioned herein in the budget report for FY09
which will be submitted to our office in January 2008.” The Provost could not have
been clearer. At the last Council of Deans meeting she shared some personal
observations, noting that all the changes we’ll be implementing at the University
this year will make us a better place and concluding that she’s finally seeing some
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light at the end of the planning tunnel. At the same time, she stressed that we
must move away from a culture of growth. We cannot request new funds without
demonstrating what we’ll stop doing or give up and each dean will be asked to
develop a hiring plan with a business plan attached. This is good news to me; we’ve
been very careful here in the Library in recent years not to hire with funds we
don’t have and not to fill jobs without evidence that they will help us meet our
strategic goals. Perhaps that’s why we’re not in budget deficit and why you’ve seen
and in many cases embraced so much change.
I will be as clear as possible and as clear as the Provost: we must and we will
consider a wide range of options to utilize our resources more effectively in these
changing times and we will have a plan in place by the end of this calendar year. Our
planning will be led by the Budget Plus Group, which I chair; it has the following
membership: the three Associate University Librarians, the Assistant Dean for
Business Operations and Management Information, the Head of Library Human
Resources, Chris Prom representing the Executive Committee, Mary Stuart
representing the Administrative Council, and JoAnn Jacoby representing the
faculty. And because I heard what you said, I have asked Peggy Glatthaar to
represent the staff. This group, together with regular input from the Executive
Committee, will review all the proposals and ideas you will have submitted by
September 15. We will share ideas and drafts with you often throughout the
process, inviting and listening to your feedback. After reshaping and combining
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some ideas and rejecting others, we will produce a master plan – with time
schedules – by December 31. Your ideas and perspectives are important to me. I
hope you’ve heard in what I’ve said today that I have been listening to what you’ve
been saying. Please keep it up.
I want to be clear in saying that everyone – let me repeat – everyone on the
Library faculty and staff will be affected by these plans. And I want to be clear in
saying that there will be no single program in which we will invest the money that we
are able to free up. Put to rest those rumors that every dollar saved will go to
support collections. They won’t. Rather our resources will be invested in several
ways. Supporting access to more content is very important; so is supporting new
services, new tool development, new collaborations on and off campus, and new ways
of working with our constituencies. And yes, new content. But, before we invest in
new content we first must ask ourselves what the collections should resemble over
the long-term. As we have been reminded recently, more than 100 years ago, the
University administrators had a vision of a library with one million books and they
knew that if they were going to get them, they needed the infrastructure to
support them. We know that we want to provide our faculty and students with
access to content they need that they cannot get anywhere else, but what does
that mean and what infrastructure will we need to be able to provide it? Although
we are in a formative period trying to figure out what our “million book library” will
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be, we won’t be able to get to it in the long-term unless we have a clearly
articulated vision soon.
We also must ask ourselves what services will we offer – not forty or fifty
years from now but rather 5 years from now? For most of the 20th century, our
department library model fostered close connections between librarians and
academic departments housed together in a single building. This system closely
resembled the models found at other major research universities. As we work to
meet the challenge set by Provost Katehi to design exemplary library services and
collections for the 21st century, I am convinced, as you already have heard me say,
that the best way to provide the level of service we’ve provided in the past is to
move away from our monolithic department library model and toward new service
models that recognize the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of academic inquiry,
the critical importance of digital information resources, and the opportunities for
collaborative approaches to providing library services and collections through the
use of information technology. New service models will build on the strengths of
the departmental library model, retaining assigned subject experts, facilitating
collaborations, developing specialized services and tools, increasing access to
relevant content, and making the best use of library facilities for research, study,
teaching, and the preservation of the cultural and scholarly record represented by
our collections.
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In developing our new service models, it is important that we change some of
our traditions, particularly those that focus on department-related disciplines and
those that segment and isolate us by traditional services or functions. It is
increasingly important that we share our knowledge and expertise with each other
as we work to build the future. Just as the disciplines are blending and working
together, we must do the same within the Library, as many of you already do.
Those of you who are willing to explore and change, to work together, and to push
the boundaries are the people who will get the rewards.
We also must stop our traditions that seem to suspend the rules of civility.
We’ve developed some pretty bad habits in how we treat each other. We make
gratuitous negative comments. We can’t leave each others’ ideas alone, taking an “I
knew that” or “I know a better way” attitude. We start with “no,” “but,” or
“however,” without even thinking about it, dampening creativity and demeaning our
colleagues. We treat people who open their minds and arms to new ideas as if they
were our enemy. We read and send email during meetings. We stretch and fidget
while others are talking. And we treat people as if they’re invisible, failing to give
recognition or to thank someone for a kindness or even failing to say good morning
to one another. These are unacceptable behaviors. Let me repeat: these are
unacceptable behaviors. So, let’s stop them. We have to hold each other
accountable for doing better. And more importantly, we must commit ourselves to
creating the culture of caring that I’ve talked about many times before.
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I want to repeat what I’ve said in previous years, but this time drawing from
Chancellor Herman’s recent message: We are one Library with many voices. If we
are to continue to be one of the world’s great libraries, we have to do things
differently. We have to respect our differences while reducing the level of our
squabbles, maintaining the values and the best of our traditions while embracing the
realities of the 21st century.
I assure you that my visions are not hallucinations. We have taken actions
and we will continue to take action. These are very exciting times – or these are
very scary times. Which one depends on you – on your attitude, your tolerance for
ambiguity, your willingness to change and to embrace change. We should all care
about the future because we’re going to have to live in it. So, if this train isn’t
headed to a future you want, it’s time for you to get off at the next stop. I hope,
truly I hope, that most of you will want to stay on for the ride. That you’ll want to
climb into the driver’s seat, help shape our journey, and help steer us to where we
need to be. And that working together we will remain one of the world’s great
research libraries throughout the 21st century. There’s no library with better staff
and faculty than Illinois. I know you’re up to this exciting set of challenges and I
look forward to helping us get to where we know we need to be.
Thank you very much.
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