Imagine a library that is not only bookless but is not necessarily tied to a building, one that takes its personnel and services to patrons rather than expecting them to come to it. Two projects—one now under way at the undergraduate level and one well established at a medical library—suggest where the untethered library is headed. One approach focuses on space; the other on librarians.
Academic libraries have been beset by changes that have led some observers to wonder whether they have a future at all. Their budgets have been hit hard even as the cost of buying and storing information—whether print monographs or journal databases—continues to climb. Search engines have replaced librarians as the go-to source of information for most researchers. And students headed to the library now are more likely to be in search of a cup of coffee than to be looking for a book. If they do want a book, it might have been moved to remote storage because the library has run out of room.
Like many institutions, Drexel University, in central Philadelphia, faces a space crunch. On the positive side, Drexel's undergraduates aren't even close to abandoning the main campus library, says Danuta A. Nitecki, the university's dean of libraries. "We are just so overcrowded and packed to the brim that I don't think we will see an absence of people coming here," she says.
But what those crowds of students need and want from the library has changed. They don't come for books. They come for study space and company. Once upon a time, "you had to go where the book is," Ms. Nitecki says. The time has come to "put the library presence closer to where the students are."
So the university is building what it describes as a "bookless learning center" near where undergraduates live and eat. It will occupy what used to be a breezeway outside a student residential hall. "We identified a space that's in the heart of where our residential life is," Ms. Nitecki explains. "We used the problem—the challenge of the lack of adequate space—to redefine what the library of the future should be."
Called the Library Learning Terrace, the center will be open around the clock to give students access to the library's digital resources as well as a place to gather. It won't be staffed at all times, but students will be able to arrange for a librarian to rendezvous with them to work on projects, and professors will be able to meet groups of students there.
Many colleges and universities have replaced some stack space with a learning commons, a dedicated spot within the library where students can come to work and study together. Most academic libraries have a social-media presence too, with the aim of interacting with students and serving them virtually.
Drexel wants the learning terrace to bring the library—or some of its services, at least—to students in a flexible setting they can configure themselves. "The commonly adapted prototype is to just turn library stacks to study areas or to create a student commons and continue with service desks," says Kimberly I. Miller, Drexel's director of design. "We see this prototype as a hybrid where the librarians and the faculty are more engaged and technology is readily available to target learning," she said in an e-mail.
In Ms. Miller's view, one of the Learning Terrace's main attractions is that students themselves will decide how to use the space. The furniture will be on casters so it can be easily moved to accommodate groups. There will be a general open area with power sources built into the floor, so the space can be used in a variety of ways. Ms. Miller expects there will also be projection facilities, for those who want to work with audiovisual materials. More technology will be incorporated as the space develops. Part of the idea is to observe how students actually use the space.
"With each new technology and class of students will come new ways of learning," Ms. Miller says. "Creating a space that can adapt to those changes is a challenge." The total cost of the project will run about $950,000, according to Ms. Miller, with $700,000 of that covering construction costs.
Once it's built, will the learning center attract the students it's designed to serve? The idea itself seems to appeal. Some 200 students came to two town-hall-style meetings the library held to discuss the project. "I have never seen that many students engaged and interested in an issue about libraries," Ms. Nitecki says.
Lucas S. Hippel, a senior chemical-engineering major who is president of Drexel's Undergraduate Student Government Association, helped plan and organize the town-hall meetings. Even though most students no longer go to the library to browse or borrow books, the concern he heard most often was that the new facility will be bookless. "This is going to be a step in a different direction," he says. But students welcomed the chance to have more study space. "Everyone seems really happy that Drexel is being proactive about a problem like library space," he says.
IN SOME CASES, the academic library of the future may cease to exist in physical form—at least as far as patrons are concerned. At the Johns Hopkins University, students and faculty members in the schools of medicine, nursing, and public health have no need to set foot in a dedicated library building. The library, through specialists known as "informationists," comes to them.
The informationist program takes the concept of embedded librarians—who work in classrooms, labs, and other settings outside the library—and adapts it to the needs of health-care students and researchers. "Here it means actually going into the departments and doing whatever kinds of work the department needs," says Sue M. Woodson, associate director for digital collections at the university's Welch Medical Library.
The program was inspired by research on library users' needs that was initiated by the Hopkins library director, Nancy K. Roderer, when she arrived at the university in 2000. "People needed their journal articles online wherever they were, and they needed really good interfaces to get to them," Ms. Woodson says. "They needed librarians on occasion. What they didn't need was a building."
With its new Medical Education Building, Hopkins has state-of-the-art study space available. That means a trip to the old 1930s-era medical library no longer tempts many students or their professors, according to Ms. Woodson. "People like to work where they are," she says.
Today, many or most of the resources needed for teaching and research don't require a physical library to house them. Journal articles and research papers can be obtained in digital form, and the medical library buys fewer and fewer print books. "It's not like we throw out the entire collection," Ms. Woodson says, but it's being culled.
So patrons' changing habits and the digitization of research materials have contributed to the dwindling appeal of the older library building. The librarians, too, no longer find it an appealing place to work, according to Ms. Woodson. They'd rather be out where the patrons are. The old building will close to patrons as early as next year. What will happen to the 1930s space—a classically influenced stone rectangle that looks like a smaller cousin of some of the federal-department architecture down the road in Washington, D.C.—has yet to be determined.
The medical-library staff at Hopkins has the advantage of making the shift away from physical facilities on its own terms and schedule. For libraries in general, "there's a lot of pressure to give up space, and it comes unpredictably," Ms. Woodson says. "If we had to do this fast, I don't see how we would do it."
At the moment, the informationist program includes 10 library specialists. Six of them serve eight to 10 clinical departments or user groups (medical students, for instance) in the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and Nursing. The other four work with the departments of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the basic-science departments in the School of Medicine. They're assigned in part based on what areas they know best and enjoy most, but there's also a good deal of learning on the job. "We ask a lot of questions. We really do want to get to know our users," says Blair Anton, associate director for Clinical Informationist Services. "We're kind of working against the traditional view of the library and the traditional view of what you might engage a librarian for."
An informationist assigned to a certain department will sit in on meetings and research answers to questions that arise during the proceedings. He or she will conduct systematic literature reviews for researchers working on articles and grant proposals—the kind of task researchers themselves have traditionally done but now find it harder to do as digital resources become more sophisticated and the literature expands.
In fact, systematic literature reviews are among the most important work the informationists do, according to Ms. Anton. Recruited to help assess a specific medical trial or treatment, for instance, a Hopkins informationist will put in as much as 40 to 60 hours searching the relevant medical literature, then import the results into a citation-management system, filter them, and come up with a master list the researchers can analyze.
"Those kinds of projects are extraordinarily time-consuming and detailed," Ms. Anton says. And they're so central to research now that scholars are increasingly giving informationists credit as co-authors of papers that result.
Dr. Lynette Mark, an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical-care medicine at Hopkins, says she has come to rely on Ms. Anton's skills.
"From my clinical/academic practice perch, Blair is the first step of any projects I now get involved in," Dr. Mark said in an e-mail message. She lists a number of research projects on which the two have collaborated, including work on transaxillary robotic thyroidectomies, specific case treatments, and simulations for legal cases.
Like librarians everywhere, the Hopkins informationists also have a more basic mission: to teach patrons how to find and use information. Victoria H. Goode is a clinical informationist who works with about 120 medical students at a time. She trains them in some of the current essentials of research, such as how to take a research question, turn it into a searchable query, and then apply that query to a database. Ms. Goode, a former high-school librarian, is enthusiastic about the more specialized, take-it-to-the-people model of her current job.
"I enjoy being seen and being advertised not just as a librarian but as an information specialist," she says. "I can help you not just in the building, but many different places."
Source | http://chronicle.com/
