Washington, D.C.
October 16-18, 1996
William F. Prokasy, Vice-President for Academic Affairs
University of Georgia
William G. Potter, Director of Libraries
University of Georgia
MR. POTTER: It is my pleasure to introduce William Prokasy, Vice-President of Academic Affairs at the University of Georgia.
Dr. Prokasy is responsible for all the colleges and schools at the University of Georgia, plus he has direct administrative supervision of other academic units, including computing and, of course, the library.
A graduate of Baldwin Wallace College, he holds a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology from Kent State, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology and Statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He served on the faculty at Kent State, was Dean of the University of Utah, and then became Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, before coming to Georgia in 1988.
He has served on numerous professional boards, including at the Psychology Association, and has just completed a term on the Board of Directors of the Center for Research Libraries. He has authored four books and over 70 journal articles.
I would like to mention that, at the University of Illinois, Bill worked closely with Hugh Atkinson, a librarian who had a profound impact on many of us here today and with whom I worked for seven years. The values Hugh has expounded regarding the benefits of giving support to libraries have influenced Bill in many ways that have helped my library nearly every day.
All in all, I consider myself extremely fortunate to have one of the most library-friendly chief academic officers you hope to find. Bill Prokasy.
MR. PROKASY: I will begin by addressing a couple of the questions that were put to us by answering them as generally as possible. One question was how to justify greater public and private investments in higher education. Both Martha and Peter Magrath dealt with that a bit. I would like to add one thing, though. At a public university, the most important thing we can do to convince the citizens of that state and the legislators to invest in us is to convince them that, if their son or daughter attends our institution, he or she will be well taught. I firmly believe that. I see evidence of it when we deal with the legislators and the citizens groups; they are amazed to hear discussions about what is going on in the structure, and ultimately that is where we will get our support.
Another comment is on the influence of the transformation of scholarly information on academic programs and on approaches to faculty reward and tenure. In thinking on this question, I consider the potential impact of information technologies, including the uses and role of libraries, to be absolutely revolutionary. Our instructional programs will be highly interactive among students and faculties, and education will be more individualized. Technology is able to provide access broadly and in many ways which, before now, were simply unavailable.
One of the most important impacts that this revolution will have is the emphasis it will place on learning rather than on teaching. Students will take a stronger role in their own education than they have in the past. This is what technology enables. It emphasizes access, information integration, and organization. It doesn’t emphasize knowledge in the traditional sense, but it does give us a framework from which we can teach ourselves how to find out things we want to know.
To answer how the technological revolution has affected faculty reward and tenure decision, I would have to say that there has been limited change. We can see some differences. We see, for example, more evidence of pedagogy being part of a promotion tenure package than we did ten or 15 years ago. We are gradually changing the allocation profile of our institutions. Far more funding is going into technology and technology support, even though the number of faculty and other support staff may have remained constant, and perhaps even decreased. In our own case, for example, these changes have taken place, but over the last eight years our student enrollments have gone up 17 percent. The number of faculty has stayed roughly constant, but the new money we have received has gone into providing the infrastructure support that has been talked about here, so it is really changing the way we conduct our business.
I don’t think we are going to see an immediate impact of technological change on faculty reward and tenure; it will remain limited until we finally discover and act on the fact that publishing houses are simply irrelevant to scholarship. We have a different kind of future in front of us, and, even though I don’t know where it will go, I don’t see publishing houses as being the most important element in tenure. Unfortunately, they are the most important element today, and it affects our tenure decisions deeply. I think we ought to change that, but we will see what happens.
I think what is important that relates to faculty is “reward.” We will get more impact, more out of our faculty, and more interest from our faculty by the climate that we create on our respective campuses. What I mean by a climate on campus is an operating mode that says that faculty roles are important. How do you do that? You provide opportunities for faculty to do things. You set up curriculum-change support grants. You provide competitive grants for international program development. You set up competitive grants for computer-based equipment support for courses of instruction. If you put enough support into efforts like these, the faculty will begin to believe that they are taken seriously, and that will effect change.
In the first place, faculty change what they do. In the second place, what they do begins to influence promotion and tenure decisions. At the University of Georgia we created a climate with a set of discreet acts that are seen as interrelated. In the long run this climate will make a difference when it comes to the meaning of technological change in faculty reward and tenure.
I want to spend just a few minutes commenting about the Galileo Project and the statewide commitment that was made by the State of Georgia. For those of you not familiar with the project, I will first give you a brief background, and then comment about some of the results.
With a $10 million grant from the Board of Regents and the State Legislature, the State of Georgia launched the Galileo Project in 1995, linking 34 institutions to the university system. The goal was to ensure universal access to core materials for every student and faculty member in the Georgia University system, regardless of geographical location. Now Galileo also provides state access to private academic colleagues and universities, and will set aside some grant money for that. Plans are underway to extend selected elements of the Galileo project to the Department of Technical and Adult Education, the Office of Public Library Services, and the Department of Education, so it is a very broad panoply.
The menu of database offerings began with UMI products: ABI Inform, Dissertation Abstracts, and Periodicals Abstracts. The OCLC First Search files were incrementally redone to display in a customized format. Then, in 1996, a contract with Cambridge Scientific was signed. This agreement allowed users of the Galileo system access to Cambridge’s server in order to search its biological, ecological, biomedical, and technology files. The pact also included the most recent five years of the National Library of Medline and Toxline Databases. A total of 45 biomedical and life science databases are now available for use.
The third, and perhaps most important, phase of this project incorporated more full text sources. While the UMI data bases of ABI Inform and Periodicals Abstracts have some full text, it was the addition of the Academic Press Ideal Package that gave the scientific community an opportunity to experiment with exploring and retrieving full text scientific journals, which were then implemented in Galileo in the summer of 1996. Now the faculty and students have unlimited access to 1995 and 1996 issues of Academic Press scholarly journals in biochemistry, biology, genetics, microbiology, and medicine. In addition, the New York Times and several Yale directories are also available in full text mode.
That is a substantial addition. I might say Bill Potter had an awful lot to do with these developments that are setting the stage for change in our educational enterprise. What does that mean? It offers some opportunities for the future that we are beginning to experiment with. It will be especially valuable if we build repositories of interactive course segments, whether a person accesses it on-site, in a classroom, or at home. It will provide an adjunct to individual delivery in another way, via home cable systems. I’ll give you an example. Suppose you have a multiple-site seminar of people from different institutions. You will be able to have on-the-spot access to information right there, in multiple contexts. It is going to change a lot of the way we interact with one another.
I’ll close with comments about some things that I believe ARL ought to think of more generally.
The most obvious impact, to me, of this new technology is that the traditional classroom is going to have a greatly reduced direct information transmission role. But it is going to be a catalyst, providing a very different kind of environment through which the students will then work to gain whatever information they need.
Obviously, libraries are going to be absolutely key to this environment, as they should be. But, how do we know what a good library is? I’m not sure that our current criteria will apply in this new format. We need to get some measures on the characteristics of electronic access, including indexes, ease of access, and cost effectiveness. We need to consider quality of service provided as a resource locator, as opposed to a resource provider. How will we measure that? Consider the extent to which libraries are actually integrated in the kind of coursework we are developing, no matter how or where those courses are offered. They now play an integral role because of the technology. Consider the differential selectivity and acquisitions of the various libraries represented in this room, where some, by virtue of having one area of expertise and organized knowledge, may be able to set up far better and more interesting data retrieval and organization systems by focusing on certain areas of knowledge, allowing other institutions to focus on other areas. Linking these together could make a greater national impact than if we try to cover all the categories on our own. Libraries will have to become far more selective.
If we are going to make good use of this technology, we will need to have good search techniques. That raises questions on how one can organize the library of the future in a way that produces really good access for what people want to retrieve.
Thank you.
Copyright � 1998 by William F. Prokasy