7
For Better or Worse: Change and Development in Academic Libraries, 1970–2006
Bill Simpson
7.1 Introduction
It has been fashionable among librarians to view the changes that have occurred over the past thirty years or so from the particular standpoint of digital technology and its impact primarily on how we deliver information to our users. This is probably unavoidable and even right given the effect that technological developments have had on almost everything that libraries do.
Technological change has been fundamental, in fact, to many of the wider changes in the culture of libraries that I discuss in this article but other changes in management styles, relationships with staff and expectations among users, to name but a few, stem from wider developments in society to which I shall also refer. Considered alongside technological change these other developments help demonstrate how fundamental a shift has taken place in a generation.
There is scope for much more detailed study and discussion of the issues I have raised in this short contribution and it may still be too early to attempt a complete assessment of all the changes that have taken place over the past thirty years or so. Those that were externally driven by changing social atti- tudes, customer expectations and the digital revolution were probably inevi- table and recent innovations in university management suggest that more will follow. It would be interesting to know how much difference individual librari- ans or librarians as a group have made, not to the changes themselves but to how successfully they were introduced. In other words, could we have done it better?
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7.2 Style Matters
When I began my own career as an Assistant Librarian in Durham University Library in 1969 my immediate line manager, the redoubtable and eccentric Keeper of Oriental Books, invariably addressed me as Simpson. If he called me Mr Simpson I knew I was in trouble and I have no doubt that he did not even know my Christian name. He cheerfully smoked his pipe and cigarettes indis- criminately in the Library, sometimes setting fire to himself in the process whilst managing somehow not to burn the place down. A brilliant if slightly unhinged polymath he had built the Oriental Collections from scratch after the Second World War, working closely with academic colleagues who regarded him with a mixture of awe for his knowledge and astonishment at the range and scope of his eccentricities, on which it would be unkind to dwell. He combined vast erudition, total disregard for his appearance, wild mood swings and fluctu- ations in behaviour and a paranoid distrust of the staff who reported to him. He would have been considered unemployable today, yet he achieved vastly more than many more reasonable people who carried on with their quiet, industrious lives.
My brief sketch of my first boss illustrates, even allowing for the fact that he was considered eccentric in the late 60s and early 70s, a number of very significant changes over the past thirty years in how libraries are managed and run. The formality of addressing male staff by their surnames and females always as Miss or Mrs has long gone, though I experienced a kind of coelacanth version of it in the University of London Library in the early 1990s before introducing some long overdue changes there myself. Smoking in working areas of the Library had been prohibited at Manchester some time before I moved there from Dur- ham in 1973, an early harbinger of a much wider social change that was to fol- low. Collection development is now guided by written policies rather than emanating from small cabals of librarians and academics acting opportunisti- cally and often on the basis of inspired guesswork as to what would be of lasting significance. Personal appearance and hygiene are taken very seriously and any member of staff found wanting in this area will soon be told to clean up their act. Above all, psychological aberrations would not be tolerated by users or colleagues.
The world of librarianship that we now inhabit is, in its social norms and mores, ostensibly more relaxed and friendly than that of thirty or so years ago but, par- adoxically, it is also less tolerant, more prescriptive and more circumscribed. It is, though, I am sure, a better world for younger colleagues, who are protected by the “restrictions” to which I have referred, from the eccentricities and wild mood swings among managers from which I and other young staff sometimes suffered early in our careers. Those who regret the demise of the “characters”
are inclined to forget that, whilst providing excellent spectator sport for others, those characters were often hell to work for!
7.3 And the Substance
The academic library of 1970 was entirely print based and its activities were highly labour intensive, with inordinate effort going into the creation of locally produced catalogue records on cards or slips of paper so that each individual library system more or less replicated what others were doing across the world.
The assiduous checking of each entry by supervisors or cataloguing team leaders was followed by the filing of entries into banks of drawers or rows of sheaf binders according to strict rules. Circulation services were entirely manual, with loan records kept in duplicate or triplicate by borrower, author and/or classification number. The boxes containing these records (the “charge”) occupied large amounts of space and when, as occasionally happened, one was dropped and its contents spilled out pandemonium ensued. Document supply in those pre-BL days involved separate agencies such as the National Central Library, National Lending Library for Science and Technology, regional bureaux and a certain amount of inspired guesswork, with or without the use of BUCOP and other aids. All of this, with the total dependence on print meant that libraries had an air of permanence, both in their physical appearance and in the range and nature of the activities that went on within them. As a result I was able to say on the completion of the James Ussher Library at Trinity College Dublin, where I was Librarian until 2002, that the Ussher bore less resemblance in struc- ture and function to the Berkeley Library that was completed in 1967 than the Berkeley did to the Old Library, completed in 1731. The information revolution of the 70s onward meant that the solid, monumental and inflexible buildings of old had given way to buildings designed to be light, airy, environmentally acceptable and highly flexible in structure and function.
The ongoing shift from print to e-publishing was preceded by a shift from man- ual to largely automated library management systems as the card catalogue gradually gave way to the OPAC, more or less seamlessly in retrospect but, to those of us who lived through the transition, with much debate and a certain amount of angst at the time. The records were being stored electronically but were still produced locally, taking such inspiration as we could from the National Union Catalog, the British Museum’s GK3 and other such “Guides to the perplexed” (with apologies to Maimonides) as we could find. Was our cata- loguing better for being home grown and the product of so much intellectual effort for what many would regard as so little return? It is hard to know and the answer is probably “sometimes” but what is not in doubt is that the combination of subject and cataloguing responsibilities for a particular discipline meant that subject librarians had a much better knowledge of their stock than is usually the case today when, apart from creating the order request, the subject librarian may have no further contact with the stock for which (s)he is responsible. Mod- ern cataloguing practices are infinitely more cost-effective than those of a gen- eration ago but result in a less joined-up approach to collection development in individual subject areas.
While there can be no doubt that the advent of BLDSC and other document sup- ply services such as RLG’s SHARES have totally transformed the face of
interlending and document supply and produced a vastly improved service to users who need material from other libraries, it is debatable whether the major- ity of those borrowing and returning their own library’s books in today’s heavily automated environment receive a significantly better service than their predecessors of thirty or more years ago. Automated systems have enabled libraries to manage their lending services more effectively and facilities such as on-line or automated telephone renewals are a boon to readers who cannot visit the library physically, but the chief gain brought by the automation of lending services is that is has enabled us to cope with greatly increased numbers of users as higher education has expanded without significantly increasing our staffing levels. The improvement has been in efficiency rather than quality of service and, with the advent of self-issue machines in recent years libraries have become more like banks as transactions increasingly take place without human interaction.
The revolution brought about by the advent of sophisticated library manage- ment systems has brought very real gains for users who can access catalogues remotely, reserve or renew books on-line or request documents from BLDSC in the knowledge that they will have them almost as quickly as if they were in their own library. It has brought huge gains in library efficiency in the face of the very rapid expansion of higher education in recent years but these gains have to be expressed in terms of the additional staff we have not added to our workforce rather than in reduced staff numbers. What seems to have been lost in the pro- cess is much of the interaction between staff and users and the empathy that developed as a result of this. Combined with the fact that, for many academics in particular, the library now comes to them electronically so that they do not have to visit it physically, this change in relationships has thrown up a whole new series of challenges for academic libraries and librarians.
7.4 The Ecstasy of e-
Much has been written on the transformation brought about in information provision by the advent of e-publishing, whether in relation to the content, its metadata, licensing and copyright issues, or in more recent times, alternative publishing and long term preservation models. Much less time has been devoted to the associated issues, which are vital to librarians and the future of libraries, of perceptions and expectations of our roles. As long ago as 1990 the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of London assured me, as the newly appointed University Librarian there, that electronic journals would solve libraries’ financial problems “in the next two or three years”. They hadn’t done so by 1992–3 and they still haven’t done so now but that did not prevent my being asked by one of the University’s Vice-Presidents at a recent operational performance review of the JRUL in Manchester “what savings are being made as a result of your heavy investment in e-resources?” Of course we can answer such questions with reference to savings in processing costs, storage and preserva- tion but this isn’t what those who control our funding have in mind and the myth that “electronic = cheap = less spent on acquisitions” is so curiously
persistent that it seems to be in danger of becoming one of Richard Dawkins’s
“memes”.
The idea that electronic information is much cheaper than print is combined in the minds of many academics, particularly those in science, medicine and engineering, with the view that libraries are no longer required “because I can get everything I need on my computer and have no need of a library”. I have lost count of the number of occasions on which, over the past few years, I have either been told categorically that, except for Special Collections, there won’t be any libraries in ten years time or asked “Do you think there’s any future for libraries?” This attitude is based on both ignorance as academics confuse the computing infrastructure with the content (“the pipes with the gas”) and a self-centredness which takes no account of the needs either of students, for whom the library is much more than a purveyor of information, or of academ- ics in areas such as the humanities for whom instant, up-to-the-minute on- line information is not the absolute boon that it is for those working in SME.
The twin dangers for librarians are that if we dispute the assertions of our immi- nent demise we are regarded as Luddites desperately clinging on to the familiar to protect our jobs, but if we do not we lose the argument by default, even though the weight of evidence is on our side. It is always uncomfortable to argue with a body of received wisdom such as that which has become the new ortho- doxy in the SME community and one risks ridicule in doing so, but it is a risk we must take, whilst demonstrating by the quality of service that we provide in all media that we are in reality giving a lead in the information revolution rather than resisting it. I would like to think that the massive e-resources that we pro- vide in Manchester would make us immune to any suggestions of being reac- tionary but this isn’t always so and, alongside the questions about how much money we save by substituting electronic for print publications, we are under considerable space pressure as capital planning exercises assume that the physi- cal library will shrink. It can be helpful when researchers in the humanities pro- test loudly that multi-volume works on which they depend have been moved from open access to closed storage!
If I have dealt with the issue of perceptions of the impact of the e-revolution on library costs and services at some length it is because it represents a profound shift among most academics in a single generation from viewing the library as central to their work (“The Library is the heart of the University” as Vice-Chan- cellors used once to proclaim like a mantra) to viewing it as, at best, peripheral and, at worst, irrelevant. To some extent we may have contributed to this percep- tion ourselves as we have pushed the e-aspects of our work at the expense of almost everything else that we do over the past twenty years or so. It may also have been inevitable given that a huge and irreversible revolution has occurred and we may currently be in the antithesis stage of Hegelian dialectic, with the ultimate synthesis in the form of full acceptance by academics of the hybrid library as the norm for the future yet to come. Either way, the world of 2006 is far less stable and certain than that of 1970 for university libraries and I suspect that our successors will have to navigate through much choppier waters than
those which contributors to this volume will have experienced – rough though some of ours have seemed at the time.
7.5 Power to the People?
If the internal governance of libraries was autocratic in the early 70s, with rela- tively little interaction beyond the strictly necessary between senior manage- ment and more junior colleagues, so was the relationship between libraries and their users, with the possible exception of those senior academics, not neces- sarily members of the Library Committee, who had the ear of the Librarian or were otherwise able, by way of a combination of perceived power and ruthless- ness, to intimidate him (and it was almost invariably a “him” at the time). There were those such as Nance McAulay at Durham who sought to move away from autocratic management with the introduction of staff meetings at which colleagues were encouraged to express their views freely and openly and I well recall such meetings in the “dungeon” at Place Green, where the stuffiness of the heating system on cold winter afternoons was more than compensated for by the opportunity of engaging in tentative debate with the Librarian herself. Such openness was, though, exceptional at the time and it was another decade or more before management styles became overtly more participative and, to a degree, democratic.
To my knowledge no systematic study has been made of the impact of the glut of early retirements of senior librarians and their replacement by younger col- leagues, who had been at university in the 60s, in the mid 1980s. Those of us who fell into this younger group of successors were “baby boomers” who had not known the unquestioning discipline of military service and, though we had mostly been at grammar schools in the late 50s and early 60s, this experience had been overlain by that of the social revolution that the mid to late 60s brought. Having lost much of our own unquestioning respect for authority fig- ures we were hardly likely to try to become such figures to others – and would probably have felt ridiculous if we had attempted to do so. We were undoubtedly part of a wider process which included the disappearance of the culture of def- erence but, wittingly or unwittingly, those of us who became chief librarians twenty or so years ago ushered in a culture in which, if all people cannot be equal in pay and status, we can at least treat each other with equal respect and courtesy irrespective of relative places in a hierarchy.
The relationship between libraries and users has undergone a similar process of change but for a different reason. The abolition of grants followed by the intro- duction of tuition fees has transformed readers/users into customers who are buying a service and will no longer accept whatever is on offer without com- plaint. The result is that library opening hours increasingly reflect what readers want rather than the convenience of staff and, as universities conduct satisfac- tion surveys of libraries and other activities, we are regularly required to address perceived shortcomings of provision, whether of the insatiable demand for extra copies of undergraduate textbooks or in the provision of information
in electronic form even when it is not yet available electronically. If the relax- ation of management styles in the 80s is to be reversed in the future it will be because managers themselves now have less freedom to manage as they would wish because they themselves are obliged to respond to an emerging culture of constant assessment and monitoring.
It is paradoxical that the desire of university managers to control libraries and make them more accountable has gone hand in hand in many institutions with the abolition of library committees. For all their faults and inadequacies such committees were a valuable sounding board and source of advice from repre- sentatives of the academic community and it will be interesting to see how suc- cessful the trend away from representative committees to executive authority, subject to more formal and ongoing performance measurement and review, will be in delivering effective library provision. It gives power to far more people, each of whom can have a say in the regular satisfaction surveys, but it is power without responsibility that can be exercised thoughtlessly as one ticks boxes on a questionnaire rather than the genuine influence that can be built up over an extended relationship through membership of a committee or other governing or representative group. Some changes may not be for the better!
7.6 Jeux sans Frontières
The world has expanded dramatically beyond the walls of our own libraries during the last thirty years to an extent that would have startled our predeces- sors for whom SCONUL, with its multifarious sub-committees and working groups and, for the more adventurous, occasional forays abroad to IFLA, would have been the norm. Possibly, as with more democratic and relaxed internal management structures, academic librarians have simply followed uncon- sciously society’s wider developments as people have embraced foreign travel as a normal part of life. Just as the Algarve, Umbria and Florida have replaced their homely British counterparts we librarians have fled halls of residence in UK campus universities in favour of LIBER meetings in St Petersburg, RLG meetings in Los Angeles and CURL visits to Australia. We have, in fact, become much less insular and more globally aware and this wider awareness and enhanced international co-operation has been fostered also by the advent of email and, more recently, international recruitment to senior library posts in the UK. It had long been a tradition for British librarians to become directors of Commonwealth university libraries, but the relatively recent arrivals of Helen Hayes and Sue McKnight from Australia at Edinburgh and Nottingham Trent respectively, with the imminent arrival of Sarah Thomas from the USA as Reg Carr’s successor at Oxford, mark a sea change as our profession moves from being a one-way process of Brits going overseas to a truly global recruitment market. This is an exciting development which promises to challenge and broaden our thinking in the UK if, and it is a big “if ”, academic librarianship does not become so bland and uniform that, apart from levels of resource, it is impossible to distinguish one country from another. I personally look forward to the appointment of chief librarians from non-English speaking countries to