It’s bigger than just libraries

The next generation of professional librarians are enrolled in information management degrees. They need to be given the explosion in digital information, reports Jeremy Gilling.

The information revolution has transformed the world of libraries. Books are still borrowed, though in decreasing numbers, while information is increasingly held in electronic form. Librarians’ role now is to guide students and staff through an increasingly self-service environment, and spaces are being redesigned to facilitate this process.

Academic libraries employ about 10 per cent of Australia’s 14,000 professional librarians. Diane Costello, executive officer of the Council of Australian University Librarians, to which all 39 Australian and eight New Zealand universities belong, says academic libraries have experienced three recent waves of change, with a fourth on the way.

“The first occurred a decade ago when journals went online. Then followed reference works such as encyclopedias and dictionaries. Libraries don’t buy these in hard copy any more, which represents a substantial saving. Around this time we adopted as policy the replacement of any print material with its electronic version as soon as it became available.”

“Then, four or five years ago, general books started to become more widely available in electronic form,” says Costello. “This has revolutionised learning – users can now access material from any desktop, at home, work or play.” Att UNSW, for example, more than 80 per cent of the scholarly information that was accessed in 2008 was accessed online.

Textbooks however have been slow to join the revolution, particularly at the high end. Costello says publishers have yet to come up with a workable pricing or business model, “although one or two are making progress”,

Andrew Wells, UNSW’s university librarian and president of CAUL, says that even though the growth of electronic information means users don’t need to physically visit a library as they did in the past, university libraries are busier than ever before.

“The gate count continues to grow steadily. Loans may be falling – by 16 per cent between 2002 and 2007 – but students are drawn to the learning spaces we’re providing.

“These spaces are information-rich and stay open for longer – at nights and weekends, and in some cases for the full 24 hours.”

Changing face of librarians

This changing environment means libraries are seeking to recruit different sorts of professionals.

“We need people who combine traditional library skills with specialist knowledge,” says Wells. “We need IT and technical skills to help us manage the growing electronic repositories of scholarly information, such as graduates’ theses. We also value people who have subject expertise and can guide students through the huge range of materials they can now access.”

Maureen Henninger is a senior lecturer in UTS’s information and knowledge management program. She expects only around 20 per cent of her 60 first-year students will end up working as librarians.

“We teach students to design systems that will enable people to share and manage information. Librarians are a significant part of that endeavour, but it’s much broader than that,” she says.

“The past 20 years have seen an explosion in the range and quantity of digital information, which heralds a whole new approach to the discipline. When much of your information is held and accessed electronically and takes many different forms, all sorts of organisations – museums and other cultural institutions, law firms, media outlets and financial institutions, for example – will find themselves dealing with the same sorts of issues.

“For example, suppose you have a large and diverse collection of posters in electronic form. How do you organise and present them? It could be by theme, purpose, title, technique, country, designer, style, year, or even colour or size. You would also need to include information about file format and rights management. We teach students how to build the metadata to fit them into the appropriate taxonomy. We also teach them how to present the collection as a collage, with high resolution images for the master file and lower resolutions for browsing.”

Henninger says a large part of the course is in web architecture, design and management, which is fundamentally about organising and presenting information to meet audience needs.

“Universities’ websites, for example, have to serve several very different client groups. Intending students want easy, intuitive access to basic information. Current students want online services. Graduates, academics and parents expect gravitas. Industry wants relevance.

“We teach the principles and approaches that would help them achieve this reconciliation, including how to write and present information to different audiences.”

Libraries and the GFC

Libraries are not immune to the global financial crisis. According to CAUL, between 70 and 80 per cent of expenditure is in foreign currencies, mainly the $US, £ and €, against all of which the $A has depreciated substantially in recent months. CAUL last week called on publishers to cut their prices, or at least maintain them at 2009 levels. Failure to do so, CAUL says, would mean that libraries would need to consider withdrawing from package agreements on the purchase of scholarly journals. It would also be likely to result in more aggressive resistance to publishers’ efforts to restrict access to content.

While things are dire, they’re not as bad as in the US, where income and endowments have collapsed by 20 to 30 per cent. “I expect they will be looking very seriously at their spending if publishers don’t respond,” says Costello. “There’ll be much less discretionary spending – on print books, and on filling back numbers of electronic journals, for example. Either way the publishers will feel the pinch.”

Getting the degree

ALIA accredits bachelor degrees offered by six universities:

• CSU: bachelor of applied science in library and information management

• UTS: bachelor of arts in communication (information and media)

• Monash: bachelor of information technology and systems with an information management major

• RMIT: bachelor of business in information and knowledge management

• Curtin: bachelor of arts in librarianship and corporate information management

• ECU: double degree bachelor of science in communication and information technology and bachelor of science in library technology.