The Future of Academic
Libraries for Florida Higher
Education Planning
Predictions based on my experience,
observations of larger higher education trends
and my hunches.
David Shulenburger, A۰P۰L۰U,
Vice President for Academic Affairs
Our Digital Future
I.
The collections of university libraries
increasingly will be made up of digital
objects. Very few print items will be acquired
in ten years.
II.
The physical volumes that remain will
have value beyond their content, making
their retention in physical form
worthwhile; in most cases their content
will be available digitally.
There is little value in having shelf space taken up in 500
universities by copies of the January 1954 American
Economic Review
III. To permit economies in holding physical
artifacts, libraries will/must organize
methods of ensuring that a few physical
copies of most artifacts are preserved
across the "system" of research libraries.
Implications for patrons and space
• Less space will be needed for books
• Almost all access to collections can be remote (and will
be)
• Unique collections will be digitized and most collections
will be moved to inexpensive storage facilities.
• Few students or faculty will come to the library to access
collections.
• Library patron space will be converted to computer
access and group study spaces-the “learning commons.”
(On some campuses library space will be converted to
classroom and other non library uses.)
Implications for personnel and
technology
• Fewer personnel will be needed for the logistical
tasks of retrieving and shelving books
• Librarians will focus on electronic resourcesacquiring, organizing, documenting, preserving
• The library will focus on assisting students and
faculty in doing high quality research in the
digital world.
• A high premium will be placed on integration
between libraries and information technology
IV. Acquisition of Relevant
Collections will become a key
strategic activity.
• Electronic Information Vendors will have
increased market power. Licensing terms will
supplant copyright as the major force restricting
distribution of information.
• Buyers of information will increasingly find that
they will benefit from membership in buying
cooperatives as market power on the buyers
side of the market is required to offset market
power on the seller’s side of the market.
V. Holding material generated by
institutional faculty will a become
valued library activity.
• The information commons will reemerge
as a users of information who are also
producers of information determine that
free exchange of information with other
producer/users is the most effective
strategy for distributing research and
gaining access to research. The “circle of
gifts” will reemerge.
Circle of Gifts
• The original concept that underlay the first
scholarly society journals—I will give you access
to my scholarship in exchange for access to
yours.
• Desire for the Circle will reemerge as scholars
see their ability to conduct research constrained
by difficulties in accessing research and the
federal government, its funding agencies and
private foundations embrace public access.
University Mandated Deposit of Faculty
Research
Va. Ultimately, this will lead most research
universities to follow the lead of Harvard, MIT, the
University of Kansas and the roughly 100 others
world-wide that have adopted faculty “mandated”
deposit of scholarly works into public access
repositories. The movement to mandate deposit will
be faculty-led, but supported by provosts and
presidents.
Or
Vb. Alternately, Deposit may be required as a
condition of awarding credit for producing
knowledge
Major Florida Universities Already have the
Capacity to Digitally Collect
Faculty Research
According to the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) four
Florida Universities have Open Digital Archives Now
• Florida State FSU Libraries Digital Library Center
Institutional Repository
• Florida Atlantic Digitool@Florida Atlantic
• Florida International DigitalCommons@Florida
International University
• University of Florida University of Florida Digital
Collections
Implications
• As more libraries hold their faculty's works
in electronic archives that are fully
accessible through the web, the circle of
gifts will effectively increase the holdings
of all libraries at minimal costs.
VII. The Public will also value access to
faculty published and unpublished works
The public is accustomed to accessing
material on the internet but that generally
does not steer them to valuable material
created by their own tax dollars.
Search of the University of Nebraska Institutional
Digital Repository the sort of things Nebraska
citizens might be interested in:
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Colic 17
Muskrats 135
Milton 334
Switch Grass 103
Clean Coal 71
Electoral College 34
Swine Flu 32 (as of 5/8/09)
This is an opportunity for “branding”
This is an opportunity for the public earn a
visible return on tax dollars and to expect
their legislature to increase the funding for
higher education.
THE NATIONAL PICTURE
US Education Revenue by Source,
per FTE in 2009 Dollars
$11,010
$12,000
$10,287
$10,000
$8,000
$6,000
$7,769
$6,904
$4,000
$2,000
$4,106
$2,518
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$-
Educational Revenue
Educational Approriations
Net Tuition Revenue
US FTE enrollment up 47% from 1984 to 2009
The Florida Picture
Florida's Higher Education Revenue by Source,
Per FTE in 2009 Dollars
$10,000
$8,568
$8,567
$8,000
$6,000
$7,107
$6,340
$4,000
$2,229
$1,460
$2,000
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Educational Revenue
Educational Approriation
Net Tuition Revenue
Florida FTE enrollment up 95% from 1984 to 2009
The repositories will be Public Access –
not Open Access
VIII. Most items deposited will be freely
accessible by all, with a few items
embargoed for varying time periods
until intellectual property constraints
which accompany those items are
satisfied.
Implications
• We will finally know what our faculty actually do
and what they produce with their time devoted to
scholarship
• So will governing boards, legislators, citizens,
donors, research funding agencies and
foundations
• Increasingly good search engines will improve
the visibility of faculty - world-wide
• University Reputations for research will be
based less on hunches and more on evidence –
citations, down-loads, etc.
VIII. Libraries will again become
Major Contributors to University
Reputation
• University libraries will be minor
contributors to university reputation unless
they focus on providing access and
making the campus visible on the web.
• Consider the vs. the U.S. News Ranking of
U.S. Universities vs. the Webometrics
ranking :
US News and World Report
Peer Assessment
25%
Percent classes under 20
6%
Percent class more than 50
2%
Average faculty salary
7%
Percent of Professors with Highest Degree
3%
Student/Faculty ratio
1%
% of faculty full time
1%
Spending per Student
10%
% of students in top 10 % of High School Class 6%
SAT scores
7.5%
Acceptance Rate
1.5%
Graduation rate
16%
Retention Rate
4%
Alumni Giving Rate
5%
Graduation rate (predicted vs. actual)
5%
Fame 25%
Wealth 30%
Exclusivity 40%
Quality 5%
Kevin Carey, College Rankings Reformed, Education Sector, 2006
Webometrics – Criteria
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC),
the largest public research body in Spain.
Weight
20% Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live
Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalized to 1 for the highest
value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every
institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum.
50% Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site
can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search. Results are log-normalized to 1
for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank.
15% Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication
activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were
selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google and merging
the results for each file type after log-normalizing in the same way as described
before.
15% Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each
academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers,
reports and other academic items.
Webometrics --- US News
Ranking--------- Ranking
9
private
and
16
Public
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Harvard
MIT
Stanford
Berkeley
Cornell
Washington
Minnesota
Johns Hopkins
Michigan
Wisconsin
Caltech
Texas
Illinois
Penn
Carnegie Mellon
Columbia
UCLA
Maryland
Purdue
Texas A&M
Penn State
UNC
Michigan State
Indiana
Florida
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Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Caltech
MIT
Stanford
Penn
Columbia
Chicago
Duke
Dartmouth
Northwestern
Washington
Johns Hopkins
Cornell
Brown
Emory
Rice
Vanderbilt
Notre Dame
UC Berkeley
Carnegie Mellon
Georgetown
UCLA
Virginia
21
private
and
4
public
The Transformation of Scholarly
Journals
IX. Within a very few years, most scholarly
journals voluntarily will make all of their
content available for public access, not just
the content covered by a university or
funding-agency mandate, within one year of
publication in the journal.
X. Scholarly Journals, both subscription based
and open access, will continue to survive in
this environment.
Implications
• Journal demand will come to be more
elastic as libraries make decisions at the
margin to provide access to scholarship
through public access routes rather than
pay extraordinary subscription fees.
• Journal price inflation will moderate
• Libraries will have more flexibility to
allocate funding to support digital activities
Summary
• Libraries will continue to change rapidly
• Students, Faculty and the Tax-paying Public will
demand broad digital access to collections
• Collections will enlarge to include works by own
faculty members
• Libraries will become more important to building
institutional reputation
• The future of university libraries is bright if they
become major vehicles for making all scholarly
work available to their students, faculty and the
public.