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Universities such as Carleton are investing millions to renovate their libraries, filling them with technology and versatile spaces for group work. But in the age of Google and abundant information, are academic libraries destined to become little more than high-tech study halls?
When you think of academic libraries, you think of Mario and Luigi, of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, of Call of Duty 4 and Grand Theft Auto 5 and Resident Evil 6. Actually, none of those probably come to mind. Yet a growing number of university libraries do indeed collect video games. Carleton University's MacOdrum Library, for instance, owns about 400 video games — a collection that isn't held in equal regard by all on campus.
"It has been controversial, no question," says Robert Smith, Subject Specialist in Science and Engineering at the library, who started the collection in 2008.
Most university librarians who start buying video games hear similar complaints. Why waste limited resources on something so frivolous? Won't allowing students to play video games in the library distract them from their studies? Aren't many titles of dubious social value?
At Carleton, a few faculty members objected to one game in particular: Rage, a gory first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world teeming with bandits and mutants. In an email that eventually found its way to Wayne Jones, Associate University Librarian in Collections and Library Development, they argued that the game is offensive. Too violent. Denigrates women. Despite the complaint, however, Rage remains at Carleton.
"Our main argument is that there are very legitimate reasons for keeping this video game. For one, it's technically innovative," says Jones. "If you took everything that was offensive to some people out of the library, you would be substantially reducing the collection."
Of course, change is bound to create some discord, and the addition of video games to their holdings is but one way that academic libraries are changing. Try typing "future" and "library" into Google. Now go ahead and skim the results. Shouldn't take more than a year.
An ultra-concise summary of trends in university libraries might look something like this: more student space, more technology, fewer stacks. As for how the exterior of libraries are changing, that can best be summed up by paraphrasing the first recorded words of a certain well-known deity. Let there be non-artificial light.
* * *
Everybody hates the windows. First of all, they're small — about the size of a typical dorm room poster. Then there's the height issue. Even if you're lucky enough to nab a window seat at MacOdrum Library, you won't enjoy much of a view. Unless you like studying on your feet.
"You have to stand up to look out them," says Margaret Haines, University Librarian at MacOdrum Library. "Nobody is very fond of those windows."
Vista-deprived students and faculty don't have long to wait, however, for a library that offers more glimpses of the outside world. By the end of next summer, if renovations proceed as scheduled, the entire front façade — all four stories — will basically be one big window. The nearly 75,000 square feet being added to the library will also ameliorate another problem frequently voiced from student lips — lack of study space. The number of seats will increase from 1200 to 2000.
In addition to the makeover out front, a two-level addition is being tacked onto the back. The new fifth floor will house archives and research collections, offices, graduate student space and rooms for seminars and reading. The new fourth floor will contain a digital media lab, help desks and areas for group work and special projects.
"That's going to be our noisy, interactive floor," says Haines, adding that quiet areas will remain, so silence-lovers needn't worry.
The renovations will cost around $27 million. Like Carleton, many other universities are investing heavily in upgrading their libraries or building new ones. The University of Calgary's new $200-million Taylor Family Digital Library, a technological marvel, is the envy of every campus in Canada. Printed materials in the University of Chicago's new library are retrieved from underground storage by robotic cranes. At Drexel University in Philadelphia, the library recently opened a 3000-square-foot "learning terrace" with wireless Internet and flexible seating, and without books or computers.
But is it really so wise to spend millions on a library in the Google era? Indeed it is, says Haines. Students will always need a refuge from chaotic dorms and crowded apartments to get work done. And even those who say they don't use the library (ahem, engineering students) still frequently access its services, even if they never step through its doors.
"Nobody graduates from the library, but nobody graduates without a library," says Haines, repeating a popular adage within the librarian profession.
Academic libraries that plan on staying relevant, though, had better keep up with the times. The libraries of yesteryear — gloomy book temples that kept sunlight at bay to preserve their many stacks of bound-paper tomes — bear little resemblance to the bright, versatile, high-tech libraries going up today.
"Librarians used to think that libraries were immutable, just as newspaper owners once thought newspapers were immutable. But now there is recognition that things are changing. A library in 2012 needs to be different than in 1982," says John Dupuis, Acting Associate University Librarian at York University. "Gone is the image of the library as a holy cathedral."
But what about the academic library of 2020? Or 2050? What will those buildings look like? Or is it possible, just maybe, that they won't look like anything? Because they will no longer exist.
* * *
If you write a satirical autopsy report for your own profession, expect some of your peers to be less than amused. Brian Sullivan, Information Literacy Librarian at Alfred University in New York, knows that all too well.
Last year, Sullivan wrote an article called "Academic Library Autopsy Report, 2050" for The Chronicle of Higher Education, ending the piece with a doozy of a kicker: "Librarians planted the seeds of their own destruction and are responsible for their own downfall." It generated a slew of comments, many by academic librarians dismissing it out of hand, some referring to certain statements as "ridiculous," "laughably incorrect" and "horsecrap."
Anyone with irony bone intact, however, would realize Sullivan was suggesting that if certain factors — affordable access to digital books, user-friendly databases, better search engines, improved education on how to find sound information — one day enable students and faculty to meet their academic goals independently, the relevancy of university libraries would be threatened. In other words, academic librarians, who drive much of the innovation in these areas, could make their jobs redundant by doing their jobs extremely well. The point of a library, after all, is to help users, not employ librarians.
"Is what's best for librarians also what's best for higher education?" says Sullivan. "If Google Books were to digitize everything and, for $15 a month, provide unlimited access, that would be good for students but not so good for us."
Many of the bold statements made about the uncertain future of academic libraries are intended to provoke discussion, not predict the future. In fact, the Taiga Forum, a community of academic librarians that challenges "traditional boundaries in libraries," claims just that about the "provocative statements" it periodically releases. The latest set suggests that, within five years, academic librarians will have far less autonomy, books will become mere décor in designer reader rooms and on-demand purchasing of materials will replace collection-building.
If you peruse the library blogosphere (budget lots of time; it's vast), you'll get the feeling that most academic librarians aren't exactly fond of what the Taiga folk have to say. Nor did they appear pleased when Jeff Trzeciak, former University Librarian at McMaster University, suggested that future hires at his library would likely be PhDs or information-technology specialists rather than librarians. That prompted a flurry of blog posts with titles such as "Valuing Librarian Work: McMaster is Not The Only Model," "McMastergate in chronological order, or, do libraries need librarians?" and "Shut up, Jeff."
The provocateurs within the librarian profession, though, appear to be in the minority. Most in the field foresee a bright future for academic libraries, no matter how technology changes the way people find, filter and process information. "The academic library is far from dying. It's evolving," says Brent Roe, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. "It's finding a wide range of new purposes."
* * *
Acquire it, catalogue it, house it, preserve it, make it accessible. That used to be the modus operandi in academic libraries. But in an increasingly digital world, some of those steps aren't as important anymore — especially the housing and preserving ones, which more and more universities are doing in off-site facilities.
"In the past, you needed the whole building to be dark, with artificial lighting, to protect physical materials," says Roe. "Now you need light. A lot of renovations are to increase natural lighting and create spaces that are inviting and safe and have variety and can accommodate students who want to work alone and students who want to work in groups."
To facilitate group work, many libraries are creating spaces called "information commons" or "learning commons." These are central areas where students can access technology, reference material and staff expertise. They contain resources such as computers, productivity software, audio-visual equipment and help desks. Services commonly offered in these spaces include writing tutorials, peer mentoring and technical assistance.
"We want a space where students are not just passive but also using the library to create knowledge. We want it to be a space of intentional learning. We don't want the library to just be an expensive study hall with computers in it," says Steven Bell, President of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. "The library has a unique place on campus. It's where the social and the intellectual come together. It's for everybody, and a place like that should be a signature building, a place you want to be in."
Another trend in academic libraries is an increased focus on "information literacy" — teaching people how to identify the information they need and how to locate and critically evaluate sources. Some librarians venture to other parts of campus to teach information literacy, holding office hours in various departments or providing lectures. Thanks to the Internet, it is now easier to access information than ever before, but digging online is as likely to yield garbage as gold.
"When I was a student, the problem was finding enough sources. Now the problem is finding the right sources," says Valerie Critchley, Associate University Librarian at MacOdrum Library.
Most renovations at academic libraries also include the addition of extra space for collaborative work, and Carleton is taking that one step further, creating a "discovery centre" for work on large projects. This technology-loaded area, to be located on the new fourth level, will be a flexible space, easily rearranged to accommodate the needs of different groups. Peter Ricketts, Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at Carleton, envisions the centre being used for immersive projects — that produce practical outcomes, such as published research papers, and involve community partners, faculty and students from multiple disciplines — as well as for less-intensive projects integrated into existing academic programs.
"It will create really fascinating opportunities for students to be creative and innovative," says Ricketts.
Most of the modern trends in academic libraries receive near-universal enthusiasm. But on occasion, a new idea is met with a chillier reception. Some academics, it turns out, doubt that students receive much educational benefit from slaughtering digital zombies. Which brings us back to video games.
* * *
The video game industry is huge, generating billions in profits each year. It is also a topic of growing interest among students and researchers, and not only in computer science and software engineering programs. Students in gender studies examine how women are portrayed in video games. Humanities' researchers explore their artistic and cultural significance. Other video game elements that have piqued academic interest include aesthetics, narratives, race, player interactions, violence and sexuality. It would be difficult for even the most ardent of technophobes to deny that video games are important cultural artifacts.
But should libraries collect all types of video games, even the most gratuitously violent and unapologetically misogynistic? Some faculty members at Carleton, as previously mentioned, obviously don't think so. Perhaps the relevant question, then, is not "should university libraries collect video games," but rather "should university libraries censor their video game collections?"
"The blatant, flat answer is, unequivocally, no — we don't censor," says Brian Greenspan, an associate professor in Carleton's Department of English and the founding director of the Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab, the school's first digital humanities research centre. "The content of our holdings in novels is far more violent and disturbing than anything you will see in a video game."
Even if the subject matter of certain games is questionable, it is important to explore why they're popular, says Greenspan. Are they meeting a need that can't be satisfied by other forms of media? Some violent video games, including titles in the massively multiplayer online genre, are also proving valuable in opening up whole new areas of study in fields such as psychology, anthropology and other social sciences.
"Having thousands upon thousands of players experiencing the same fictional world simultaneously, and how that affects their actions, is brand new," says Greenspan.
Another emerging area of study is game-based learning, which examines what skills and knowledge people retain while playing video games. There are many interesting questions on this subject to explore, according to Jerremie Clyde, an associate librarian who conducts research in game-based learning at the Taylor Family Digital Library, which has the largest video game collection for academic study in Canada. How do video games motivate people to keep playing despite repeated failure? Why do people want to master certain games but not others? How much more difficult should a game level be than the one preceding it?
"We are studying things like transfer of knowledge," says Clyde. "You can explore the ability to transfer what people learn playing games to other areas of learning."
Will an extensive video game collection be a standard feature of all academic libraries in the future? Well, predicting the future is something of a dangerous game in itself. Besides, those brave enough to test their prognosticating skills tend not to focus on what the library of the future will collect. They're more interested in what tomorrow's libraries will help create.
* * *
From collection to scholarship. From dissemination to action. From sharing to social good. This is how the academic library could transition from being "collection centric" to being a platform for knowledge creation, as recently described by R. David Lankes, Dean's Scholar for the New Librarianship at Syracuse's School of Information Studies, in his lecture "New Librarianship and the Library as Platform."
Others have also suggested that the library of the future will no longer be a passive entity, waiting for information-seekers to drop in and sample its wares. Instead, it will follow more of an entrepreneurial model, becoming a place that actively fosters invention and innovation.
Tomorrow's academic libraries could become more involved in the scholarship process, forging stronger partnerships with researchers and publishers to help generate knowledge. Perhaps they could develop new publishing models to facilitate the growth of open-access journals. Or they could find a way to themselves become major publishers of scholarly work, thereby reducing the influence of commercial academic publishers and their ever-rising subscription rates.
Academic libraries could also make better use of their rich supplies of metadata — the information about how their holdings are used. Which electronic journal articles are downloaded the most? How often are works reserved or brought back early? Which portions of ebooks are highlighted or annotated? Valuable information such as this is often tracked internally but not released to the public.
"Libraries know a lot more than they let on," says David Weinberger, Co-director of the Harvard Innovation Lab and Senior Researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "This information could be extraordinarily useful to the community. A library could use this information to provide a sense of how a community values certain works."
Another way libraries could integrate themselves further into the scholarship process would be to embed their staff in various academic departments. In fact, the Welch Medical Library at John Hopkins University in Baltimore is already moving toward abandoning its physical space. It has a team of "informationists" who work directly with researchers on their own turf.
"One of the things we know about information behaviour is that convenience trumps everything else," says Nancy Roderer, the library's director. "What if the library is where you are?"
Could this embedded model be the future? Will tomorrow's academic libraries have staff but no bricks or mortar or four-storey glass façades? Is Carleton sinking millions into a temporary structure? Not likely — on all counts.
General libraries — the main branches on campus where students study, socialize, do group work and seek resources — are unlikely to shed their walls. It could be a possibility, though, for speciality libraries that serve specific departments, such as engineering or medicine, and focus on collecting information rather than providing student space.
The engineering library at Duke University in North Carolina, for example, used to be filled to capacity toward the end of semester, all seats occupied by students completing projects and preparing for exams. But laptops, wireless Internet and other factors changed student work habits, and the library was eventually so empty that talk arose of folding it into the main branch, according to Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke.
"The library doesn't have such an essential claim to space as it once did," says Petroski.
Still, the sentimental attachment to libraries of those who value learning could make it challenging for even the most progressive of infrequently visited facilities to close its doors. When Roderer presented her "distributed library" plans to a faculty group at John Hopkins, for example, not everyone responded positively.
"One person said, 'You're taking my library from me,'" says Roderer. "Some people are very attached to the physical building."
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