billings.p65 The Wild-Card Academic Library in 2013 105 105 The Wild-Card Academic Library in 2013 Harold Billings Harold Billings is Director of General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin; e-mail: billings@mail.utexas.edu. The transformational agents that have produced dramatic changes in academic libraries in recent years will continue to influence those librar- ies over the next decade, but it should not be assumed that the aca- demic library of 2013 will represent a natural progression from the li- brary of today. Rather, the academic library of the future will be marked by unanticipated “punctuations” that will be just as surprising and unex- pected as have been so many of the influences that have shaped the contemporary library. This paper suggests that “wild cards” will be intro- duced into the evolutionary growth of the academic library, some per- haps harmful, but more likely enabling libraries to provide even richer information resources and better services than they do today. t would be folly to imagine that the academic library will de- velop over the next decade as a purely natural progression from the library of today. Far more likely is a library model that will be constructed within the type of �punctuated equilib- rium� that the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested as a modification of long-accepted Darwinian principles. 1 Present trends and transformational forces will continue in the years ahead, but it is likely that wild-card influences will help shape the academic library of 2013. Some of these influences could be harmful; some could be dramatically helpful. There may be directions from which such influences can be anticipated, and speculations about them might help librarians prepare for those �punctuations� ahead. The core concerns of the coming library will continue to include the responsibili- ties that libraries always have held as gath- erers, keepers-in-trust, and servers of the intellectual records of humankind, of the art and culture, history, science, and natu- ral records of our earth in whatever form they are captured. The transformational forces that have both burdened and beau- tifully reinvented our libraries in recent years will continue, as will the growth of print-based publishing and increases in the creation of digital content. The wild cards and so-called punctuations are likely to simply appear unexpectedly on library doorsteps, welcome or unwelcome, as time will tell. The types of punctuations that might be recollected as wild cards that surprised libraries of the past include the introduc- tion of printing, the industrial and social upheavals that promoted the growth of education and reading, the introduction of pulp paper and the rotary printing press, the economics that fostered paperback publications, the advancement of comput- ers and telecommunications, the develop- ment of the new information technologies, and the establishment of the commodity Internet and World Wide Web. A terrible war and the simple sound of an Earth-cir- cling Sputnik played significant roles in 106 College & Research Libraries March 2003 altering the directions of American science and reshaping research and its published product, remaking the scholarly informa- tion flow and the academic library in the process. The unrelenting inflation and vol- canic publication of journal literature in recent decades have not been welcome results. These examples serve as remind- ers that an arrival of the unexpected is more to be expected than the continuation of unpunctuated library evolution. We can only surmise, then, that the trust we place in an orderly progression of the academic library is uncertain at best. The academic library�s succession from its long-held physical format and service model through a transformative process that adds to and extends the contempo- rary library�a digitally influenced meta- morphosis�into a more sophisticated and hybrid progeny in 2013 may somehow be altered. In fact, that modern academic li- brary may well be a wild-card library, grown from what we see transpiring to- day, but punctuated in some unanticipated manner by events that cannot be foreseen. While retaining within it the same principles of stewardship and service that libraries have always held, the �skin� of that library�its shape and features�may become almost as malleable and subject to user choice as the music and video players that now abound on the screens of our computers. It can be assumed, as is presently occurring, that the physical constructions�the seating, the wiring (or the rapid development of the �unwired�), the processing and service points, the hours of library opening, the library�s staffing, the training places, and the amenities of the physical library�will be altered to better accommodate change and the requirements of future learners. In some measure, libraries and their ser- vices will be designed so that users can reshape them into environments that best fit their particular needs. Academic libraries will assume the same basic roles they have always held� and will continue to hold�as long as there are people who require a shelter in which to house and use the collections they ac- quire. But compared to the present, the proportion of physical collections to the electronic will decline, and libraries will contain (or make available remotely) im- proved tools to reach toward the informa- tional heart of the modern library to come�a vast global collection, constantly building and rebuilding in an international knowledge commons. The contents of that globally linked library will be ported to mobile digital information assistants or to the physical library shells that house book and journal collections. Tools for digital harvesting�to discover, deliver, and ma- nipulate the media and content available in both local collections and digital con- tent from the international commons�will represent the most significant technical improvements made during this period. The key drivers that can be expected to shape the future of academic libraries as they move toward the model of 2013 will be the availability of library resources and the demands on their use, alterations in scholarship and scholarly publishing, and changes within the teaching and learning establishment. Cultural, social, and politi- cal changes throughout the commonweal; further advances in computing, telecom- munications, and information technology; a steadily increasing globalization; and the dislocational wild cards that are likely to appear in any of these areas of influence will play their part. Resources to be considered in the library economy include money, work time, com- puter time, space, facilities, equipment, the skills of workers, training and instructional programs for patrons and staff, facilitation through favorable international standards and local legislation, and the informed sup- port of public and private leaders. Teach- ing and learning processes, and the educa- tional establishment itself, are under com- pounding influences from economics, tech- nology, and dramatic social forces. There is generational tension among educators re- garding instructional methodologies. The possibilities of distance education wax and wane. The only certainty that higher edu- cation has appeared to grasp is the neces- sity to provide some level of support to K� The Wild-Card Academic Library in 2013 107 12 students and lifelong learners through programs that previously have been iso- lated from them and directed solely toward the traditional college student. It is especially important that the infor- mation-deprived have access to informa- tion, art, and knowledge improved in what- ever setting that best serves their needs. It is unconscionable that an information ghetto be allowed to exist wherever there is a hunger for learning or a lack of oppor- tunity to read or listen or observe and im- prove one�s life. Libraries can play a major role in this mission and should develop a better means to do so in the next ten years. It can be anticipated that the activities of several scholarly communication change agents will have dissipated as in- stitutional energies become depleted with no improved information crops to show for all the fiscal plowing and planting. The notion of �self-archiving� by individual scholars will have been determined to be foolhardy all along, and scholarly works will be aggregated in journals or some as- yet-undesigned container for evaluation, delivery, and preservation. Only institu- tions with sufficient resources and a guar- anteed long life�like that of a university, a scholarly organization, or a tested com- mercial enterprise�can be trusted to archive and preserve humankind�s cul- tural heritage. In that sense, the concept of institutional self-archiving, and networked access to the digital repositories thus cre- ated, could become a practical scholarly al- ternative to introduce into the present in- formation flow. To be successful, however, this responsibility had best be invested in libraries to ensure the application of nec- essary metadata and preservation require- ments. Libraries and publishers will continue to rebalance their shared interests, their re- sources, revenues, information produced and delivered, as print and digital publish- ing continues to increase, as library bud- gets continue modest growth, and as new means of resource sharing are established both nationally and internationally. A net- working of nations may occur as govern- ments find it imperative to make the prod- ucts of their financially supported research available to the community that needs it. The sharing of such research could make the world a healthier, better-educated, and happier commons. In truth, however, the results of government-sponsored research are relatively small in the larger universe of scholarly production. Global partnerships for information cost sharing must surely develop as many national currencies become a more stan- dardized unit and as physical borders be- come even more boundless. The relational nature of the global information commons will make meaningless the source of its contents. Even the language of origin will be of no consequence because translation devices can present the content in what- ever language the reader prefers. The derivation of the content, and the place and costs of its storage, preservation, and delivery, will be determined by inter- national protocols (including copyright) created through the collaboration of coun- tries, international institutions and orga- nizations, commercial publishers, schol- arly communities and publishers, and technological powers. How the commer- cial interests of the powerful for-profit community will be balanced by the rights of authors and the ability of the learning community to afford the reasonable, legiti- mate costs of information will represent a battle that even the gods of Greece would have envied. Only faintly brushing the academic li- brary of 2013 will be the invasion of Third World research, scholarship, and publish- ing, but that world as market and provider will develop rapidly in the years follow- ing. The growing importance of research done in China and Japan is well under- stood, and a means of exchange for those countries is pretty much in place. But a huge portion of the contributions from and the needs of other countries remain to be established. Wireless communication and the portability of computers and multime- dia reading devices will enable Third World learners to leap more quickly into the knowledge commons�as contributors and borrowers�than those pioneers of the 108 College & Research Libraries March 2003 past century who laid the framework for the virtual information sea and created the initial harvesters of its content. New technological applications affixed to library informational requirements are likely to continue along paths presently established. Advances in telecommunica- tions and information exchange, as noted above, will be of rapidly increasing influ- ence, as will the financial contributions of the corporate world toward the cre- ation of information that demands their tools and services. It now appears that the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the most powerful not-for-profit global infor- mation organization ever constructed� OCLC�may hold the strongest cards to effect the positive punctuations that could most benefit the users of the academic li- brary of 2013. In addition, the CrossRef enterprise represents a powerful commer- cial alliance that could either help or hinder affordable access to the literature of science, technology, and medicine. It is from these several quarters that one might anticipate unexpected influences and punctuations on the evolution of the aca- demic library model over the next decade. These are the tables at which the wild card may well be played before societal, cultural, and educational agents (which deal their hands in much slower motion) have an opportunity to consternate the li- brary world with their own surprises. With the rich, robust collection of information rapidly being assembled in the global in- formation commons, the development of content and its deposit within this bound- less Web-based relational library will be- come almost secondary to the preliminary need for permanent digital repositories, for a means to apply metadata to that infor- mation, and for a tool for the cross-data- base searching of this mammoth body of information and knowledge. Consider the �Arc,� for example, a fed- erated search service based on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) under develop- ment by the Digital Library Group at Old Dominion University.2 Described as a �fed- erated search service,� it can harvest the contents of OAI-PMH-compliant reposito- ries�in this instance, repositories at the Library of Congress, the universities of Il- linois and Michigan, ArXiv at Cornell, and some one hundred other OAI-PMH-com- pliant repositories across the nation. Al- though the body of literature that is tagged and available throughout the repositories of this federation is presently small, and although Arc is still very much an experi- mental search service, it suggests the pros- pects for successful cross-database harvest- ers that lie ahead. Another example, the open-linking ca- pability of Fretwall-Downing�s Zportal, has been selected by a group of Associa- tion of Research Libraries (ARL) members as the interface to a portal under develop- ment by the group.3 Searchlight is a cross- reference search tool used by the Califor- nia Digital Library, Flashpoint is a search tool developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a number of other such tools created by libraries or commercial bodies are in use or near launch.4 The point is that the academic library of 2013 will likely have a harvester�whether off someone�s shelf or locally developed�that is many levels of usefulness and sophisti- cation better than the experimental and rather primitive devices presently extant. While work on a harvester moves to- ward constructing an efficient tool that will be in general use in the next decade, aca- demic libraries are likely to develop more elaborate content-building programs simi- lar to smaller versions of those presently in place. It can be anticipated that federal funding will eventually support a massive program building from the United States Newspaper Project into a digitization ef- fort to make the contents of the nation�s newspapers available online. This will be a natural correlative to the state-based in- ventory and microfilming projects that have helped identify them and preserve their contents. As a start in that direction, OCLC has established a Historic Newspa- per Digitization service that will enable li- braries to use Olive Software to digitize and make online access available to these rich newspaper resources.5 The Wild-Card Academic Library in 2013 109 Somewhat related projects have been mounted in California and Texas to iden- tify little-known and seldom-used archi- val resources across their states and to en- code paper finding aids through the EAD standard so that these materials can be made known and available over the Web. The next logical step will be to digitize the contents of the most significant of these historically and culturally impor- tant archives so that this information also can be made available to the nation�s citi- zens, schoolchildren, and scholars. These projects simply serve as indica- tors of future efforts by academic librar- ies that will add to the massive amount of important resources available in a glo- bal knowledge commons. These will join similar products from other countries, as well as the ongoing flood of publications from many directions, that will find the libraries of 2013 overflowing with infor- mation opportunities. What a task for li- brarians to help bring selection, order, and access to this boundless body of informa- tion, imagination, and knowledge! Another unexpected development may provide assistance. It is likely that the commodity Internet and Internet2 (which presently supports selective re- search programs of educational agencies through extraordinarily high-speed con- nections) will be joined by an Internet3, a parallel network dedicated to the access and delivery of scholarly information and knowledge with doors through which useful content from other network streams can migrate. This would greatly simplify some of the difficulties presently associated with digital linkages. Librarians who staff the academic li- brary a decade hence increasingly will have received their degrees from schools of information. Library schools will have changed their names to reflect the fact that many kinds of information service provid- ers will require much broader and more diverse fields of study than have been lo- cated within the traditional tents of library schools. The values that library schools have long instilled in librarians could un- dergo subtle shifts as information schools reflect interests that are no longer as sin- gularly social or public service oriented as in the past. The places of work of information school graduates will be, colloquially speaking, within any number of information �joints,� some perhaps more commercially oriented than others. It will be the case that the in- formation �joint� that the academic librar- ian has chosen as a workplace will be a li- brary. Even within the academic library, the requisite skills and training of a librarian must have embraced the traditional library and information model and an understand- ing of rapidly changing generations of more complex technical and learning attributes of the new library paradigm. But the tradi- tional values of librarianship must hold within libraries. So, what will the general wild-card aca- demic library of 2013 be like? It will be freshened by many of the ideas recited above. It will be just as familiar and just as surprising to us as today�s library would be to librarians and library users a decade ago. The academic library of 2013 most likely will provide even richer informa- tion resources and better services than the academic library does today. But the wild card, the wild card, bright or dark, will provide an extra level of surprise to the academic library of 2013, just as the wild cards of recent years have astonished the librarians and library users of today. Notes 1. Jerry Adler, �Evolution�s Revolutionary: Stephen Jay Gould, Paleontologist: 1941�2002,� Time (June 3, 2002): 59. 2. Xiaoming Liu et al., �Arc�An OAI Service Provider for Digital Library Federation,� D- Lib Magazine 7, no. 4 (April 2001). 3. Mary E. Jackson, �ARL Scholars Portal Group Final Report,� ARL 222 (June 2002): 10�15. 4. Roy Tennant, �Cross-Database Search: One-Stop Shopping,� Library Journal 126, no. 17 (Oct. 15, 2001):29�30. 5. OCLC Newsletter, no. 257 (July 2002): 19.