Aligning the Research Library to Organizational Strategy by Danielle Cooper, Catharine Bond Hill & Roger C. Schonfeld for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), and Ithaka S+R © 2022 (https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/aligning-the-research-library-to-organizational-strategy/)

Overview

A colleague of mine recently shared with and encouraged the University Libraries’ IT leadership to read Aligning the Research Library to Organizational Strategy. This report authored this April by Danielle Cooper, Catharine Bond Hill & Roger C. Schonfeld for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), and Ithaka S+R, provides an examination of university senior leadership’s impressions their library’s alignment with institutional strategies. Through a mixture of interviews, focus groups and literature review, the authors identified four common strategic directions for research universities:

• “The pursuit of growth, particularly in the STEM research enterprise
• At public institutions, efforts to engage the state, both through its political system and its population;
• Redressing relationships with the historically marginalized, with significant variation between Canadian and US institutions in terms of how this priority is framed; and
• Defending the residential experience, which remains core to the educational strategy of most universities.”

The authors are careful to note that the results are based upon analysis of ARL and CARL institutions, acknowledges differences and dynamic between American and Canadian institutions, and that there are leadership perspectives both within and outside of individual institutions.

Expectations of the libraries and library leadership

The posits that there are three general perceptions or expectation of university libraries and library leaders:

• “Some university leaders have comparatively modest expectations of the library…Many of them appear to be hoping that their library will maintain the status quo — continue to serve students and faculty more or less as it always has done…”
• “Others feel that the library could offer substantially more value to their institution than it does and are discouraged by the pace of change…”
• “Still others see their library as an innovative partner in the strategic directions of their institution. These leaders are able to cite tangible value that the library adds to the university, typically through new services of one type or another.”

For those libraries seen as a partner for strategic impact, the university leaders consulted indicated expectations for their library’s leadership. Some expectations that may be being met, while others aspirational, include:

• “The most important characteristic sought by university leaders was for the library director to act not as the chief manager of the library but rather as a university leader with responsibility for the library.”
• “A second characteristic sought by university leaders was for the library director to push the library beyond its traditional responsibilities to serve the current and emerging needs of the university”
• “A final characteristic sought by university leaders was for the library director to take responsibility for resource stewardship… We heard several times that the library…was too meek in cutting costs for long-standing roles that have become decreasingly valued relative to the university’s needs, and as a result insufficiently redeploying personnel resources to address new priorities.”

The report further examines the organizational context for library leaders from both strategic and political perspectives:

• “To be successful, library leaders must navigate within a multipolar university leadership context with the complexities of faculty governance.”
• “Library leaders must seek to support the strategic agenda outlined by the president while also typically reporting to the provost.”
• “Chief information officers are in some cases strong allies of the library, looking for opportunities to collaborate and respecting the areas of expertise that both bring. In other cases, CIOs see the library as a flailing legacy organization that needs dramatic reform, perhaps under their own leadership.”

• “While senior research officers are rarely hostile to the library, few of them see meaningful contributions the library can make to their strategic objectives, and in some cases when libraries try to do so SROs express frustration that the library should “stay in its lane.”

A menu of possible strategic directions

Based upon the aforementioned “…common strategic directions and key trends in research practice and support, [they] proposed a menu of strategic directions from which research libraries may wish to choose:

• An accelerated pivot to STEM
• Double down on humanities and distinctive collections;
• Focus on student needs and student success;
• Redress relationships with historically marginalized groups;
• Serve the needs of the political entity that funds or controls the institution; and/or
• Make scientific communication fit for purpose”

These bullets are just the various “courses” available on the menu, to which they detail options for which an institution can identify with and/or select to engage.

Interesting insights

There are too many insights to quote here, and I encourage folks to read the report for oneself; however the following are a handful that particularly resonated with me:

• “There was relatively little reflection on the possibility that technology may have important impacts on research labor by, among other things, enabling considerably more remote work.”
• “Universities tend to be differentiated in terms of whether their STEM programs, and growth strategies, are more focused on the engineering or the biomedical fields, with some institutions being equally weighted in both”
• “In a handful of cases, university leaders reflected on the position of the humanistic fields relative to the sciences, and several discussed the importance of humanistic scholarship. But the humanities fields were not framed as a plank in the institutional growth strategy”
• “…universities must significantly reorient how they provide computer science education across their undergraduate, graduate, and professional offerings, as well as to their faculty and staff…”
• “The need to broaden pedagogical approaches to computational thinking may present an opportunity for academic libraries and other campus support units, but only insofar as they can be successfully integrated into the core curriculum.”

The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson © 2021 (https://muse.jhu.edu/book/83358)

Cover of Craig Robinson’s “The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information”

It is a history of information management at the turn of and in the early twentieth century from the perspective of the introduction of the vertical filing cabinet.

I know, I know, really exciting stuff! But to both an info management and history of objects geek, like myself, it has a certain appeal. Further, it approaches the subject not just from a “nuts and bolts” (pun intended) point-of-view, but from a sociological one and gender roles in the work environment.

The author notes: “The shift in focus from filing systems to filing cabinets means the book you are about to read is a history of storage, not a history of classification. To focus on storage is to bring the filing cabinet to the foreground, to see how the cabinet as an object shapes people’s interaction with information rather than explore the effects of systems of classification on knowledge. This is a history about the tabs that make classification and indexing systems visible, not a history that uses the filing cabinet to explore the consequences of organizing papers by author name or subject. Classification and indexing (and the blurring of those in the early twentieth century) do appear in this history, but as ways to rethink storage and to understand the filing cabinet’s role in the development of a modern conception of information.”

A couple of key concepts/quotes that I found interesting:

Chapter 1: Verticality (A Skyscraper for the Office): On page 50, Robertson paraphrases Carl C. Parson from his 1921 work, Office Organization and Management: “ The move from an “old-style storehouse model” to a modern flat-top desk foregrounded a change in the mode of storage—from personal to collective—as papers would ideally be moved from desks into filing cabinets.” I wonder what this has to say in our digital age about how we store and share our digital documents? Have we moved back from the collective to the personal? Food for thought as we further embrace the use of Teams, OneDrive, etc.

Chapter 4: Granular Certainty (Applying System to the Office): On page 132 Robertson says: ‘Within an economic context, the term granular signifies the belief that breaking things down into small parts to produce a high degree of detail or specificity will result in efficiency. Certainty indicates the conviction that greater specificity will reduce individual discretion and increase the likelihood that a task will be completed efficient.” It is my hope that the work we have been doing with the DP&A and workflow visualization will bring more granular certainty to what we do within the University Libraries.

Although, dry at times, it is well interspersed with reproductions of equipment catalog and marketing material images, and is generally engaging. I give it 3 of 5 stars and a recommended reading.

I read a good article recently by Nathan Tallman at Penn State and Lauren Work at the University of Virginia, “Approaching Appraisal: Guidelines and Criteria to Select for Digital Preservation” (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/8Y6DC). It is based upon their presentation at the International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres) 2018. (additional related materials can be found at: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/96cd007a-4a97-4a9d-8ec8-91f6af636033)

It traces a history of collection development and appraisal in context of both general and special collections, and posits 6 criteria to consider in the appraisal process for the collecting of digital materials:

After sharing my review of the “Final Report of the Lighting the Way Project” last week, Beth Snapp drew my attention to a 2017 OCLC report referenced within, “Demystifying IT: A Framework for Shared Understanding between Archivists and IT Professionals” (https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2017/oclcresearch-demystifying-it-shared-understanding.html) that had been languishing on my “To Read” list.

As always from OCLC an accessible read; if you haven’t previously read it I encourage you to, or even re-read it.

Abstract

“Today’s digital archivist needs tools and platforms to ingest, manage and provide access to electronic records and digital content of all types. The complexity of digital systems makes the participation of information technology (IT) professionals essential. Archivists have sophisticated domain knowledge, while IT staff have advanced technology skills. As in other areas of human endeavor, working together effectively requires a desire to understand each other’s expertise, priorities and constraints. It requires developing a culture of collaboration.

This report describes types of IT providers and the services they typically offer, offers insights on the software development process, provides guidance toward building partnerships and emphasizes the centrality of resource constraints. Many of the issues described are relevant to librarians and archivists who work with IT colleagues on issues other than born-digital management.”

Key Discoveries

• “Regardless of the number of IT staff, they must always prioritize core functions (e.g., workstation and server maintenance, internet connectivity, email) that serve the entire organization over specialized services and projects.”
  • DAN: I think this also presumes  a “monolithic” IT; need to keep in mind the various parts of “IT” one is collaborating with.
• “IT resources are never limitless. You will always have rivals for time and attention. Be prepared to negotiate rather than demand.
• IT staff must equate time with money, which often means utilizing formalized approaches to project management to develop timelines and guard against “scope creep.”
• All parties should clarify terminology and intended meaning to guard against misunderstanding and be prepared to explain themselves clearly.
• Clients are more likely to be respected and valued by IT colleagues if they follow designated procedures (such as use of a ticketing system) and utilize documentation before seeking help.
• The ability of IT units to acquire new hardware, software or storage space for their clients on short notice is often constrained by an annual budget cycle.
• IT must always be involved from the outset when acquisition of any product or service from an external provider—including open-source software—is under consideration. They will be asked to support it in future.”

Key Concepts

“Archivists should see their IT colleagues as essential consultants and service providers and learn how to articulate the archives’ needs clearly and effectively”

IT Service Provider Models describes three common organizational structures

1. “Small shops, in which IT responsibilities fall to a single individual or a small group
   1. Be open to compromise. An appropriate technology may be available that provides most of what you need and is already familiar to your IT staff. A few well-chosen concessions may make the difference in enabling your vision.
2. Departments, in which a management structure coordinates staff who support IT functions
3. External service providers, who sell products and services that organizations either cannot or choose not to provide internally”

Building Partnerships describes three project roles

1. Client (archivist/curator/librarian)
2. IT professionals
3. Project manager

Resource Management

“…describes the limits that both archivists and IT professionals face for funding, infrastructure and staffing [emphasis added], and how finding the right balance within those limits may offer the best chance of achieving an optimal technology solution.”

• DAN – KEEP IN MIND: Infrastructure and staffing require funding!

Buy Build Adopt? Three general options exist for obtaining a new service or tool:

• Buy a commercial product, either off the shelf or with slight modifications
• Adopt an open-source solution.
• Build, either in-house or through an external provider

 Development and Support

“…describes widely used models of software development (waterfall, agile and lean), the process of negotiating project requirements and good practices for archivists to help developers fix software problems.”

Reporting Issues

The client “…can play a valuable part in the problem-solving process by providing as detailed and accurate a report as possible…”

• DAN: This is a really important step/concept, to provide detailed, articulate feedback to help fix or improve the developed solution.

….and above all when we collaborate with our University Libraries colleagues, “…Follow the rules of civil human behavior: never lose your temper or become impatient”

“Reading w/Dan” Announcement

This year as part of an informal personal goal, I am trying to get a handle on and tackle my reading backlog of articles, technical reports, books, etc. With readings I finish I have decided to share interesting tidbits and recommendations with University Libraries colleagues. I had been approaching this by sharing via the Libraries’ Special Collection Forum and All-IT listservs.  Beth Snapp has suggested I use the Libraries’ IT blog as a means of wider dissemination and I concur that is a great idea. To that end I will repackage my existing shares/reviews from earlier this year over the next couple of weeks, and then any new ones will be posted both here and on the University Libraries’ Information Technology blog (https://library.osu.edu/site/it/).

Partners for Preservation

I recently completed reading the book, Partners for Preservation: Advancing Digital Preservation through Cross-Community Collaboration edited by Jeanne Kramer-Smyth © 2019.

It is a series of 10 essays split into 3 parts with an introduction and follow-up by the editor. I have bolded and italicized my three favorite essays that I feel also deliver the most useful information.

• Memory, privacy and transparency
  • The inheritance of digital media by Edina Harbinja: When users of social media and other online resources pass, who has the rights to access/own/maintain the data?
  • Curbing the online assimilation of personal information by Paulan Korenhof: “The RTBF [Right To Be Forgotten] is meant to aid individuals in moving beyond their past in the current information age by erasing information that ‘with the passing of time becomes decontextualized, distorted, outdated, no longer truthful (but not necessarily false)”
  • The rise of computer-assisted reporting: challenges and successes by Brant Houston: “The rise in the number of journalists analysing data with the use of computers and software began in the mid-1980s. Widely known as computer-assisted reporting, the practice started in the USA with a handful of journalists in the late 1970s, grew significantly in the 1980s, spread to western Europe in the 1990s, and then to the rest of the world in the early 21st century. During its rise, the name for the practice has varied, with some researchers seeing an evolution of the practice with a different name for each era.”
  • Link rot, reference rot and the thorny problems of legal citation by Ellie Margolis: Explores the need for accurate legal citations as provenance for laws. Ironically, one of the legally resources cited had moved and the link provided had died of “link rot.”
• The physical world: objects, art and architecture
  • The Internet of Things: the risks and impacts of ubiquitous computing by Éireann Leverett: “At its core, the Internet of Things is ‘ubiquitous computing’, tiny computers everywhere – outdoors, at work in the countryside, at use in the city, floating on the sea, or in the sky – for all kinds of real world purposes…All of these purposes initially seem logical, and even business critical to the users, yet each of them involves decisions about security and privacy with incredibly long lasting and far-reaching implications.” “The Internet of Things often rejects standard business models Entirely…But with the Internet of Things, a variation of the freemium model applies. We expect services for free (or at least as cheap as Internet of Things devices). The companies make money from the data we generate”
  • Accurate digital colour reproduction on  displays: from hardware design to software features by Abhijit Sarkar: Provides a concise explanation of color spaces and why color management is important in the GLAM communities
  • Historical BIM+: sharing, preserving and reusing architectural design data by Ju Hyun Lee and Ning Gu: Explores the complexity of architectural design in the virtual environment
• Data and programming
  • Preparing and releasing official statistical data by Natalie Shlomo
  • Sharing research data, data standards and improving opportunities for creating visualisations by Vetria Byrd: A good primer on the steps that go into data visualization
  • Open source, version control and software sustainability by Ildikó Vancsa: An excellent summation of the open source software development process.

Partners for Preservation is an e-book available from The Ohio State University Libraries (https://library.ohio-state.edu/search/t?SEARCH=Partners+for+Preservation+&searchscope=7) for students, staff, faculty and alumni.