The Future of Academic Libraries for Florida Higher

Education Planning

Predictions based on my experience, observations of larger higher education trends and my hunches.

David Shulenburger, A۰P۰L۰U,

Vice President for Academic Affairs

Our Digital FutureI. The collections of university libraries

increasingly will be made up of digital objects. Very few print items will be acquired in ten years.

II. The physical volumes that remain will have value beyond their content, making their retention in physical form worthwhile; in most cases their content will be available digitally.   

There is little value in having shelf space taken up in 500 universities by copies of the January 1954 American

Economic Review

III. To permit economies in holding physical artifacts, libraries will/must organize methods of ensuring that a few physical copies of most artifacts are preserved across the "system" of research libraries.

Implications for patrons and space• Less space will be needed for books• Almost all access to collections can be remote (and will

be)• Unique collections will be digitized and most collections

will be moved to inexpensive storage facilities.• Few students or faculty will come to the library to access

collections.• Library patron space will be converted to computer

access and group study spaces-the “learning commons.” (On some campuses library space will be converted to classroom and other non library uses.)

Implications for personnel and technology

• Fewer personnel will be needed for the logistical tasks of retrieving and shelving books

• Librarians will focus on electronic resources- acquiring, organizing, documenting, preserving

• The library will focus on assisting students and faculty in doing high quality research in the digital world.

• A high premium will be placed on integration between libraries and information technology

IV. Acquisition of Relevant Collections will become a key

strategic activity.• Electronic Information Vendors will have

increased market power. Licensing terms will supplant copyright as the major force restricting distribution of information.

• Buyers of information will increasingly find that they will benefit from membership in buying cooperatives as market power on the buyers side of the market is required to offset market power on the seller’s side of the market.

V. Holding material generated by institutional faculty will a become

valued library activity.• The information commons will reemerge

as a users of information who are also producers of information determine that free exchange of information with other producer/users is the most effective strategy for distributing research and gaining access to research. The “circle of gifts” will reemerge.

Circle of Gifts

• The original concept that underlay the first scholarly society journals—I will give you access to my scholarship in exchange for access to yours.

• Desire for the Circle will reemerge as scholars see their ability to conduct research constrained by difficulties in accessing research and the federal government, its funding agencies and private foundations embrace public access.

University Mandated Deposit of Faculty Research

Va. Ultimately, this will lead most research universities to follow the lead of Harvard, MIT, the University of Kansas and the roughly 100 others world-wide that have adopted faculty “mandated” deposit of scholarly works into public access repositories.   The movement to mandate deposit will be faculty-led, but supported by provosts and presidents.  

OrVb. Alternately, Deposit may be required as a

condition of awarding credit for producing knowledge

Major Florida Universities Already have the Capacity to Digitally Collect

Faculty ResearchAccording to the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) four

Florida Universities have Open Digital Archives Now

• Florida State FSU Libraries Digital Library Center Institutional Repository

• Florida Atlantic Digitool@Florida Atlantic

• Florida International DigitalCommons@Florida International University

• University of Florida University of Florida Digital Collections

Implications

• As more libraries hold their faculty's works in electronic archives that are fully accessible through the web, the circle of gifts will effectively increase the holdings of all libraries at minimal costs.

VII. The Public will also value access to faculty published and unpublished works

The public is accustomed to accessing material on the internet but that generally does not steer them to valuable material created by their own tax dollars.

Search of the University of Nebraska Institutional Digital Repository the sort of things Nebraska

citizens might be interested in:

• Colic 17

• Muskrats 135

• Milton 334

• Switch Grass 103

• Clean Coal 71

• Electoral College 34

• Swine Flu 32 (as of 5/8/09)

This is an opportunity for “branding”

This is an opportunity for the public earn a visible return on tax dollars and to expect their legislature to increase the funding for higher education.

THE NATIONAL PICTUREUS Education Revenue by Source,

per FTE in 2009 Dollars

$10,287

$11,010

$7,769 $6,904

$2,518$4,106

$-

$2,000

$4,000

$6,000

$8,000

$10,000

$12,000

Educational Revenue Educational Approriations Net Tuition Revenue

US FTE enrollment up 47% from 1984 to 2009

The Florida PictureFlorida's Higher Education Revenue by Source,

Per FTE in 2009 Dollars

$8,568$8,567

$6,340$7,107

$2,229$1,460

$-

$2,000

$4,000

$6,000

$8,000

$10,000

Educational Revenue Educational Approriation Net Tuition Revenue

Florida FTE enrollment up 95% from 1984 to 2009

The repositories will be Public Access – not Open Access

VIII. Most items deposited will be freely accessible by all, with a few items embargoed for varying time periods until intellectual property constraints which accompany those items are satisfied.

Implications• We will finally know what our faculty actually do

and what they produce with their time devoted to scholarship

• So will governing boards, legislators, citizens, donors, research funding agencies and foundations

• Increasingly good search engines will improve the visibility of faculty - world-wide

• University Reputations for research will be based less on hunches and more on evidence – citations, down-loads, etc.

VIII. Libraries will again become Major Contributors to University

Reputation

• University libraries will be minor contributors to university reputation unless they focus on providing access and making the campus visible on the web.

• Consider the vs. the U.S. News Ranking of U.S. Universities vs. the Webometrics ranking :

US News and World Report Peer Assessment 25% Fame 25%Percent classes under 20 6%Percent class more than 50 2%Average faculty salary 7%Percent of Professors with Highest Degree 3% Wealth 30%Student/Faculty ratio 1%% of faculty full time 1%Spending per Student 10%% of students in top 10 % of High School Class 6%SAT scores 7.5%Acceptance Rate 1.5% Exclusivity 40% Graduation rate 16%Retention Rate 4%Alumni Giving Rate 5%Graduation rate (predicted vs. actual) 5% Quality 5%

Kevin Carey, College Rankings Reformed, Education Sector, 2006

Webometrics – CriteriaConsejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC),

the largest public research body in Spain. 20% Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live

Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalized to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum.

50% Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search. Results are log-normalized to 1 for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank.

15% Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google and merging the results for each file type after log-normalizing in the same way as described before.

15% Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items.

Weight

Webometrics --- US News Ranking--------- Ranking

1. Harvard2. MIT3. Stanford4. Berkeley 5. Cornell6. Washington7. Minnesota8. Johns Hopkins9. Michigan 10. Wisconsin 11. Caltech12. Texas 13. Illinois 14. Penn 15. Carnegie Mellon 16. Columbia 17. UCLA18. Maryland 19. Purdue 20. Texas A&M21. Penn State22. UNC23. Michigan State24. Indiana25. Florida

1. Harvard2. Princeton3. Yale4. Caltech5. MIT6. Stanford7. Penn8. Columbia9. Chicago10. Duke11. Dartmouth12. Northwestern13. Washington14. Johns Hopkins15. Cornell16. Brown17. Emory18. Rice 19. Vanderbilt20. Notre Dame21. UC Berkeley22. Carnegie Mellon23. Georgetown24. UCLA25. Virginia

9 private and

16 Public

21 private and

4

public

The Transformation of Scholarly Journals

IX. Within a very few years, most scholarly journals voluntarily will make all of their content available for public access, not just the content covered by a university or funding-agency mandate, within one year of publication in the journal.  

  X. Scholarly Journals, both subscription based

and open access, will continue to survive in this environment.

Implications

• Journal demand will come to be more elastic as libraries make decisions at the margin to provide access to scholarship through public access routes rather than pay extraordinary subscription fees.

• Journal price inflation will moderate

• Libraries will have more flexibility to allocate funding to support digital activities

Summary• Libraries will continue to change rapidly• Students, Faculty and the Tax-paying Public will

demand broad digital access to collections• Collections will enlarge to include works by own

faculty members• Libraries will become more important to building

institutional reputation• The future of university libraries is bright if they

become major vehicles for making all scholarly work available to their students, faculty and the public.