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The Digital Library

Culture Morph

6/1/2007

By Susan D. Heid

"It's definitely not quiet," echoes Sister M. Carroll Isselmann, vice president for academic affairs.

At the Gabriele Library, students can leave a driver's license or dorm key at the front desk and borrow one of the library's wireless notebook computers to take elsewhere in the building. To save their work from the laptop, they can check out a flash drive just as if they were checking out a book. And the library has long since moved from those initial CD-based databases to about 40 different online databases. It has added to the digital collection by licensing electronic books through NetLibrary and eBooks.com.

Transforming the College Library: A Plan

"WE ARE ON THE CUSP of an important change," says Scott Bennett, Yale University (CT) librarian emeritus, former librarian at The Johns Hopkins University (MD), and currently a senior adviser for the library program of The Council of Independent Colleges. Bennett, who did research on higher ed library construction projects, says that of 400 projects completed between 1992 and 2001, respondents reported that what most motivated their projects during that period was the need for additional shelving. When he asked (in follow-up interviews with 30 CAOs and library directors) whether that was going to be the same driver for their next library projects, their response was, "We think not.We hope not."

Yet, figuring out what the new drivers for library design are poses a challenge for campuses. The reason this is so difficult, says Bennett, is because "We have a genetically conditioned sense of ourselves as [belonging to a] service profession; we're still fixated on service.We get lots of libraries that are traditional, dressed as new. They're successful; they're very fine libraries. They're not libraries designed for learning, however, but designed for service."

What's the distinction? "We think of students as consumers of services, but we're not treating them as learners," he stresses. And the principle space where students take command of their own learning, Bennett believes, is the library. For example, he says, a year or two ago he was consulting at an institution and talking with faculty, "who were justly proud of the way they were shaping assignments for students to work with each other collaboratively." Yet when he asked them, "Where do they do that?" the instructors scratched their heads and said: "We don't know." His point: If you think it's important for students to work collaboratively, then you'd better design your library to foster that.

That's where the CIC comes into play. Since 2002, in partnership with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, the CIC has offered the workshop series, "The Transformation of the College Library." The goal of the three-day events: to help small and mid-sized independent colleges and universities deal with the change sweeping through college libraries.



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