on campus
Profit
Profit
Profit
Profit
£ 724m £ 294m $ 106m £ 47m
Profit / Revenue
36 %
Profit / Revenue
34 %
Profit / Revenue
42 %
Profit / Revenue
32 %
would not be so traumatic if we had the effective last-copy protection that a coordinated super library could guarantee.
Over the past 10 years, as student numbers in Australia have risen by about 250,000 EFTSL, borrowing rates have gone down whilst visitors to many libraries have climbed. Clearly, students do value libraries as a place to study, to socialise and to get help, but this requires a different sort of library to those that existed when students and academics relied on the campus library as a single source of information.
At the Society for College and University Planners( SCUP) conference in San Diego last month, the talk was all about disruption of existing university models. Robert Reich, president Clinton’ s secretary of labor, even wondered aloud how long the US-style four-year college degree could survive.
One of the most discussed issues was how to provide a compelling environment for undergraduate study in the library, and particularly to cater for different styles of study, including work in groups. There was hardly any mention of storing books,( a key issue of the’ 80s and’ 90s) but there was a lot of discussion about PowerPoint and coffee.
It is worth contemplating the trajectory that Australian university libraries have travelled over the past 50 years. In the’ 60s, most Australian universities built libraries with large amounts of study space for students. In the’ 70s and’ 80s, this space began to be eroded by book stacks as libraries struggled to accommodate the‘ information explosion’. During the’ 90s, some university librarians began to question whether kicking undergraduates out to accommodate more and more books was a good thing. And since 2000, and the widespread introduction of online resources, enlightened librarians and university administrations have begun to find ways to kick books out to accommodate students again.
The Murdoch University Library, run by Jan Rutherford, is a great example of current practice. Huge numbers of redundant books have been removed to create vibrant study space in the library, to the delight of students. The same is true of the Newcastle Library, run by Greg Anderson. Both these libraries have a buzz of student energy that is inspiring.
So what will happen to the university library? As the US Council
on Library and Information Resources speculated as long ago as 2008:“ With the predicted rise in new forms of scholarship, the promotion-and-tenure process, which favours print publications, especially in the humanities, will need to be rethought. As these methods of communication change, the procedures, skills, and expertise that libraries need to manage them will change as well. As cross-disciplinary work increases, it will be necessary to reassess the organisation of higher education – its departments, schools, and centres. The research library in the 21st century will thus be profoundly influenced by the transformation of scholarship and research, as well as by changes in the traditional organisational structures of a university.”
I am certainly looking forward to a bit more transformation and re-organisation than we have seen in Australia so far, and particularly for the HE sector to find a way of encouraging more AustLII’ s. I am particularly looking forward to a solution to the last-copy problem, and if co-operative arrangements won’ t work( which they haven’ t to date), then the funding authority, the Australian Government, will have to take a role.
This is going to be painful for libraries and librarians. Like other sectors affected by technological change, such as journalism and bookstores, jobs have already been lost and more will disappear as time goes by. In the US, the aggregate budget for university libraries has been in decline since the late 1970s, and the same is probably true in Australia.
Nevertheless, if in 10 years we manage to find a way to build a vibrant Australian online information sector along the lines pioneered by AustLII, then we will have replaced something good with something better. ■
Geoff Hanmer is managing director of ARINA Hayball.
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