Kay Cunningham's List: Academic Libraries

• A research team of librarians at the University of Minnesota shows that first year students who go to the library once in their first semester are one and a half times more likely to reenroll for their second semester of study. In addition, these students had higher grade point averages than their counterparts who never attended the library.
• A study at the University of Huddersfield in England shows higher levels of student achievement among students who access library e-resources and books. A similar study at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales shows a positive correlation between database usage and borrowing and students’ grades.

• Paper books have no limitations since the library owns the book. But as Clifford Lynch recently put it, “nobody buys an e-book: one licenses it under typically very complex terms that constrain what you are allowed to do with it.” For example, at UCSD, Ebrary (now owned by Proquest), limits e-books to one user at a time, allows users to save a maximum of 30 percent of a book, “though some publishers have set more restrictive limits,” and allows you to copy only 15 percent of a book, text only, no illustrations.
• E-books also do not circulate beyond the institution, which effectively kills interlibrary loan. As for one book serving the entire CSU or UC systems, many come with one-user restrictions, which means that only one user at a time in the CSU or the UC can read the book.
• And that’s the point: publishers do not impose restrictions on paper books. E-book packages also compromise the stability of the library’s collection since the vendor can remove one at their discretion, without notice.
• E-books prevent deep reading, their use is highly restricted, and they can vanish without notice, so why are the CSU and the UC libraries experimenting with replacing paper with computer files? Is the e-book phenomenon yet another example of university administrators chasing after the latest e-fad?
• seem like a cheap way to access hundreds, if not thousands,
• But the long-term costs of these loans can be ruinous, and the same goes of e-journal article packages. In the beginning they too were priced “extremely low relative to the number” of journals acquired.  But they did not stay “extremely low” for long. Today, the exorbitant amounts such companies as Elsevier and Springer charge eat up a greater and greater percentage of library budgets, and their contracts usually last for three to five years with built-in increases of 6 percent per year, well above inflation.
• Why would libraries even consider such a Faustian deal? Simple: they are trying to make the best of a very bad situation. University budgets have in no way recovered from the financial crash, which reduced funding by two billion dollars.

5 more annotations...

• And in spite of our degrees and our knowledge, we are here to support the students and faculty. That’s our job. So while I’d love for faculty members to see me as an intellectual equal and to understand what I do, I don’t think tenure is what would do it.
• When I was looking for a job, the places I interviewed where librarians were on the tenure track seemed like the worst environments. And let me preface this by saying that these may just be peculiarities of the places I interviewed at.
• I don’t want to be seen as one of them. I want to be seen as a member of the team (a diverse team). I want faculty members to see that we’re all working towards the same goals — graduating great students and promoting the university — and should work together because we each have good (but different) things to offer.

1 more annotation...

• why we have a literature with a small number of gems amongst a whole lot of of mediocrity.
• The idea that librarians need tenure to be on faculty-level committees seems like a red herring to me, because there are so many institutions at which librarians who are not tenure-track (and even not faculty) serve on these committees. I chaired an academic committee of disciplinary faculty members at Norwich and served on another faculty senate committee, all while being “staff with faculty rank.” I wasn’t thought of as less than, but as different. Then again, I’m also ok with being seen as different from disciplinary faculty, which some librarians seem uncomfortable with.
• librarians are much more effective when they show what unique value they bring to a collaboration with faculty than when they try to show how they’re just like disciplinary faculty. We’re just not
• the tenure process can silence librarians early in their careers when they’re most likely to want to challenge the status quo.
• what good is academic freedom when it only protects a small percentage of the workforce? Oh, I deserve academic freedom, but my fixed-term and adjunct faculty colleagues don’t?
• three higher education institutions, and the one where the librarians were tenured and in the faculty union was by far the worst working experience I’ve had. Part of it was the culture of apathy, part of it was the seeming inherent passive-aggressive nature of librarians, but most of it was the strange focus on scholarship over service. My job was to manage a not insignificant collections budget and small department, but in order to keep that job, regardless of how well I did it, I would have to produce scholarship at a level that was nearly another part-time job. I left that place for many reasons, but the ridiculous expectations of tenure-track librarians (mind you, just the new ones — the rest were grandfathered into a more lenient system) was definitely up there
• as our libraries grow ever more complex in terms of the roles we must fill, we are consistenly shrinking in terms of the number of people we have on the payroll (often in both absolute and relative terms, a nefarious double whammy) to do work. As such, we need to focus every ounce on our effort on performing work that benefits our communities. As you point out, often the demands of tenure make it unsafe to do the work that needs to be done for those we serve and point people toward the work they have to do to survive in their career.
• As someone mired in a long-running legal issue that is pretty much all about about intellectual and academic freedom, I can say without hesitation that I have no doubt that the former employer where I had tenure as faculty would have thrown me under the bus in the face of such a lawsuit, while my current employer–where I have no faculty status–has been a stalwart and unequivocal defender of my academic freedom, even when it’s been unpleasant for them. Academic freedom–when push comes to shove–is really about institutional culture and values, not an individual’s status, as your story and my saga make clear.

6 more annotations...

• Not only is individual decision-making slightly suspect in academic libraries (did it go through committee? Have you secured the boss’s permission?) there is a disheartening disinclination to acknowledge the existence of librarians at all, much less to celebrate their contributions. The library offers a service, the library has made a decision, the library (like the butler) did it.
• both structural and cultural conditions that work against tenure being as valuable for librarians as it might be in other fields
•  If, in fact, an institution that won’t count research as actual work, defines research too narrowly, doesn't support it, and sees tenure as at best high-stakes testing for individual job security, it’s pretty hard to see why anyone would think it’s worth it.
• respect seems pretty independent of tenure when it comes to librarians.
• only outside the library if Inside the library, the director calls all the shots and I'm not trusted to make decisions without taking them through the appropriate committee

3 more annotations...

• Based on reports from 40 research libraries, the percentage of university funds spent on libraries has shrunk by over one-half in the past three decades, from a high of 3.7% in 1984 to just 1.8% in 2011.

• The majority of academic libraries, 2,417, were open between 60-99 hours during a typical week in the fall of 2012 (derived from table 2). Another 595 academic libraries were open 100 or more hours per typical week and only 67 were open less than 40 hours per typical week.

• But Jones said the faculty was essential in reviving the library budget. Professors are “the top of the food chain here on campus. If faculty work together to make noise, you can really achieve things.”

   

  She praised the university’s decision to establish the Campaign for the Berkeley Library in particular, as libraries – outside of academic departments – lack a “natural constituency” for donations, even though they’re a “common good.”
• But budgets cuts also have threatened the library’s ability to maintain resources – mostly the more than 90,000 journal subscriptions faculty and students report using, with some costing $25,000 annually, Jones said. “It’s hard when a faculty member says to you, ‘I need you to buy this journal,’ and you say, ‘What would you like me to cancel so we can buy that?’” (Library expenditures on serials have increased more than 400 percent since the late 1980s, compared to a 188 percent increase for library expenditures over all.)
• Facilities also are hurting. “We’ve got a building that’s 45 years old and has never been remodeled – it’s embarrassing,” Jones said of the large Moffitt Undergraduate Library.

1 more annotation...

• Indeed, all members of the academic community are likely to become increasingly dependent on skilled professional guidance in the acquisition and use of library resources as the forms and numbers of these resources multiply, scholarly materials appear in more languages, bibliographical systems become more complicated, and library technology grows increasingly sophisticated.
• Because the scope and character of library resources should be taken into account in such important academic decisions as curricular planning and faculty appointments, librarians should have a voice in the development of the institution’s educational policy.