Re-Positioning Libraries: A Consideration Of The Obstacles

Iconsider it a “given” that the contribution of academic and research libraries was a central element in the success of the mission of higher education in the twentieth century. That premise leads to a difficult question—does it matter if libraries continue to be central in the century just beginning? Here I will make a second assumption—that it really does matter a great deal. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, it helps to understand the obstacles to re-positioning libraries successfully so that they may continue their vital contribution of providing access to scholarly information. These are largely beyond our immediate ability to remedy. That does not mean we should not try to understand them and to find the allies who can help us do the work of shaping the future of libraries—and there are many such allies. During the last two years, I have written closely allied pieces that have appeared in these pages exploring several topics that in my view are critical to the question of the future of libraries—on change, on the so-called “paradigm shift” and on intellectual property. In large measure, this essay is a capstone for all of them. 1 Among the most immediate and obvious of our problems is one that libraries have been grappling with since I began my career 30 years ago in the great higher education downturn of the early 1970s—a declining share of fiscal resources. That downturn brought an end to what has been called the “golden age of library collecting.” Libraries have never recovered. A recent cover story in the Chronicle of Higher Education devoted itself to “The Crumbling Intellectual Foundation” and described budget cuts for libraries, university presses, journals, and culture, which are converging to threaten the infrastructure on which professors and students depend. The key point was that in budget downturns, some items traditionally have been protected. These include the largest single line item in higher education, faculty salaries. At the same time, tuition, the major source of support, has been protected from dramatic increases—at least until re