june07b.indd


from
the
inside


Richard A. Detweiler 

The
great
oak
table


Strengths of librarians and libraries 

For
this
final
“From
the
Inside”
column
I’ve

deviated
 from
 the
 usual
 librarian­turned­
administrator
 author
 to
 ask
 Rick
 Detweiler,

president
of
the
Great
Lakes
College
Associa­
tion,
 to
 share
 his
 thoughts
 on
 the
 future
 of

academic
libraries.
His
perspective
is
shaped

by
 his
 presidency
 of
 Hartwick
 College,
 his

interim
presidency
of
the
Council
on
Library

and
 Information
 Resources,
 his
 tenure
 as

dean
of
the
Frye
Leadership
Institute
and,
in

the
last
century,
his
teaching
social
psychology

at
Drew
University
to
this
ACRL
President.—

Pamela Snelson, ACRL President 

Aprized possession in my home is a big oak table. A discarded library table 
picked up many years ago, sanded and var­
nished, it occupies the center of our home 
offi ce. 

This library table can be a real pain. Its 
middle name is inertia—it is so heavy that 
it takes four people to move it. There is a 
crack down the middle, where decades ago 
the wood mightily resisted changes in heat 
or humidity, but ultimately the table warped 
and fractured and is impossible to repair. 
But the size of my library table makes it re­
ally useful for our work; there is plenty of 
room to spread things out and pile up tons of 
resources, a couple of computers, a printer, 
and more. 

I do wonder whether it still makes sense 
to own this massive library table, yet it is a 
reminder of my long affection for libraries. 
My first recollection is the Burbank children’s 
public library, where I happily spent hours 
of my childhood; then the wonderful college 
library, where, as an undergraduate, I studied; 
and the Hartwick College library, where, as a 

college president, I could sneak into a remote 
corner and read as a getaway from the un­
ceasingly incessant demands of the job. 

However, in my reflections today, this li­
brary table also brings me a sense of sadness. 
I think of the fact that libraries a millennia 
ago were the true center of the university, 
since it was around a collection of precious 
written materials that the fi rst universities 
formed; today there are many questions as 
to the purpose and future of libraries. I think 
of my many friends who run libraries large 
and small, and the struggles they and their 
professional staffs have over their status, the 
value of the MLS, and the respect they often 
don’t get from faculty. 

I think of the enormous energy that goes 
into trying to invent new roles for the librarian 
(e.g., information literacy specialist) and the 
library (e.g., the coffee house and the student 
support center)—roles that are thought to be 
meaningful for the decades ahead, but which 
may well be temporarily valued and transi­
tional in this time of rapid change. 

I also feel a greater sadness because I 
recognize there are no small number of librar­
ians who will be offended, even angered, by 
my observations about the state of the library 
and librarian. 

But as a natural glass­half­full fellow, I 
don’t stay long with this melancholy. I begin 
to think about how this great oak library 
table—a strong and positive symbol of the 
past of the library to me—might become a 

Richard A. Detweiler is the president of the Great Lakes 
Colleges Association in Ann Arbor, Michigan, e-mail: 
detweiler@glca.org 
© 2007 Richard A. Detweiler 

360C&RL News June 2007

mailto:detweiler@glca.org


simile about possibilities for a strong “library” 
for the future. 

Strengths and weaknesses 
Like the strong oak library table, what are 
some of the strengths of today’s library? 

• a staff that is highly organized, service 
oriented, creates effective process, and 
knows how to maintain systematic, struc­
tured, systems; 

• possession of some truly unique re­
sources (special collections); 

• one of the largest spaces on the typical 
campus under the (collaborative) control 
of one person; a symbol of the learning 
community; 

• one of the largest budgets on the typical 
campus under the (collaborative) control of 
one person; and 

• a profession that produces a true gener­
alist in this time of over­specialization. 

Weaknesses (or, at a minimum, pressures 
libraries create for their host institutions), like 
the crack in my library table, must also be 
recognized. While no one library or librarian 
is characterized by all of these, those that 
come to mind are: 

• a highly constrained budget with little 
or no excess; 

• a budget that has demanded (though 
not always received) increases at a rate far 
greater than most other budgets because 
of the added costs of technology and the 
rapid rise in the cost of print and nonprint 
resources; 

• space issues, including unlimited de­
mand for future added space due to the 
growing size of collections (because of the 
increase in available materials and frequent 
resistance to weeding among faculty), an 
orientation toward the creation and main­
tenance of physical space at a time when 
people are increasingly wanting to work on 
their own schedule and in spaces of their 
own choosing, distrust of off­site storage, 
and space that is, because of fl oor­loading 
requirements, relatively expensive to build; 

• a tendency to emphasize current ways 
of organizing knowledge, such as the orien­

tation toward structured intellectual inquiry 
(e.g., systematic use of often discrete infor­
mation resources with their own vocabular­
ies and modes of inquiry) in a time when 
people inquire in Google­ized ways with 
unstructured common vocabulary and lack 
of distinction among information types; 

• a tendency to defend legacies (e.g., the 
need to grow paper collections in a digital 
age), and the predilection to equate value 
with collection size and patron count, re­
gardless of whether books ever circulate or 
people who walk in the front door ever use 
physical information resources; 

• an alliance with the least resourced and 
sometimes under­valued part of most institu­
tions—the humanities—for whom the library 
is seen as the “laboratory” (the sciences are 
very laboratory and digital collection based, 
with the various social sciences somewhere 
between the sciences and humanities in their 
needs); and 

• a profession that lauds the generalist 
(e.g., the typical MLA prepared librarian) 
in an era when the specialist is most highly 
valued in virtually every other discipline (yes, 
this is both a strength and a weakness). 

Hmm, there is a challenge there. While 
neither list is exhaustive, the list of weak­
nesses—challenges to be avoided or over­
come—is longer than the strengths. While 
advocates of libraries in the traditional sense 
might produce a longer list of strengths, in 
my experience, senior leadership in colleges 
and universities do often think that the weak­
nesses/challenges outweigh the strengths of 
libraries as currently confi gured. 

Creating opportunities 
Are there ways to transform weakness into 
opportunity? If, for example, one did not 
try to maintain past practices, regardless of 
however valued and valuable they are, then, 
one could imagine: 

• capitalizing on the extensive staff com­
petence in supporting intellectual inquiry; 

• capitalizing on the strengths of the gen­
eralist, particularly for the liberal education 
goals of American higher education; 

June 2007  361 C&RL News 



• allocating time to new activities that 
support student and faculty information 
needs; 

• a (relatively) large budget that could 
be redeployed; 

• a large amount of space made available 
for new purposes; and 

• the opportunity to create new alliances 
with more powerful or resourced parts of the 
institution (ranging from the sciences to the 
interests of students in this consumer­driven 
higher education environment). 

Can we add these transformed weak­
nesses to the list of strengths and begin 
to think differently about the future of the 
library and the librarian? Let me give one 
example (perhaps a too aggressive example) 
of how one might imagine future activities or 
programs, based upon a subset of library/li­
brarian strengths: 

1. a staff that is experienced in supporting 
intellectual inquiry; 

2. the intellectual strengths of the gen­
eralist; 

3. time for new, information­needs sup­
porting activities; 

4. budget and space for new activities; 
and 

5. new alliances. 

Imagine that we want to strengthen in­
formation seeking by today’s contemporary 
inquirer—a person who most likely turns to 
the Internet from wherever they happen to 
be sitting, at whatever time it happens to be. 
Let’s make this anywhere/anytime activity 
the domain of the librarian who can capital­
ize on the above five attributes in support 
of the inquirer. What kind of system might 
this inquirer actually want to have; a system 
that the librarian might invent and support? 
It could involve an inquiry tool that would a) 
provide a mechanism for focusing searches 
on information of known quality; b) access 
all information types (text, visual, auditory) 
with a single inquiry/inquiry tool; c) access 
all information sources (books, periodicals, 
etc.) with a single inquiry/inquiry tool; d) 
support natural language (full text) as well 

as structured inquiry (e.g., subject and author 
using disciplinary conventions). Finally and 
importantly, e) a living librarian, routinely 
working remotely from the inquirer, available 
24 hours per day, who could directly look 
at the search being done by the inquirer (or 
group of inquirers) and provide guidance. 

There is nothing revolutionary about that 
description—it is an obvious way to improve 
the ability of inquirers to succeed at quality 
inquiries regardless of when and where they 
work. But what might be thought of as novel 
is the reconceptualization of the library/li­
brarian—there is no assumption of the work 
of the library being associated with a physical 
place nor of librarian support happening at 
a particular time. 

Librarians are not the collectors and 
preservers of a defined set of resources, but 
are creative collaborators in the process of 
inquiry. It doesn’t say that to become infor­
mation literate, one must come to classes 
run by librarians at particular times in the 
library. It doesn’t say that to access the 
expertise of a librarian, one must come to 
the library. It doesn’t support gate counts 
nor the importance of having a Starbucks to 
encourage gate counts. It doesn’t say that a 
purpose of the library is to support collab­
orative learning through group study space 
nor to have classrooms to encourage use of 
the physical space. 

While it doesn’t say a lot of the things 
that are currently conventional about the 
practice of librarianship, it does refer to 
ways that libraries/librarians can directly 
support the work of today’s inquirer. It says 
that there is an opportunity to support the 
process of inquiry as people actually prac­
tice it by using some of the strengths of the 
library/librarian. 

The moral to this story is not that this 
way of thinking about serving the inquirer 
is the right idea, nor that other purposes of 
the library are unimportant. The moral is 
that, from this writer’s perspective, librar­
ies and librarians are too often “yes, and” 
people. Because they are supporting the 
systems and facades of the past, while si­

362C&RL News June 2007



multaneously trying to add a bit of the new, 
they are allied with neither the past nor the 
future; they are rarely seen as strong and 
sustainable advocates of the future of the 
institution. In this time of resource limits and 
challenge from virtually every stakeholder, 
courageous choices are necessary. If librar­
ians are to play an active and constructive 
role in creating the future of their institutions, 
including their own future in supporting 
education and scholarship, then they must 
start with open­eyed examinations of their 
strengths and weaknesses, not an evaluation 
based on past or current habits, but on the 
competencies and weaknesses that underlie 
current practice. 

I am reminded of an earlier era of com­
puting, the mainframe days, when to use a 
computer one needed to go to the impressive 
campus computer center for access. Coffee 
and snacks were available. Various support 
offices were located there and open for long 
hours. There were large areas with tables to 
facilitate group work, because we needed to 
be taught by each other as we learned. These 
centers were made anachronisms by personal 
computers, and became empty, even as the 
effectiveness of the tools provided by com­
puters increased. 

Personal computers didn’t make the 
physical library anachronistic, but the rapid 
growth of vast quantities of Internet­based 
anywhere/anytime information is a real chal­
lenge to libraries and librarians. Over the 

long term these challenges will not likely 
be addressed by increasing the noninquiry 
reasons for coming to libraries (e.g., cof­
fee shops and group­study spaces), but by 
thinking in new ways about how libraries 
and librarians can serve the inquiring mind. 
These new ways should not be based on the 
current practices of libraries as places, but on 
the underlying competencies and strengths 
of the profession. 

My great oak table, once designed for 
the reading room of a library and capable of 
holding tall stacks of books and periodicals, 
is no longer in that setting nor is it used for 
that purpose. It is now in my home offi ce, 
where my most creative inquiry happens, and 
instead of holding up books and periodicals 
(though I will admit that it does hold up 
some of them), it is the base for my Internet­
connected computers. While cracked and a 
bit warped, it serves today’s new needs as 
effectively as it did yesterday’s needs—and 
indeed, supports a much more effective and 
efficient process of inquiry today than it ever 
did in the past. 

Where is the value in libraries and librar­
ians? There are many and they are strong, and 
as previous C&RL
News
columns have indi­
cated, there are many ways to communicate 
them. But if the future of the library is to be 
strong, then librarians must demonstrate that 
they are moving beyond the past and making 
choices today that directly serve the needs 
of tomorrow’s inquiring mind. 

(“Stepping
through...”
cont.
from
page
358)


together for the benefit of the educational 
process. 

While there are potential barriers to 
effectively enacting many of the ideas 
brought forward at the forum, all of the 
sponsoring associations expressed a need 
to continue to work together and discuss 
collaborative issues on a national level. 
Presenting joint panel discussions at the 
major conferences of each organization 
and cross­organizational work through 
committees were major ideas expressed 

to potentially continue and expand the 
conversations started in Denver. Adding 
stakeholders, such as university presses 
and classroom faculty, to the mix can serve 
to broaden the discussions. Continuing the 
conversations begun in Denver through ad­
ditional forums and online or face­to­face 
presentations and repositories of successful 
real world collaborative projects can ensure 
that all stakeholders step through the door 
opened by technological innovation for the 
benefit of their individual institutions and 
the improvement of higher education. 

June 2007  363 C&RL News