Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994

The Research Library the Day After Tomorrow

A Public Library Perspective

Eleanor Jo Rodger
Urban Libraries Council

It is a delight to be invited to be among you. We have heard lots of metaphors today. I was thinking in particular about your use of flight and landing. A book I never read but was immensely attracted to by the title was one called Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief. That is why we need to learn when and how to pay attention.

A number of years ago I was vacationing with some friends in northern Virginia. Now, there are two kinds of people on vacation, those who pay attention to historical markers and those who do not, and they are generally married to each other. The friends I was with were like that. The wife believed in historical markers, the husband did not. So every time we sighted one--and in northern Virginia there are a lot of historical markers--she would yell, "Historical marker!" He would screech over in front of it, and we would decide if it had been worth the almost crash landing.

One that was well worth it was near the town of Spotsylvania Courthouse. The reason for a marker at that place is because during the Civil War this settlement was between General Lee and his communication center in Richmond. The union troops thought if they went around and headed him off there he would be cut off, the war would be over, and everyone could go home. The marker said that although this was an insignificant village at the time, it became of "utmost temporary importance." My friend driving the car turned to me and said, "That's the story of your life." I will not tell you which of my jobs I was working in at the time, but you might be able to guess.

The reason that I share that with you, besides I think it is a terrific phrase, is because as we in public libraries try to sort out our research role, we are, as you are, inundated by things that are "of utmost temporary importance." It becomes an enormous challenge to figure out where to pay sustained attention so we can honestly do that part of our job well.

I would like to take a few minutes to share with you what some public libraries do in support of research today, and some things about what I believe tomorrow may look like.

I am deliberately not talking about public research libraries. We have very few. Two of them belong to your distinguished association. I am talking about the support for research provided by many public libraries.

First of all, we are not sure what research is. We have these debates about whether it is research or research. We find out when we do user studies that the person in the street thinks anything more sustained than asking his brother-in-law for information is research. So we get people who, when we ask them why they come to the library, say they come to do research, but what they are actually looking for is a price to ask for their used car. This is not what I am talking about.

There are very few public libraries that have research collections that are broad. Rather many have research collections that are narrow, and they have come into being for a number of reasons. Many public libraries, even tiny little libraries, have regional history and local documentation collections. They often have them shelved in places and ways so that anyone who did not happen to know that they were there could never find them. That is a problem for people who may need that little chunk of information to broaden their perspective or to put another piece into the puzzle.

They also tend, in some of our libraries, to cover subjects that are or were of great regional interest. Portland has a whaling collection second to none--except Providence, Rhode Island which claims to also have a whaling collection second to none. Providence also has a checkers and chess collection second to none. Seattle has a research collection that is designed to support Pacific Rim businesses. These are subjects that libraries have collected in-depth because it matters to people in their region, or historically has mattered.

Some public libraries have more extensive collections for historical reasons. They were the major libraries in the area when they started and so they collected everything. The Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh existed before the University of Pittsburgh had a library so they have several research collections. Public libraries often have very rich collections of public documents. Often academic research libraries have not seen such collections as a part of their mission.

Some have specialized research collections because of gifts they received in the past; I suspect some of your collections came that way as well. Sometimes they remain a gift. Sometimes it is something you simply cannot get rid of politically, but you would really like not to have to tend them anymore. There is a magnificent collection at the Multnomah County Public Library in Portland on roses, second only to the Huntington Library, I understand. Ginnie Cooper, who is the director of that library, tells me that she keeps trying to generate excitement about the rose collection in Portland but nobody cares. Even though they call themselves the City of Roses, it has become a tourist thing, not an academic pursuit or a research pursuit of many of the people who live there.

I asked a number of our Urban Libraries Council libraries who are known for their research collections and services, "Who uses these anymore?" and "How much of your library's use does it account for?" The high number that came back was, "It is 50 percent of our use." The low number that came back was ten percent. It varies a lot. The people who use the collections are students, often high school students, college students. Again the positioning varies. It varies from Boston, where there are a hundred institutions of higher learning in the service area of the Boston Public Library, to Portland, which is the only metropolitan area in the country that has no academic library to partner with for local delivery of services.

The users of research collections are independent learners, people who are just trying to figure something out for the sheer pleasure of it, writers. We also get use by researchers who are in the business of creating new knowledge.

One of the directors I talked with said, "Be sure to tell them that the depth of our collections does not mesh one-on-one with the use of the collections." So our collections may not be as broad and deep as yours are, but they are used very broadly and very deeply by lots of people who come in with different agendas.

There are some funding issues we have similar to some of the dilemmas you have--but we also have some unique perspectives. It is very hard for urban libraries to get money because they are very low on the food chain in urban funding areas. Many of our biggest libraries are in old cities with eroding tax bases. The increase in federal entitlement programs makes competition for local tax dollars very stiff because many of those dollars are not a discretionary part of the appropriations cycle. There is also an increase in unfunded mandates. The people in public administration have begun holding National Unfunded Mandate Day in the fall. You probably are not having parades yet for this. Urban public administrators are observing it, however, as the federal government is increasingly telling them they have to do very expensive things, and not providing any money to do them. So our funding competition is getting tighter and tighter.

The other thing that we face, which is interesting and relates particularly to our research function, is the perceived opportunity cost for money that is spent on specialized resources. Public libraries are political. For the most part, they are funded almost always by politicians who are doling out money. That means that the decision to keep a branch library open in a particular council member's district is a political decision. It is not a decision about adequate or appropriate service delivery. It is a decision about "What can I deliver for my constituents?" If the questions come to political funders about whether the library should buy specialized resources, or in many cases even more abstractly provide preservation money for the resources we have, or keep the branch open in their district on a Sunday so kids can do their homework, it is not a choice.

We are making increased use of private funds both from businesses and from individual donors. The Urban Libraries Council just did a year-long study on what happens when public institutions turn increasingly to the private sector for funding. One of our directors who was part of the advisory committee for that project commented that "Individuals give to the library of their past, corporations give to the library of the future." We can get technology money for specialized research resources from corporations. The people who die and leave the library money tend to give funds for something that the deceased cared passionately about that may or may not translate to research collection support. That is part of our funding picture challenge, too.

That is where we are.

Where we are going is interesting and unknown. There are libraries that are making substantial financial and programmatic commitments to the research function. This last Saturday in Atlanta, Georgia, the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American History and Culture opened with immense fanfare and civic pride. It is a branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library. I asked Ron Dubberly, who is the director there, how he got funding for that and how he expected to continue to get public funding. And his answer was "students." It has to serve students. And it has to serve high school students as well as college students, graduate students, and scholars in the profession.

The New York Public Library is opening a new research library in science and technology and I know less about that, except that it is going to be a state-of-the-art library designed, as I understand it, to serve the research needs of the business community.

We do not know what technology is going to enable us to do either directly or indirectly to support researchers in the future. And speaking for my colleagues in the Urban Libraries Council, I want to express appreciation for the fact that all of you are tackling many of the very difficult issues that are before us--the intellectual property rights issues, the recent study you did on the cost of interlibrary loans so that we know what it really costs to borrow as opposed to what it really costs to buy, the work you are doing on the effective use of electronic information.

In public libraries we have a hard time sorting out when the technology is really going to be useful and when it is just something that is possible. What will happen and how fast it will happen none of us knows. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an entire section on the information highway, and basically it said, "Not so fast, here are all the technical problems."

Another thing we do not know about the research function of the public library in the future is how to reflect, react to, and be nourished by the great growth in diversity in this land; diversity in our staff, diversity among our users and diversity within our governing bodies. I was at a meeting at the Providence Public Library last winter. It was held in the board room, which is a typical New England public library board room. I suddenly looked around the group, who happened to be all female and white, and I looked at the pictures on the wall and they were all male and white. Then I looked at the demographics I had just been given on the city of Providence, and I said, "There's a gap here." As we bring in not only new immigrants, but people who have not historically been stakeholders in the American public library, whom we have not served well and who have not been part of our governance structure, there is an immense richness. There is also an immense risk of being misunderstood and of misunderstanding. That is one of the issues that is consuming an enormous amount of attention as we try to figure out what it is we will become.

In our public libraries we are not keeping good track of our research collections and our collections generally. We do not have time and money. We just did a collection development survey at the Urban Libraries Council. Sixty percent of our members said they did their last inventory either before 1980 or they do not know when. Another 20 percent had no written collection development policies. Another 31 percent had collection development policies that had not been updated since before 1988. The publishing world has changed immensely since 1988. Public libraries are looking at how to spend their money differently. We asked what proportions of collection development money was spent on different formats in 1990, 1992, and 1994, then what spending was anticipated in 1996, 1998, and 2000. One of the biggest shifts was, of course, print on paper which averaged 86 percent in 1990 and will be reduced to 69 percent, they believe by the year 2000. Electronic formats represented four percent in 1990 and are anticipated to be 18 percent in the year 2000. I believe that is low, but a lot of it depends on what publishing gives us.

The other interesting thing--and I was very interested in reading your ILL study--is that 52 percent of the ULC member libraries expect that ILL levels will remain about the same in the next five to ten years. I believe they are wrong. There are a lot of changes that you are helping us see, and I am immensely grateful for that.

We have huge staffing issues that affect our research function as well as our other functions. Seventy percent of our libraries said they expect to have 60 to 99 percent of the same individuals working in their libraries in the year 2000 that they have now. We do not get the infusion of technologically literate students that come in as paraprofessionals or student workers in libraries that you get. Keeping up with technology and with our immense staff training lags is a huge issue for us.

Our struggle for funding will increase for some of the reasons I have indicated. I suspect we will find ourselves in competition with some of you for the limited private money that may be available for preservation or for the pursuit of particular research level collections. This sounds like the public library research function day after tomorrow is filled with problems, and it is. But that is not the whole picture. I tend to agree with Professor Lanham that it really is a brighter picture.

We are at a time in this profession that must be like what it felt like in medicine when they discovered bacteria. It unsettles all the old ways we did things, and unless you have a vested interest in a leech farm, it feels very exciting. We have an immense opportunity to be the first public institution operating outside its walls. Our customers in public libraries are already receiving information services outside institutional walls by using commercial online services. The resources may be out of the walls, but an enormous amount of our own thinking is still bounded by our institutional walls rather than faithfulness to our institutional missions.

We have an opportunity to create a seamless Library for America. We have an opportunity to create a system of libraries, not a library system; a combination of public and academic; of publicly and privately funded academic libraries; of public libraries, public school libraries, and special libraries. And to create a system in such way that the people of America think of us as--whether they think of your library or my library--the place to go to get the resources that are available globally.

There is a wonderful article by a man named Danny Miller in The Academy of Management Review called the "Architecture of Simplicity." He says is that only variety can regulate variety. So I believe that the Library for America is not a tightly-held, carefully-defined entity. But I believe it needs to be a system that rewards innovation, that rewards making it easy for the user, that creates new models of how to fund services, of what is federal responsibility, what is state responsibility, what is local responsibility, and what is institutional responsibility, that has some loose agreements about what we charge for directly as well as indirectly by forcing people to wait. We have a chance to create a model of something that has never before been known.

With a seamless Library for America we can handle that genetic trait of librarians to buy and save material "just in case," and we can relax and get rid of some of ours if we know that you are keeping it and we can get it when we need it. We have a rumbling clumsy set of procedures for that now, but we do not have anything that could be called a Library for America that would allow us to share what it is we have, so that rare photographs in the Auburn Avenue Library in Atlanta can be shared with school children all over America, digitally and in print.

I know these things cost money. I just believe, and I tend to be an incurable optimist, that we have an opportunity because of the gifts of technology and the gifts of understanding to create something we have never seen before.

My favorite model for change comes from a speech I heard in a very different context a number of years ago. It was called "On Leaving the Obviously Good for the Somehow Strangely Better." What we are now is obviously good. Are we ready for a quantum leap in vision? Can we take steps towards that vision as a broad library community instead of paying attention to our individual institutional chunks?

Lewis Carroll wrote, "The valley grew deeper and darker and colder till merely from nervousness, not from good will, we marched along shoulder to shoulder." I do not want that to be our model for cooperation within the library profession. I would rather that it be a chance to take the opportunity we have to acknowledge that there are problems. There are staffing problems. There are collection problems. There are money problems. These problems will always be with us. The question is: Is solving them the end or is creating the Library for America the end?

I would like to offer the cooperation of the Urban Libraries Council in working with you, particularly in, and fairly immediately, the areas of legislation that relate to this, but more importantly in working together to create a vision of what it would really be like if anybody in America could go to any terminal or building and get whatever they wanted, whether it was from your library or from my library. The right person paid for it at the right time and paid the right cost and the right government responsibility was in place. We all need to back away from our current structures a bit in order to do that.

One of my favorite poets is Wendell Berry, who farms with horses and writes poetry in the mountains of Kentucky. I would like to lift from one of his poems a final, in effect, salute to all of you from the Urban Libraries Council: "May we have many years and be faithful to the good in one another."

Thank you.