The library is the intellectual center of every
great university. As a gateway to information and a repository of knowledge,
the library is essential to the educational and scholarly mission of the
university. For this reason, the primary function of the university library
is to meet the research and instructional needs of students and faculty
at the highest level.
The centrality of the library for the mission of Rice University was recognized from the beginning. In the 1891 charter of incorporation, William Marsh Rice listed as his first objective "the establishment and maintenance ... of a public library." And in his 1912 address commemorating the opening of Rice, President Edgar Odell Lovett noted that the university's "work of investigation is not to be allowed to suffer from any inconvenience due to inadequate provision of library and laboratory apparatus." This commitment to building a high quality library was particularly admirable because of the university's youth, limited resources, and geographical isolation.
The original Rice library collection occupied part of Lovett Hall, with small departmental collections scattered across the campus. The opening of Fondren Library in 1949 made it possible to consolidate all the holdings into one central collection. Yet by the early 1960s, Fondren's stacks were filled. To make room for the library's growing needs, the building was expanded in 1968. Additional space was gained again in 1984, when the business holdings were moved to Herring Hall and in 1988-89, when a remote storage site for seldom used periodicals and books was constructed in Rice Stadium. Some of the spaces freed up in Fondren as a result of these moves, however, have been used for non-library purposes. The History Department was moved to the fifth floor in 1968, other faculty and two journals have been placed in the library as well, and more recently the Computer and Information Technology Institute and the Baker Institute have occupied part of the first floor. The last two will move out of Fondren in 1997 making more room available once more for library functions.
The consolidation of the university library into one building, the imminent move of the Baker Institute and CITI out of Fondren, and recent technological developments that have affected all libraries, provide a unique opportunity for Rice University to develop a library commensurate with the high quality and national rankings of its other academic programs. Locating all the major library resources in one building was the result of necessity. But it has turned out to be extremely advantageous in an age when most research is interdisciplinary, when rapidly changing technology has made a consolidated site a superior option, and when secondary locations, which many other libraries have to deal with, exacerbate the costs of doing research, and providing access, security, and personnel.
Moreover, because new developments in information technology are likely to continue to revolutionize the world of libraries in the coming decades, all libraries confront similar issues how to continue to perform their necessary traditional functions with distinction, while fulfilling new demands in a technological environment that no one can predict with certainty. In some ways but only in some this has evened the playing field among libraries. The emergence of digitized materials, the creation of computer networks that link data sources around the globe, and the spread of cooperative arrangements among libraries, have helped decrease the obstacles posed by the limited size of the library's holdings and by its geographical isolation.
Fondren now stands as a unified library at the center of the campus. When it was built, in 1949, the site was at the western edge of Rice's academic buildings. The expansion of academic programs and the construction of new buildings in the intervening decades have placed it in a central position that matches symbolically its central role in the research and teaching life of the university. Fondren is the one place on campus where the synergy of bringing together all the modern resources of information print, video, electronic data can be fully realized. This is an unprecedented moment to redefine the library, not only with respect to its new spatial relationship to the rest of the campus, but to its new functions in the world of teaching and research. To do this will require careful planning and a realistic assessment of how the library is positioned with respect to the needs of the university's academic programs.
Since Fondren was last expanded in 1967-68, the number of faculty on regular appointments increased from 246 to 450. Counting the number of instructors, lecturers, adjunct professors, and faculty fellows, the faculty grew from 304 to 651. This increase was accompanied by striking growth in the numbers of students and the number and variety of degree-granting programs. Bachelor's degrees awarded increased from 374 to 673; master's degrees grew from 105 to 314; and the number of doctoral degrees from 76 to 125. As the world of knowledge expanded in new directions, so did the diverse programs of study available. Although some programs were eliminated, undergraduate degree programs, for example, grew from twenty-five in 1968 to forty-five in 1995. At the graduate level, similar changes took place. Until after World War II, Rice was essentially an undergraduate college; modest enlargement of the graduate programs in science and engineering occurred during the 1950s, but the largest growth in those programs, and the creation of new graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences, occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.
Implicit in such growth are massive increases in the pressures brought to bear on service centers such as Fondren Library. The library now serves a remarkably enlarged population of faculty and students working in more diverse programs of study and research than ever before. As the university has grown, its programs and ambitions have outpaced the development of the library. While the number of faculty, students, and programs have roughly doubled, from 1967 to 1995 the professional staff grew only from 25 to 33, making it by far the smallest of any research university in America. Furthermore, Fondren Library serves this enlarged, diversified community of students and scholars in less space than it had in 1968.
To help us evaluate our current situation and assess a variety of plans for the future, President Malcolm Gillis and Provost Davis Auston asked four nationally-recognized librarians to assess our library. They are Patricia Battin (Vice President and University Librarian emerita, Columbia University Library, and former President, Commission on Preservation and Access-ARL), Karin Wittenborg (Director, University Libraries, University of Virginia), Peter Lyman (Director, University Libraries, University of California, Berkeley), and Michael Keller (Director, University Libraries, Stanford University). These consultants were particularly insightful because they are national leaders in the transformation of libraries to meet the needs of the next century. They are, indeed, a new breed of librarians a younger generation that is as much at home in cyberspace as in the world of ancient manuscripts.
The consultants' reports revealed a strong consensus about our current strengths and weaknesses. All agree that the location of most of our collections in one building is a strength which should be maintained in the future, both because of the growing interdisciplinary nature of research and because it strengthens the unity of research and undergraduate teaching in a university environment. The weaknesses they found fall into the following categories: vision, collection development, staff, space, ways to compensate for geographic isolation. The Current Assessment that follows is informed by the observations of the consultants and the Library Planning Committee.
The vision outlined here for Fondren Library seeks to expand its role in supporting research and teaching at Rice University as well as its potential national role. Given the rank and status of Rice University, this library can become a national beacon where the new ways of accessing and using information are explored, where the complicated relationship between print culture and digital media, as well as their policy implications, are routinely discussed, analyzed, and brought to the attention of a wider public. This public should include our students, who must begin to think critically about these issues as scholars, citizens, and future leaders. The library can and should become a catalyst for a much needed organized voice in higher education a voice that could articulate the complex needs of teaching and learning communities as integral to the national good.
As expressed throughout this report, many problems and issues attend Fondren Library. They include a variety of external forces that, in contrast to times past, will have enormous budget, organizational, and program implications. These influences, played out mostly beyond the hedges, will have a powerful effect on the development and long-term strength of the libraries at Rice University. Copyright law, global intellectual property issues, telecommunications policies, the increasingly risk-averse reaction of computer corporations in a volatile and less competitive market place, the metamorphosis of the academic publishing industry, and the historical tendency to treat technological advancement more as a commodity than as a creative tool for educational enrichment all these forces will help redefine the function and structure of late twentieth-century academic libraries.
In addition, those who steer the course of library development librarians, faculty, administrators, and students must also confront recent dynamics within the culture of the academy that will similarly force us to reconceptualize the function of the library. These include the sustainability of research universities and research libraries, the changing nature of authorship and authority, the reorganization of knowledge, and the intensification of questions about how students actually learn and who should teach them in a multi-media era.
For many years, Fondren Library has remained marginalized from the more formative activities and planning processes at Rice a rather passive institution within a top-ranked university. If it remains so in the coming decade, simply reacting to the legal, cultural, and social transformations around it, it will always have to scramble to meet each disruptive surprise. It would be wiser for Fondren Library to shed its past and link its vision to the aspirations and talents of the university. The library should take on the responsibility of understanding and influencing those powerful forces that currently render its future so ambiguous.
Such new emphasis could have a profoundly positive effect on the quality of services in support of the library's primary mission to the Rice community and on the quality of staff, who should embody these aspirations. Fondren Library could become an elegant and flexible laboratory for its own evolution a place where the idea of a library is studied, enriched, and transcended.
To do this, Fondren Library will also need to take on the challenges of "local" issues shortage of space, the need for improved services, the necessity of a more vigorous collection development program, recalculated budgets, and a larger staff with opportunities for professional enhancement that will help them shape and implement a grander vision.
In order to shoulder these tasks, the next phase of Fondren Library should include appropriate instructional space; meeting places for visiting scholars and students; programs of lectureships, workshops, and interdisciplinary seminars for the intellectual exploration of these themes; a program of internships for foreign librarians; advanced technologies for archiving and disseminating the results of these programs; and means of strengthening ties to business, industry, political organizations, the government, and prominent libraries and institutes in the United States and abroad, including national libraries.
A vision such as this must inform the development of a library plan. And that plan, in turn, should emerge from an ongoing planning process that links the library to global transformations, to the university's strategic plan, and to the changing needs of Rice faculty and students. Such a plan should guide the improvement of collections, the allocation of staff, the utilization of space, and cooperation with other institutions.
Although in the last decade a substantial effort has been made to overcome the inadequacies of the library's collection, Rice University has by far the smallest library collection of any research institution in the nation. Ranked 104th almost last place in the list of holdings by University Research libraries in the U.S. and Canada Fondren Library's holdings are, according to the consultants, inadequate to meet the essential needs of current and future generations of students and faculty. 1
Given Rice's small size, its collections can never be, and should not aim to be, at the top of the rankings. But even taking size and institutional profile into account, the size of the collection is inadequate (see Appendix A - Table 1). The collections are heavily used compared to those of similar institutions 70% of the books in all disciplines have been checked out in the last 15 years and many more are used within the library. It is noteworthy that at Rice, as at other universities, the availability of an on-line catalogue, accessible in student's dormitory rooms and in faculty offices, has resulted in an increase in library usage, even for traditional print resources.
Not surprisingly, growing usage and patrons' more sophisticated awareness of the quality of other collections have led to increasing dissatisfaction with the library's printed holdings and digital resources. Undergraduates complain that we are not competitive and that the library collections do not meet even the basic needs of undergraduate research. Faculty, especially in the humanities, wonder how they can remain productive scholars, train graduate students, or sustain undergraduate honors programs with the library resources available. Twenty-one percent of Rice faculty report that the library is inadequate to support their undergraduate courses, let alone the work of more advanced students or their own research. A survey of Rice graduates by the Council on Financing Higher Education revealed that in contrast to their extremely high satisfaction with their Rice experience, Rice graduates expressed dissatisfaction with the library.
Several factors have contributed to this predicament. First, is the size of Rice University. Given our small size, there are no opportunities to benefit from the economies of scale. Individual faculty and students at Rice need as many library materials for their work as those at larger institutions, but the costs of collections at larger institutions can be spread across a greater number of students and faculty. To be sure, in recent years Rice's acquisition budget on a per faculty or per student basis has been above the average for research universities, but this ratio is more an artifact of our small size than a reflection of the adequacy of the library's holdings. Second, Rice is the most recent private research university to emphasize graduate programs. Duke University, for example, founded two decades after Rice, began with a strong emphasis on research and graduate studies and investment in a research library to support them. Third, because of Rice's small size, library collection development was narrowly confined to the interests and course offerings of faculty who were actually here, with minimal effort by library professionals to build collections broadly to reflect emerging trends in different disciplines. As academic fields become more and more interdisciplinary, this is especially damaging even for specialties that have long been present at Rice. Moreover, because of such narrow focus, entire fields, even in traditional areas such as Renaissance studies, have been entirely missing. Fourth, because Rice began with an emphasis on science and engineering, significant course offerings in the humanities and social sciences did not begin until after 1960. Holdings in these fields are particularly weak, even more so in emerging areas such as Islamic, Latin American, or Asian Studies. When faculty are hired in these areas, as they increasingly have been and will continue to be in the foreseeable future, the library holdings to support their teaching and research are practically nonexistent. The problem of collections for emerging fields, however, is not confined to the humanities and social sciences. Some science disciplines, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology, face a similar problem. Finally, because electronic information resources have often been funded by one-time expenditures or re-allocations with no budget support for the replacement and update of hardware and software, even the new electronic collections are uneven and not always accessible.
In order to build a strong collection and to make it accessible to faculty and students, the library will need an adequate staff, particularly as we move into the electronic age. Although the library staff are dedicated and hard-working, many do not have the professional expertise necessary for collection development in an age of hybrid print and electronic technologies or for the delivery of library services that are becoming electronic as we approach the twenty-first century. Moreover, by all measures, the current library staff is too small to support either the current or the future functions of the library. 2
According to the outside consultants, the current staff size and range of expertise is not adequate to improve the printed collections or to plan for and maintain short and long-term digital resources. The library will have to enhance and enrich appropriate staff skills and will have to develop new organizational structures to deal with a rapidly changing technological environment. Because the size of the current staff is smaller than those of comparable institutions, and much too small to support the current or future functions of the library, this is an opportune moment for a judicious expansion in the number of staff, particularly in those areas that will enable the library to take advantage of the opportunities and economies offered by new technologies.
Fondren library is now critically out of space. When the digital revolution began, many hoped that the relentless need for space to house the library collections would cease. The experience of the last decade and the projections for the future made by the national library experts who have advised us on this issue suggest otherwise. As one consultant put it, the digital revolution "is not yet ready for prime time." Our need to acquire books is likely to continue at the same annual rate as at present "for the rest of our lifetime." In some fields, it may even increase. Not only is space then needed for printed materials, but the use of technology for important library functions has created its own space needs. Students and researchers need space where they can work individually and in group settings; where they can gather, analyze, link, and manipulate data from a variety or sources and in a variety of formats printed, digital, visual, etc. Rather than needing less space, the library of the 21st century will require different kinds of spaces, of the sort that do not yet exist at Fondren.
Turning first to the issue of space for printed collections, accepted library standards consider a stack full when shelves are 85 percent filled. Stacks filled at greater capacity result in large and wasteful reshelving by over-extended staff, who must shift several rows of books to free up space for new titles. Fondren's stacks are at 100 per cent capacity on two floors and 95 percent on the others. In addition, 250,000 volumes (14% of the whole collection) are in remote storage. This also wastes staff time, as books must be retrieved for the use of patrons.
In order to reduce the need for space, the library has aggressively weeded books from its collection. Over 11,000 volumes were withdrawn, for example, in 1994; and over 13,000 were withdrawn in 1995. Since major weeding of the collections has been completed, however, future withdrawals are likely to reach a maximum of only 1,500 volumes annually. With an acquisitions rate expected to continue at close to 50,000 volumes per year, it is clear that a major space crisis at hand.
In the past, Fondren extended the stacks to every conceivable place where books might be shelved. Spaces that were once meant for seats and desks, collaborative study tables, and graduate student carrels, or that might in future be used for collaborative learning around electronic work stations, have been replaced by stacks; and these have been put so close to each other that they are cramped, ill lit, and difficult to use because of the narrow aisles. The imminent move of CITI and the Baker Institute will free up some 8,270 square feet of space that will provide a few years of breathing room while the university considers a long range solution that will add space and more of the different kinds of spaces that will be adaptable to the changing needs of information technology, and to innovative ways of learning.
Unlike some of the institutions with which Rice is compared, such as The Johns Hopkins University, Brandeis, or even Duke, Rice is not located close to any great library. The distance to the University of Texas does not allow regular, frequent use by faculty or students. Undergraduate students, especially, cannot travel extensively to other collections in time to complete their work within a semester. For this reason, Rice has had to rely to a greater extent than many other libraries on cooperative interlibrary arrangements. Rice's geographical isolation, however, also complicate these arrangements when exchanging research materials that are not yet on-line. In addition, cooperative agreements with other institutions have not been explored to their maximum potential.
III.
SHORT-TERM STRATEGIC RESPONSE TO CRITICAL NEEDS
The above assessments made by the outside consultants and by the library planning committee indicate the need to address a number of current issues immediately and to begin planning for long-term solutions as well. Two areas that need immediate attention are collection development and space.
The critical assessments of our collections and collection development program made by the outside consultants was confirmed by the Collections Analysis Project recently completed by the library staff (See Summary in Appendix B). This analysis compared the library's holdings, discipline by discipline, to that at similar universities (that is, not at Harvard or Yale, but at Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt). The project revealed gaping holes in the existing undergraduate collections, especially for fields newly offered by the faculty and in areas where Rice is hoping to expand, such as Latin American and Arabic studies, and biomedical engineering.
At present, the operating budget for the library amounts to 4.85% of the university's E & G (educational and general) expenditures (See Appendix A, Table 7). This is considerably higher than the average among our peers. The reason is that funded research expenditures, which are an important component of E & G expenditures, are relatively small at Rice compared to its total E & G expenditures. Nationwide, there is a high correlation between a low volume of research expenditures and a high proportion of the budget spent on libraries (see Appendix A, Table 8). For this reason, better measures of the adequacy of library expenditures are: how they compare to instructional expenditures and how they compare on a per student and per faculty basis (See Appendix, Tables 9-11). At Rice, the amount spent on library expenditures is nearly 12% of the amount spent on instruction. Compared to our peers, this is a high level of expenditure (see Appendix A, Table 3). Rice ranks even higher 4 out of 12 when looking at per-student expenditures on the library, although it ranks considerably lower 8 out of 12 when looking at per-faculty library expenditures. These last two measures are particularly telling. Rice's small size does not allow it to capture the economies of scale of some of our peers. No matter how small the size of our student population, our students still need certain basic educational materials, just as students at larger universities do. Similarly, the faculty need certain basic research materials to do their work, yet Rice ranks in the bottom third of our peer institutions, even though all of our peers are expanding collections that are larger and older than those at Rice.
The committee lauds the efforts made in recent years to increase the proportion of the university budget spent on the library and the focus of these efforts to look to the future rather than to fix the past. Yet taking into account the lack of economies of scale, the lacunae in the collection due to past under-investment and the fact that in the last decade the cost of published materials has been growing at about 8%, particularly in scientific fields, with little sign of abatement, the library planning committee strongly recommends that an immediate one-time addition of $1 million be made to the library budget. This amount is based on the collection analysis project undertaken last year, which identified those fields where gaps need to be filled, the types of media needed to fill them, and the most cost-effective way to acquire and make accessible the new materials (see Appendix A, Table 12). This one-time infusion, to meet a critical need, would enable Fondren to address the current shortcomings in the basic undergraduate collections by purchasing printed and digital materials, and acquiring the staff to identify, order, and catalog them.
It is clear from the reports of the outside consultants and the daily experiences of faculty and students, that the physical facilities of Fondren must be made more appropriate to the library's central role in the life of the university. The construction of two new buildings on campus, which will allow CITI and the Baker Institute to move from the library, present Rice an opportunity to do something really significant to help Fondren prepare for the next century. The Board has already approved the funding for an important augmentation and renovation of library space 11,140 square feet (on the first and basement floors of Fondren library. This area will house much of the reference collection, the reserve collection, a video collection; several computer work stations, a computer classroom, four group study rooms, 110 study spaces for individual students, and space for 150,000 volumes, primarily in the basement.
With the recovery of this space, students will also now have a secure 24-hour access to the library, a long-standing need. In addition, the book storage space gained will accommodate Fondren's future acquisitions for three to five years. This projection, however, assumes little or no unpacking of the present shelves, no provision for alternative spaces on the second, third, and fourth stack floors, and no increase in the acquisition rate of library materials.
The recovery of this space will not solve the longer term space problems of the library. For this reason, the library planning committee sees this as Phase I of several phases that should address space issues. Because of the long lead time in planning for any remodeling and construction projects, the committee strongly recommends that immediate consideration be given to funding Phase II, a relatively small-scale, comparatively inexpensive, $1.5 million remodeling of the fifth and sixth floors of Fondren, in the event that the History Department and many other Humanities offices move out of Fondren. The building of a new facility for nanoscale science and technology and the possible move of humanities offices to spaces outside the library are, of course, university projects, not library projects, but they have significant impact on Fondren Library. If this Phase were to occur, The Journal of Southern History, the Papers of Jefferson Davis, and probably Studies in English Literature (editorial projects that occupy very limited office space and make extremely intense use of library materials) would move to the sixth floor along with other library offices; the cataloging division of the library would move to the fifth floor; and the present basement location of cataloging would be turned over to book shelving. Phase II, limited in scale and cost and staged in response to other construction and renovation projects, would give Fondren another two years of growth.
We also strongly urge that immediate consideration be given to planning for a possible Phase III, which would be a more ambitious, costly, and complex undertaking. We will present the reasoning for Phase III in greater detail later in our report, but we wish to call attention here to the value of immediate early planning so that the university administration and the Board will have a variety of options and alternatives available from which to chose.
IV. THE CHANGING
WORLD OF UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
In the 1980s, popular predictions of the demise of the library to be replaced by the library without walls, the virtual library argued that computer technology would replace the functions of academic libraries. Over the years these predictions have been routinely contradicted by publication statistics. In 1995, over 100,000 scholarly books were published; there are an estimated 80,000 academic journals currently on the market. The publication of books has in fact increased at an average of 5% a year for over a decade, in part due to the efficiencies afforded by word processors and desktop formatting programs. The proliferation of books and journals, combined with academic values that emphasize peer-reviewed publications, contribute to the tenacity of paper.
At the same time, digital resources and tools have exploded. There are at latest count over 30 million World Wide Web pages; over a dozen large electronic text centers in universities across the nation are digitizing texts and images for networked access; an increasing number of school consortia are pooling local digital works to create significant online resources in specific disciplines, such as medieval history and Latin American studies. Some academic presses, such as Johns Hopkins, now offer full text digital versions of their more popular journals, and prestigious granting agencies, most notably NSF and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, are funding large scale projects to digitize texts and back runs of key journals for greater accessibility in support of scholarship. Many printed materials, however, are never likely to be digitized and probably should not be.
In truth, the contemporary university library encompasses two related cultures: the printed medium and digital data sets, which sometimes contend with each other and sometimes reinforce each other. Each offers exceptional opportunities for teaching and learning, each elicits complex responses in readers, and each is fundamental to the perpetuation of our cultural heritage. The major challenge facing the modern academic library is that both printed and digital resources are indispensable in the support of a university's educational mission. The costs of this complementarity are enormous. Libraries must continue to buy from a wide and expensive range of books and journals (the cost of academic journals has increased approximately 190% during the past six years), and at the same time purchase computers, software, and data that allow for vast storage capacity, sophisticated manipulation of information, and access to resources across the globe. A subscription to Lexis/Nexis, a primary online service for the legal profession, can cost an institution more than $80,000 a year. A recent CD-ROM collection of several centuries of English poetry cost $45,000.
As the collection budget is impacted, library professionals must remain proficient in their ability to utilize printed matter, and at the same time become expert in the technical aspects of online searching, retrieval, and analysis of electronic information appropriate for faculty and students. This expertise also entails new costs for training and other aspects of professional development.
In light of these circumstances, a different course is emerging for university libraries. Collection development programs will have to acquire a greater focus on the content of information needed by the users, as opposed to the media of delivery, whether printed or digital. As the information explosion continues, consortia must be sought out to share the growing costs of acquisitions. The traditional concept of a library as an institution that encompass all fields of knowledge will disappear, as it becomes clear that even while increasing their collections, libraries will acquire an ever smaller proportion of the materials published or disseminated yearly. Instead, selected areas of excellence, in keeping with the educational and research directions of the university, will have to be targeted for special support. The idea of internal and external library resources will become ever more irrelevant. A library is no longer an end point for those who seek information. Rather, it has become and will increasingly be, an open gateway to a networked culture within and beyond its walls.
Far from vanishing into virtual reality, during the past decade university libraries have become immensely more complex and expensive, and they will continue this trajectory in the immediate future. The library at Rice, as at other first rank institutions, must respond by developing a keen and sophisticated understanding of the needs of its constituencies, responding with the greatest degree of cost-effectiveness, which will most likely include a process of redefinition that may ultimately discard traditional concepts of territory, space, holdings, and notions about the functions of the library in a research university environment.
V.
LONG-TERM STRATEGIC RESPONSES TO THE CHANGING WORLD OF LIBRARIES
Because the world of libraries is rapidly changing in ways that no one can fully predict, the key to success in meeting the needs of future generations of students and faculty, is to develop a flexible, multi-pronged approach to the library's long-term challenges.
Strategic Philosophy for Collection Development
Nowhere is this more true than in collection development, where Rice will have to adopt short-term strategies while positioning itself for a very different electronic future. There is widespread agreement that while it is necessary for the library to acquire the critical mass of materials to support the core needs of faculty and students, it would be ill-advised to play "catch-up" with traditional holdings to correct previous collection patterns. In many instances, the library will have to acquire additional materials by moving aggressively and creatively to make use of electronic means of access to them. Standardized data for which there are many users government and economic information, dissertation abstracts, medical abstracts, etc. are already on line or in easily accessed digitized form. Science and technical journals will increasingly be available on line, while social science and humanities journals are likely to follow. There is much truth to the aphorism that once a library contains a sufficient core collection, it is not ownership of materials that matters, but access. Fondren Library will have to do both acquire a core collection of printed and digitized materials, and open up access to other electronic sources available on line from distant places.
In addition, research materials that are out-of-print or not available electronically will have to be accessed by interlibrary loan. Fondren Library already does a great deal of this, but new methods should be explored in the future to expedite delivery of such materials. Another strategy is to send researchers to the site where needed materials are located. In many situations it will make more sense for Rice to underwrite research trips for faculty and graduate students to great libraries elsewhere than to make a futile attempt to replicate such research collections at Rice. Although budgetary controls would have to be exercised over such expenditures, short-term travel grants to library collections should be understood, not as luxuries, but as a way to provide necessary information resources for faculty and graduate students.. Funds designated for regular travel to research collections should be added to the budgets of the deans of each school so that faculty members and graduate students may be able to depend on regular travel assistance.
The above approaches reveal that no single method will suffice to bring the library resources of Rice up to the quality of its students, faculty, and academic programs. Rather, Rice must develop a mix of approaches. Even so, careful choices must be made because information sources are almost infinite while available resources are finite.
What kinds of criteria should Rice employ as it attempts to meet the information needs of its students and faculty? Two factors must shape Rice's response to its needs. The consensus of the community, as expressed in the university's recently completed Strategic Plan, is that while Rice's undergraduate excellence must be maintained, every effort should be made to enhance the graduate programs and to elevate a limited number of them to unquestioned distinction. Rice is no longer primarily an undergraduate college, but has become a major research university. Second, the previous collection patterns render impossible any notion of elevating the library to a position of real distinction in terms of books and other traditional printed materials. These two realities must dictate acquisition strategies in the future.
In fields where undergraduate work is offered, Rice must have high-quality core collections that will support student needs. It does not at present, and the first collection priority, as stated above, is to fill in the gaps necessary for undergraduate instruction. Undergraduates cannot rely extensively on interlibrary loan or travel to other libraries.
In those fields in which graduate degrees are offered, the collections should be both broader and deeper so as to fulfill the reading needs of faculty and graduate students and provide the necessary background reading required to guide students toward major research collections elsewhere and make efficient their research when there. In this important sense, libraries have always been the gateway to resources housed elsewhere, and the advent of computer catalogs, accessible by means of the World Wide Web, has markedly increased the role of the home library in guiding scholars to the information riches at other repositories.
Only in a few fields where the collections are already strong, should the library try to build and maintain distinguished research collections of specialized materials. Rice should also be alert to collecting opportunities in research materials that are especially relevant to this region or to existing academic strengths. The recent acquisition of the Pan-Energy papers is a good example of such an opportunity. Rice might even explore the possibility of taking on a leadership position in digitizing some of those sources and making them available to other institutions through partnership agreements.
Collection Development Process
Collection development requires a carefully thought-out program, informed by the above philosophy, and led by a highly-trained and experienced collection development officer. This person, in turn, should recruit or reassign a staff of skilled subject specialists with advanced degrees in particular academic fields. The subject specialists should work closely with the faculty to learn about their library needs and should then include the diverse preferences expressed by faculty into a sophisticated program that seeks to develop a balanced, even, and coordinated collection growth.
Collection development officers should also be included in discussions with deans and other academic officers when faculty are being hired in new fields and new programs. Fully costed program budgeting, including library and information resources for every new appointment and program, is essential to provide the infrastructure that will lead to academic excellence. Such expenditures should be seen as analogous to start-up laboratory funds.
Since Rice cannot and should not create a completely self-sufficient, stand-alone library, it should expand its existing consortial agreements and create new ones. At present Rice participates in HARLiC, the Houston Area Research Library Consortium, whose other major participants are the University of Houston, Texas A & M, and the Texas Medical Center Library. However, neither the UH nor the A & M library is strong, so that neither offers a powerful enhancement to Rice's collections. Explorations should be made to see if the University of Texas library could be persuaded to join the consortium. As Rice moves to strengthen its offerings in fields such as Latin American Studies, perhaps an agreement could be worked out with UT and Tulane to share resources with Rice via interlibrary loan, with special provisions for expedited overnight delivery. Rice would always be a net borrower, but if the agreement included a fee per item, these institutions might be interested in participating. Such an arrangement would be far cheaper for Rice than trying at this late date to build anything more than a basic undergraduate collection in such fields. The limitations of Fondren's holdings should motivate Rice to become a national leader in exploring ways to share the resources in a fee-for-service arrangement with major libraries in other sections of the nation. Specialized library consortia could become as characteristic of Rice in the future as interdisciplinary centers are now.
Through careful augmentation of its undergraduate collections, which for many fields will largely be traditional printed sources, through enhanced use of electronic information sources as quickly as they become available, through creative use of specially tailored consortia with other libraries and expedited interlibrary loan, though a generous program of travel grants, Rice has an opportunity to pioneer new strategies for making information available in timely, affordable, convenient ways to its primary community of students and faculty.
Organization,
Staffing, and Reporting Structures
Staffing and Internal Organization:
The library's staff is too small and in many cases does not have the professional expertise to help transform the library from a traditional library to a responsive organization for the 21st century. Because libraries have changed so rapidly, the qualities and skills that are now valued in the staff are different from those of the past. Library staff must now have sophisticated understanding of the educational and research mission of the university, the ability to discuss complex information gathering issues with the Rice community, strong analytical skills, technical expertise, creativity, the ability to work in an environment of ambiguity, and willingness to take risks.
The new library leadership will have to develop a different type of organization. The University Librarian will have to take a visible leadership position focused on strategic planing, developing a vision for the library, representing the library to the Rice community and its outside supporters, fundraising for new initiatives, developing cooperative arrangements with other institutions, spearheading innovative electronic applications, and shaping the directions of collection development. Daily management should be in the hands of a set of strengthened middle management professional staff, who in turn would put a premium on hiring library personnel who are bright, creative, problem-solving individuals with ambitions for building and improving their area of the library. Ideally, the library staff, like the faculty, should match the ability of the students.
As with collection development, flexibility and a variety of approaches will be necessary with regards to staffing and organizational issues. Certain tasks may best be contracted out or performed by consultants. Some very specialized foreign language cataloging, for example, could be contracted out. When concentrated efforts are made to build up a new field, the library might consider hiring consultants rather than hire a permanent collection specialist in that area. For some functions requiring great computational expertise, the best solution could be to use staff from the Office of Information Technology, who may have the quality of expertise not available through library personnel. Such IT staff could have a reporting relationship to IT but be accountable to the library for specific assignments.
The changing nature of information technology will require not only new skills on the part of staff, but educational opportunities to keep them informed about new developments and technically able to implement them. Opportunities for staff education must be provided and, once they avail themselves of these opportunities, staff must be held responsible for adapting their work to the new standards.
Communications
and Reporting Structures:
Because the library is an institution that serves the teaching and research needs of the Rice community, all of its initiatives must be in keeping with the University's larger strategic goals and priorities and with the future directions of its academic programs. To keep the library on this course will require structured methods of communication between the library and the President, Provost, Vice President for Information Technology, and the deans on the one hand, and the faculty and students, who are the library's principal users, on the other.
In addition to the close interactions already described between collection development specialists and individual faculty members, structured methods of communication must be developed between the library's staff and the library's various constituencies. As Associate Provost and University Librarian, the university librarian will now sit on the Council of Deans and will be in a better position to be an advocate for new library resources when, for example, faculty hires are made. It is absolutely essential that the library needs be effectively and regularly articulated in the highest counsels of the university. The university librarian should also be named to the Committee on University Information Resource Development, whose creation has been recommended by the university's strategic planning committee, and whose task would be to deal with long-term planning for the library and for computing on campus. The librarian should also, on occasion, attend academic department meetings and should explore ways to improve communication about library needs, policies, and innovations by creating special advisory committees to address the needs of undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty in the various divisions of the university.
The standing University Committee on the Library, which should be advisory to the Director of the university's library but report directly to the Provost, should be given a precise charge and should be involved in substantive issues of planning and evaluation. Among the committee's most important tasks would be conducting periodic reviews of the library. It should also be involved in organizing reviews of the library by experts from outside of Rice every so many years. It is crucial that the library committee focus on important substantive issues and that it not be limited to approving decisions already made; rather, it should be a powerful advocate for the library and for the library needs of faculty and students. The functions of the present ad hoc library planning committee might well be absorbed by the standing University Committee on the Library. Moreover, several members of the Committee on the Library, as well as the University Librarian, should also sit on the Committee on University Information Resource Development, since the purposes of these two committees are closely linked.
Information
Technology and the Library
The emergence of powerful, small, and economically-priced computers, interconnected to each other through high-speed networks that span the globe will profoundly affect the ways in which knowledge is acquired, shared, and managed in the academic community. As has already been mentioned, Rice can exploit advanced information technology to remedy several of the widely-recognized deficiencies of our library collections and operations.
All those initiatives focus on Fondren as it is today. But if we use information technology only to improve current operations and resources, without rethinking the nature of teaching and learning, we will achieve very limited results. We will, in effect, be using computing to make more efficient the scholarly processes that were developed centuries ago. Rice needs a second, complementary way of thinking about the interplay of technology, teaching, and learning.
We should treat important aspects of planning for the library as seeing possibilities that are invented rather than discovered. With new technology we can create radically new models of scholarship and teaching. But we will be challenged to loosen mental constraints of current practice so we may see ways to use technology to enhance individual and organizational effectiveness.
Recently some companies have come to understand the behavioral aspects of technology and have "re-engineered" or "reinvented" the corporation. Because of the complexities of the interaction of technology and work, they have found re-engineering fraught with difficulties. In the case of the library, Rice should expect no less. Even recent precedents, which are amply documented, may not serve as reliable guides to the future because culture, institutional beliefs, and practices may deflect technology from its intended use. Not all organizations that have undertaken this transformation have succeeded. Nonetheless, Rice should meet this challenge head on because, like other organizations, the University and the library can emerge transformed, far better prepared for the future.
Examples of ideas that are relevant to this second, and transformative,
view of the library include:
· the emergence of virtual communities that expand the scholarly communities supported by books, radio, television, and movies. Networking can replace transportation with communications, giving teachers and students interactions with remote centers of expertise. Already networking is crossing, and even dissolving traditional educational boundaries. Virtual communities may realize other benefits as well from reductions in the cost of current functions, the attainment of a higher standard of work, or through a radical redefinition of work itself.
· the proliferation of multimedia documents that will challenge paper as the preferred medium of representing knowledge in many domains. Just as virtual communities break bounds of space and time, multimedia documents break sensory constraints. Such documents would engage more of our senses with webs of textual, graphic, video, and audio elements that would support new educational communities.
· the transformation of knowledge, as powerful computer graphics bring imagery to the forefront of teaching and learning. The extensive use of visualization will induce a shift toward a more metaphorical, image-based knowledge. With modern graphics, even text itself, with its changeable fonts, is a form of visualization.
Rice needs to view information technology both as an aid to current practice and as a new conception of the library. Without the latter, a technology strategy will rigidify the past. When we think about the future of the library, we should keep uppermost the behavioral aspects of computing the interplay of people, process, and technology.
We must also keep in mind the impact of public policy affecting the library's digital technology. As publishers and libraries move quickly into a digital environment, new critical issues have arisen about fair use of copyrighted materials. Will libraries, for example, have to pay-per-view in order to access digital materials? There is a very real danger that as policy makers develop new guidelines and laws to deal with digital sources, this scenario will come to pass. If it does, fair use and interlibrary sharing will disappear and the costs of accessing materials will be even higher than in the days of an exclusive print culture. Fondren library should be as proactive with regard to technology policy, just as it should be toward the implementation of technology. It needs to pursue these issues vigorously in the public arena, in concert with other libraries and educational institutions. Fondren can become a forum for public discussion of these issues through lectureships and workshops that will influence public policy. Rice need not be the recipient of technology policies that are beyond its control; it can be the shaper of national strategies for using digital technologies for the public good.
To create such a view of the transforming possibilities of technology and of Rice's role in the public arena, to give it life among faculty, students, and staff will be difficult. For it will require not only the development of new skills and expertise on the part of information users and providers, but it will call for imaginative new conceptions about the nature of knowledge, how it is acquired, how it is used, and how it transforms individuals, communities, and nations.
This is a moment of redefinition for the library as a central place in the life of the university. It is a moment of great opportunity to do something significant for Fondren and for integrating new methods of acquiring and manipulating knowledge in all academic activities of the university. Fondren has long been the most widely used academic unit in the university. The annual number of person-visits to Fondren is more than double the attendance to all Rice athletic and musical events combined. New technologies will change the ways that Fondren will be used, often in ways that we cannot yet discern, but it will still retain its key role as a learning center for the Rice community.
The library of the future will become the central place where learning occurs collecting and evaluating data from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats, working with others in team projects, producing reports that are multimedia in format. Because students involved in research projects often live in different colleges, none of which offers the necessary combination of information resources, the library is, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, the common meeting place most forms of collaborative learning as well as for research. While it is true that the availability of high-speed networking facilities in dormitories and offices has increased the library functions that can take place off-site, at the same time, as students have become more skilled at using the computer for accessing information sources and research tools they have tended to migrate to the library and the university's computer facilities because the hardware/software available there are superior.
To facilitate these activities, Fondren will need more individual and group study spaces and more flexible areas where paper and electronic materials can intermix and be manipulated by students and faculty in creative ways; it will also need a variety of reading and study areas, from carrels to sofas, quiet areas and social areas. The library of tomorrow will have to be a more flexible, multi-format and multi-task learning center than the traditional library. Different kinds of spaces will have to be opened up to facilitate innovative learning, and team research. At the same time, traditional shelving needs will continue to expand for at least the next two or three decades. These very different but complementary library functions, and the loss of traditional shelf space to new space uses, will complicate the existing crisis caused by a shortage of shelving for books.
A generation ago a library was primarily a place where individual students went to use reference materials, to find the books necessary for a term paper, and discover a quiet place to study. The library still performs those essential purposes. The architecture, the aesthetics, the furniture and lighting, should make the library an inviting, comfortable place for individuals to confront the ideas and arguments contained in books, journals, and other sources. Lives can and have been transformed by this quiet, individual exchange between the mind of a student and the mind of authors of distant times and places. Most of us treasure memories of such experiences, intellectual epiphanies that often led us to our chosen fields. For this reason alone libraries play a central role in the whole academic enterprise.
Yet Fondren neither has enough of those kinds of spaces, nor is it laid out to facilitate the new forms of collaborative research, team problem solving, and group writing that have developed more recently. It is essential that space be reconfigured in Fondren to facilitate the manner in which today's students study, research, and create. Good libraries have never been merely passive warehouses for books, but the configuration of Fondren's stack floors today allows it to be little more than that. The rooms or spaces for group activity are few and inadequate; there are no computer work stations in the major stack areas; there are no groupings of sofas and comfortable chairs for quiet study or for planned or serendipitous discussion of books, ideas, and research findings. The main stack areas will have to be unpacked, making space available for adequate work stations, with room for spreading out paper and notes, group study, and comfortable, inviting chairs for private reading and study.
With the move of CITI and the Baker Institute out of Fondren, the Board has already approved an important and welcome augmentation of library space, which will allow the library to provide some of the kinds of work spaces just mentioned in the first and basement floors. It will also accommodate three to five years of growth in shelving space if we maintain the same packed shelves that we do at present. Since this, however, is not an optimal situation and since it does not provide for alternative research and learning spaces on the upper floors of the library, the library planning committee, as stated earlier, recommends that the university administration and the Board consider funding a second phase of Fondren space improvements. This consists of converting the fifth and sixth floors back to library spaces in the event that the Department of History and other humanities offices move to other buildings on campus.
Although Phases I and II meet a severe shelving crisis and allow remedial efforts to improve the undergraduate collection and some services, they are not long-term solutions to the library's needs. At the current acquisitions rate, without any enhancement to the collections, and without reducing the overcrowded shelving from near full to 85 percent capacity, these phases combined provide about six years of growth. While they would alleviate a crisis situation, they do not address the severe overcrowding of the present shelving, or the demand for different kinds of library spaces that will be required in the increasingly electronic library. In short, Phases I and II would essentially allow Fondren to continue operating at the present level of service while the university community makes detailed plans for the next, major, augmentation of Fondren Library.
A proposed Phase III holds forth the promise of doing something really new, creative, and exciting at Fondren and transforming it into the prototype of the multipurpose research and learning center of the future. The library planning committee recommends that Rice seize the present moment of real library crisis and turn the occasion into an opportunity for envisioning the kind of library Rice University will require in the future. Fondren should actively encourage creative new ways of teaching, researching, and learning through the innovation of its design, the range and depth of the information services, and the expertise of its staff. The planning committee believes that the key to all planning for future spaces must be flexibility and openness to new technology. Rice will need to develop space strategies that position it to adapt to technologies that do not yet exist and that are difficult to imagine; yet at the same time, it must work out strategies for the short term, that is strategies to address those developments that are most likely to occur in the next two decades. Within that time frame, Fondren's paper collection will probably expand by about a million volumes, while the amount of space needed to accommodate computer work stations, digital and multimedia holdings, group and individual study rooms, and diverse instructional rooms will expand proportionally to an even greater extent.
On the basis of these projections, Rice should begin shortly to plan for a major physical addition. The addition should be flexible enough in design to accommodate the changing information-learning needs of the next two decades and even, in the very distant future, when electronic sources are likely to reduce significantly the storage needs of printed material. Well-designed buildings in the heart of the campus must always be susceptible to redesign and reuse, especially so in this particular case.
The discussions held by the committee with the outside consultants suggest that the addition to Fondren should contain approximately 55,000 square feet of assignable floor space, with no fixed internal walls, in order to provide room for growth with maximum flexibility and efficiency. A new west public entrance might be also be considered, so as to allow pedestrian access through the building and create an aesthetically pleasing vista from the main entrance of the campus, through Fondren, to Alice Pratt Brown Hall.
In conjunction with the above recommendations, the committee also considered other alternatives that may help alleviate some of the current and projected needs for library and research space. These are not necessarily either/or options, but constitute different approaches that may be used concurrently to address a variety of needs.
One possibility is to construct a fully electronic science and engineering library wing to the north of the present Fondren structure. Another is to move the music collection to a slightly reconfigured space in the Shepherd School of Music. For technical reasons, the music collection is much more self-contained and less used by non-music students and faculty than the rest of the library collection. Its move to Alice Pratt Brown Hall would enhance its accessibility to music students while not depriving the rest of the campus of a frequently used resource. On the other hand, such a move would also entail one-time costs for building remodeling and on-going costs for staffing.
In addition the university may want to consider various alternatives for the remote storage of books. The current facilities are difficult to access and therefore discourage use. Patrons need to be able to read the shelves, which is not possible in the current double-density remote storage facility. The current facility is also expensive to operate when measured on a per-request basis because it requires staff to retrieve the materials requested. Other remote-storage alternatives could extend the capacity of the expanded version of Fondren envisioned here for several more decades.
Space permitting, Rice may also want to look at the library building, particularly the sixth floor, as an ideal location for carrels for emeritus faculty who are still active in their research and contribute to the intellectual life of the academic community. Sometimes faculty are reluctant to contemplate retirement because of concerns that without any sort of office space they will be unable to continue their research. Admittedly, such use of space would diminish some of the library space acquired through phases one through three, but it would alleviate one of the university's growing needs in an efficient manner.
In all of the recommendations made thus far, there are financial costs involved, and not just for construction. The library staff must be significantly enlarged, improved, and empowered. A more professional and highly skilled staff may be a more costly staff. The acquisition budget to purchase the basic collections that Fondren must have to support its outstanding undergraduate programs, its rapidly improving graduate programs, and its expansion into new fields of knowledge will have to increase. More funds will also have to be made available to acquire additional electronic forms of information and the machines to access this data the increasingly electronic library of the future will be more expensive to acquire and maintain than traditional holdings. But with the exception of a recommended one-time $1 million appropriation to fill in the existing gaps in the basic undergraduate collection, these increases in the acquisitions budgets can be phased in.
The costs of the programs outlined above will not be small, but much can be done to help meet them.
· When new chairs are given to Rice, for example, consideration must be paid to assigning endowment to support associated library materials. Similarly, new programs that are being considered must contain a library acquisition component.
· The library can and should be made more efficient. To achieve this, it will be necessary to reengineer the library's administrative and financial systems and to create a consolidated budget that incorporates all sources of income and all objects of expenditure.
· The library should also pay greater attention to long-term planning, based on five- and ten-year budget projections.
· Creative efforts should also be undertaken to supplement and enhance annual budget allocations through a variety of means, including a library acquisitions endowment.
· Fundraising needs to be a major new component of the job of the librarian. The Director of the Library should work closely with the advancement office to identify sources of support for the library, from the Friends of Fondren, and from Rice's other friends and alumni. Foundations may also provide additional funding for particular library projects.
While the costs of transforming the library into a library ready to meet the challenges of the next century are not small, they are less than the educational costs of not improving Fondren significantly. In order for Rice to continue its present trajectory toward becoming a world-class university, the limitations of Fondren library must be addressed. We will not be able to keep up with the latest developments in scholarship or be competitive in recruiting the best students and faculty unless we do so.
VII.
THE LIBRARY OF THE 21ST CENTURY
If Fondren Library is to succeed as the central academic support for Rice in the next century, it is important to determine what attributes of an academic library are essential to conserve, and how those attributes might be enhanced in the coming decades. Too easily, planners tend to define the library of the future in terms of technology or architecture. The basic question, however, is what activities, procedures, and services do we want technology, in the broadest spectrum of the term, and architecture to encourage? What is a great library meant to accomplish? Among other things, a library facilitates the confrontation of living memory with the accumulated knowledge of the past; it allows for personal transformation and new perspectives that can profoundly alter an individual's sense of self and the world; it facilitates collaboration; for a library is an institution founded upon the realization of the empowerment of historical continuity and the social nature of knowledge acquisition.
At the same time a library preserves information, makes it generally accessible, and is constructed on ever-shifting paradigms of how knowledge is and should be organized. Knowledge organization, moreover, is secondary to the mission of making accessible a body of information that can be used by the living community in confronting its intellectual inheritance.
The Fondren Library, however, does not currently facilitate collaboration nor ease of access. Neither does it privilege its user community in exciting or innovative ways. Its sight-lines are poor, its spaces are cramped, services are scattered in an ad hoc fashion, with the physical design obscuring rather than revealing information. In this respect the future Fondren will not be built upon the current paradigm.
In order to construct a working, successful library for the twenty-first century, the Rice community should inaugurate a process by which the specific needs of faculty and students are articulated, salient attributes for conservation in the improved library are defined, and only then ask what technologies and what design can best embody and encourage these essential characteristics for generations to come.
This is a moment in history when the functions of libraries are being expanded. Even more than in the past, well-designed, well-equipped libraries, rich in information resources both owned and accessible, will be the intellectual center of their universities. Fondren's obvious limitations should be seen not as a problem to be solved but as an opportunity to ensure that Rice meets the future with boldness, creativity, and a firm resolve that, as its centennial approaches, it truly becomes what Edgar Odell Lovett imagined in 1912, a university of the first rank.
Go to Rice
University Office of the Provost Home Page
Go to Rice
University Home Page
Copyright 1996-97
Rice University.