We recently completed a series of regional meetings for Directors, during which we met with close to 600 senior level library administrators. One question that was posed to the attendees for roundtable discussion was:
“How do you see the value of librarianship being sustained and extended in the future?”
The variety of answers was enlightening, but I want to focus on just one cross-section of answers in this post that were very common across most of the meetings. This category of answers involved face-to-face interaction with a librarian. For instance, librarians’ serving in various capacities in the classrooms was a very common answer or librarians being assigned to various courses to conduct support work, for example, or to write LibGuides or other course specific support tools.
When the various presenters brought up these ideas, I’d pose two questions back:
- How do you plan to scale up and support it on the campus?
- How do you deliver this kind of service across the Web given that so many course attendees are increasingly remote?
Not surprisingly, the answers to those two questions were not easily formulated. Especially in the current economic climate in which libraries are forced to function.
As if to answer the questions I asked, I recently came across a presentation from October 2010 by Donald King and José -Marie Griffiths entitled: “The Future of Academic Librarians: A Ten-year Forecast of Librarian...”. It’s a fascinating, yet very sobering presentation that underscores the problem I was trying to highlight with my questions.
The problem is this: We’re facing a severe shortage of Academic MLS Librarians. King/Griffiths presentation, on the last slide, summarizes the situation (not all points are listed and the emphasis below is mine):
- “5,850 MLS librarians received degrees in 2008-2009
- ~4,500 took jobs in libraries
- Of the 4,057 MLS grads that were hired in 2006, 1,380 were hired in Academic libraries
- Demand for all MLS librarians is 62,320
- If the supply remains constant, the demand fast outpaces the available supply
- The Academic MLS librarian workforce could be in dire straights.”
This data (if, like me, you agree to substitute “could” with “will be”) provides answers to the two questions I posed in the meetings. That is, we can’t plan the future value-add of librarianship using existing or new face-to-face service models. It can’t be done because we’re going to run out of the sheer human resources to do it.
It can, however, be done using a different model. That model is based on implementing cloud computing and web-service tools that deploy the value-add of librarianship right next to the vast information services now available to everyone. Wherever and whenever they use them. Here are some examples based on what we’re doing here at Ex Libris:
- bX recommendation service for scholarly articles. I’ve said many times that what makes this product so exciting to me is that we’ve taken the SFX log files, data largely unique to libraries, and mined it to build a data set we can process with analytic tools in order to develop recommendations. bX then takes those recommendations and allows libraries to deploy them across the web and potentially to any device, be it a smart phone, tablet, a personal or organizational PC. So a process that formerly required an end-user to interact directly with a librarian has been captured and automated in a way that now makes it scalable and widely deployable across the Web. This is a perfect example of the kind of tools we have and will continue to develop in order to make librarianship and the work we do important to end users.
- Discovery services, such as a hosted Primo with the Primo Central Index, are another example. Products like these are truly scalable, web services that can be embedded in Facebook™,Blackboard™, Sakai, and numerous other places. They are again examples of putting the library and librarianship added value right where the users are located.
- Alma, our unified resource management product that is in early releases now and scheduled for general release next year, will also substantially move forward this kind of value-add librarianship. While Alma is designed to manage the backroom operations of print, electronic, and digital collections and provide workflow consolidation. It will also, as a cloud computing web service and through data-in-the-cloud and related analytic analysis, result in data-driven decisions that allow libraries to be more efficient and effective in responding to end-users needs.
Are cloud computing and web-services the end of person-to-person library services? Does this kind of technology replace librarians? No.Anyone worried about that has a far too narrow view. There will be face-to-face library services for a long time. However, as the data above shows, if we continue on the path we’re on, more and more people will never experience librarianship, nor assign any value to it. That, in turn, will mean a decline into obscurity for librarianship.
If we leverage the librarian/human resources we have and will have, take the skills of librarianship, re-engineer them in ways that we can encapsulate and deploy them across the Web to all the virtual places where users can enjoy their benefit; the future of librarianship will be far more vibrant. Librarians will be needed to embrace, implement and help develop and enhance this kind of technology to ensure that happens. Cloud computing and web services, such as these from Ex Libris, will help make this an achievable goal.
4 comments:
Hi Carl - I love the closing paragraph of this essay. This sentiment and products you describe are hallmarks of my proposal for a National Public Library Corporation. The addition of this type of organization* to the library ecosystem would leverage the skill of librarians nationwide with cultural, scholarly and technological partners to deliver high-quality information services to people throughout the country, regardless of their location or economic status. The NPL would also provide a suite of tools to help academic and public libraries meet the evolving needs of their users. These tools would enable operational efficiencies and free library staff up to provide important in-person services.
An organization like the NPL would enable progress and growth that even our largest library systems cannot achieve on their own. With support from the NPL, I am excited to think about the value our most talented librarians and companies like ExLibris could deliver to the American people.
* More info on the NPL proposal here and here.
Carl: In fact there are very few job openings for professional librarians at this time. It seems like Griffiths' data was collected and analyzed before the economic downturn. The evidence now shows that it's difficult for MLS graduates to find work,and librarians are retiring later than many had planned.
Jeffrey - Thanks, appreciate the comment. You're right and I expect to hear from many saying "I've got an MLS and I can't find a job!" However, the situation is more complicated than that. We've gone from not having enough human resources, to not having enough job slots. Ok, but the end result is the same.
On one hand, I would submit that because of the thinking I mention early in the post, the profession has created a situation where university administrators find it easy to trim jobs in libraries. Our value is not well understood at those levels of the university. As a profession, we've been too slow in scaling our value-add services up to the level needed to keep up with the vast information resources now available to everyone and those services are not available everywhere end-users need them. That is why moving the direction I've mentioned (or that Jean is talking about above) would change that situation and restore having the jobs "in-demand".
Staying with the thinking that many librarians are currently using is a downward slope. What I'm really advocating for here is that as a profession, we've got to think bigger. It starts at the library administrator level. If we don't solve the larger problem I identify (in whatever form it manifests itself) it will continue to erode our ability to succeed.
Jean - very nice to hear from you again. Your proposal for NPL is quite impressive and ambitious. The challenge is to get it moving at a time when most public libraries are intensely focused on trying to keep their doors open and services running, a political environment that is certainly not favorable to libraries and at the same time, getting those libraries that are doing well into the national spotlight to show the positive impact they have on their community of users. I really feel that this is a necessary and early step. If libraries can't point to data that shows the value they add, they're going to lose out to organizations that can show that data. Maybe ask Bill Moyers if he could organize some special TV programs highlighting libraries that can do this? We simply must be able to show value in this environment. Having a video like that in hand to show those you'd like to solicit funding from, would seemingly be a very useful tool.