FROM THE RHETORIC OF
such as changes in management and evaluating and setting goals for results, were adapted from the private sector. A clear example of this was the so-called ‘‘New Public Management’’ – movement, which started using private sector instruments within the public sector:
yinstruments of such policy interventions are institutional rules and organizational routines affecting expenditure planning and financial management, civil service and labor relations, procurement, organization and methods, and audit and evaluation.
(Barzelay, 2001, p. 156)
These instruments can also be found in the descriptions of quality management in the Finnish public sector published by the Ministry of Finance (Sorri-Teir, Pallas, & Westerlund, 1998, p. 8). They list the pressures for the public sector actors as:
– Economic situation and continuing demands for savings
– Results management; the need for development and goals set by the Ministries
– Ministries have demanded quality improvement from civil service departments
– Budgeting has changed from sub-item specified to framework budgets – Clients require quality services and are eager to provide feedback – Civil service departments have become more independent and thus they
have become more able to improve quality
– There has been a strong emphasis on the total quality management (TQM) during the 1990s
Publicly funded higher education institutions, like all the universities in Finland, are under the umbrella of the Ministry of Education, and these policy definitions have a great effect on how universities may, should and actually do act. The Finnish universities must adhere to the statutes of the Act, which determine the distribution of educational responsibilities between universities by means of decrees issued separately for each field of study. The university performance is monitored in annual budget negotiations with the Ministry of Education. Thus, the Ministry has the responsibility for the quantitative evaluation of higher education institu- tions. At the beginning of this millennium, quality evaluation began to be used actively and now auditing is being introduced as a public management tool into Finnish higher education institutions.
In addition to the developments triggered by the policy makers, there has also been a major change in how scientific information is disseminated that has affected university libraries and changed their ways of ‘‘doing business’’.
The traditional, reactive way of building and owning collections has, at least partly, changed to a more reactive way of intermediating printed and electronic resources as part of the university’s learning and knowledge creating processes (see, e.g.,Huotari & Iivonen, 2005). On the other hand, libraries can be seen to be moving to become the knowledge management centers of their parent organizations (Parker, Nitse, & Flowers, 2005).
Libraries face vast challenges as they move into the digital environment.
There is a huge number of publications available, especially within bio- and health sciences, and they seem to be among the most expensive scientific journals. Increasingly, publishing of hard science is seen more and more as a business, and it has been claimed that commercial pricing bears little relation to production costs and is relatively immune to competitive pressures (see, e.g., Morgan Stanley Equity Research, 2002; La Manna, 2003). For a medium-sized university, such as the University of Kuopio, this means that we have to struggle to balance the needs of our researchers and students against the commercial interest of international publishing houses.
In the digital world the library also faces competition from other providers of information, all competing for the same clientele. Clients have become more quality conscious, and they want to participate in the development of the information services within the campus. Information technology not only enables the interaction between clients and libraries but also provides opportunities to engage the active client in developing innovations (see, e.g.,Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000).
But there are also challenges for management in this modern result- and profit-oriented culture. It has been quite difficult to define what a result is when one evaluates a university library. Results should be quantifiable, but this is clearly problematic when one considers learning and the creation of new knowledge (see, e.g.,Poll & Boekhorst, 1996;Quinn, 1997).
On the other hand, the consumer culture ideology can create inequality among users. Libraries have always defended the idea that all individuals should be able to utilize the library’s resources and services but they are now confronted by the fact that more and more digital resources are drifting away from open to restricted access. Goodman and Cohen (2004, p. 76) define two types of inequality: stigmatizing inequality that exists in a direct, less ambiguous and more transparent manner, and anonymous inequality, the kind that is indirect and not resulting from any deliberate intention. The digital revolution has clearly increased this anonymous inequality.
Unequal access poses major challenges for the leadership and manage- ment of university libraries.Fig. 1depicts the different pressures faced by a Quality Management to Managing Self-Organizing Processes 99
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.