Welcome and Introduction by Shirley K. Baker Washington University in St Louis October 19, 2001 We
are thrilled with the community response to this event. There are approximately
140 people here from the US, Canada, and three from Australia all with the
following excellent mix of responsibilities. 41
library directors 25
collection managers 17
public service managers 14
technical services/cataloging managers 6
IT or systems staff, and 12
very special others representing other important parts of our community. 45
libraries are represented in teams of 2 or more. At
the outset I wish to publicly acknowledge and thank two agencies that have made
financial contributions to offset some of the expenses for this Forum: EBSCO Subscription Services and
Fretwell-Downing Inc. When
plans were first being made for this event, we sent messages to directors of
ARL libraries inviting their participation and suggesting that they bring or
send those people from their libraries who were most involved in the
transformation of the library. I would
like to assume that this means everyone in this room, regardless of position in
the library, is a change agent. And
this is exactly the kind of people we wanted to bring together to focus for the
next day and a half on some exciting but difficult issues…issues we confront on
an operational basis every day but which we seldom have occasion to reflect
upon in a strategic sense. That is what
this meeting is about. We’ve
called this an exploratory discussion and I want to underscore what we mean by
that.. This is the beginning of a process for ARL. We seek your help in thinking together about how to position research libraries to meet the information needs of the
21st century scholar. Our
speakers today have each given a lot of thought about one or more aspects of
this set of issues but none of them, last I heard from them, are here to lay
out ‘the answers’ and prescribe a strategy for us. They have agreed to make remarks to set the stage for our
discussions. They all hope you do as
much talking as they do. We want this
to be a meeting with multi-directional exchanges. Some
ground rules. It is ok to ask ‘stupid’
questions and challenge ‘assumptions’ without fear of ridicule from each other
or that you will be reminded of this later in another setting. Let’s suspend making judgment long enough to
get a lot of ideas out on the table. Saying them out loud does not mean they will
be accepted or even remembered but obviously, they won’t have a chance of being
accepted if they are not said out loud.
Any maybe your idea will inspire someone else. Most
of our discussions will be together in this room, in plenary session. However, there are two other settings:
informal conversations at breaks, meals, and at the reception this
evening. And two structured, small
group discussions – one this afternoon and a second tomorrow morning. In the small group discussions we have
assigned people to groups to achieve the broadest perspective in each
group. We sorted to give each group
representation from a variety of institutional characteristics (public and
private, geography, size of collection) and a range of job responsibilities in
each group. Since
we encouraged you to attend in teams, when will you talk together as teams? We
suggest that each team find their own time to make connections. This may be at
lunch today, at the reception, or afterwards at dinner. Certainly we hope you will also talk about
this during and on your return to the library.
We will not prescribe when but we hope you will not miss this
opportunity to find a time to talk about the implications of what you are
hearing here for your library. And,
while I am mentioning the reception, I want to acknowledge and thank OCLC for
sponsoring the reception for us this evening.. It
is now an understatement to say that the environment of libraries is
changing. But what we may know but
don’t often say is that the environment of the 21st century scholar
is changing. A basic hypothesis of this
Forum is that the Web has changed the way people seek information. More and more, academic users start and may
conclude their searches on the web. An
academic user’s access to the web may vary from institution to institution and
the quality of their connectivity will vary depending on when and how they
connect. But what we all know is that this way of information-seeking is
prevalent and becoming more dominate with each entering class of freshmen. Eventually these freshmen become graduate
students and perhaps future faculty. I
will cite one recent report to illustrate this point. In a study released in June 2001 entitled “Teenage Life Online”
the Pew Foundation documents that teens 12 to 17 years of age increasingly use
the Internet as much as they can for assignments in writing papers for school
. Why?
Because of the ease and convenience of information on the Web. •94%
of the teens interviewed had used the Internet for school research. •71%
of them used it as the major source for their most recent school project. The
parents agreed with their children that the Internet is a learning
resource. •97%
of the parents interviewed believe that the Internet helps with school not just
generalized learning. Students specifically cite the “ease and speed of online
research as their main reasons for leaving the library behind.” And these teens will soon enter college. This
does not mean libraries become irrelevant. It does mean that if we want to help
these people find high-quality information resources (of any format) that we
need to take it to where they are looking--- on the web. The
people in this room all have experience with this new environment. We are
learning lessons in our own libraries, and some may even be beginning to see a
vision of a future library. But the
environment is changing fast and our libraries are in different phases of this
transition period. There is a need for
us to internalize what we are learning, comprehend its significance, and
synthesize some of the more significant findings of this phase of
libraries. This Forum presents us an
opportunity to together try to
internalize, comprehend, and synthesize what we are learning. Only then might we begin to bring the future
of our libraries into focus. In
this one-and-a-half-day forum, we seek to achieve a shared understanding, among
different units of the library, of the impact of this changing
information-seeking behavior on 1) approaches to collection management and 2)
library access strategies What
do we hope to achieve by tomorrow at 12 noon?
The anticipated outcome will be an inventory of potential individual
library strategies as well as ideas on reshaping ARL's agenda in support of
these emerging research library collections and access strategies. Libraries
and the institutions of which we are a part on a continuum of change and this
makes finding a coherent posture on some of these issues somewhat
challenging. And so we have invited
Richard Lucier, Librarian at Dartmouth College to begin our discussions. As most of you know, Richard came to
Darmouth within the last year after leading the California Digital Library- an
environment somewhat different from the one most of us have experienced first
hand. Richard, we look forward to
hearing from you.
© Association of Research
Libraries, Washington, DC |
|||||
