Librarianship and the Public Purpose
Robert V. Labaree, The Von KleinSmid Center Library

A current feature of our nation's corporate landscape is the propensity for mega-mergers among industrial giants. The $95 billion merger between Time Warner and AOL is the most significant recent example of this phenomenon. A similar pattern of merger mania is taking place among information technology organizations in higher education. The most frequent players in this game of technology takeover are computer centers, telecommunication units, and academic libraries. Academic merger mania is primarily an attempt by university administrators to control the spiraling costs of information technology in the face of stagnant budgets and limited resources. 

In 1997, the University of Southern California chose such a path to controlling costs by merging its telecommunications, computing support, and academic library units into one organization, the Information Services Division (ISD). When formed, ISD represented a master plan for the reorganization of the primary technology-related operations on campus and was intended to bring a sense of "coherence and clarity" to the process of providing customer support to the university community as it relates to technology.

This merger experiment mania, involving three distinct organizational cultures, has been met with decidedly mixed results for the campus community. On the one hand, formation of ISD has enhanced opportunities for collaborative library and computer-related instruction. There are also indications that ISD has helped the university to better manage the distribution of information technology on campus by bringing together diverse, but often redundant, resources and services under one administrative umbrella.

Despite these opportunities, there is a persistent undercurrent of anxiety and a profound sense of lost values among the library faculty concerning their role in this brave new world of technology-driven über-divisions. This apprehension is especially apparent in terms of evaluating how such an gigantic organization actually enhances access and service. The lack of a coherent strategic plan underpinning the development of ISD led many librarians to question their place in this new bureaucracy. Perhaps the clearest indication of this situation is the fact that the university made a significant financial commitment to acquiring the latest electronic resources and online databases, yet for over five years, it has been almost impossible for librarians to purchase any new journals except in cases of replacing ceased titles or substituting one subscription for another. It is not my intention here to be a David Stoll to the current Rigoberta Menchu-like accounts of why we need a unified organization of all things technology at USC. However, the absorption of the libraries into a much larger information services organization highlights specific, on-going challenges concerning the future of teaching and research at USC.

The phenomenon of technology-driven mergers is not unique to USC, but reflects a growing trend among universities that are wrestling with the explosive growth of information technology. A number of institutions have radically reorganized information services on campus. For librarians, the consequences of merged libraries and computing services can produce a sense of misplaced professional values and an unsettling ambiguity concerning how to best serve constituents who have themselves redefined how research is conducted. In response, our professional journals are littered with didactic proclamations that we must change in order to survive or risk becoming subsumed by a wave of technology that will quickly leave us behind to whither away, not unlike much of our print collections already sacrificed at the altar of java scripted web pages and specialized online systems. Worse perhaps is the perception of some in the academy that librarianship is an antiquated profession that has no place in a merged information age.

There could be some truth imbedded in this rhetoric, but discerning the repercussions of merger mania for the university is rarely examined within the conceptual framework of the academic library's public purpose. And what is that public purpose you say? Simple- to provide access and service for those seeking information. It means that librarians act as the path builders between the question and its answer, the concept and its design, and the challenge and its defeat. Properly operationalized, the library's public purpose requires that no administrative decision should be made or policy implemented that does not either directly or indirectly show how such action benefits our constituents. Unfortunately, academic librarianship is losing its sense of public purpose in the face of merger mania and, in so doing, reneging on its social contract.

I propose that, by acting upon the following six issues, the profession of academic librarianship will not only preserve social legitimacy, but enrich it as our nation's institutions of higher learning continue to adapt to new technologies.

We should strengthen the connection between practice and research. The preparation of academic librarians shares at least one unfortunate characteristic with the professional education of teachers, health care providers, social workers, and other professionals whose job is primarily practice-based. That is, the linkages between the daily responsibilities of the practitioner and the research conducted by academicians in our professional schools are uncertain at best.

The possibility of connecting practitioner knowledge to the research of the academician is largely unfulfilled in the education of academic librarians. As a result, research often described in our professional literature suffers from at least one of several burdens: an overemphasis on the irrelevant institutional case study that fails to build connectedness to other organizations; studies that describe fanciful ways of doing new things with technology, but often ignoring the fiscal realities hidden within such endeavors; or, the literature exhibits a proclivity for locating solutions to problems in individual performance absent of the social, economic, or political conditions external to the library. Due to research being so disconnected from practice, our professional schools have failed to develop what Peter Jarvis describes as the practitioner-researcher. In other words, the epistemologies of research in academic librarianship are not anchored in theories derived from practice in order for them to be applicable in the real world. A commitment by our remaining library schools to prepare true practitioner-researchers will facilitate a more meaningful connectedness between the work of the professional educator and the academic librarian.

We must know the needs of our users and show them new ways to utilize technology. Librarians and their administrative counterparts make a lot of assumptions about what our users want. This is due, in part, to simple necessity. For example, a fundamental tenet of building collections is that we strive to develop collections reflecting all opinions representative of a pluralistic society. We are also aware that any attempt to maintain responsive collections would be difficult if academic librarians relied solely on the input of our faculty colleagues and student users. Their hidden biases and research agendas would likely collide with the rubric of comprehensiveness and uncensored approaches to building collections. A related but more self-inflicted challenge to evaluating our constituent's needs is the perception by many that such an exercise will produce very little new information and only lead to an abundance of irrelevant data ("I'd like to see an espresso bar on every floor") that is incongruent with the desire to maintain a free and open learning environment.

However, these concerns should not forestall a deliberate effort among academic librarians to conduct sound, comprehensive, and regular surveys of our users needs and desires. We must work harder on learning more about the basic processes of student learning, cognition, and motivation within a technology-driven information environment if we are to gain a more sophisticated understanding of our public's information needs as well as feel confident in our ability as practitioners to reject one-size-fits-all solutions to new challenges.

We must change from passive reactors to proactive contributors. As a result of our own choices as professionals and due to our almost subterranean position within the power and influence structures of the university, academic librarians tend to be almost entirely reactive to policy debates on campus and motivated to participate only if the issue appears to affect our work directly. Mostly, we simply sit in silence, emaciated by the minutiae of our daily work lives. However, while we focus on the singularity of our trade, emerging technologies are forcing universities to seek solutions to challenges they have never had to face before. Distance learning and digital intellectual property rights are just two examples of technology-related issues currently grabbing USC's attention. Academic librarians have something to contribute to these discussions taking place in higher education.

For this to happen, librarians must challenge stereotypes that portray us as passive reactors and develop a reputation as thoughtful contributors to ongoing discussions about issues that intersect the body of knowledge we have created as practitioners and as the result of careful deliberations that have already occurred among ourselves. Our understanding of concepts related to fair use could form the basis for thoughtful debates about regulating intellectual property in a digital environment. Our experiences with teaching students to navigate through information stored electronically and applying critical thinking skills to the evaluation of digital information can help frame issues of distributive learning on the Internet. Proactive participation will help validate the contributions academic librarians make as faculty members to the spirit of intellectual discovery and legitimize our practice in the eyes of campus leaders.

We should reconfigure the library from a laboratory to organizational communities of practice. A critical problem associated with transforming library space into computer commons is that separating technological delivery of information from traditional collections and services reinforces the illusion that everything is on the computer. Perhaps worse, the movement to computer laboratories in libraries has the subtle effect of substituting the computer terminal for a reference librarian. The insular activity of sitting in front of a computer for answers only contributes to widening the gap between the information seeker and the information interpreter. It is difficult to serve the public purpose when your constituencies are disengaged from your practice.

What is missing in the rush to merge technology organizations on campus is a general failure to recognize opportunities for creating communities of practice in academic libraries. Etienne Wenger (1995) describes communities of practice as "groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise." The linkages between different organizations are not dictated by administrators, but occur naturally through informal, yet sustained, communication among groups. The encouragement and support of informal communicative pathways among different cultures of practitioners, who choose for themselves the framework that holds them together for the purpose of building and sharing knowledge, is the key ingredient missing in most merged library environments. This exchange of knowledge among different communities of practitioners in the library can form the basis for new and better ways of doing things that is not forced into existence by visionaries without vision, but energized by a mutual commitment to the values that govern our public purpose.

We should accentuate our role in nurturing student's intellectual development. Social psychologists, such as Chickering, Kolhberg, Perry, Belenky and others who study cognitive development among college students, contend that individuals move from a dualistic perception of their environment to a relativistic or multiplistic understanding of the world that develops in conjunction with a person's own concept of self. Of course, how students move through these patterns of intellectual development is open to debate. Nevertheless, a significant, but often overlooked contribution made by academic librarians to the vitality of tertiary education, is their ability to advance a student's intellectual development through content analysis of information.

Librarians contribute to developing a sense of competence, autonomy, and purpose in a number of ways. They help to teach critical thinking and evaluative skills to students as part of the research process. They play a crucial role helping students to manage the often overwhelming plethora of information available to them. Librarians also contribute to student's cognitive development by providing the individual with a sense of empowerment and ownership over information by breaking down barriers to understanding how information is collected, classified, stored, and disseminated. As a function of resource-based learning activities, students begin to understand processes for identifying multiple vectors to problem solving, they develop an understanding of knowledge as contextual and relative, and students who begin the research process with an undifferentiated view of authority, learn to value authority, not in terms of the relationship between the authority figure and the student, but due to the authority figure possessing expertise that the students can learn on their own.

Our contribution to the intellectual development of college students, though, is more complex than simply introducing the individual to different forms of information. If one were to view the unique body of knowledge produced by a community of scholars as their "language," then academic librarians can be understood as scholarly multilinguists who, for example, can easily transition from the language of political scientists to geographers to organizational theorists. In addition, if language really is the architect of culture as many believe, then the language of scholars in a specific discipline reflect the normative rules and values of their academic community. This cross-disciplinary, multilinguistic perspective gives academic librarians the competencies to develop relativistic and contextual thinking in students by drawing on the cultures of different disciplines to distinguish ways of learning and judging about the world around them. This is often an unrecognized, but powerful gift of our profession that should be at the center of our public purpose.

We must transform the library into an institution for positive social change. The last twenty years have witnessed a significant increase in university-based outreach to disadvantaged communities. Many examples currently exist of institutions that have mobilized resources and developed service learning programs that work with local communities to draw upon their own strengths to meet the challenges of poverty, inadequate job training, and dilapidated urban infrastructures. This movement towards community engagement is rooted in the desire of university leaders to seek alternative ways to increase diversity on campus, the recognition that the university's mission cannot be served in isolation from the community in which it occupies, and the idea that meaningful learning takes place beyond the classroom and that the community can be a fertile setting for exploring alternative pathways of experiential learning. One of the ways that universities are contributing to the community is by formulating initiatives that help address the gap between those who have access to technology and those who are denied its benefits, due in large part, to socioeconomic reasons. This is an area in which librarians can have a major impact in community outreach programs and, in fact, many do. Here at USC, librarians have been active on a number of fronts.

Despite this, more can and should be done among academic libraries to become institutions for positive social change in their communities. Library leaders should be vigilant in recognizing opportunities to partner with other community outreach programs on their campuses. More importantly, administrators should actively seek out ways to promote library-centered community outreach programs. To accomplish this, time and resources must be made available to those librarians who seek opportunities to develop and participate in community outreach projects. Initiatives at USC show that the melding of library practice and social action creates opportunities to effect positive social change in culturally diverse communities. What better way to serve the public purpose than to seek opportunities to share our expertise and time with others?

In conclusion, few would argue that the evolution to a knowledge-based society does not have profound implications for the future practice of academic librarianship. However, only by committing ourselves to the public purpose of our profession can we avoid decision-making that too often places a premium on technological initiatives that do not parallel the core values and belief systems that guide the practice of what we do and why we do it. Academic librarians must recommitment ourselves to the public purpose of our practice in the face of merger mania and work to reestablish the library, not as the intellectual center of the academy so commonly promoted these days, but simply, as Joan Bechtel noted in 1986, places that facilitate intellectual dialogue among people.

Materials cited

• Bechtel, Joan M. "Conversation, a New Paradigm for Librarianship?" College & Research Libraries 47 (May 1986): 219-224.
• Evans, Nancy J. et al. Student Development in College: Theory, Research, and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998.
• Jarvis, Peter. The Practitioner-Researcher: Developing Theory from Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
• "Special Issue: The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy: The Nature and Politics of Truth and Representation in a Postmodern Era." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 13 (March-April 2000): 101-184.
• Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.