Indiana Alumni Magazine
The ELP Library will contain no printed books or other printed material of any kind … No one, including staff, will be allowed to bring any of those materials into the library. That rule will be strictly enforced, and contraband will be seized at the entrances and destroyed on the spot.
The Library of the Future Is Here
In the age of electronic information overload, academic libraries prove their relevance
By Jennifer Piurek
Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio.
Picture, if you will, the academic library of the future. Commissioned by the Molesworth Institute, it will be housed at Ezra Beesley University, scheduled to open in 2007. No textbooks will be used at EBU, saving the average undergraduate more than $10,000 per year. This library houses no books, only computers containing all of the information from all of the books in the world. The slogan “No Books! No Paper!” flashes continuously from neon signs on the walls.
When Norman D. Stevens’s article “The Fully Electronic Academic Library” appeared in the journal College & Research Libraries in January, many academics and librarians were outraged at his description of this futuristic library. How could this have happened? First the Google project, in which the contents of several major libraries were digitized through the popular Internet search engine, and now a library with no actual books?
Naturally, the Molesworth Institute, home to such staffers as “Ted E. Behr” and “Nouleigh Rhee Furbished,” doesn’t exist. The article was meant as a parody of the modernization of libraries, says Patricia Costlow Steele, BA’66, MLS’81, Interim Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University.
Steele has worked in libraries since the 1960s, when her poor woodshop skills landed her an assistant’s position in her junior high school’s library. Over the course of her career, she has seen librarians thrown into a tizzy by the dissolution of the card-catalog system and heard collective groans of disbelief when shelf space was created for audiovisual materials. Despite current rumblings about the Internet usurping librarians as the go-to source for information, Steele cannot imagine a future without librarians.
“There’s been some questioning about why people would come to the library in 10 years,” Steele says. “Norman Stevens takes it to the most outrageous extreme. After all of this exposition of change and what can go away, though, he has the discussion ‘Should the library have a building?’ And the article concludes that yes, you need a building. Even in the most electronic environment, people need a place for social intercourse.”
It’s this need for human contact and help navigating the morass of information that many believe will preserve academic libraries, no matter how much information becomes available digitally. The Herman B Wells Library at IU Bloomington has already updated and expanded its services in response to the electronic and group-work needs of the ‘Millennials,’ the generation of students born in or after 1982. Libraries at IU’s other campuses, including IU Northwest and IUPUI, have also modernized their facilities, and IU Southeast has a new library. But will there be a compelling reason for students to visit campus libraries 10 years from now?
Patricia C. Steele, Interim Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries. Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio.
A Sea Change
An article published in the January/February issue of EDUCAUSE Review by Jerry Campbell, dean of libraries at the University of Southern California, asserts that libraries are in the midst of a 10-year transition period. What Campbell calls the “legacy services” of libraries — physical access to monographs and printed materials — are expected to become digitized. The article, titled “Changing a Cultural Icon: The Academic Library as a Virtual Destination,” refers to Google’s 2004 announcement that it would digitally scan and post large collections of books (for Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Oxford, and the New York Public Library) as a cul- tural “tipping point.”
“When someone starts talking about a decade-long shift, that’s not the Hundred Years’ War here,” says Steele. “We’d better get with the program pretty fast, or at least figure out the program. Having items available digitally is a sea change in the library world.”
At the Wells Library in Bloomington, Steele and her staff are immersed in a series of initiatives that will help establish how to increase and preserve resources while staying relevant to the lives of people who are accustomed to doing their research online.
In early 2006, IU conducted a “LIBQUAL” survey — a national survey developed by the Association of Research Libraries — of a randomly selected group of students and faculty to hear feedback about how the library can become more user-friendly. IUB Interim Provost Michael McRobbie plans to bring in outside experts to analyze the Wells Library, which is the 12th largest academic library in the country, in order to meet future users’ needs. In addition, the Bloomington Faculty Council library committee conducted its own survey in the spring of 2006, hosting discussions on what faculty throughout campus need from the library.
“Any changes we make, we have to make sure that we’re listening to our users and responding to what they’re going to need. If we aren’t fully engaged with them as we make these changes, we’re going to be off the mark,” says Steele.
“We’ve always been the experts. We’ve been the ones who provided the information — it was the place you had to come. That isn’t true any longer. Students will use what’s available in the easiest way, which is valid. There’s going to be even more available to them in the easiest way. So are they going to want to come to the library, and how do we respond to this? What is the ‘library of the future’?”
Updating For Better Service
Between the Wells Library’s two Information Commons areas (IC and IC2), users already have access to 24-hour technical assistance from University Information Technology Services and librarian assistance until midnight, with personalized research consultations, 320 workstations, a multimedia center, wireless network, group and quiet study areas, and free software and programming workshops, among other services. The popularity of text-messaging has been translated to live “e-chats” with both Wells and IUPUI librarians. New equipment allows students to digitize collections such as government documents, as well as request the digitization of journal articles that exist only in print. Vending machines will soon be placed in the lobby area for students who use the open portions of the building after the café closes, and a browsing collection of DVDs and CDs has been added.
The IU libraries have been revamped to provide the latest in technology, collaborative work space, private areas, self-check units, and other amenities. Photo by Indiana University Media Relations.
Among other changes at the Wells Library, Steele says a Barnes & Noble-esque seating area will be added to the third floor for quiet reading and study, possibly with the addition of magazines and best-selling books. Also in the works are plans to enhance training for the 700 to 800 students working at the library, add more drop boxes, and create a “self-check” unit where patrons can scan out their own books.
“We are a service organization. That customer-service side is something we just have to keep working on,” Steele says.
Other concerns include cutting costs, repurposing staff, and finding new sources of funding, always with an eye to the future. The more money that’s required for digitization of materials and technical support, the less there is for maintaining branches with low circulation. In 2006 IUB closed the doors of the School of Library and Information Sciences’ library, and the Journalism and Geography and Map libraries remain in peril of closing because of their comparatively low circulation. A student protest prevented the closure of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library in early May.
Digitizing materials is imperative to giving people what they need, says Steele. The Wells Library in Bloomington has already worked with faculty to digitize some local collections using a small amount of money from its materials budget, and the IU Digital Library Program received a $768,747 National Leadership Grant to extend its digital music library to teachers and students across the country.
“It’s a start in a direction we need to go,” says Steele. “The whole library needs to become a digital library program, and I don’t think we’ve got 10 years to do it. I think it has to be much faster.”
Another new library initiative, ScholarWorks, is a digital repository for materials produced by IU researchers, making the work freely available while ensuring its preservation. (Currently, academic libraries are at the mercy of publishers, who receive free dissertation content and articles by professors, then sell it back to the university of origin for a profit.) After an initial testing period on the Bloomington campus, the service will be offered to IU’s other campuses.
The University Library at IUPUI is no longer a "no talk, no food, no drink" kind of place. Photo by Wendy Kaveney, IUPUI Image Gallery.
No Food, No Drink? No More
David Lewis, who has worked in academic libraries since 1975 and has been dean of IUPUI’s University Library for the past five years, says today’s library is a different world from when he started out.
“Clearly, the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web makes information available in a totally different way,” Lewis says. “It’s easy for librarians to look at the Web and say, ‘It’s not authoritative, it’s not as good as what we have.’ It’s clear to me that over time, the Web will get better and more organized. More good information will become available.”
IUPUI’s campus library opened 13 years ago with more than 200 computers and today has about 400 public computers — plus more than 650,000 volumes, digital collections online, subscriptions to more than 4,000 periodicals and journals, a multimedia auditorium that seats 100, and a full range of reference materials. The University Library recently launched IDeA, a digital repository of research from IUPUI that includes working papers, theses and dissertations, conference papers, and more.
Because IUPUI is largely a commuter campus, having a common space in the heart of campus will remain essential, says Lewis. “Particularly in an academic environment, learning is a social activity,” he says. “Students need informal spaces that are conducive to academic work, and that’s a role libraries easily play. This is not the ‘nobody talks, no food or drink’ kind of place anymore.”
Lewis notes that whether librarians want it to happen or not, more resources are becoming available online and major libraries are digitizing an increasing amount of their materials. He cites the Open Content Alliance, a reaction to the Google digitization project by a group of cultural, technology, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations from around the world. OCA will help build a permanent archive of digitized text in several languages that will be available through Yahoo and the OCA Web site.
“The EU is embarking on a computer project to do European literature,” says Lewis. “A significant amount of older materials will be freely available in the foreseeable future.”
Lewis says a coffee shop is planned for the library, and he and his staff are looking at bringing in campus organizations that support student learning, such as the Writing Center, which opened a branch in the library last year.
What the library offers, says Lewis, is an array of services and study areas under one roof. The IUPUI library has areas for individual study, group projects, and easy access to technology. Over the summer, a new seating area was added, creating more than 35 new work spaces. The next hurdles will be figuring out a way to keep a portion of the library open for a longer period of time and how to store and preserve original materials that have been digitized.
“The academic library is an exciting place to be,” says Lewis. “If you come into the field thinking it’s going to be the way it is until you retire, it’s not going to happen, but that’s not going to happen in any field. Clearly, technology is going to change libraries. It’s probably as profound a shift in technology as the inventing of printing.”
WWRVWD? (What Would Rip Van Winkle Do?)
Marty Rosen, Director of Library Services at IU Southeast, has worked in libraries since 1985. Like Lewis, Rosen has seen a radical technology-driven shift in the way library business is conducted and how information is stored and retrieved, as well as the way students and scholars seek and use information.
Despite these shifts, Rosen says libraries have remained focused on their core missions: selecting information, organizing it in useful ways for library users, and, in academic libraries, instructing users in good techniques for accessing and using information.
The new library at IU Southeast is as modern as it looks.
Photo by Pat Pfister.
“It seems teeth are always being gnashed about the future of the library, both as a conceptual institution and as a physical space,” Rosen says. “In fact, librarians over the last 20 years have very deftly managed one of the most striking transitions in the history of Western intellectual life.
“Just imagine what Rip Van Winkle would have experienced had he fallen asleep in a library in, say, 1986, surrounded by card catalogs and printed periodical indexes, and awakened in 2006 to a world of online catalogs and digital collections of books, journals, and newspapers. The fact that most folks probably don’t understand what kind of challenge that metamorphosis has been is a tribute to the skill and ingenuity of the generation of librarians who’ve shepherded that process.”
The 74,000-square-foot library at IUS opened in January 2005, offering students their first freestanding, on-campus space for group study, library resources, and technology. The building also houses the campus archives and the Institute of Learning and Teaching Excellence.
Rosen says the Internet and increased digitization of course and research material is a boon for students, many of whom work full-time jobs and commute 50 or more miles to campus.
“Their ability to connect to digital journals and books whenever they want, and from wherever they want, is an enormous benefit,” he says. The challenge, he adds, comes in helping students evaluate the credibility of what they find online compared to some of the scholarly, peer-reviewed information resources that are currently only available at libraries.
Rosen says he is thrilled with the advances anticipated in technology over the next decade. For one thing, the more complex the volume of information, the more help people will need using and analyzing it.
One of the core functions of librarians is to help people find their way expeditiously to the information they need, and to teach new generations of information-seekers to use that information themselves,” he says. “I think that sort of specialized expertise can’t be automated; it involves very human interactions — even at the fundamental level of helping students and scholars shape their questions in ways that will help them drill into mountains of information to the specific things they need.”
Rosen says libraries are a place of sanctuary and refuge that reflect the societies in which they exist. “Even if every home had access to a networked computer, not every home is a suitable place for research, collaboration, and creative activity. As public places, libraries have and will continue to serve that vital purpose in the intellectual lives of the communities they serve.”
Paper Meets Digital
So what is the future for academic libraries? Can a paper-based system really adapt enough for a digital society, or, as Norman Stevens describes, will the library one day be a place where incoming visitors are frisked for paper?
Despite increased digitization of traditional materials, Steele says, students will continue to need a place to study where they can get assistance sifting through and analyzing the morass of available information.
“I remind my colleagues who keep talking about computers that at some point, when a student has to learn something, it doesn’t matter where they get the material from, they have to sit down and learn it,” says Steele. “We haven’t found a way to just insert it without you working on it. For many people, that means the library.”
It’s summer session for Indiana University. The crowds of students at the Wells Library have thinned somewhat since school let out, but groups and individuals still populate the tables, chairs, and computers throughout the building. They squint at computer screens, flop across couches with laptops, discuss their summer-school classes and weekend plans, and yes, read actual books. Most of them wear iPod headphones, though some have their ears free to talk on their cell phones. A girl walks up to the information desk to ask for some assistance finding a journal article for a paper she’s writing.
The library assistant smiles, calls up the information, and writes it down on a piece of scrap paper. The paper is from the library’s old card-catalog system. 
Jennifer Piurek, MA'01, is a freelance writer living in Bloomington, Ind.