The Future of Academic and Health Sciences Libraries

Full Report: Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services

by Education Advisory Board
For University Leadership Council

Note

A few weeks ago we provided a link to a summary of a session at the Charleston Conference where findings from the Education Advisory Board report were shared. The summary was written by Don Hawkins for The Conference Circuit blog.

Don’s s post also included a link to 56 slides used during the presentation. These charts and graphs are found in the complete report.

by Joseph Kraus, Rocky Mountain Chapter, Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics and Science-Technology DivisionsCollaboration has been a big buzzword in the library literature lately. Well, maybe I see that buzzword just because I have been training myself to see that concept in library articles, blog posts and reports. I am one of three editors for the blog, Collaborative Librarianship News at http://collaborativelibrarianship.wordpress.com/. This blog provides news and links to information concerning collaboration and cooperation in libraries of all types. Valerie Horton, Robin Hastings and I have been doing this since the journal Collaborative Librarianship opened its doors in January of 2009.

When it comes to collaboration, I agree with Stephen Abram when he noted that “cooperation is simple; collaboration is hard since it hits so many of those human hot buttons that generate emotional intensity—territorialism, ego, identity, sharing, power, etc.” (http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/50). True collaboration means that the staff of a library may need to give up some control of an aspect of their work. Collaboration with other types of organizations and people in other fields will require the staff to trust that the other organization or group will support a service that is no longer offered by library employees. Or, the collaboration may provide enhanced services that the library couldn’t have done without collaboration. In the end, some aspect of the work could have formal contracts between the library and the other organization so that the services and tasks are spelled out.

Some examples of collaboration could include:

• Public library collaboration with a middle school
• Academic library collaboration with the Anthropology Department to develop museum displays
• Corporate library collaboration with the R&D Department
• Library/vendor collaboration
• Government information center collaboration with the IT Office on a specific project

What does this have to do with being future ready? As libraries and information centers continue their transformations, collaboration of all types and flavors will be even more important for the sustainability of the organization. The skill we all should have learned in kindergarten, “plays well with others,” continues to be a crucial skill.

Joseph Kraus is currently the Science & Engineering Librarian at the University of Denver (DU) Penrose Library. DU is a medium sized private university in Denver, Colorado. He is active in the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics and the Sci-Tech Divisions of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). He has written numerous articles and has presented on topics from Library2.0 resources, unconferences and collection development.

http://futureready365.sla.org/11/20/collaborative-librarianship/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

In an earlier article on embedded librarianship: 

Extreme-Embedded-Librarian

Posted on July 18, 2011. 

and in the spirit of collaboration this article from  Information Tyrannosaur

On Friday I was at the LJ/Temple Library Future Symposium. I was on a panel with some great folks about bridging the culture gaps in our libraries. Courtney Young, our moderator framed the panel in terms of misunderstandings, and I found this to be really enlightening. Many of the problems we face when groups interact with one another, whether it’s the library vs. IT, change agents vs. resistors, or librarians vs. students, stem from these groups having different perspectives and a lack of mutual understanding of those perspectives.

Let’s take change agents vs. resistors as an example. For this example we’ll use changing the food policy as the conflict (though any change could be substituted here). On one side, you think that the food policy is outdated and that food and drink should be allowed in the library. On the other side there is a group resistant to this change who believe that it shouldn’t change. In order to get past this, there needs to be clear understanding on both sides.

You should first try to understand the other person’s perspective. And don’t just pretend to listen while dismissing what they say in your head. Pay attention and genuinely understand their concerns. Are they concerned about damage to the books or computers? Are they concerned with messes? Are they concerned with the smell? These are all genuine concerns and should be (and can be) addressed. Get to the bottom of why they are resisting the change. When you understand concerns you can then address them.

Then you need to communicate clearly to them why you think the policy should change and make sure that they understand your concerns. Do you think it will create a more welcoming environment? Do you see it happening other places (bookstores, etc.)? Are your users asking for it? Make a clear case for why you think the change is necessary. In discussing the change and coming up with solutions together make sure that their concerns are addressed. You can say something like, “I understand you are concerned with damage to our collection. I don’t want anything to get ruined either. Do we think that will happen a lot though? It seems like Barnes and Noble is not concerned with food or coffee ruining their merchandise. And at home I drink coffee and read books all the time. Does the benefit of making the library more comfortable and welcoming outweighs the risk of a few damaged books? Is there a way that we can limit damage while still allowing food and drink?”

Too often we assume that something is obvious or that someone is just obtuse when in reality we just have differing perspectives. The above approach might work and it might not, but it will be a lot more effective when we try to understand others and address them in terms of their concerns instead of only ours.

http://andyburkhardt.com/2011/11/15/getting-past-misunderstanding/

Ten-year study shows increased need for academic libraries

CHICAGO — For a stranger, the main library at the University of Illinois at Chicago can be hard to find. The directions I got from a pair of clerks at the credit union in the student center have proven unreliable. I now find myself adrift among ash trees and drab geometric buildings.

Finally, I call for help. Firouzeh Logan, a reference librarian here, soon appears and guides me where I need to go. Several unmarked pathways and an escalator ride later, I am in a private room on the second floor of the library, surrounded by librarians eager to answer my questions.

Flickr CC image by Tinkerbots

I think we can all accept that people have become very important in librarianship. It is the people who make the difference between the library and the internet, the people who add the value which makes libraries more than a warehouse full of books, it is the people who teach and educate and train users, it is the people whose visions inform the new directions libraries are taking.

At SLA2011, a lot of people said “There are loads of presentations, across loads of chapters and divisions – but it’s the people who that you really want to focus on. The value lies with the individuals.” The tweets emerging from ALA11 seemed to indicate the same things – @JustinLibrarian saying “What I learned at #ala11: sure, exhibits and panels are great, but the true power of the organization is in people” for example.

I think that while we can accept this as true, it doesn’t seem to have penetrated the deeper professional psyche as to what libraries are, and what they are for. When there are grants or external funding, they seldom get spent on people. When there are marketing campaigns, they rarely feature the people. (Library marketing books often talk about The Four Ps of marketing. Guess what – none of them are People.) When there are cuts, it’s often the people who go first.  It’s still the resources which are king in libraryland, and I’m not sure this will work as well in future.

At his spotlight session during SLA2011, Stephen Abram said the key thing about all the new tech changing the way we all work is not the technology itself, but about representing our role (as information professionals) within that technology. Which is to say, we’re the people who can make it work for our patrons and customers. We need to remind people more explicitly that the value lies with us – each particular ‘us’ that works at each specific library. Stephen later pointed out to me that automated process are increasingly common, so eventually we could keep libraries open but get rid of almost all staff – but they will find it a lot harder to do that to us if we can successfully  emphasise more clearly the role of the individuals. We know that our value lies in our expertise, but does our approach to marketing, funding, finances etc really reflect that? We’re still promoting books and databases most of the time.

So if we position ourselves as experts in new trends and technologies per se (rather than just, for example, a guru in a certain area such as micro-blogging) then when the technology goes mainstream, people will know to come to us for help and further information. It’s not about saying “Hey the library is an expert in FourSquare!” – it’s about saying “The librarians know about new trends and technologies, come to us and we’ll guide you through it!” and then when FourSquare (or any other geolocational social media app, or anything else) goes mainstream, our patrons and customers already have as in mind as potential experts. Like so much of what I write about on here, it’s about positioning ourselves successfully within the wider global narrative.

A more personality driven approach to promoting librarians, as opposed to just libraries, is needed.

- thewikiman

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome guest author Derek Rodriguez. Derek serves as a Program Officer with the Triangle Research Libraries Network where he supports collaborative technology initiatives within the consortium and is project manager for the TRLN Endeca Project. He is a Doctoral candidate at the School of Information and Library Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is the Principal Investigator of the Understanding Library Impacts project.

Value for money in higher education

These are challenging times for colleges and universities. Every week it seems a new article or book is published expressing concerns about college costs,[1] low graduation rates, and what students are learning.[2] We also don’t have to look very hard to find reports computing the economic benefits of a college education to individuals.[3] Clearly, U.S. colleges and universities are under pressure to demonstrate that the value of an undergraduate education is worth its cost.

Graduation rates are important measures.  Personal income is  certainly a measure that hits home for most of us during these difficult economic times. However, stakeholders in higher education have had their eyes on a different set of metrics for many years: student learning outcomes. A recent example is A Test of Leadership, better known perhaps as the Spellings Commission report in which the U.S. Department of Education raised concerns about the quality of undergraduate student learning. The report called for measuring student learning and releasing “the results of student learning assessments, including value-added measurements that indicate how students’ skills have improved over time.” [4] In recent years, higher education has responded with new tools to assess and communicate student learning such as the Voluntary System of Accountability.[5]

As colleges and universities grapple with this challenge, academic libraries are also seeking ways to communicate their contributions to student learning. The recently revised draft Standards for Libraries in Higher Education from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) signals the importance of this issue for academic libraries.[6] The first principle in the revised standards, Institutional Effectiveness, states that:

“Libraries define, develop, and measure outcomes that contribute to institutional effectiveness and apply findings for purposes of continuous improvement.”[7]

And an accompanying performance indicator reads:

“Libraries articulate how they contribute to student learning, collect evidence, document successes, share results, and make improvements.”[8]

While libraries have made significant progress in user-oriented evaluation in recent decades, libraries still lack effective methods for demonstrating library contributions to student learning. Unless we develop adequate instruments (and generate compelling evidence) libraries will be left out of important campus conversations.

In this post I review current approaches to this problem and suggest new methods for addressing this challenge. I close by introducing the ‘Understanding Library Impacts’ protocol, a new suite of instruments that I designed to fill this gap in our assessment toolbox.

The challenge of linking library use to student learning

Demonstrating connections between library use and undergraduate student achievement has proven a difficult task through the years.  Several authors have suggested outcomes to which academic libraries contribute such as:  retention, grade point average, and information literacy outcomes.[9] I review a few of these efforts below.

Retention

Retention is a measure of the percentage of college students who continue in school and do not ‘drop out.’ A handful of studies have investigated relationships between library use and retention. Lloyd and Martha Kramer found a positive relationship between library use and persistence as students who borrowed books from the library dropped out 40% less often than non-borrowers.[10] Elizabeth Mezick explored the impact of library expenditures and staffing levels on retention and found a moderate relationship between expenditures and retention.[11] Several authors report a different ‘library effect’ on retention: holding a job in the library.[12] This finding is supported by evidence that holding a campus job, especially in an organization that supports the academic mission, is related with “higher levels of [student] effort and involvement”[13] in the life of the university and should logically lead to increased retention. Those of us who have worked in academic libraries have probably observed this mechanism at work with students we have known.

However, I believe relying exclusively on this measure is problematic. First, numerous factors influence retention and it can be difficult to isolate library impact on retention without extensive statistical controls. Second, retention is an aggregate student outcome; it is not a student learning outcome. Retention is an important metric in higher education and we should seek connections between library use and this measure, but it does not satisfy our need to know how libraries contribute to student learning.

Grade point average

Several authors have attempted to correlate student use of the library with grade point averages (GPA). Charles Harrell studied many independent variables and found that GPA was not a significant predictor of library use.[14] Jane Hiscock, James Self, and Karin de Jager, among others switched the dependent and independent variables in their studies and found limited positive correlation between library use and GPA.[15] Shun Han Rebekah Wong and T.D. Webb reported on a large-scale study with a sample of over 8,700 students grouped by major and level of study. In sixty-five percent of the groups, they found a positive relationship between use of books and A/V materials borrowed from the library and GPA.[16]

However, GPA-based studies have their problems. As Wong and Webb note, studies that use correlation as a statistical method cannot assure causal relationships between variables; they can only show an association between library use measures and GPA. As the old adage goes, ‘correlation does not imply causation.’ Do students achieve higher GPAs because they are frequent users of the library? Or do students who make better grades tend to use the library more? Without adequate statistical controls it is impossible to conclude library use had an impact on GPA. Also, as noted by Wong and Webb, it can be difficult to gain access to student grades to carry out this type of study.

Information Literacy Outcomes

Information literacy outcomes assessment is the most fully developed approach we have for demonstrating library contributions to undergraduate achievement. Broadly speaking, information literacy skills encompass competencies in locating and evaluating information sources and using information in an ethical manner. Instruction in these skills is a core offering in academic libraries and findings from Project Information Literacy suggest there is still plenty of work to do![17] ACRL has also created a suite of information literacy outcomes[18] to guide the design and evaluation of library instruction programs. Numerous methods have been used to assess information literacy skills including fixed-choice tests, analysis of student work, and rubrics.[19]

It is tempting to rely solely on student achievement of information literacy skills to demonstrate library contributions to student learning. However, a recent review of regional accreditation standards for four-year institutions suggests there is uneven support for doing so. Laura Saunders found three of six regional accreditation agencies specifically name information literacy as a desired outcome and assert the library’s prominent role in information literacy instruction and assessment of related skills. [20] Others rarely use the term “information literacy” in their standards. Instead, competencies such as “evaluating and using information ethically” appear in these standards as general education outcomes to be taught and assessed throughout the college curriculum. In part, I think this reaffirms for us that many in higher education associate information literacy outcomes with general education outcomes such as critical thinking.

While it may be encouraging for information literacy outcomes to be integrated into the college curriculum, I think this poses real difficulties when we attempt to isolate library contributions to these outcomes. If information literacy and critical thinking skills are inter-related, how are we to assess one set of skills, but not the other?  Heather Davis thoughtfully explored this issue in her post “Critical Literacy? Information!” finding that these competencies are intricately related and it is extremely difficult to teach (and assess) them independent of one another. If information literacy skills are taught across the curriculum, when, where, and by whom should they be assessed?  Where does faculty influence stop and library influence begin?

Information literacy outcomes are integral to undergraduate education, but these are not the only learning outcomes that stakeholders are interested in. And information literacy is not the library’s sole contribution to student learning.

I believe we need to shift course in our assessment practices and tackle ‘head on’ the challenge of connecting library use in all its forms with learning outcomes defined and assessed in courses and programs on college and university campuses. We should also link our efforts to the learning outcomes frameworks used in the broader academic enterprise. Broadening our perspective will provide a better return on our assessment dollar.

Where to begin

We can improve our ability to detect library impact on important student learning outcomes by carefully choosing our units of observation. Fortunately we can look to the literature of higher education assessment for clues.[21] My conclusion is that a one-size-fits-all approach to assessment is not likely to work for higher education or for library impact. Instead, our instruments should respect differences in students’ experiences. We should focus on the ‘high-impact’ activities in which faculty expect students to demonstrate their best work. Capstone experiences and upper level coursework within the academic major seem to fit the bill for four year institutions.

The academic major

Students majoring in the arts and humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences acquire different bodies of knowledge and learn different analytical techniques. We also know that learning activities, reward structures, and norming influences vary by discipline. This suggests the academic major plays a significant role in shaping expectations for student learning outcomes and the pathways by which they are achieved.[22] Shouldn’t student information behaviors vary by academic major as well? Our assessment tools should be sensitive to these differences.

The capstone experience and upper level coursework

Capstone courses are culminating experiences for undergraduate students in which they complete a project “that integrates and applies what they’ve learned.”[23] I think we should be studying information use during these important times for several reasons. First, there is ample evidence that the time and energy students devote to college is directly related to achieving desired learning outcomes.[24] Students who work hard learn more. Furthermore, students exposed to high-impact practices such as capstone experiences are more likely to engage in higher order, integrative, and reflective thinking activities.[25] Finally, there is strong evidence that student learning is best detected later in the academic career.[26]

If faculty expectations are at their highest and student effort is at its peak during the capstone experience and in upper-level coursework, shouldn’t studying student information behaviors during these times yield valuable data about library impact?

Speaking the language of learning outcomes

Assessing information use during upper-level and capstone coursework in the academic major is only part of the puzzle. We also need to link library use to student learning outcomes that are meaningful to administrators and policy-makers. I’d like to share two frameworks for student learning outcomes which I think hold great promise.

The Essential Learning Outcomes and the VALUE Rubrics

The Association of American Colleges & University’s (AAC&U) Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) project[27] defined fifteen ‘Essential Learning Outcomes’ needed by 21^st century college graduates such as critical and creative thinking, information literacy, inquiry and analysis, written and oral communication, problem solving, quantitative literacy, and teamwork. These outcomes are applicable in all fields and highly valued by potential employers. A companion AAC&U project called VALUE (‘Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education’) generated rubrics that describe benchmark, milestone, and capstone performance expectations for each outcome. These rubrics are intended to serve as a “set of common expectations and criteria for [student] performance” to guide authentic assessment of student work and communicate student achievement to stakeholders.[28]

Tuning

Some student learning outcomes are discipline-specific. For instance, one would expect students majoring in chemistry, music, or economics to acquire different skills and competencies. A process called Tuning is intended to generate a common language for communicating these discipline-specific outcomes.[29] First developed as a component of the Bologna Process of higher education reform in Europe,[30] Tuning is a process in which teaching faculty consult with recent graduates and employers to develop common reference points for academic degrees so that student credentials are comparable within and across higher education institutions.[31] Expectations are set for associate, bachelor, and master degree levels. Generic second cycle or bachelor degree level learning expectations as defined by the European Tuning process are noted below. Recent work funded by the Lumina Foundation has replicated this work in three states to test its feasibility in the U.S.[32]

Subject-specific learning expectations for second cycle graduates[33]

• Within a specialized field in the discipline, demonstrates knowledge of current and leading theories, interpretations, methods and techniques;
• Can follow critically and interpret the latest developments in theory and practice in the field;
• Demonstrates competence in the techniques of independent research, and interprets research results at an advanced level;
• Makes an original, though limited, contribution within the canon and appropriate to the practice of a discipline, e.g. thesis, project, performance, composition, exhibit, etc.; and
• Evidences creativity within the various contexts of the discipline.

The VALUE rubrics are currently being evaluated in several studies[34] and colleges and universities have begun using them internally to articulate and assess student learning outcomes.[35] While the Tuning process hasn’t yet ‘taken off’ in the U.S., the Western Association of Schools and Colleges recently announced a new initiative to create a common framework for student learning expectations among its member institutions.[36] As colleges and universities experiment with and adopt these frameworks, we should incorporate them into our library assessment tools.[37]

New tools for generating convincing evidence of library impact

As part of my doctoral research I created the Understanding Library Impacts (ULI) protocol, a new suite of instruments for detecting and communicating library impact on student learning outcomes. The protocol consists of a student survey and a curriculum mapping process for connecting library use to locally defined learning outcomes and the VALUE and Tuning frameworks discussed above. Initially developed using qualitative methods[38] the protocol has been converted to survey form and is undergoing testing during 2011. I illustrate how it works with a few results from a recent study.

A pilot project was conducted during the spring of 2011 with undergraduate history majors at two institutions in the U.S., a liberal arts college and a liberal arts university. Faculty members provided syllabi and rubrics regarding learning objectives associated with researching and writing a research paper in upper-level and capstone history courses. History majors completed the online ULI survey after completing their papers.

First, students identified the types of library resources, services, and facilities they used during work on their research papers, including:

• Electronic resources, such as the library catalog, e-resources and databases, digitized primary sources, and research guides.
• Traditional resources, such as books, archives, and micro-formats.
• Services, such as reference, instruction, research consultations, and interlibrary loan.
• Facilities and equipment, such as individual and group study space, computers, and printers.

The forty-one students who participated in the pilot project collectively reported 590 types of library use during their capstone projects ranging from e-journals, digitized primary sources, books, archives, research consultations, and study space. Electronic resource use dominated, but traditional resources, services, and facilities made a strong showing.

Students then identified the most important e-resource, traditional resource, service, and library facility for their projects and when each was found most useful.  At one study site over 60% of students said library-provided e-resources were important when developing a thesis statement.  And 90% of students said both library-provided e-resources and traditional resources were important when gathering evidence to support their thesis.  Over 80% of this cohort reported library services were important during the gathering stage.  These services included asking reference questions, library instruction, research consultations, and interlibrary loan.  These data help link library use to learning outcomes associated with capstone assignments and to the VALUE and Tuning frameworks.

Students reported next on helpful or problematic aspects of library use. For instance, students at both study sites extolled the convenience of electronic resources and the virtues of interlibrary loan, while several complained of inadequate quiet study space and library hours. Information overload and ‘feeling overwhelmed’ were also frequent problems. Time savings and ‘learning about sources for my project’ were mentioned often in regard to library services.

A series of open-ended questions ask about a challenge the students faced during the project. Almost fifty percent of the student-reported challenges were related to finding and evaluating sources and almost as many were related to managing the scope of the paper and issues with writing. Faculty and librarians can ‘drill down’ into these rich comments to understand challenges students face and shape collaboration faculty-librarian collaboration to meet the needs of future student cohorts.

Open ended questions also elicit powerful stories of impact. When asked what she would have done without JSTOR, one student replied:

“I honestly have no idea. I may have been able to get by with just the books I checked out and Google searching, but those databases, JSTOR specifically, really helped me.”

I hope these glimpses of recent pilot study results demonstrate the value of focusing our attention on important and memorable academic activities in students’ lives. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods helps us understand how and why libraries support students when the stakes are highest. Authentic user stories coupled with links between library use and student learning outcomes serve as rich evidence of library impact to support both advocacy efforts and internal improvements.

Future uses

The Understanding Library Impacts protocol is not designed to assess student learning; teaching faculty and assessment professionals fulfill this role. The protocol is intended to link library use with existing assessment frameworks. ULI results can then be used in concert with other assessment data enabling new partnerships with teaching faculty and assessment professionals. For example:

• The AAC&U Essential Learning Outcomes map well to general education outcomes at many colleges and universities.  The protocol’s use of the VALUE rubrics creates a natural vehicle for articulating library contributions to these outcomes.
• Understanding Library Impacts results may also integrate with third-party assessment management systems (AMS). As Megan Oakleaf noted in the Value of Academic Libraries Report, integrating library assessment data with AMSs allows the library to aggregate data from multiple assessments gathered across the library and generate reports linking library use to a variety of outcomes important to the parent institution.[39]

It is critical to find ways to connect library use in all its forms with learning outcomes important to faculty, students, and stakeholders. Doing so will bring the library into campus-wide conversations about support for student learning.

Thanks to Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, and Diane Harvey for their comments and suggestions that helped shape and improve this post.  Thanks also to Hilary and Brett Bonfield for their help preparing the post for publication. I also want to thank the librarians, faculty members, and students at the study sites for their support and participation in this pilot study.

JARED KELLER – Jared Keller is an associate editor for The Atlantic and The Atlantic Wire. He has also written for Lapham’s Quarterly‘s Deja Vu blog, National Journal’sThe Hotline, Boston’s Weekly Dig, and Preservation magazine.

My love for books comes from a story of their utter destruction.

As an adolescent, my father made an effort to turn me on to Ray Bradbury by screening the 1966 François Truffaut film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, set in a dystopian future where possessing books is a criminal offense. Apart from the enduring irony of a society where firemen are dispatched to set fires rather than extinguish them, one scene has stayed with me since that initial viewing. Oskar Werner — in the role of the former fireman and now fugitive Guy Montag –  escapes to the countryside and finds himself among a group who have memorized entire books, preserving them orally until the law against books is overturned. ”Are you interested in Plato’s Republic?” asks Granger, the leader of the book-loving vagabonds, pointing Montag towards a young woman. “Well, I am Plato’s Republic,” replies the woman. “I’ll recite myself for you whenever you like.”

“Now here’s Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte,” Granger continues, gesturing to his fellow “Book People.” “And here’s The Corsair by Byron. She used to be married to a chief of police. That skinny fellow is Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Now where’s Alice Through The Looking Class today, she should be somewhere about. Ah … now there’s The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. He ate his book so they couldn’t burn it.”

While we understand the need to manage physical holdings, we believe this should be done thoughtfully and well.

Bradbury’s Book People are the equivalent of a literary Noah’s Ark, living repositories relying on the oral tradition that preceded bound books to safeguard works of cultural significance. And they are far from fictional characters.

The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library with the Wikipedian mission of “universal access to all knowledge,” has offered free storage and access to digitized music, movies, websites and nearly three million public domain books since 1996. In May, the Archive turned its focus offline, towards the preservation of physical reading materials. The aptly-named  Physical Archive to the Internet Archive, a prototype facility devoted to the long-term preservation of physical records, launched last Sunday in Richmond, California. Materials are stored in 40-foot shipping containers, modified for secure and individually controllable environments of 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit and 30 percent relative humidity and designed to keep out undesirable pests.

On the Internet Archive’s blog, founder Brewster Kahle compares the Physical Archive to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as “an authoritative and safe version of crops we are growing.” Saving physical copies of digitized books might at least be seen in a similar light as an authoritative and safe copy that may be called upon in the future:

Digital technologies are changing both how library materials are accessed and increasingly how library materials are preserved. After the Internet Archive digitizes a book from a library in order to provide free public access to people world-wide, these books go back on the shelves of the library. We noticed an increasing number of books from these libraries moving books to “off site repositories” (1 2 3 4) to make space in central buildings for more meeting spaces and work spaces. These repositories have filled quickly and sometimes prompt the de-accessioning of books. A library that would prefer to not be named was found to be thinning their collections and throwing out books based on what had been digitized by Google. While we understand the need to manage physical holdings, we believe this should be done thoughtfully and well.

Two of the corporations involved in major book scanning have sawed off the bindings of modern books to speed the digitizing process. Many have a negative visceral reaction to the “butchering” of books, but is this a reasonable reaction?

While no crushing yoke of political censorship or governmental censorship has made literature and criticism a dying medium, physical books are running into trouble in the digital age. A recent reportby the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) recently reaffirmed what any casual Internet observer recognizes as fact: that information-seeking behavior is constrained by the convenience of tracking down resources. A Google-generation untrained in the art of deep archival research is likely to have less patience in tracking down that hard-to-find translation of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis should a digitized scrape of the tome not appear in the first few pages of Google or JSTOR results. And as demand for physical books drops, so does usage: thousands of books spend hours, untouched and unread, in musty basements. Atlanticcorrespondent Yoni Applebaum noted a new trend towards “deaccessioning” of newspapers — the transferring of newsprint to microfilm — in 2001, along with an unintended consequence:

In 1997, Columbia celebrated his 150th birthday with Joseph Pulitzer Day, complete with cake and speeches. Our library houses a significant portion of his papers, including an extensive collection of documents relating to the World.

If you go to Butler Library, you may search the shelves for hours, but you will not find the New York World. Gone are the bound volumes, preserving the faded newsprint upon which Pulitzer’s fame and fortune were founded. No more are the beautiful color advertisements, the full-page illustrations in a dozen fantastic shades, and the promotional inserts on hard stock. They were “deaccessioned,” in the technical jargon of the library trade, and replaced with grainy black-and-white images on microfilm. A half-million pages of newsprint were discarded for a few drawers of film in small cardboard boxes.

Columbia was hardly the only library to junk its newspapers. In fact, almost every major research library in America did the same. Along with them went nearly a million books, all destroyed in the name of preservation.

While reams of microfilm have been replaced by crowded avenues of servers, the principle remains the same: as the written word moves online and print libraries are in lesser demand, the economic incentives to preserve and maintains extensive collections wane.

Kahle’s comparison to the Svalbard Seed Bank may be more indicative of the Physical Archive’s real utility. While concentrated server farms may be better homes to the digitized sum of the world’s cultural and literary knowledge than libraries to their physical counterparts, a single phenomenon — an electromagnetic surge in the earth’s atmosphere, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or even a spilt coffee cup — could instantly hasten the evaporation of our literary cloud. One need not be a bibliophile like myself to recognize the potential importance of this project: should our digitized world of knowledge and information suffer such a drastic reduction in the vein of Fahrenheit 451, it should be comforting to know that the Internet Archive has Book People in California ready to preserve and protect our literary history.

Image: The book stacks at The British Library, via SteveCadman/Flickr.

I had a chance recently to visit the new School of Medicine at the University of Virginia with a team of educators with whom I work. We went in search of the learning studio which has garnered a great deal of media coverage and which I discovered, not from local coverage, but through a post at the FischBowl, Karl’s blog. It seems ironic that I’d traveled virtually to a Colorado post to discover a gem of a learning treasure in my own backyard. After reading the post, I googled more information and then had one of those experiences in which I thought, “Why am I not talking with my son’s roommate, a member of the medical class of 2014?

Here’s what I discovered from online research, chat-time, and the visit. The radical innovations touted in articles about the School of Medicine are the real deal. This is not your family doctor’s medical school. The transformation of this program cuts across learning spaces, curriculum, teaching, learning project work, assessment and grading, and learning technologies, all of which have been integrated into a learning system designed to engage medical students in high levels of Bloom’s thinking processes. The end in mind? The program’s designed to create physicians who serve patients well. Here’s an image that the staff uses to illustrate their prescription for educational change:

NxGen Curriculum: Across the board, sweeping changes have been made to the curriculum by abandoning the discipline-in-isolation model that has held sway for well over a hundred years in medical schools. Instead, the UVa medical school faculty now integrate content relevant to the practice of medicine, discarding discipline-based content that’s not connected to serving patients. The days of students following a prescriptive series of courses in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and so on are over, beginning with the current crop of first-year students. As the associate dean indicated, “We want to cull from disciplines the clinically relevant components that are important to take care of patients.”

Teaching: The planning committee realized that a change in curriculum had to be accompanied by a change in teaching practice. The new case study approach parallels its use in other graduate programs such as business and law. A key to why this approach both challenges and engages can be found in the push of student learning teams to apply, synthesize, analyze and evaluate while pulling relevant content from the integrated content curriculum. The days of eight-hour rote learning lectures have been abandoned in favor of patient-based case studies that are staged inside a learning studio for four hours at a time. Professors facilitate singly or in teams, pausing to teach more informally from a central location. When students spend time in more of a presentation format, they interact using strategies such as think-pair-share. Teaching in this model represents a flipped classroom approach with learning of relevant content assigned for work outside of class time.

Learning Work: The new learning model promotes increased engagement and interactive learning whether working with “standardized patients” in the Clinical Skills Center, learning skills using full body, high-tech mannequins in the Simulation Center or analyzing cases with team members in the learning studio. Why? The Associate Dean of the School of Medicine says that medicine is best practiced in a team rather than as a solo practitioner model, a shift born from research using patient diagnostic data.

The faculty also noted in making the change from lecture to learning work that the majority of students were not participating in lectures, often skipping them and learning content outside of class anyway. Survey data collected in 2008 by the medical faculty led to the conclusion that changes in pedagogy had become critical to engaging students. It seems to be working as one first-year student described her reaction to this new model,

“ Interactive learning here facilitates long-term learning. Applying our learning helps us take it to the next level.”

Assessment and Grading: The faculty also have moved from assessments of mainly rote learning to a more balanced assessment system using case studies as a key component of summative assessments, in particular. Students take formative assessments online every other weekend with a final online assessment at the end of each unit of study. Daily online quick checks of content learning take about five minutes at the beginning of class. Each assessment garners points towards a performance-based grade based on standards. Variables that once were used to accrue credit (behavior, attendance in lectures, etc.) no longer are counted in the new standards-based grading system. Students who do not master expectations have the opportunity to study and retake tests. This mastery system is designed to promote successful learning among all students, not failure.

Learning Technologies: Learning through contemporary technologies is ubiquitous in the School of Medicine. Students use personal response systems to provide feedback and respond to questions during their work with faculty. The central lectern demands that faculty use multiple technologies for demonstration purposes, to share case work from any of 30 student teams (6 each), or for assessment. Faculty considers PowerPoint to be a dead presentation approach that “depresses” learning rather than engaging learners. In the two practice centers, Simulation and Clinical Skills, the use of work stations allow faculty to watch or guide teams working with either living “standardized patients” or high-tech mannequins and provide students with real-time performance feedback. In fact, the simulation centers are so realistic that the “docs in training” respond physically (heart rate and blood pressure) similarly to actual practice.

Paper texts are a thing of the past for these medical students. Digital content is available from publishers as well as created by faculty. Students and faculty favor the use of web resources such as 3-D anatomy because 3-D resources are better representations of the body than cadavers, an old technology learning tool.

Learning Spaces:The new School of Medicine represents a holistic approach to learning. Students access multiple spaces; the simulation centers, learning studio, a state of the art learning auditorium, and a lounge space complete with gaming capabilities as well as a baby grand piano.

The learning studio represents a significant transformation from lecture halls of the past. It’s borrowed from the TEAL model put into place at MIT to reduce failures in freshman physics. Students work in teams at round tables (the associate dean says round tables support team learning while square tables separate students) that allow each team to project from a tablet PC onto one of several drop down screens around the circumference of the round room.

A high-tech lectern sits in the middle of the room and any time faculty use it, they teach to multiple presentation spaces, not a dominant teaching wall. Often, faculty co-facilitate learning studio work, sharing their cross-disciplinary expertise.

Faculty development: A new curriculum taught in very different learning spaces, using new technologies, demands new pedagogical approaches. The associate dean talks of the old lecture model as one of “egocentric control.” He shares when he was a student that the days of textbook reading, lecture, and memorization demanded a lot of repetitious work, but not a lot of brain power. He sees the work of students in this year’s class as being far more rigorous than the work he did as a student or assigned as a faculty member. At the same time, the highly motivated group of young people in this first-year class already have impressed faculty members and older medical students with the quality of their questions and depth of knowledge. One lab supervisor commented,

“The questions that these students ask blew me away. I would never have been able to formulate a question like they were asking when I was a first-year medical student.”

For teaching faculty to undertake shifts in teaching practice, assessment and learning expectations, they’ve engaged in over 160 hours of pedagogical coursework. The staff admit it’s been a challenge for some. However, the faculty’s work as learners alongside medical students reaffirms Jefferson’s vision of an Academical Village as well as that of the associate dean who’s led the transformation of UVa’s medical education program, “Here students, residents, practitioners, and teaching docs are all defined as learners.”

My Impressions: I feel as if I’ve seen the near future of what education can be. The medical faculty planners at the University considered the art of possibilities and have taken the risk to create a system of radical innovations in medical education. They did it because they believe it’s what contemporary medical students need today to become the practitioners of tomorrow. They threw out 100 years of tradition and in doing so have created a cutting edge model for both higher education and secondary schooling.

The learning studio looks more like an elementary classroom than anything else. The student lounge reminds me of a photo from the Mozilla offices in California. The auditorium’s set up as a working space, not a listening place. And, the simulation centers remind me of the doctors’ offices, emergency rooms and surgical centers we all have occasion to visit. It’s rigorous and relevant learning that feels like the real world of medicine.

This shift did not come cheaply for the University in staff time, new facilities, or learning resources. However, the investment seems well worth the costs of educating these first-year medical students. I’d like to see this kind of investment in transforming education across America. This kind of learning does not come cheap, but it’s learning to hold dear. Imagine if the billions being spent by the USDOE could support this kind of innovation work. Imagine Technology Enhanced Active Learning(TEAL) in secondary classes everywhere. If the top 1% medical students who attend UVa and the top 1% math-science majors at MIT need this kind of learning, isn’t it a no brainer that all kids would benefit?

Also from Library Journal, what do the circulation trends tell us about the future of libraries?

Print on the Margins: Circulation Trends in Major Research Libraries

Everyone knows, or ­assumes, that use of academic libraries’ physical collections—especially of printed books—is dropping. It’s been a topic of discussion for years, and statistics bear out the conventional wisdom: the 2007-08 statistical report of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) indicates a 26% drop in initial circulations for its member libraries since 1991, while the National Center for Education Statistics’ 2006 report on academic library data reports 144.1 million circulation transactions among academic libraries generally, down from 229 million reported by that agency in 1992—a decline of 37%.

Reading behind the numbers
Standard circulation figures don’t tell the whole story, however. Raw traffic and usage numbers do matter, but more important to the future of libraries are trends in the behavior of individual library users.

It’s possible to tease out those trends from the available data but only if we control circulation figures for changes in the size of user populations. In other words, knowing how many books circulate in a given academic library is important, but since it’s the behavior of individual patrons that will determine the future of libraries, it’s much more meaningful to know how many books the average patron checks out.

At most academic institutions, enrollment tends to rise over time. If enrollment rises while circulation numbers remain the same, then the borrowing behavior of individuals is not actually remaining the same—it’s declining.

With these issues in mind, the data for this study were collected as ­follows:

1. Initial circulation data were gathered for each ARL institution beginning in 1995 and ending in 2008 (the most recent data available as of this writing)
2. Full-time student enrollment numbers were gathered for the same years
3. For each year in the study period, initial circulations divided by full-time students yielded a per student circulation rate
4. For each ARL institution, the annual numbers describe a circulation rate trend for the period 1995-2008.

There is not room in this article for a full presentation of all the data, but a spreadsheet with the complete dataset is publicly available. All circulation and enrollment source data are taken from annual ARL statistical reports.

Table 1 (see below) presents three data points for a handful of ARL members (a complete table representing all ARL institutions is also available). The first data point, labeled “% Change (Raw),” indicates the change in initial circulation numbers between 1995 (or earliest available date, as indicated in parentheses following the library name) and 2008. Initial circulations are used because total circulation figures would include renewals, and the purpose of this particular study was to look only at changes in the average number of items checked out per student over time. The second data point, labeled “% Change (Rate),” indicates the degree to which the number of circulations per enrolled student has changed between 1995 (or earliest available date) and 2008.

The third data point indicates the difference (in percent) between the previous two numbers. So, for example, the University of Houston, TX, saw a 54% decline in initial circulations between 1995 and 2008; however, the rate of decline in initial circulations—the decline in the number of initial circulations per enrolled student—during that same period was 64%. In this case, the decrease in circulation rate is 19% steeper than the decrease in raw circulations.

Moving beyond circ
What do these data tell us—and what do they fail to tell us?

While the percentage of change for each column is interesting, perhaps the more compelling data point is the difference between the raw number and the rate. In a few cases, there’s hardly any difference: when adjusted for enrollment, the University of Cincinnati’s circulation decline steepens from 63% to 67%, for example, and MIT’s goes from 56% to 58%. However, in most cases the difference is significant, and in quite a few it’s dramatic. The University of Alabama saw a decline of 31% in initial circulation transactions during the period studied; the adjusted rate of decline, however, is 50%.

Even greater differences can be seen between the raw and controlled circulation data reported by Columbia University (-16% vs. -50%), the University of Illinois at Chicago (-52% vs. -80%), and, most dramatic of all, the University of California, San Diego. There, shallow circulation growth and exploding enrollments have created perhaps the most misleading raw circulation figures of all: initial circulation transactions there have increased by 13% since 1995; however, the number of initial circulations per student has dropped during the same period by 35%. Controlling for enrollment reveals dramatic percentage differences between the change in raw circulation and the per student rate in quite a few cases: UCLA (233%); UC-San Diego (369%); Oklahoma (414%); Pennsylvania (600%); and, most spectacular of all, Johns Hopkins (617%). Not all of these percentage differences represent huge disparities in real numbers, of course—the 600% difference at the University of Pennsylvania is between a 1% increase and a 5% decrease over the period examined—but where large differences exist between apparent and actual circulation trends, they illustrate a real problem with at least one of our traditional measures of library use.

Clues to change
This discussion raises a question, though: Why does per student rate matter more than raw circulation figures? One could argue that circulation is circulation and what keeps a store in business is the amount of merchandise sold, not the number of customers doing the buying. The problem with this view is that it ignores the central importance of individual behavior to the future of libraries. If the average user in 2008 checked out 80% fewer books than the average student in 1995, then there is an important message in that fact for libraries. If enrollment drops, students won’t magically start checking out more books.

Even the specific, individual numbers themselves are not accurate representations of the actual circulation behavior of any typical student: the circulation figures reflect the behavior of faculty members and (in many cases) members of the general public as well, which means that they are artificially high as far as student behavior is concerned. What matters to the future of each library is not so much whether the “typical” student checks out 55 or 58 books per semester but whether the number of items checked out is growing or shrinking and how quickly. What this study seeks to measure for each institution isn’t the exact amount of per student circulation at each institution in any given year but rather the rate of change over time in the number of average per student circulations—in other words, the shape of the curve rather than the exact height of the curve.

It’s also important not to misunderstand the significance of circulation numbers. A library that circulates fewer books isn’t necessarily doing anything “wrong,” nor is it necessarily serving fewer patrons or offering its patrons less service. Actually, a library that moves large amounts of its collection online is likely to see drastically fewer physical circulations even as it fosters greater use of the collection overall by making it available more easily, remotely, and around the clock. Exposing the real extent of circulation declines in ARL members isn’t just to sound an alarm about decreasing use of print collections but rather to expose more fully the shape of changes in patron behavior. Those changes have generally been more radical (in many cases dramatically so) than an examination of the raw circulation figures alone can reveal.

The data in Table 1 strongly suggest that the trend away from print books is even more pronounced than we’ve often understood or assumed. But for each individual library, the trends in the world at large matter less than the trend in that institution. These data, which are general and leave many, many other variables unexamined, should prompt a broader and more rigorous study at each individual library.