ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


4 2 0  / C&RL News ■  June 1998

Provosts, libraries, and electronic 
information

Reports from AAHE and CNI

by A lthea H. Jenkins, Laverne Simoneaux, and W illia m  M ille r

Taking learning and libraries seriously
“Taking Learning Seriously,” the American 

Association of Higher Education’s (AAHE) 
53rd National Conference, held March 21- 
24 in Atlanta, Georgia, brought together 
college and university personnel to discuss 
the ways student learning is at the center of 
institutional missions and programs.

In an effort to help identify ways in which 
academic libraries can and are helping their 
respective campuses with student learning 
and information issues, ACRE and AAHE 
jointly sponsored a lively discussion, “Fo­
rums on Information Issues facing Higher 
Education,” held Monday, March 23.

Twenty provosts from all over the United 
States provided rare glimpses into their con­
cerns and their campuses. Community, state 
and private colleges, as well as, state and 
Research I universities, were all represented 
at the forum. Additionally, six librarians were 
present, including W. Lee Hisle, ACRL presi­
dent.

Earlier this spring, in preparation for the 
forum, topics were identified, researched, 
and incorporated into a docum ent created 
to guide the discussion. Topics included: fa­

cilitating student retention, enhancing the 
quality of the teaching and learning envi­
ronment on campus, preparing students for 
lifelong learning and career changes in the 
information age, ensuring access to the full 
range of print and digital scholarly resources 
in the future, addressing intellectual prop­
erty issues on campus, and assuring quality 
in distance education. The docum ent was 
distributed to each participant prior to the 
session with the final report from the Task 
Force on Institutional Priorities and Faculty 
Rewards, “Academic Librarianship and the 
Redefining Scholarship Project.” It was ob­
vious as the session opened that most of 
the provosts had read the materials and were 
prepared for the lively discussion that followed.

After som e brief introductions, Hisle 
welcomed the provosts and shared the es­
sence of coming together for the Provosts’ 
Forum. Cooperation and collaboration were 
the cornerstone of his welcome. Hisle hoped 
the forum would serve as an impetus to build 
new  w o rking relatio n sh ip s, to create a 
healthy and vigorous dialogue betw een aca­
demic administrations and academic librar­

About the authors

Althea H. Jenkins is executive director o f  ACRL; e-mail: ajenkins@ala.org; Laverne Simoneaux is user education librarian a t 
Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond; e-mail: lsimoneaux@selu.edu; William M iller is director o f  libraries a t Florida 
A tlantic University; e-mail: miller@fau.edu

mailto:ajenkins@ala.org
mailto:lsimoneaux@selu.edu
mailto:miller@fau.edu


Q&RL News ■  June 1998 / 421

ians, and to forge alliances, and thus, new 
programs in today’s colleges and universi­
ties. Next, Lou Albert, vice president of 
AAHE, spoke of the timeliness of the Pro­
vosts’ Forum. His recent work with Patricia 
Breivik and the National Forum on Infor­
mation Literacy, and the growing importance 
of information literacy as stressed by both 
the Middle States Association of Colleges and 
Schools and the W estern A ssociation of 
Schools and Colleges have made him an ally 
of the modern library and its importance in 
today’s college or university experience.

Technology, libraries, and partnerships
As the discussion started, Elaine Didier kept 
the session moving by clarifying and prob­
ing issues throughout the forum. While the 
hopes had been that the discussion would 
follow the materials and perhaps visit all 
the issues outlined, three major themes were 
important to the provosts in attendance and 
continued to resurface. They included the 
following: How to continue to pay for in­
formation and information technology; What 
should a library look like today?; and How 
to increase partnerships betw een librarians 
and other faculty.

The first issue addressed was the over­
whelming concern of provosts regarding the 
cost of information resources and informa­
tion technology in academia today. The pro­
vosts were keenly aware of the issues con­
cerning cost and access to information fac­
ing libraries: print versus electronic re ­
sources, access only to resources versus full 
ownership, and the provision of informa­
tion resources for distance education, to 
name a few. The various ways colleges and 
universities were handling the cost of infor­
mation in their respective universities in­
cluded resource sharing, consortia member­
ship, alternative funding through grants and 
sponsorships, and technology, and library 
fees. It was clear to all present that many 
colleges are feeling the pinch and technol­
ogy was partially to blame.

On an up note, the majority of provosts 
echoed a reliance on skilled library faculty 
and staff making the best use of resources 
to enhance student learning.

A second area of interest that surfaced 
during the discussion was what libraries 
should look like. Several provosts spoke to

The p ro v o sts w ere k e e n ly  aw are  o f 

the issues concerning cost and access 

to  in fo rm a tio n  fa c in g  lib raries.

w hat they believe the academ ic library 
should be like in the future. As distance 
education becomes increasingly important 
to universities, many provosts spoke of a 
reliance on electronic resources with the 
importance of remote access being foremost 
and, thus, physical location taking a back 
seat. Dane Ward, coordinator of the infor­
mation literacy program highlighted Wayne 
State’s new undergraduate library, the David 
Adamany Undergraduate Library which con­
tains state-of-the-art technology and infor­
mation resources.

The last item addressed was the impor­
tance of collaboration between librarians and 
university faculty and im proved learning 
through these efforts. Provosts have seen 
librarians come out of the library to support 
learning in new ways. Three ways that li­
brarians are collaborating on a num ber of 
campuses were discussed. First, the provosts 
agreed that librarians are providing a nec­
essary service by instructing all, from stu­
dents to administration, to critically evalu­
ate and choose sources from the wealth of 
information available. Information literacy 
competencies and the idea of instructing all 
to “separate the wheat from the ch aff’ was 
a recurrent theme.

Another idea that was addressed several 
times was the importance of librarians serv­
ing on instructional teams. An administrator 
from Indiana University Purdue University 
Indianapolis (IUPUI) spoke of the automatic 
inclusion of librarians in th ree-m em b er 
teams, which also include the professor and 
a computing services or technology mem­
ber. Through the librarian team members, 
the faculty are advised of resources avail­
able for subjects and disciplines that may 
have otherwise been overlooked. The im­
portance of librarians being given instruc- 
tor-of-record status was also noted.

When librarians are given this status, their 
contributions tend to be given more cred­
ibility and wider acceptance.

Lastly, in this era of explosive technologi­



422 I  C&RL News ■  June 1998

cal advances, on many campuses librarians 
have been asked to take on an instructional 
role to the faculty. Whether instructing faculty 
to use databases or e-mail or bringing their 
expertise concerning intellectual property to 
a variety of committees and projects, academic 
librarians are rising to meet the challenge.

As the session ended, the group was 
thanked and asked if similar sessions should

CNI spring task force meeting
ACRL continues as a m em ber of the 

C o a litio n  fo r N e tw o rk e d  In fo rm a tio n  
(CNI), w hich offers a variety of program s 
about m em bers’ activities and national ini­
tiatives regarding the provision and orga­
nization of electronic inform ation. This 
spring’s m eeting in Arlington was followed 
im m ediately by the Educom  Net 98 m e e t­
ing and an Internet2 conclave, w hich e n ­
abled atten d ees to take in several events, 
including a joint reception  sp o n so re d  by 
IBM.

The keynote speaker, Michael Lesk, is the 
recently appointed Director of Information 
and Intelligent Systems at the National Sci­
ence Foundation.

Lesk, who is on leave from Bellcore, pre­
sented a panoply of digital facts and w on­
dered what humans will make of all of our 
information capacity. Dialog’s databases con­
tain 9.2 terabytes, Lexis 5.9; the Library of 
Congress contains 20 terabytes w orth of 
books and 3,000 altogether w hen graphics 
are included. Amateur photographers cre­
ate 520,000 terabytes each year, or 520 
petabytes. If we saved all phone calls in the 
United States, there would be 4,000 petabytes 
each year.

On the other hand, the average human 
has a memory of about 200 megabytes and 
could take in 2 gigabytes of information dur­
ing a lifetime, assuming that nothing was 
forgotten. How far should we go in archiving, 
and how will we use it all? Most of the data 
sent back from space flights sits forever un­
used. Librarians, Lesk says, are more impor­
tant than ever as we attempt to organize 
masses of information and help people to 
use it.

The heart of CNI is the multitude of small

be scheduled in the future. The response 
was a resounding yes. At that point, it was 
suggested that faculty and student groups 
be present at the table for these discussions. 
The provosts appreciated the opportunity 
to discuss topics related to the library in a 
way that they could never do in other fo­
rum s.— A lthea H. J e n k in s a n d  Laverne 
Sim oneaux

breakout sessions. In addition to the obliga­
tory Internet2 updates, there w ere a vari­
ety of breakout sessions covering activi­
ties at individual institutions, such as the 
University of Michigan’s Digital Library Ini­
tiatives program — an integrated activity of 
the library and cam pus inform ation tech­
nology services with 18 full-time employ­
e e s — a n d  th e  U n iv e rsity  of S o u th e rn  
California’s reorganization of library and in­
form ation technology services under the 
leadership of Jerry Campbell; group activi­
ties, such as digitizing college archives at 
the Five Colleges Consortium of Western 
Massachusetts; and reports on a variety of 
CNI-related projects, such as the Scholarly 
Publishing and Academic Resources Coa­
lition (SPARC), which is trying to provide 
alternatives to high-priced traditional p u b ­
lishing in ways that suit scholarship and in­
tellectual property rights, and CNI’s “Assess­
ing the Academic Networked Environment” 
project, w hich is looking for assessm ent 
measures in areas such as user support and 
network use.

One interesting aspect of the sessions was 
the num ber that focused on humanities ac­
tivities—such as the Art Museum Image Con­
sortium (AMICO), a network of large art mu­
seums formed to build a large, digital multi- 
media library of documentation of works of 
art for educational use—and the Arts and 
Humanities Data Services project (AHDS), 
the British government-funded project which 
collects, preserves, and encourages the use 
of digital resources in the humanities. Such 
sessions indicate clearly that CNI, and net­
worked information in general, is now of 
equal importance in all areas of scholarly 
activity.— William Miller