Faculty Survey Tracks Changing Perceptions of Libraries

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By Gordon Flagg

A new survey of U.S. colleges and universities has some troubling findings for libraries about their declining use by faculty, but also holds clues as to how they can maintain their relevance.

The report of the results, Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies (PDF file), summarized the findings as:

• “Basic scholarly information use practices have shifted rapidly in recent years, and as a result the academic library is increasingly being disintermediated from the discovery process, risking irrelevance in one of its core functional areas;
• “Faculty members’ growing comfort relying exclusively on digital versions of scholarly materials opens new opportunities for libraries, new business models for publishers, and new challenges for preservation; and
• “Despite several years of sustained efforts by publishers, scholarly societies, libraries, faculty members, and others to reform various aspects of the scholarly communications system, a fundamentally conservative set of faculty attitudes continues to impede systematic change.”

The survey of 3,025 faculty members in 2009 is the fourth conducted by Ithaka S+R over the past decade on faculty attitudes and behaviors, and the trend shows that “the library’s physical edifice and catalog have declined steadily as starting points for research. The research process is no longer likely to begin with a face-to-face consultation with a librarian, a visit to the library’s special collections service points, or a search of the online library catalog. Rather, faculty most often turn to network-level services, including both general purpose search engines and services targeted specifically to academia.”

Scientists continue to be the least likely, at around 10%, to start their research in the library, with humanists, at about 30%, the most likely.

Since 2003 the survey has asked about faculty perceptions of three traditional functions of the library: The perceived importance of the library as a starting point for research (the “gateway” function) has declined; that of the library as a repository of resources (the “archive” function) has held steady; and that of paying for needed resources, from books and journals to electronic databases (the “buyer” function), always the most important, has grown even more valuable, rated as important by 90% in 2009.

Role as electronic hub

The report notes that “many believe that these historical roles will not be the main focus of libraries in the
future, and envision the transformation of the library from an institution focused on acquiring, maintaining, and providing services centered on a local print collection into a more electronic hub offering a variety of services to support campus needs for research, teaching, and learning.” It adds that many libraries are already taking steps
toward such a transformation, and that others “are taking on new research-support roles, providing digital information curation and management services and even establishing a new professional identity for themselves as ‘informa­tionists.’”

In addition, two new roles that were asked about for the first time in the 2009 survey, teaching support and research support, “suggest unique opportunities for libraries to further develop campus relationships.”

The report also includes findings on acceptance of the transition of scholarly works to digital form, and new online communications channels such as open-access journals and digital repositories.

American Libraries, Wed, 04/21/2010 - 10:35