In yesterday's plenary session, Dr. Breivik established the first of the three themes for this Conference--the changing mission of higher education-- and this morning, I'm going to explore with you the role that some of those changes will have in the profession of librarianship, and how the profession is likely to play out in the not too distant future in our academic libraries.
In the September CARL Newsletter, my charge today is stated as "[I am to] outline my vision of the changing nature of the library and information management profession, and the future of the relationship between the professional education programs and the staffing practices of academic libraries." Now, in a letter, Bill suggests that I try and include "some stimulating and even provocative speculations." I'm not sure whether he's suggesting that I please not be too dull [laughter], or whether I should incite to riot, ... I don't know. I'll do my best.
Much of what lies behind this charge, however, I think begs for definition, so a fair amount of my time is going to be spent looking at our notions of this thing called the library, and this profession called librarianship.

Librarianship in a struggle for survival

I posit, here at the beginning, that in all of its venues, librarianship is engaged, not only in its traditional struggle for resources, both inside and outside the academy, but also, for the first time, librarianship is involved in an emerging struggle with other professions and disciplines, both for its existing domain, and for emerging niches in the information universe for which librarianship might be suited. Many of the modest changes that you've seen in the schools of librarianship, and even greater changes waiting in the wings, are being shaped somewhat by this emerging competition among professions and disciplines, because others see the processes underlying the creation, the storage, access and dissemination of information, and its use, as sources of power, wealth and professional recognition in an age of information as commodity. So it's far from clear to me that many professionals in the field are willing to pursue the adaptive behaviors necessary to the survival of the profession. It is equally unclear, to me, whether the professions and disciplines with an eye on information management, information itself, and information systems might not engage in the sorts of preemptive adaptive behavior that would challenge the credibility of librarianship even in its traditional niches. I would say that, not only is the jury out on that, but the trial has hardly begun. But it's nevertheless here to be reckoned with.

Introduction

For my comments this morning, I'll look at what appears to me, and talk at some length, about what I think is central and immutable about the definition of this profession, and its work, in light of the demands made on libraries as they transition from institutions identified in terms of place, and finite, container-based collections, to logical entities--frequently geographically distributed--which provide context, amidst a flood of information and misinformation. In the course of the discussion, I'll hint at my response to one of the questions I saw reflected in the [CARL] Newsletter, as to whether there is a future for us, in the university or anywhere else, and that response is, although cautiously given, in the affirmative -- but a positive role in our current niche and in others evolving will come only at a price.
So, what is driving all of our concerns today, in this room? For me, at least, it's without doubt the transforming power of the emerging information technologies. In a short period of time-- really less than a decade--we've watched the dramatic release of information from the tangible media--the containers, if you will--that were the past focus of our profession. We've watched these technologies blur the notion of library as place, and our notion of a geographically constrained constituency. So today we find ourselves here, looking at re-tooling in the face of the inevitable changes in our domain--some that have already occurred, and others that are yet to come. So this morning, I want to divide my talk into three parts. The first part, I'll talk about the shape of the emerging library and some of the technologies driving its development. Second, I'll frame what is meant by librarianship in that emerging environment. And then I'll close by exploring with you the potential relationship between schools of librarianship and information studies --no matter what they're called...[laughter]-- and your libraries as they are both re- tooled and transformed. (I didn't really mean anything, but there's a lot in names, I guess.) So let me start with some of the changes.

Changes in the library and its environment

Paul Saffo recently said that "the relationship between burgeoning paper and even more rapid electronic diffusion resembles an expanding sphere, in which volume increases more rapidly than surface area. The information business has become a kind of piñata, a thin paper crust surrounding an enabling electronic core. Paper has become the artifact of electronic media but we barely notice, because the paper crust conceals the core." And that's kind of going to be the theme of where I'm going to be heading.
Among the factors shaping the evolution of Saffo's digital core are accelerating developments in computing, in telecommunication technologies and their fusion with computing, and complex new information structures that are emerging, first in primitive forms, such as multi- and hyper- media, and others as yet to come. Now, Moore's Law tells us that computing power will double every 18 months, and in fact what we're really seeing is a doubling of power every year, with an order of magnitude change every three or four years. We're seeing stunning 30% performance improvements a year in telecommunications--a performance, by the way, which is outstripping the rate of development in semiconductor technologies. The difference is expected (between those two technologies) to accelerate over the course of the next decade, and I think what we'll see emerging at the end of that (or a little further down the road) is the inevitable digital library.
The third technology of interest to us, at least this morning, is the rapid emergence of new, complex data structures. The convergence of all of these technologies are transforming, and will continue to transform, libraries and the roles played by information professionals. While Saffo's enabling core will free us of geographic constraints to information access (and, by the way, access to the full educational experience, ultimately), it will result, as it already is, in a deluge of information in complex new forms that are exacerbating the need to alleviate information overload for information consumers through the development both of new tools for structuring geographically distributed information in order to provide for rational access, and the development of new service models. So it goes without saying, that these technologies are rapidly transforming how we teach, they're transforming how we learn, and construct knowledge. In other words, they're fundamentally transforming the university itself, its libraries, and the profession of librarianship. To handle the tasks ahead, we need a new breed, and a newly re-tooled breed, of librarians. So, having said that about the technology, to complete my charge, I'll explore the ramifications of some of these changes on the future role of librarians, as well as the content of the profession's knowledge base, which itself is shifting. In order to do that, I need to take a little bit of time to define what I mean by this notion of librarianship, and of course, in order to do that, I've got to look at libraries and talk about what is happening there.

Definition of librarianship

As simple as it may seem, in terms of definition, I've come to recognize that there is much misunderstanding lurking behind the notion of librarianship. And, you might as well get "where I'm coming from" here at the top, so we can avoid some confusion later on. In the end, what will settle out of these remarks are the following three things: (1) the concept of library as place, both in the university and without, is giving way, and will continue to give way, to one of library as logical entity. (2) There is a relatively immutable base, core, of professional expertise in librarianship that can guide us in our exploration of professional identity in this new information universe, and provide for a definition of new skill sets that will be necessary to survive in it. And (3) that immutable core of professional expertise will be played out in the near future in strikingly new ways, and in strikingly new skill sets, in the library as logical entity.

Typology of libraries

So let me start by giving you a typology of libraries. (I'll try and keep it brief, because the real goal is to go beyond that, and I also see that Michael Buckland is sitting in the back there, and he recently covered this territory of the typology of libraries in great detail, and so if you have questions, you can go ask him, afterwards.) I want to look at it for a moment, though, because I want to trace along this continuum so that we can look at some pivotal shifts in our notion of collection and service. Now this typology doesn't exactly match Michael's, but it is a continuum which begins with the traditional library, moves to the automated library, then what I call the hybrid library, and then finally to the digital library, which is of concern to me today. The picture of that traditional library is sort of the Carnegie library that we all grew up with, that I went to in the fifties, when I was in high school, to study. And it's a place with a finite collection that's housed, and owned. All access is geographically constrained--you had to go there. And, most important, all information is container-based, or embodied in tangible media--no digital stuff in that library.
The first incursions into this by computing technologies were in the automated library, and, as Michael pointed out, all that did, was help us do what we were doing before, but maybe do it a little better. So we got OPAC's, and circulation control, and serials control, and all of those transaction-intensive things, but it's basically the same stuff. That automation push did really nothing to affect our service models--basically nothing. And the nature of collections, in a pure sense, remained container-based and finite.
The first incursions of telecommunications technologies come with linking to bibliographic utilities and subsequently to even greater sharing of resources. Now with the hybrid libraries, which is the third one down this typology, we get the first glimpse of what it means to not just be in the information container business, but in the information business. We start dealing in a broad mix of tangible media, as well as digital information--both stored locally and accessed at a distance. And then finally, we get to the digital library, which as a pure type has no geographic locus. With it, geographic constraints to access will be gone, for both primary and meta-information, and that will result (and I'll talk about this a little bit later) in profound changes in the service models that we provide our patrons.
So shifts along this continuum are of the following. The service models begin to change, and along with simple resource provision, we get consultative, value-added agency services. By that, I mean the following. The resource-provision model is of this sort. Patron has a problem. Patron comes to the library. Patron talks to the librarian. Librarian says "X, Y and Z may contain your answer." They provide the resource, and the patron "walks the last mile," culling out the information, using the information. Basically, we weren't interested in the use, and that last endeavor--synthesis, and so forth, was the patron's problem. So that was the service model that marks a lot of what we've done, basically, in our libraries. That's giving way to a consultative model, in which the processes of synthesis, and analysis, and the creating of new information products, is going to become increasingly the role of the librarian. And we've seen this movement in special libraries, but I think it's permeating research groups in academic institutions and also in the private sector. The attributes of that model are--and we've heard some of these before-- the right information to the right person at the right time, and to this we'll add, at the right place, in the right form, at the right price. So it's actually delivering information products. So the service models are going to change. And what we do in schools, to prepare people for that shift in service models, is going to also shift what we do.

Changes in concept of collection

A second shift along the continuum is our notion of collection. It starts as a finite array of content-bearing objects, owned and housed, in the traditional library. And our concept of collection, as we move across that continuum, becomes increasingly strained, as we all know. And some would assert that, by the time we get to the digital library, there'll be no such thing as collection anymore--which I think is hogwash!--(and I'll talk about why a little bit later). But there is that movement in our conception of collection, and what that means.
Along that continuum, there's also a change in intermediation. The role played between the user information need and the data store, in the past, has been a human process--the reference librarian, a librarian, that serves the intermediary function. As we move toward the digital library, more and more frequently that function will shift to the machine (although anybody that knows what goes on in a reference interview knows we're a long way from machines being able to take the place of full intermediation--a long way.) And, in fact, the abundance and complexity that are brought through digital information in fact are increasing the need for human intermediation. But even as we move into the digital library, somewhere there will be humans, doing some of that intermediation, or a great deal of it.
We also see along that shift that we're moving from being in the information container business to being in the information business itself. John Perry Barlow, a couple of years ago--I guess it was at ASIS mid-year, in Portland--talked about information as fine wine, and that now we're at a point where the wine has been let out of the bottle, and all the time we thought we were in the wine business, when what we were in was the bottling, and the bottle- schlepping business. And that now, for the first time, we're confronted, in digital form, with the information itself. So suddenly, that also comes as a big shift in the way we handle who we are.
And then finally, our notion of library as place begins to shift to a notion of library as logical entity. Now the dynamics of some of these shifts have a lot of people nervous. When I hear about "re-tooling"...--some of this makes us nervous. So I'd like in the next few moments to kind of calm our fears, and talk about librarianship and what effect this movement will have on librarianship. And to do so, I need to play a little bit like an academic, so you'll have to bear with me.

Professional expertise

I think we can take professional expertise-- and I don't care what profession it is, it doesn't matter--and layer it out into a hierarchy of three layers. At the top are core areas of professional expertise. These are immutable, and they are defined by the societal problem the profession seeks to solve, and therefore defines all professionals within the profession. In library and information science, there are three core areas of professional expertise, and those are immutable. And you can't be a professional if you've got two of them. You've got to have three of them. (Clearly you can't be if you have one.) But those are immutable--sit at the top. And they are what basically define us.
The next level down are what I call dimensions of practice. They too are immutable, but not all dimensions are mastered by all professionals. So this would be the arena of specialization, and so forth. But nevertheless, they're immutable, and in library and information studies, there are four, and I'll talk about two of them in depth, and brush on two of them.
And then at the bottom of that hierarchy are skill sets for functioning along those dimensions. And the skill sets are variable--they change a lot--but they're necessary to successful action along any of those four dimensions. In LIS, they are potentially vast in number, tend to be context-sensitive: for example, is the context a library? Is it some other form of information center? What are the skills that are there?
What I'm going to do is explore the top two of those. I'm not going to play around much with skills. (And if you ever talk to my faculty, you'd get the impression that I think nothing of skills. Not quite true. But I think it's the top two levels that really define us as a profession.) I'll touch tangentially on the skills, because I think they are the most sensitive to technological change--the skills are not the immutable parts. I also think that it's the bottom layer, or the two bottom layers, that are most susceptible to being handled by paraprofessionals, who can fit into the architecture of the professional structure (and I'll talk a little about that at the end.)
So let's take the top one. Recently, Marcia Bates, from UCLA, and Nancy Van House, from UC Berkeley, and I, served along side library professionals from around the state on a Task Force for the California Library Association regarding the future of librarianship. So the results of some of what I'm going to talk about are the results of deliberations there, and I'm going to preempt them a little bit by telling you some of them. About a year ago, Marcia Bates, in an unpublished paper, defined what I believe are those core areas that rest at the top -- they will sound simple, but they're not.

Core areas of professional expertise

Those core areas of professional expertise are knowledge of information, knowledge of information technology, and knowledge of users. Now it sounds simple. But it is knowledge in those three areas that basically define who we are and how we approach the problem we have decided to solve--the information problem. Now, there are other disciplines and professions out there that are interested in the same things. We could take computer science. Well, they know a lot about information technology. They know a lot about information, or at least enough, when it impacts on the structure of the technology, but they know nothing about content (which we do). And computer science, basically, isn't very interested in users. [laughter] All you've got to do is look at the fact that human factors and interface design have made very little inroads into schools of computer science in our major research institutions, because the user is sort of tangential to that technology.
This is not to say that they couldn't become interested. And many people, in terms of looking at credibility in a digital age, are praying that they do. It's one of those things [where] Breivik says "we've got to bring ourselves to the table."
Anyway, Marcia defined those three areas. Now there is "penumbral" knowledge (that's the lawyer in me talking) penumbral knowledge around that and that is the professional is also aware of the social, political, and economic context in which those core areas interact, and I think that also makes us unique.
So those are the top three--got to have all three.

Four dimensions of practice

Nancy Van House and I worked on the Task Force at the second level looking at the dimensions of practice, and there are four of them. There is a tool-making dimension, an information-management or tool-use dimension, an agency dimension, and a management of information organizations dimension. Let me take them one at a time. I'll only deal with the first two only in any depth.
The tool-making dimension confuses many professional librarians (... which surprises me). If you look back, at the end of the 19th Century, you find Dewey. Melvyl Dewey was a librarian, but he was also a tool-maker. The great librarians at the Library of Congress and on the continent who created the magnificent organizational schemes that have controlled the way we organize information for most of this century. They were all great tool-makers. Michael [Buckland] and I have had talks about when we dropped the ball as a profession and cease being tool-makers, and become mere tool-users. And we are. Students come to us with their tool-kit open, ready to be filled with tools to use.
The whole process of the creation of new tools was something where the schools dropped the ball--we as a profession dropped the ball--and I think it's going to be somewhat defining, whether we survive or not, whether we have the initiative to pick that ball up again. And we have to stop being the complainers. Every problem is somebody else's problem--every design problem, every implementation problem. It's the vendor. It's those people out on the Internet, who just don't know how to organize information. And we're floundering around there as fragile, innocent users, instead of assuming a role in the tool- making process. I should not speak for Berkeley, but I am trusting that, in the new school that emerges there, there is a keen sense of identity in terms of tool-making, and bringing that back. Because I think it's critical. Someone's got to do it. Someone's got to conquer cyberspace with tools that make sense. Which doesn't mean taking Dewey out there, ... or LCSH. No, no, no.
Second dimension: Information management or tool-use dimension. Now for me, this dimension is the creation or the structuring of context, or information architecture, that's ferreted out of available information. In the end, there is nothing useful, or good, about unstructured access to all the world's information. We all know that. Again, anyone who has wandered around lost--"navigating" is the term--on the Internet, knows what we are talking about. No context. Libraries provide context.
Now my favorite example to illustrate this idea is to take a look at collection development. And I like to wed collection development with my favorite story about Harvard Law--or rumor about Harvard Law. Being an intellectual property lawyer and a onetime law librarian, everybody kind of bows twice to the East, to Harvard Law. And there was a rumor--probably just that, but it's instructive--that the collection policy at Harvard Law was "If it exists, buy it." Now if you really think about it, that's no policy at all! Because what we've got, really, is--we've got Harvard Law, sitting out here, with that, and at the other end are you folks, working in libraries with severe economic constraints, where a great deal of judgment has to be expressed in order to construct a context that will work for your users. So I like to say that every single library that's out here--not Harvard Law--is in essence an opinion piece. They express an opinion, the best opinion that a group of librarians can express about the needs of a certain group, and the information containers, etc., that will satisfy those needs.
Now, there are those who will say that this belies the objectivity required for good collection development. I think that those who have that opinion have fallen prey to the popular misunderstanding in our society that objectivity denotes an absence of point of view-- which is not true. So great libraries express a point of view, and great expressions of opinion. That's not going to go away in the digital universe. Well, it hasn't even arrived on the Internet. Again, you'll get that I like Paul Saffo. Here's Paul again. Paul Saffo notes, when talking about the Internet, "It is this plethora of content that will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift, and sort and gather the morsels that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs neither to the conduit or content players, but to those that control the filtering, the searching, and the sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace."
Now, John Perry Barlow, of the Grateful Dead among other things, echoes Saffo's thoughts in the following terms, "In a world of floating realities and contradictory maps, rewards will accrue to those commentators whose maps seem to fit their territory snugly, based on their ability to yield predictable results for those who use them. Reality is an edit. People are willing to pay for the authority of those editors whose filtering point of view seems to fit best." That's collection development in a different place. So tool-use, the structuring of context, that's not going to go away. That's why I say it's immutable. How it will be played out, will change. The skills underneath it will change. But it will not.
Agency: The agency dimension--that's the third--I've already suggested that there is this inexorable shift from the resource provision to a consultative agency model. And I think that will continue. It will have ramifications. It means a lot of increased specialization and increased subject expertise, in order to play those roles effectively, so we may see a shift in the kind of person, or the educational backgrounds, of people coming into this profession. I won't say any more about it.
And the last one I will say nothing about-- because I don't know anything about it--and that is the management of information organizations. However, I can't imagine, even in a digital environment, that there is not something to be managed.

Core expertise and the dimensions of practice are context- independent

So, those are the four dimensions. Now this is important to get, because in a minute I going to go over to the schools and talk about education. Please note that the core areas of expertise--information, information technology, and knowledge of users--are really context- independent, as are the four dimensions of practice. You can practice them... anywhere--EVEN in a library. But not necessarily in a library. For example, consider a librarian attached to a research unit, either in the public sector or the private sector, providing consultative research services. Knowledge of information, knowledge of information technologies, knowledge of the users. Consider an information broker. Knowledge of information, knowledge of information technologies, knowledge of users. Consider the new systems designers, when we wake up to the tool-making function. Same thing. The new tool-makers must be informed by those three things--not the computer science two, (or one and a half), but all three. So even in the structuring of context, in a digital universe, it need not take place within anything closely resembling the contemporary library. So I guess the bottom line is: librarianship and libraries are not co-extensive. The profession of librarianship can function well, and is functioning well, outside of libraries, as well as within it.

Library education

So let me close with talking about education, and what's going on there. Well, you can't have that much change in the environment and not have change in the schools. And we are changing. Let me frame it by going back about fifteen years, to a guy by the name of Robert Taylor, who was on the faculty at Syracuse University and was subsequently dean there. He talked about how we view the information universe; and what he said was "We have this Ptolemaic view, with the library at the center, and with users all around it." And I think that pretty well was the truth, back with that Carnegie library where I studied and read as a child, it was the truth. If I couldn't go next door and get the information some easier way, I went to the library to get it. Well, Taylor said, "Hey folks, because of these emerging technologies, this view of the universe isn't going to work!" And what he suggested was what he called the Copernican view of the information universe, which has information at the center, as the focus, and around it are a whole series of planets, among which are libraries, and DIALOG, and the Internet (of course, the Internet didn't exist then--it wasn't in his drawing of that universe). But libraries will play an important role, but probably not the most important role, in the mechanisms for information access for a lot of people. And that our focus must come to center on the information itself--we need to make that Copernican shift. That shift, by the way, if you think back to what's happening technologically in the library, and so forth, follows that same movement--the liberation, as Barlow would say, of the wine from the bottle. Suddenly we're confronted with the information, and this is what Taylor was talking about, a number of years ago.

Schools shift from focus on library to focus on information

So, instead of an educational system that focuses on an institution-- and that is what our educational system has done, because the center of our universe was the library--and the preparation of spare parts for that institution, instead, the focus needs to be on the information and on the core areas of expertise necessary to practice. So that the focus is on information itself and its use. Here's what we see beginning to emerge in our studies--suddenly we're looking at the user, but we're not simply doing studies of their use of library materials, we're looking at them in terms of cognition, information-seeking behavior, how are they looking for stuff outside of these contexts. So a whole new view of the user is emerging because suddenly we're focusing in on information, information use and how people go about finding it, and getting it, and using it.
But this shift means that we are suddenly looking at programs of study that are less institutionally-based. Now we can pick up there and look at all of the arguments and everything that we've been hearing about the name of our schools. Because the focus of study has shifted from the institution to the processes that underlie information creation, storage, transfer and use we've watched schools across the country making that shift--started with some of the major schools. And at a price. At Illinois, many of the people in the alumni association were getting ready to pull their support, because they didn't recognize that there had been a fundamental shift in the universe. Doesn't eliminate libraries! Libraries are still very, very important. But a fundamental shift.
Recently the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Tennessee became the School of Information Science. It's going to be very, very interesting to see what happens when a school has the opportunity to spring full-grown from the forehead of Zeus--which is getting ready to happen across the Bay [UC Berkeley]--it's going to be very, very interesting, because for the first time, we'll get to see a school that has the opportunity to not have to slowly migrate, but actually pick itself up and put itself into a Copernican universe. And I think that's bloody exciting! And, we're all going to be watching you folks over there.

Paraprofessionals - Role and education

Well, let me try and do some wrapping up here. I want to talk about paraprofessionals and stuff, and continuing education, and the education of paraprofessionals. If you go back to that hierarchy of expertise, and I say, at the top are those three, and every professional must have those three, and then there are the dimensions of practice below it, and then the skills sets that support them. Paraprofessionals have an integral role to play. They don't get the hand-me-downs of stuff we don't want to do anymore, or we don't have time to do anymore. There is an integral role for them to play. Thus, there is an integral role for us as educators to take care of them and their education. So, I would describe a paraprofessional as somebody who has the broad skill sets at the bottom to function on one of those dimensions. They may lack the penumbral knowledge, and the stuff at the top, but they're an integral part, and in fact, knowledge for the professional is going to be in the higher end, and down at the bottom are going to be the paraprofessionals who will fill in to a rational structure, instead of hand-me-downs, and doing what we don't want to do. So...we need to assist in their education. So I don't think it's a question whether we want to do it, should do it--I think that's moot. It has to be done. And it has to be done with honor, and dignity, so that they fit into the profession. And, if I find a paraprofessional that in fact has all three things at the top--knowledge of information, knowledge of information technology, and knowledge of users, and the penumbral view of how it functions, and how they interact--that IS a professional, regardless of the credential. Now, as a school that gives out credentials, that's probably a very dangerous thing to say, but they are a professional because that's what defines us, those functions. So we need to take that into tow, and integrate.

Continuing education

Continuing education: With accelerated change, obviously, the change in that hierarchy occurs at the bottom. The other stuff--fairly immutable. But the technologies and stuff that are impacting the skill sets at the bottom need to be of concern to us, and they need to be of concern to us for the following reason--it will decide whether we will survive, on whether we can re-tool, and keep re-tooling, and keep re-tooling. Because these other disciplines and things out there are ready. And I don't want to hear it--and I HEAR it from people all the time--"My library won't give me the release time." "My library won't pay for it." Well, it may mean survival--not from internal attack (though I guess your boss could fire you, but..), not internally, but from the outside. Because information as commodity is a very attractive thing today. And that's why you see all these mergers, and things--of transport carriers, and content--they all see it. And your survival is going to depend on doing what Dr. Breivik suggests-- getting "to the table," and being prepared to keep up, with stuff that is moving so fast that my students now have to show me what's going on, because they're playing around down there. It's moving very, very fast.

Conclusion

So, let me conclude. I've said enough, and I will conclude in an inelegant manner. But these are very exciting, I think, and frequently-- obviously--difficult times. And we are all, libraries and schools of LIS alike, in this process of re-tooling and transformation, in order to meet the challenges of this digital age. And since I, for one, value the partnership between the profession and its professional schools, I really deeply appreciate the opportunity today to be able to talk with you about how I see the universe shaping up.

Thank you.

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Stuart A. Sutton ssutton@ericir.syr.edu.