Retrofit 3: C-I-C, C-L-I…M-O-U-S-E

This is my third “thinking out loud” installment in preparation for the RBMS seminar “Retrofitting Expectations or Redefining Reality: What Does the Future of the Special Collections Professional Look Like?”

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My last post ended with a few basic and not very earth-shattering observations: our professional future (corporate and individual) is partially shaped by organizations external to our host institutions; other forces or movements also shape our future; and none of this is necessarily a bad thing. As an example, I highlighted the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) involvement with the RBMS guidelines on competencies for special collections professionals.

This trite conclusion, however, engendered questions with—I hope you might agree—a little more heft: Where is the balance (or tension) between individual professional expectations and corporate or administrative or institutional or external expectations? Who gets to be part of the conversation that determines or influences a balance point? Does such a balance point exist? (Which perhaps begs another question: Where—or what—constitutes a tipping point?) How many of our expectations and realities do we get to create (or at least have a say in their creation)? How many expectations are imposed from above or beyond, wherever (and whatever) “above” or “beyond” might be? Are we able to perform the core functions of our position or is something—The Next Big Thing—continually crowding in, begging for attention and completion?

I’m not ready to attempt an answer to any of these questions. For the moment I’ll let them hang there, like so many damp pieces on a clothes line. We’ll come back to them later.

In the meantime, I want to explore another relationship between my position, my library, and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, aka The Big Ten.* According to its website: “For more than half a century, these world-class research institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the Provosts of the member universities, CIC mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Champaign, Illinois headquarters.” Please note that governance and funding resides with the provosts, that is, with administrators.

References to ARL or the CIC (or pick your favorite organizational acronym) should not be interpreted as administrator or institution bashing in the course of these ruminations. Rather, it is simply my way of trying to identify centers of power and influence that bear on the seminar’s fundamental questions of retrofitting expectations or redefining reality in view of a future professional existence. The questions I raise are ontological questions, i.e. of being and becoming. (I will admit, however, to having some fun, at institutional expense, riffing on the Mickey Mouse theme for the title of this post: “Who's the leader of the club | That's made for you and me…”).

A number of collaborative projects exist within the CIC. One of these is the Center for Library Initiatives (CLI), staffed by a director, deputy director, project manager, and office manager. The CLI “focuses on three objectives—optimizing student and faculty access to the combined resources of our libraries; maximizing cost, time, and space savings; and supporting a collaborative environment where library staff can work together to solve their mutual problems.” Key projects for the CLI include: the CIC/HathiTrust Digital Repository, Google Book Search Project, Shared Print Repository, Consortial Licensing, Scholarly Communication, and Reciprocal Library Borrowing.

In 2009, Big Ten special collections librarians met in Chicago. The last time this group gathered was in 1993. Five years ago the major topics of conversation revolved around “how can we expose our collections better in the Midwest,” identifying “strategies to bring researchers to the Midwest,” and “showing off riches and promoting the Big Ten brand.” The vehicles to make this happen included the Google Books and HathiTrust projects, along with development of a shared print repository. At the 2009 meeting, representatives (primarily directors of special collections) shared major campus issues; many of these were common across institutions: budget constraints, hiring restrictions or freezes, merging units/departments/libraries, moves, space planning, renovation projects, and space constraints. In the last five years there have been perhaps two or three conference calls between special collections directors about priorities or potential collaborations, but nothing substantive has happened. It seems safe to say that such spotty meetings or conversations are indicative of corporate interest—i.e. CIC provosts or university librarians—in special collections over the past two decades.

CIC-CLI Director Mark Sandler provided an overview of goals in the most recent issue of the CLI electronic newsletter. In other words, he provided a status report. I’ll not spend any time criticizing Sandler except to note that I found some of his comments condescending—hardly the kind of esprit de corps one wishes to develop in a collaborative universe. What is important to note—and to ask—is where special collections, or libraries writ large, fit into current CIC thinking. Sandler wrote:

…I’m likely not doing justice to the breadth, depth, or significance of the collaborative work going on in the CIC offices and across our universities, but cataloging the accomplishments of CIC collaboration is not really my point here. Rather, I’m writing this in the new year to remind myself, the CLI team, and all of our wonderful CIC libraries/librarians that the goals of libraries can’t only be about libraries. Our library goals should be about advancing the interests of our campuses, higher education as a global institution, and the aspirations of scholars—both young and old—everywhere….

Within the CIC, our greatest strength in the CLI is that we work in close proximity to a broad array of campus concerns, aspirations, and opportunities. We see the future of libraries as inextricably linked to the success of these broader campus collaborations; collaborations about improving student learning outcomes, diversifying our university communities, enriching the research portfolios of our faculty, strengthening campus leadership, making our universities more cost-effective, or making athletic participation safer.

For those who work in grand libraries, with their grand reading rooms and atria, it’s easy to look up at the high vaulted ceilings and mistake them for the sky. In other words, the goals of our campuses, states, and regions are not about libraries per se, but, rather, are about student success, impactful research, creative and uplifting works of art, world-changing invention, life-saving medicine, economic advancement, and social justice. Our work in libraries, and in the CIC-CLI, is to figure out how libraries connect to, support, and advance these larger goals. And, if we do manage to figure that out, we should next be thinking long and hard about how we convey our role—our value-add—to partners, funders and the beneficiaries of our work.

This is the universe in which I work and move and have my being. If I’m interested in retrofitting my expectations around the reality defined by the Big Ten, then it looks to me like I’ll need to focus on “student success, impactful research, creative and uplifting works of art, world-changing invention, life-saving medicine, economic advancement, and social justice,” or to put it more succinctly, to advance “the interests of our campuses, higher education as a global institution, and the aspirations of scholars—both young and old—everywhere.” Sure. No problem.

Of course, this begs another question: who calls the tune for the Big Ten? Or do they dance to their own tune?

*CIC member universities include: University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

30th Year Reflections/59: By Example

“The older I get the less I listen to what people say and the more I look at what they do.” — Andrew Carnegie

A few weeks ago I gave graduate students in my preservation management class an assignment. I asked them to watch a presentation given on September 30th at the University of Minnesota by Elliott Shore, Executive Director for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and James Hilton, Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for Digital Education Initiatives at the University of Michigan. This joint presentation was made possible by University Librarian Wendy Lougee (who also serves as ARL president), and appeared under the general title “Research Libraries at Scale: Moving from 19th Century Origins to 21st Century Solutions.” While watching this presentation, I asked my students to keep in mind three questions and to write a 1,500 word short paper based on answers to those questions. The questions were these: What did Shore or Hilton say that relates to preservation? Does it make sense? Does what they said give you a roadmap to think about preservation planning in the future? Perhaps not the most profound questions, but intentional all the same. I wanted my students to: a) have a chance to hear two influential professional leaders speak about the future of libraries, and b) pull out and assemble thoughts on a topic not immediately apparent in the theme of the Shore/Hilton presentation, i.e. library preservation programs and planning.

My students handed in their papers last Saturday. Before reading them, I thought of another experiment (akin to my MLA pre- and post-conference experience of the last two posts): commit my own thoughts to paper, post them to the blog, and see how they stand up against my students. This, like my MLA reflections, is a bit risky (for me and my students). But why ask my students to do something if I’m not willing to do it myself? In my piece I spend more time than my students might at the beginning summarizing the Shore/Hilton presentation; I think it is necessary for context. I then wrap up with some observations on preservation. Here, then, are my reflections on the Shore/Hilton presentation as they relate to preservation programs and planning.

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The long-term preservation of culturally and educationally important materials is a core function of libraries. Shore—in setting the table for Hilton—argued “that how we are acting now (or trying to react to what we are seeing) is deeply and inexorably rooted in a period of human history whose foundations are now crumbling” and whose practices and habits, developed across all cultures of the world, “mark our habit of thought and continue to be present in how we make our decisions.” He further argued that “the library is the central institution that bears the most marks of the thinking of the last century and a half” and that it was his firm belief “that if we understand our habits of mind better, we may be in a better position to make choices among a seemingly infinite number” of possibilities. Preservation, as a core function, bears some of these marks and habits of thought.

Shore assisted us in this historical introspection by noting, in essence, our bad habits, i.e. the things we need to break. He observed: “The penetration of the dynamic, changeable nature of digital, web-based, linked information technologies to universities and to research libraries has shown the fissures and exposed the assumptions in some of the fixed structures into which we have organized ourselves and how we think about our work.” These habits include (but are not limited to) a propensity towards reducing problems to discrete parts and tasks; creating (and continuing)—through classification and sorting activities—information silos; organizing ourselves and our work hierarchically; assuming that items in our care are, by their nature, discrete and finished. By breaking these habits (and perhaps healing our scars in the process), we can move from a discrete, contained, hierarchical, rigid, single profession mode of existence toward something that engages us in a fluid, ubiquitous, diverse, collaborative, and interprofessional reality.

Beyond introspection (to continue a psychoanalytic or religious metaphor), Shore asks us ostensibly to perform a professional confession, i.e. to acknowledge our current state: We have lost control; we need to get beyond our “binary oppositions” of centralization versus decentralization, control versus openness, fixed versus shifting categories; we are jolted by the rapid appearance and aggressive behavior of commercial, social, and personal entities in “our” domain; we are not alone; there is a way out; we need to seek a middle ground.

The confessional ends with the realization that there is a middle ground, but even here questions arise, the principal being: “Where do we differentiate ourselves from one another and where do we work together?” Is it, as Shore seems to say, that this middle ground, this new place of professional identity and activity is in both these areas of difference and collaboration? For examples, he points to aggregators and cultural commons, e.g. the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Wikipedia, and quotes Charles Henry’s observation (“Higher Ground”) that the next two decades “could witness an extraordinary fluorescence of activity among universities and colleges focused on repositioning, consolidation, and convergence.” Is this the middle ground of which he speaks? If so, what does this mean for the core function of preservation?

Hilton, in response to (or continuing) Shore’s presentation, framed matters another way, i.e. if Shore’s talk was classical music, then Hilton offered free-wheelin’, pickin’, kinetic bluegrass sprinkled with the blood of a Baptist preacher. His presentation, like a preacher’s sermon, included three major points: the emergent nature of change, irresistible forces, and opportunities/imperatives (aka celestial navigation).

On the emergent nature of change, Hilton noted that “our notions of change don’t serve us well.” We think of change as calm waters punctuated by rapids, when in fact it is really rapids all the time, all the way. Viewed this way, change is disruptive, messy, not orderly, planned, or predictable. While Hilton did not adequately define what he meant by emergence (as understood, for example, in systems theory) he did point to it as a strategy for dealing with change. In this sense we have a known starting point and desired direction, but an unknown end point. Part of this strategy involves identifying and adjusting “fundamental conditions” so that “new opportunities will emerge.” It also entails instilling “a discipline of ‘fine-tune as you go’ and refinement based on experience. Hilton likened the process to sailing.

Taking up the sailing theme we might quote Seneca: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Hilton might respond that the port is not important, just the direction. (We would hope he wants to hit land at some point, if for no other reason than to reprovision his ship—assuming the natives are friendly and their stores abundant.) We might also amend his earlier image of change (which included pictures of canoes or kayaks on calm water and rapids) to a sailing image that includes the natural forces of massive swells, towering waves, smooth seas, and doldrums. These maritime dynamisms would correspond (by name if not by nature) to the four irresistible forces, i.e. emerging conditions, outlined in his talk: higher education, consumerization/relevance, unbundling, and digital.

Under these conditions—adjusting the tiller—we might expect nearly continuous evaluation or redefinition of the purposes and meaning of education, who participates in education, and how it is financed. We might also expect incessant gusts from port or starboard in the form of commercial blowhards (I mean entities) telling us how they can do it better, cheaper, more efficiently, etc. As an example, Hilton gave us a charming thumbnail portrait of his colleague at Michigan, Paul Courant, and the interaction between Courant and the Elsevier publishing company on the topics of preservation and digitization.

Elsevier: “Look, we were Galileo’s publisher. Trust us. We’re going to be fine.”
Courant: “We have the hubris to be unimpressed with your track record of longevity.”
Courant: “Where did you go to get your backfiles for digitization?”
Courant: “You’re going to go to your board of directors and propose something with a perpetual, binding liability with no revenue stream behind it?”

Hilton’s conclusions, his celestial navigation, led him to five final imperatives: 1) re-orient around durable access, 2) tie our fate to collaboration, 3) harness economies of scale, 4) be Switzerland on steroids (i.e. neutral and highly engaged), and 5) double down on audacity.

Let me return to the three questions I posed to my students as they relate to preservation planning in libraries. If the five major components of preservation planning are environmental control, emergency preparedness, security, storage, and handling/use, then at first blush Shore/Hilton said little in specific terms about this core library function. But in broad terms, and as a roadmap to the future, they gave us plenty to think about.

First, Shore challenged us to examine those habits of thought and work that have become embedded in our professional consciousness. In terms of managerial planning and conservators’ treatments we might question the amount of time, staff, space, and money spent on treating individual items in loco. If we are collaborating, i.e. practicing what Hilton called an “intentional interdependence between organizations,” and working to scale it would seem we would want to invest more of our resources on regional treatment centers to which numerous institutions could send individual items for attention. Something like the Regional Alliance for Preservation might provide a model or a vehicle for this type of work.

This also argues for active, real-time discussions across institutions and among staffs/faculties of what should be sent for treatment to such regional centers, what can be done in-house, or ignored. Such a discussion overlaps Shore’s concern for a middle ground and the question: “Where do we differentiate ourselves from one another and where do we work together?” If we differentiate ourselves, in part, through our special and rare collections, then we are long overdue for a conversation (let alone collaborative work) about physical and digital preservation planning for these materials. This conversation, among regional or consortial curatorial staff, needs to happen sooner rather than later. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) have a number of initiatives that address physical and digital preservation: the Shared Print Repository, Hathi Trust Digital Repository, the Google Book Search Project. But almost all of this activity addresses circulating or journal collections, not rare or special materials. It is time for curatorial staffs (and associated faculty) to gather, talk, and act.

Some might argue that digital humanities initiatives or cultural commons projects like the DPLA meet this need. This may be the case on the digital front, but I do not think it adequately addresses Hilton’s call to re-orient around durable access. Here he pointed to “traditional content,” (books and paper) as being less problematic, i.e. put it on the shelf in an environmentally stable, secure, place and we’ll be fine for five hundred years. This may be so, but we do not, at present, have the necessary capacity for such storage. The physical is being shortchanged in favor of the digital. We need to be collaboratively audacious on both fronts.