The Future is Now!How the Academic Library can Thrive in

Uncertain Times

Lynn Sutton, Ph.D.February 3, 2012

Where we are

Where we need to go

Advisory Board Company

Four Horsemen of the Library Apocalypse

– Unsustainable costs– Viable alternatives– Declining usage– New patron demands

Unsustainable costs

Abandon the arms race

Viable alternatives

Google: mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

amazon.com: April 2011, e-books out-sold all print books

WikipediA: beats libraries

7 to 1 on where

students start searches

National decline in circulation

Circulation0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

140,000

160,000

180,000

200,000

19982008

National decline in reference transactions

Weekly Ref-erence

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

19982008

Discovery failure

Where do students start a search?

83% Search engine7% Wikipedia<1% Library website

Predicting our own doom

“The new consumer utopia of instantly available digital books is leaving the library behind as a relic of a bygone age when users were not self-sufficient and when the information or book a user wanted was not simply a click away.”

Dennis Dillon, Associate Director for Research ServicesUniversity of Texas at Austin Libraries

Straddling two eras

• Demand for traditional services declining

• Model for meeting digital demand not yet sustainable– Copyright issues not yet settled– Budgets flat while costs rise– Conflicting demands of users

Two different constituencies

Students Faculty

Transformational change

The Way Forward

(Things to Do)

Flip Your Mission

Old: The mission of the XYZ Library is to select, acquire, organize, describe and provide access to yada, yada, yada

New: The mission of the XYZ Library is to help our students, faculty and staff SUCCEED!

New:

Not about US

All about YOU

Embrace Digital

Digital content: • Journals (went first more than a decade ago)•Newspapers (fastest popular media to fall)•Books (tipping fast right now)•Media (with mega storage needs)•Data (next frontier for academic libraries)•Publishing (born digital publishing )

•Digitize your own unique material

Love up the rare books

Experiment

• Try Patron-Driven Acquisitions for a “just in time” strategy.

• Mix of free access, short term rentals, purchases

Weed

• Identify pre-1923 out-of-copyright titles already available digitally from HathiTrust; either store or weed those titles from your collection

• Use ASERL’s shared journal repository to weed print journals

• Ask R2 Consulting to help expedite weeding

Government documents

• Reduce footprint to reflect use of collection• De-select print wherever practical• Minimize processing

Scholarly communication

• Work to achieve fundamental, radical change in scholarly communication

• Consider an open access mandate for faculty; start with library faculty; subsidize fees

• Be politically active against bills like SOPA/PIPA• Sign the Berlin Declaration• Educate your faculty on author rights• Build digital/institutional repository

Repurpose library space

• Move books out, move people in• Welcome campus partners to share library

space; one-stop shopping for academic success

New roles for staff

• 70-30 challenge for technical services• Maximize shelf-ready• Right-size Reference– Tiered service– Staff at peak hours only– Combine service points

More new roles for staff

• Teach, teach, teach• Embed in classes, departments, websites,

CMS, residence halls

More new roles for staff

• Emerging technologies• Data management• Publishing partnerships

The Way Forward

(Things to Stop Doing)

STOP!

• Buying print when digital edition available• Binding• Journal check-in• Authority control• Automatic replacement of lost books• Double-staffing service desks• Keeping unnecessary statistics• Item level processing for low demand material

Lead the campus

• Scholarly communication• Student success• Technological change• Curriculum innovation• Online education• Use your imagination!

Continuing Roles for Libraries

Library as Teacher

Library as Technology Leader

Library as Place

Library as Thinking Partner

Image Credits• Jump: uploaded to Flickr on October 6, 2008 by rosiehardy• Change: christianmenchristianwarrior.files.wordpress• Baby: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umpcportal/4581962986/• sizes/m/in/photostream/• Old men: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicnac/3121705656/• sizes/z/in/pool-554700@N23/• Footprints: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kfergos/37070037/• Gutenberg: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/• gutenberg/

Lynn Sutton, Ph.D.Dean, Z Smith Reynolds LibraryWake Forest UniversityWinston-Salem, NC 27109suttonls@wfu.edu