Colleges and universities "must exploit digital information technology to stay viable," said Associate Librarian of Congress Deanna Bowling Marcum.

Big cost savings for the nation’s college and university libraries are not in the immediate future, began Associate Librarian of Congress Deanna Bowling Marcum during her Presidents Institute address. However, institutions can take advantage of many “potential cost efficiencies—ways to contain costs while taking advantage of digital technology to help students learn more efficiently, to help professors teach more effectively, and to help scholars work more productively,” she said.
      Marcum stressed that institutions “must exploit digital information technology to stay viable—to attract good students, good teachers, and financial support.” She cited daunting statistics about the average four-year American campus library in 2004: circulation totaled 33,657; 5,485 reference transactions were performed; 36.11 percent of its budget was spent on library materials; it contained 186,249 volumes; and added 5,388 volumes last year. She then compared these facts with the volume of new information that has been created: new stored information grew 30 percent between 1999 and 2002; print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002 (the equivalent of 37,000 new libraries with collections the size of the Library of Congress); and the World Wide Web now contains 170 terabytes of information on its surface, a volume that equates to 17 times the size of the Library of Congress.
      “The good news for you is that a lot of that web-accessible information is free…. Moreover, libraries are now beginning to collect scholarship and material created by researchers and teachers on university campuses in electronic rather than printed forms…. Now, think ahead—What if your campus library could offer…electronic access to large collections of major libraries throughout the world? This possibility is under exploration by the Digital Library Federation…which has established Project Aquifer to create what it calls a distributed open digital library—one that will provide users anywhere a single point of entry to digital collections from multiple institutions…. The hope is ultimately to provide faculty, students, and other users anywhere with ‘one-stop-shopping’ to libraries everywhere.”
      Marcum questioned whether presidents, faculty members, or librarians were aware of these developments. “Are your librarians tracking what’s becoming available via the web, including all its free resources? Are your librarians and faculty alerting your students to good web resources for their papers? Are you educating your faculty about new digital library developments of potential help to them in their research and teaching? Are you even taking steps to be sure they know of the databases to which your library subscribes?”
      “Digital library development creates huge opportunities for liberal arts colleges to expand resources available to their teachers and students. If you aren’t taking advantage of them, you are missing a chance to capitalize on resources you don’t have to develop and in many cases don’t have to pay for,” she emphasized. There are several things colleges and universities can do to increase cost efficiencies and expand resources:

     Marcum also discussed ways to eliminate inefficiencies in digital-resource development. “Libraries and IT shops must cooperate to produce resources that work for teaching and scholarship. [And] faculty must provide input to ensure that such resources are needed and usable.” One possibility is to consolidate libraries and instructional technology units under one dean of academic resources, with a faculty advisory committee—but she cautioned that an “institution’s solution needs to reflect its own nature and needs. The important thing before dynamiting departmental walls is to find out whether informal collaborations already are working, and how to deal with territorial sensitivities if they aren’t.”
     She cited examples of what some campuses are doing about this “nearly universal problem”:

     “A great burden is on you, your faculty, and your librarians to keep track of digital developments in collections creation, open-source publishing, materials preservation, literacy training, teaching enhancement…. But doing so can help keep your institution cost-effective and competitive,” she noted.
     Marcum concluded by stressing that it is the campus library that serves as the portal to the information universe—the web is “where the students live and where their expectations are met…. It is the library’s job to move itself to this new environment. The best libraries have made the transition from a book repository to an open door to the information universe.”

Click here to view the full text of Marcum’s speech.