Culture Morph

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The Digital Library

Culture Morph

6/1/2007

By Susan D. Heid

Technologists and librarians are discovering that intelligent organizational overlap is the route to the digital library of the future.

Historically, it's been an unavoidable truth: IT people and library people have not been inclined to come to the concept of service with the same view. For IT, it's been all about keeping the servers and systems up, the websites going, and the help desk calls and their turnaround times to a minimum. For library professionals, service has meant keeping multimedia information and reference accessible; books, tapes, CDs, and other sources in order; and the environment primed for research and study.

At Rhodes College, Bob Johnson's merged IT/librarian team undergoes training to provide a single point of contact for most customer service issues-- research or technical.

Yet, in higher education today, the term "library" no longer denotes just a physical place, nor does "IT" denote a job so behind the academic scene that students are unaware it exists on campus.

The fact is, when these two essential campus areas work together well, magic happens--and that is especially true in small, private institutions of higher education.

Harmonious Culture Clash

At Rhodes College (TN), a 1,700-student Presbyterian-affiliated institution near downtown Memphis, 1999 was a year that Bob Johnson remembers well: That was when the library and IT organizations came together, and Johnson was hired to manage both (in addition to institutional research), as CIO and VP for information services.

"What we were trying to do here is realize the potential of the larger group, as opposed to remaining in smaller groups that were working on similar issues," he explains. The concept was a good one, but the transition wasn't without its headaches, he admits.

"Before we moved into the building that we're in now, the organization was split across four locations: the IT staff was divided between two classroom buildings, librarians were in the library, and the administrative office was in a building used for both classrooms and administrative functions. There were aspects of that arrangement that didn't contribute to working well together, but at least we were getting our work done," Johnson recalls. "As soon as we came together [in the same building], we increased the potential for people to work together--and to quarrel."

A multitude of differences between the two organizations surfaced: Librarians were used to working in conjunction with one another in open spaces, and IT workers were accustomed to working individually in their own offices. Similarly, librarians tended toward regimentation in their work days. ("They always knew when their coffee break was going to be," explains Johnson, "but IT got around to it when they got around to it.") Librarians generally come equipped with master's degrees; not all IT workers do. What's more, says Johnson, librarians have a "100-year horizon," while IT people need to deliver results "yesterday."