Field House of the Mind
The college library is Wheaton's largest interdisciplinary academic service unit. How must it change to keep pace with curriculum and technology?
By Terry Metz
Rapid advances in information technology haven't relieved colleges such as Wheaton from the obligation to maintain and upgrade brick and mortar library facilities, although a casual observer might assume otherwise. The news media proclaim that technology will completely and cheaply supplant the printed page in the not-toodistant future. Despite this dire prediction, if Mark Twain were a college library director today, he could boast that reports of the death of the liberal arts college library are greatly exaggerated. At campuses across the nation, libraries evolving with the times are busier than ever. Increasingly this adaptation takes the form of locating library, technology and academic support activities into a single facility-a field house of the mind. Many liberal arts college libraries have taken this step, and I believe it's important for Wheaton to aspire to this model, too.
Library as intellectual "field house"
At the nation's best liberal arts colleges, two campus structures typically are the largest by square footage and generate the most daily foot traffic throughout the rhythm of the school year: the athletic field house and the library. The athletic field house supports a wide array of activities. It exists to showcase athletic talent, foster exercise habits for lifelong health, and encourage social interaction. Spaces in the athletic field house are flexible-easily converted into support multiple activities-and are available for use at nearly all hours. Colleges take pride in the quality of these facilities and college-bound students expect that these facilities are part of the campus "package" when they enroll.
Similarly, forward-thinking colleges are expanding or remodeling their libraries in a fashion that mirrors many characteristics of a multi-use athletic field house.
Traditional academic libraries optimized their resources and services for solitary persons using the printed page. To become an effective intellectual field house, Wheaton's library must:
- offer more flexible spaces, especially areas that support more small and large group activities;
- increasingly diversify library resources to include more online information, including digital images, video and sound;
- provide the technology students require for incorporating both traditional and emerging information formats into their scholarly work, and this technology must be available in more locations within the building;
- make the most popular library resources and services available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The attractiveness and quality of the library's physical spaces must meet the expectation of today's college-bound students as part of the total Wheaton experience. And there must be social spaces providing, yes, food and drink.
Wheaton College promotes a wide range of intellectual activities undergirding intellectual rigor, instilling an excitement and appreciation for lifelong learning, and motivating students' social engagement across campus and beyond. The new Wheaton curriculum championed by Provost Susanne Woods is a new manifestation of our commitment to academic excellence. The college library is the campus's largest interdisciplinary academic service unit; it must evolve as the curriculum evolves. The field house of the mind model is a good match for a highly connected, highly interdisciplinary curriculum because it brings together many academic support services-now typically distributed across campus-within a single facility, enabling students to take advantage of proximity for more "one-stop shopping."
Wheaton's curriculum is the primary criterion for determining the focus of our library's collections and services. As Wheaton's curricu- lum evolves-influencing learning and teaching practices across campus-the library's collections, services and physical facilities must evolve, too. How our college chooses to address the following trends will influence the degree to which an academic field house can be created at Wheaton.
Supporting learning, teaching and scholarship
Students arriving at Wheaton today generally are not prepared to employ information resources well for scholarly purposes. As a result, library staff is collaborating with faculty to offer guidance and advice in appreciating how the recorded knowledge of academic disciplines is produced, vetted, distributed, and protected in the global world's increasingly complex information universe. To keep this partnership vibrant, Wheaton must attract and retain knowledgeable and well-trained library staff and technologists to assist and educate library users. Last year, the title of "reference librarian" was expanded to "reference and instruction librarian," reflecting our increased emphasis on preparing students to select the most appropriate information for their needs while avoiding resources (often Web sites) of a more spurious quality. Our reference and instruction librarians hold scores of classroom sessions each year for this purpose, both in First-Year Seminars and at the invitation of faculty in other courses. However, the college must explore additional ways to support information literacy, such as providing technology in more classrooms that it does today.
Integrating digital information formats
At nationally ranked colleges such as Wheaton, high-quality print materials remain in demand by most faculty and students. However, over the past decade scholarly publishing has begun a selective, but not wholesale, shift from print to digital formats. To maintain high standards, Wheaton must be exploring, experimenting, and funding ways that integrate digital information resources with more traditional library collections. For example, in some disciplines the library is emphasizing networked information access and reducing its emphasis on collecting physical materials, especially for journal publications. To better serve these disciplines-particularly the natural sciences-the library is shifting to electronic, networkdeliverable formats if they are affordable and sustainable.
Occasionally I'm asked why we simply cannot convert much more of our library collections from print to digital format to avoid constructing a library addition or a completely new library building. The answer is that fewer than 50 percent of the publications our faculty and students need are available in online formats. Very few books are available digitally. Coverage of electronic indexes, abstracts and journals is limited to only the most recent few years or perhaps a decade or two. This forces us to maintain both paperback files and electronic versions of the same titles to ensure comprehensive coverage. As a result, Wheaton essentially has no choice but to continue providing both traditional print collections for some items alongside electronic access for others. Therefore, library staff must routinely and continually advise and consult with faculty on selection of the most appropriate information resources in the most appropriate formats and via the most appropriate access. Understanding the tradeoffs of price, format, space and convenience was a primary topic of a faculty workshop hosted by the library staff last May.
Coping with rising scholarly information costs
For nearly two decades, academic libraries have faced annual double-digit increases in the cost of many materials they purchase. The problem is particularly acute for science and technology journals. A lively debate rages about why this is so, but most informed observers agree that a combination of publishing industry consolidation and the "publish-or-perish" reward system for college and university faculty are prime culprits. Regardless of the cause, academic libraries responded to this economic squeeze by trimming periodicals collections and raiding book budgets to pay for the declining number of journal subscriptions they could afford. Yet, even as electronic publications become more widely available, acquiring them will not translate into significant cost savings to Wheaton. This fact may surprise some readers. But regardless of popular myth, high-quality online information is not free, nor even cheap.
Forces beyond an individual college's control are at play in today's information marketplace and most do not work to the small college's advantage. For example, the costs and licensing structures of online publications can make them more expensive than their paper counterparts. Equally alarming is the fact that online information is often available only for lease, not for outright purchase. In the print world, libraries own the books and journals they buy for all time. When a library drops a subscription to an online database or online full-text publication, sometimes the library no longer has the right to access the electronic back file.
To afford many of the electronic resources we offer today, our staff have pooled funds with other libraries to strengthen our buying power. Wheaton must leverage this buying power still further by increasing its intensity of resource sharing and joint purchase agreements with other libraries and consortia. In addition, Wheaton must carefully examine the tradeoffs of ownership versus access for some types of materials in selected disciplines. For example, escalating prices of paper journal subscriptions may require us to identify needed articles and access them for a fee in lieu of our library purchasing and housing a full set of print or electronic subscriptions to the journals in which these articles are published. This is not to suggest that nothing is lost when a college decides to adjust the balance of ownership versus access to library materials. Wheaton must find balance by being judicious about the acquisition of physical materials and concentrating on making access to needed (but not owned) information as convenient as possible for students and faculty.
Providing appropriate physical space
As previously mentioned, the rate at which digital technologies will supplant paper publishing in coming decades is unknown and hotly debated. Regardless of this trend, suitable space for collections and the people who use them, as well as for the technology which users rely on to access these collections, is still required for the foreseeable future.
At the very best U.S. colleges, the physical library is a nexus for day-to-day learning and honing of lifelong skills for critical evaluation of information. New or newly renovated library buildings on these campuses support a wide variety of needs in addition to the traditional housing of print collections and provision of solitary, quiet study space. These needs include public computing areas, commonly dubbed "information commons," that provide a rich array of technology for performing research, scanning images, and creating and playing digital video and sound files. In addition, more interdisciplinary curricula and group work assignments are generating demand for group workspace, where small numbers of students can collaborate without disturbing others. Spaces for a professor and class to visit the library, for writing and mathematics tutors, for guest lectures and public readings, and for art and project displays are also needed. And students are demanding more social spaces in libraries.
Finally, our library still requires space for continued appropriate growth in the size of our print collections. This is a particularly acute need at Wheaton's library because space for print collections is very nearly exhausted in our current building. Unless more collection space is identified, we must either store print materials off-site, outside the library; shift more of our print collections into compact shelving; reduce or limit the number of print items the library acquires; or implement some combination of these alternatives.
Using the field house model as a benchmark, Wheaton's existing library is particularly hard-pressed for all types of spaces. Despite the fact that the Madeleine Clark Wallace Library has been expanded three times since its original construction in the early 1920s, the building's square footage remains about one-half the size of the Haas Athletic Center. The most recent expansion was completed 25 years ago. As a result, limited space and inflexible space are a serious impediment toward developing Wheaton's field house of the mind.
Increased reliance on technology
The reliance of both library users and library staff on expensive computer systems and networks to identify and manipulate scholarly information has been escalating for several decades. In fact, libraries can no longer be considered excellent without these tools. A prime example of this trend is the evolution from the card catalog to the online catalog, as well as the "Webifying" of many resources formerly available only in print. For Wheaton's library services to remain competitive, obsolete technology must be replaced or upgraded on a recurring basis. This may require that Wheaton enter an agreement with other colleges and universities to share technology resources that would be unaffordable to Wheaton alone.
But the advantages of new technological tools are enormous. Adoption of these computer systems and networks is a productivity boon to library users, who can access more library services, even when the library's doors are closed. Information technology also can reduce significantly the drudgery of certain types of scholarship, enabling students and faculty to peruse published literature much faster and more productively. In addition, technology is integral to the behind-the-scenes work of today's library operations.
Realistic expectations
The demise of the book and many paper periodicals is far overblown. Different academic disciplines have different information needs; not all of them can be fulfilled in the near term by digital technology. Therefore, Wheaton must be prudent and avoid embracing digital information resources uncritically, without considering their cost, maintenance, reliability and value. Misinformation abounds regarding the current capabilities of information technology as well as the cost savings assumed to accrue from it. The simple reality is that the entirely digital undergraduate liberal arts college library is neither technologically nor economically available yet. Until other conditions prevail, the highly selective liberal arts college cannot forgo developing its physical library with high-quality physical collections and high-quality physical space for students and faculty.
When and how Wheaton's library will adopt more features of the field house of the mind is undetermined. One rationale for adoption is that competing institutions are making these changes. It is wise to understand what one's competitors are up to. A stronger rationale exists if we have confidence that creating a field house of the mind generates strategic advantage for the college at this time in its history. I believe the question of whether Wheaton should or is able to commit itself to top-notch library and technology services housed in a shared facility warrants considering as we assess the curriculum during the next few years. Regardless of how the college responds to the question, I am convinced that changes in learning and teaching modes, a desire to integrate various information formats, rising costs of scholarly information, demand for new and flexible spaces, increased reliance on technology, and setting realistic expectations will all influence that answer.
Terry Metz is Wheaton's college librarian and associate vice president for Technology and Information Services.
