library in the modern world. On the one hand, we live in a culturally more open and international environment that needs sophisticated and varied services, but on the other hand, public sector decision makers seem to want to decrease this sector as a participant in the economy and open almost all services to competition. Thus, in order to compete for resources, libraries need to create competitive services and base their evaluations on hard facts, which means that the work-force must be flexible, committed to lifelong learning and highly trained. To sum up: more and better services have to be achieved while financial support is being reduced.
In this paper, we present a case study on how we have tried to confront and combat these challenges in our university’s library and its management.
FINNISH HIGHER EDUCATION POLICIES AND HOW
sciences. The annual budget of the library is about mh2.5. There are 37 staff members in the library, and the collections consist of approx. 160,000 monographs, 900 printed journals (subscriptions), 8,000 electronic journals, 16,000 electronic books and 5,500 audiovisual sources and other material.
Information literacy teaching is provided and accounts for 580 h/840 student credits each year.
The provision of higher education is being debated in Finland because international competition is becoming more intense in education and because almost all European countries are faced with declining birthrates.
One solution to make education more cost-effective is to implement quality control. During the past couple of decades, different types of quality management and evaluation systems have become integrated into higher education institutes. One impetus for these systems, especially for the evaluation process, was the decision of the member states of the European Union to create a European Higher Education Area, a process that started in Bologna in the summer of 1999. This led to the establishment of European policies and decisions on how this should be implemented in member states. The Finnish Ministry of Education has listed aims for quality control in Finland (Korkeakoulujen laadunvarmistus, 2004, also see, e.g.,Standards and Guidelines, 2005) as follows:
1. Universities and polytechnics will establish quality systems that will cover all of the processes undertaken within the institution.
2. To meet the goals set in theCommunique´ of the Conference of Ministers responsible for Higher Education in Berlin on 19 September 2003 (2003) in Finland, evaluations or auditing of the universities and polytechnics will be implemented.
Thus the higher education institutions have responsibility for quality control on their campuses. The auditing is carried out by the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council (FINHEEC) (see http://www.kka.fi/). The timetable for these evaluations is such that the piloting phase will take place during 2004–2005, and all the higher education units will be evaluated at least once by the year 2010.
As stated, this can all be viewed as a response to the new perspective of what a university education should mean. As Vartiainen (2004, p. 49) stated:
Today’s societies, on the other hand, have changed their concepts and attitudes toward university education. The requirements for today’s universities can simply be stated in eight words: more value and more results of high quality.
Quality Management to Managing Self-Organizing Processes 101
Universities are currently redefining their roles taking into account both the market ideology (the concept of university that turns out a product) and the academic ideology (the seat of learning and the preserver of cultural values) (ibid., p. 51). One outcome is that the universities as well as their libraries will be under a stricter control: measuring and evaluation is now and will be a continuous process. It should also be remembered that the evaluation can be viewed from different points of view. The following approaches have been used (Vartiainen, 2004):
– Evaluation with outcomes and goals – Evaluation of costs
– Evaluation of implementation processes – Client-oriented evaluation
– Stakeholder evaluation – Consumer needs evaluation
In Finland, all these approaches have been used. At the present, one can see that the auditing policies are nudging the system in the direction of stakeholder evaluation and consumer need evaluation – both clearly adopted from the private sector. The pressure from the growing global education market could well lead to the creation of some kind of certification in the near future leading to accreditation, without which education institutes will not be able to attract students and faculty.
The University of Kuopio has been active in quality management for the past 20 years, but the pace has accelerated during the past few years because of the developments described above. To be able to compete for national and international funding and status, one must be able to demonstrate one’s quality. One also must be critical of the evaluation rhetoric. As stated earlier, there are a great many instruments, concepts and values in use, many taken from the private sector, even from manufacturing industries with their techniques for optimizing the production of goods. Furthermore, according to Koenig’s (2005) bibliometric analysis there is a tendency for business management fads to become popular for a time and then to fade into obscurity being replaced by some new model – e.g., articles about TQM peaked at the beginning of the 1990s and have decreased radically in number since that time. Thus, the crucial question that must be asked is are these instruments suitable, per se, for the university environment and how can they effectively be implemented in the daily work being done on campus and in the library?