The Research Functions of Today S Library Staff

The Research Functions of Today’s Library Staff

by

Edgardo B. Quiros

Lecture for the National Seminar-Workshop on The Support Staff in Today’s Libraries: Keys to Effective Performance-Centered Management. Philippine Association of Academic and Research Libraries (PAARL): Sabang, Baler, Aurora. 26-28 July 2004

Many forces are shaping information services. Our skills and special expertise are desperately needed, but this fact is not widely understood in the new Internet Age. It is our job to adapt our expertise to this new era, develop appropriate tenets and service philosophies for the times, AND aggressively market those skills and tenets to the larger society. In this highly competitive era, few will come to us if we are passive; we must do the shaping and directing of information services for the 21st century (Bates 2000).

Introduction

Research is for solving problems. Some problems may be obvious, some may not but they exist in library practice. The need for research may vary at institutional and personal levels.

At the institutional level, some libraries provide research as one of their services. Common research services include the traditional bibliographic research from catalogs and databases in offline, online, Internet, or printed environment. Research is also used as a competency measure for staff evaluation. And some consider research as part of scholarly work to produce information products (bibliographies, compilations, annotations, etc.) in the library.

Some individuals do research to satisfy their hunger for knowledge. While others perform research work as part of graduate studies or institutional requirements. And others take research outputs as accomplishments.

These varied institutional and individual research stimuli do not differ between libraries and across the globe. Most LIS research still focus on LIS services, survey is still the popular methodology, and single authorship is still prevalent.

Factors Affecting Academic and Research Libraries

The changes taking place today have been described by John Howe in 1989 and called it as the "decentering of the library" within institutions of higher education. He outlined the following reasons:

1. new information technology was creating "alternative paths" for access to scholarly information, and investments in technical infrastructure and computing centers were diverting funding from the traditional library.

2. the decline in arts and sciences and the rise of science and technology programs in universities were eroding the power of disciplines that most directly supported the traditional library.

3. the profession of librarianship itself seemed to be in disarray, fraught with uncertainty and anxiety over its future in the computer age.

4. libraries were not competitive enough in the new, aggressive environment of higher education.

The first reason is very evident. The card catalog is already being replaced by online public access catalogs (OPACs). The emergence of OPACs was followed by electronic reference databases. By mid-1990s full-text digital articles and journals and digital collections emerged.

Today, digital materials are no longer copies of the printed documents. Information that cannot be printed in the traditional medium converged with printed information to form a new kind of product. Technology made possible talking books. The ebook, as it is known, contains unlimited possibilities. Sound, music, animation, motion pictures, multidimensional images, and dynamic links are just some of the features seen in the digital form.

The dynamism of the digital material provided better access. A user could activate the audio program to listen to the book when tired of reading. Some contents could be printed or copied to word processing software eliminating the tiring process of typing. Some materials even incorporate tutorials and other self-help features. Viewing the material is also dynamic. Size and type of fonts can be changed. Note taking is easily done through copying and pasting.

With the use of technology, a single material can be used simultaneously by unlimited number of users when made available in the network, including the Internet. The limit will just rely on the number of available computers to users.

The second reason, as proposed by Howe, is a trend influenced by the shift of economic forces and means of production. The information society is replacing the industrial society. Whereas goods were the most important component of the industrial society, information is now replacing it. Goods then are mass-produced. Information on the other hand is produced on demand and delivered very fast using advance technology. Information could be requested through a mobile phone and the information is sent back instantaneously. The cost is automatically debited without any money actually changing hands.

Information products are produced globally but not necessarily in industrial sites. Some aggregated and repackaged information products for example are produced partly at home or wherever a telecommunication facility is available. Repackaged business information for example are syndicated globally, and are processed in developing countries such as India or the Philippines. They are send to another country for quality control before aggregation and finally sent to the computers of business executives globally before business hours.

Business organizations are becoming oriented to specialized customers. The traditional setup of hierarchical organization is being converted to more dynamic flat non-hierarchical ones.

High technology input products are the commodities replacing traditional goods. As these changes occur, the demand for more science and technology programs also affects the universities. And so are the academic and research libraries.

The third reason, concerns issue that affect the dynamism of the profession. The shift from traditional library science to library and information science (LIS) is actually one way of adapting to technological changes. The extent may vary from institution to institution. Evident to universities are the link of LIS to education, linguistics, or computer science. Some would group LIS to applied science, and still some would consider LIS as a social science.

The multidisciplinary nature of LIS is sometimes misinterpreted. Others would debate that LIS is basically library science. The shift from the traditional discipline to LIS is not an accident. It occurred because of the challenges brought about by technology. LIS is founded mainly on the disciplines of library science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and computer science.

Globally, there are movements towards understanding the nature of LIS. The international community is conducting a regular conference on conceptions of LIS or CoLIS. Four of these have been accomplished in the past with the fifth being planned. Yet after the four conferences, no definite definition of LIS as a discipline is provided. This is not the only effort done. In the past, organization of knowledge in LIS is attempted in the form of classification systems. The “Library Economy” was the first system to be constructed. Later, the Classification and Research Group (CRG) created the first faceted classification system with librarianship as the subject area. The draft was first published in 1969 but only in 1976 did the system published as a book. At this time faceted classification systems in engineering and medicine are already well developed. Only Library and Information Science Abstracts adapted the test bed of faceted classification, which is on librarianship. Later they dropped the CRG classification.

Other researchers find it difficult to construct a classification system for librarianship. Even today there are no clear distinction between bodies of knowledge within LIS. This phenomenon could be due to the development of LIS to a discipline. Compared to other disciplines, LIS has not matured as a discipline, at least in terms of scholarly publication.

Maybe when the multidisciplinary nature of LIS is institutionalized and taken into the practice of librarianship in the future, the uncertainty and anxiety over the future of the profession in the computer age will just be a myth.

The fourth reason is rooted in the long-standing status of libraries in the society. For centuries, the library enjoyed the reputation synonymous with knowledge. Individuals go to libraries to gain knowledge. Some would consider libraries similar to storage of gold taking the contents as war booty.

The Internet of today has radically changed this status of the library. People don’t need to go to the library to gain knowledge or acquire information. Scholarly communication could be created and disseminated without the library. The digital medium is taking over the place of paper. Many librarians in the past have not taken this opportunity to expand into the digital medium. The initiative of creation, collection, organization, storage and retrieval of digital information was a credit mostly to non-librarians.

Only recently, did librarians take serious participation in the digital world. Recent efforts includes digital libraries, metadata, revival of the faceted classification system, taxonomy, ontology, electronic thesis and dissertation, electronic book, digital object identifiers, electronic journals, and open access.

Librarians of today, including library staffs, should take initiative to participate in these developments, gain more skills and knowledge and be proactive in contributing to efforts that shape the digital environment

In the case of the Philippines today, academic and Research libraries are still key partners in higher education, critical to the ability of universities to succeed in teaching and research.

There are sad stories though. New information centers have been established outside the library. And worst, no librarians were in any way involved in their conceptualization, development and implementation. The extent of this phenomenon is unknown. If this will become a trend in the future, nothing is certain. In other developed countries, some hospital libraries were actually closed down after being replaced with digital information systems. This may not happen at least in the near future among academic and research libraries in the Philippines because technology and digital information of this level are not within the budget of most institutions. Additionally, academic and research libraries are mandatory components of universities.

Provision of LIS services to its community of users is still and should be the primary concern of academic and research libraries. It is imperative that traditional library services be reevaluated and changes has to be made in the provision of services in the digital environment. Improvements in the performance of library functions can be effectively achieved if research is done in critical areas.

Significant Areas of Research

Technology and digital information have contributed a lot in the changing environments of higher education, the library and information profession, business and industry, and government. These changes need serious considerations if the library is to take active role in providing appropriate services. Research should be directed towards areas critical to library services. These includes the following:

·  learning, teaching and research

·  information use

·  library use

·  user profile

·  user expectations

·  communication of scholarly communication

·  provision and preservation of access to digital information

·  investment in technology

Learning, teaching and research is also radically changing. The classroom full time system of education is being challenge by new methods. Individual oriented teaching is already being done. Among institutions catering to children, this teaching-learning method is already being practiced.

In the universities, distance learning is also being implemented. It uses the individual-based learning for part time students. There are undergraduate and graduate courses being offered. Others named this mode of education as open-learning systems. This mode of education requires a different library service and role. The library is needed as a teaching institution, as an active participant in instructional and research processes.

New services must be developed to cater to part-time students in remote areas. Some current services needs strengthening such as OPACs, document delivery, digital documents and online reference service.

Along with these shift of library service, the performance needs to be measured using different systems. Libraries should not be evaluated based on the number of materials in their shelves, or in the physical facilities or even in the number of librarians. Rather libraries needs to evaluation in terms of their contribution to learning.

Additionally, libraries need to support learning by creating and fostering a learning environment and to balance traditional collection and service models with resource needs for new initiatives.

Along with this innovation in education, characteristics of user groups are changing, as is the nature of their use of library services. Students are diverse, often older, independent and part-time. There are users from outside the university, from other campuses and independent scholar from both within and beyond the community. They are able to access the resources of the research library with greater ease due to technology.

Some radical changes need consideration. Computer workstations or more tables? Reading or Internet rooms? Card catalogs or OPACs? Title-subject and author access or more? General or specialized classification schemes? Printed or electronic materials? Research can provide logical and objective evidence from which decisions can be based.

Users also have new needs that require attention. Some users need assistance in the use of computers. Searching OPACs require a different approach compared to card catalog. The known and unknown search paradigm used in card catalogs is not longer applicable in OPACs. Users need some help in using, search and retrieving documents in databases. Other new technology based information products and library facilities require skill for the library staff to enhance user services.

Scholarly communication on the other hand is taking a different route. Fewer scholarly materials are being published due to budget limitations. Publishers now produce most materials.

The 300-year tradition of book and journal publication is being challenged. Email and discussion groups are more current and complete than journal information. Electronic books are available in the internet even these have less market value to publishers.

In these new forms of scholarly communication, there are many interesting areas where library personnel could supply their expertise in the creation and organization.

Digital information on the other hand requires some additional and new approaches for access and preservation. As of today, metadata standards are already available to serve as structure of access point of digital documents. But this needs further development with regards to universal applicability.

Digital preservation on the other hand requires more sophisticated approach. The data structures need to be constructed in the same manner are preliminary pages, chapters, appendices and other parts of a book were conceptualized. Containers of data for digital information needs to be created. And the structure must be designed independent of particular software. Research efforts in these area includes data type definitions for journals articles, books, thesis, and other materials such as music or sound.