ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

ACRL President’s Report, 1982-83

Carla Stoffle ACRL’s 44th President

It is my belief that one of the primary responsibilities of a professional association is to remind us of our values and commitments. This is a particularly necessary role in economic times such as these we are now experiencing.

In times of economic insecurity when our institutions struggle for survival, we may feel that we do not have the latitude to be generous with our ideals. I do not believe this is so. Periods of fiscal constraint demand carefully considered decisions, and these decisions must be based on our principles as well as economic reality. If they are not, there is little point in calling ourselves professionals.

This belief in values as a guiding force in decision-making is one which I apply to my own university and to my work in ACRL. In my concluding remarks as ACRL President, I’ve chosen to reflect on our values and commitments as academic librarians rather than focus on the Association’s achievements during the past year. Our achievements are many, I assure you, and I do not intend to overlook the considerable work of ACRL members and staff in carrying out the Association’s mission during my term as your president. I intend, instead, to review that work within the context of principles which undergird our profession and this association. I do this not to deliver a sermon but rather as partial fulfillment of ACRL’s responsibility to raise societal issues and provide an opportunity for reflection on the values we apply in day-today decision-making.

As academic librarians our values and commitments stem from four major, often overlapping, traditions: librarianship, higher education, professionalism, and our social responsibility as individuals in society. Drawing on the four traditions I will briefly review what I consider to be the values of academic librarianship, discuss practical applications to decision-making in our libraries and highlight 1982-83 ACRL activities which I think are particularly strong examples of value-based decision-making.

We may not all agree with the emphasis I place on particular values or even with the applications of these values to ACRL. Each of us after all brings a personal value system to the practice of our profession. My purpose is to provide a base for future discussions, not to convince you of my perspective. Discussion of our values and greater awareness of their place in decision-making results, I believe, in a stronger profession and a stronger ACRL.

Carla Stoffle

I think we could all agree that central to our values as librarians is a commitment to the free flow of information. Some of us would say intellectual freedom; others first amendment rights; and still others access to materials. Whether our perspective is that of the research library, with its emphasis on preserving materials for future scholars as well as serving the scholars of today, or that of the college with its concern for maintaining an appropriate collection to support teaching activities, our purpose as librarians is to make available and usable the wealth of knowledge, creativity, and information produced by humankind. This purpose implies an active stance on behalf of the user and the potential user, a stance which must be applied in all aspects of our libraries and our profession: collection development, networking, bibliographic control, reference service, bibliographic instruction, and in the application of technological innovations to our libraries.

Our commitment to intellectual freedom in its fullest sense provides a value context for all our decision-making. We automate our catalogs not only to minimize routine labor, but foremost of all to make our libraries more comprehensible and usable for our public, an application of our values. Because we are librarians, our professional values require that we not take the “easy way out” when forced by budget constraints to cut periodicals. I mean by this that we should not eliminate small journals, journals presenting unpopular opinions, or those targeted at minorities, because such journals may not have direct application to the curriculum or to the immediate research needs of our faculty. This also holds true for the development of our book collections. Even in times of tight fiscal policy we must seek out the small publisher, the new idea, as well as react to the glut from the trade publishing industry. Our commitment to the free flow of information further requires that we purchase materials which bring current social issues before students and faculty as well as meet the research and curricular needs of our colleges and universities. Likewise, extension of our collections beyond the barriers of print must be part of our active intellectual freedom stance and not merely a grudging response to technological developments.

A related academic library value basic to librarianship is expressed in the theme I chose for my presidential year: “Building Bridges.” Librarians are linking agents, the addition sign in an equation which puts people and ideas together. The values which support this role have led us to create interlibrary loan networks, union lists and catalogs, to experiment with telefacsimile, provide telephone reference service, and mount displays. We must not, in the face of the economic crunch, sell short our values as linking agents and retreat onto our own campuses or into alliances only with those whose needs and resources are similar to ours. In building our library networks, we must remember that as librarians we serve not only our college or university, or even higher education, but also the needs of the nation. Platitudes, you may say; but if brought to bear on the decision-making process these thoughts take on a reality as compelling as the budget’s bottom line. Surely we as librarians should be the last to join the forces contributing to the erosion of access to information.

Application within ACRL of our linking agent values has been a high priority this year, as might be expected given a theme of “Building Bridges.” The Bibliographic Instruction Liaison Project, which takes as its motto “Integrating Libraries into Higher Education,” has scheduled speakers at 13 meetings of higher education and scholarly associations with displays exhibited at even more. Through a second series of National Endowment for the Humanities-funded workshops to encourage humanities programming in academic libraries, ACRL has sought to link humanist scholars, academic librarians, and the general public, as well as academic libraries and the Endowment itself. Three task forces concerned with linking our Association with others have been established as part of the continuation of ACRL’s planning process initiated through the Activity Model for 1990. These linking task forces are: Library Schools and Academic Libraries, Academic Libraries and Higher Education, and ACRL and ALA.

Perhaps the year’s most telling decision-making application of our linking agent values is ACRL’s leadership in creating a communication network among ALA divisions. One concrete result of this network is the development of a multi-divisional training project to strengthen the leadership skills of divisional officers and board members. This training project, which was conceived and organized by ACRL, will aid divisional leaders with both their roles in ALA and in their respective units. Recognizing a need common to all ALA divisions, ACRL contacted the presidents of the 11 ALA divisions and worked with them to prepare a proposal for a one-time pre-conference for all divisional leaders, an annual leadership orientation for newly elected division officers and board members, and a training package which can be used within divisions to develop leadership below the Board level. This proposal, endorsed by the Boards of 9 of the 11 ALA divisions, received the 1983 J. Morris Jones Award and will be implemented in the coming year, with considerable staff support from ACRL.

As academic librarians, the second values tradition we draw on is that of higher education. It is my belief that in our libraries we should strive to develop an active program advancing all three elements of the mission of higher education: research, teaching, and service.

Obviously, the academic library must support the research efforts of faculty, staff, and students. For many academic librarians this role provides the raison d’etre for the profession. A full application of our research values, however, will cause us to look beyond our defined and visible campusbased clientele and the clientele of the libraries which belong to our own particular networking configurations to the independent scholars who function outside institutions of higher education. Our values imply a responsibility to these individuals who contribute to the advancement of knowledge just as our faculty do. The fulfillment of this responsibility is dependent on individual academic libraries as well as the profession as a whole. We must consider the independent scholar when establishing our public access and interlibrary loan policies and our cooperative stance with public libraries locally and across the country.

The academic library’s research program must not only support scholarly research, it must also promote the development of the library’s own services. Our libraries, as well as our profession, must anticipate issues and problems rather than react to circumstances. Research plays an important role in this anticipatory planning process. This is not to suggest that the research efforts of a library’s staff should be limited solely to the immediate concerns of a particular organization. Research questions, just as staff development needs, should be considered in planning a library’s program of service, and the library’s resources committed to addressing those questions of particular relevance.

ACRL takes this approach in planning its own program and in responding to the needs of the profession. To fill in a major gap in academic library statistics, staff conducted and published the results of a survey of non-ARL libraries. This project was completely supported by ACRL funds. Two research-related task forces have been established this year as part of the ACRL planning process alluded to earlier; one on performance measures for academic libraries, the other on academic library research needs. ACRL leadership was also vocal in support of the American Library Association’s Office for Research, an office whose functions must not only be preserved, but developed further.

Another manifestation of our research values is ACRL’s inauguration of two awards, both donated by the Institute for Scientific Information. The ACRL Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship was awarded to Stanton Biddle for his study of the planning function in the management of university libraries. Denise Bedford received the Samuel Lazerow Fellowship for her proposed research on technical processing costs in large research libraries. These awards honor individual commitment to research, remind us of the values we draw from higher education’s research mission and should stimulate further research.

The teaching mission of higher education provides the values on which I have personally based much of my career as a librarian. I believe librarians are educators with a body of knowledge to impart and a range of opportunities in which to carry out their educational mission. These opportunities run the gamut from one-to-one encounters to classes to preparation of guides available for those who choose to use them.

The values which stem from our commitment to education have caused us to develop bibliographic instruction programs, to participate actively on some campuses in the setting of educational policy and to look to educational and developmental theory for greater understanding of how people learn. In libraries with strong commitments to the educational values of academic librarianship, staff are not content with establishing and maintaining a program of library orientation or introduction to reference tools but rather seek to integrate their instruction programs into the curriculum, to revise their teaching styles based on application of learning theory, to teach problem solving and critical thinking as applied to information use as well as the more traditional library skills.

The activities of the BI Section are conspicuous examples of ACRL’s commitment to the teaching mission of academic libraries. I’ve already mentioned the work of the Bibliographic Instruction Liaison Project. The BI Section has also worked this year to implement the project which was a 1982 J. Morris Jones Award winner: duplication at eight state and regional library association meetings of the highly successful 1979 BIS Dallas Preconference. To honor the leadership of Miriam Dudley in developing the full participation of academic libraries in the teaching mission of higher education, an award has been instituted in her name. This award, like the others given by ACRL, will not only highlight individual contributions but will identify role models like Miriam Dudley who reprasent the embodiment of our values as a profession.

The final academic librarianship value drawn from the tradition of higher education which I will discuss is service. When coupled with our belief in access to information, this value compels us to extend our libraries into the communities in which our colleges and universities are located. I realize this is a controversial and difficult issue on many campuses, fraught with concern for preserving precious resources for our primary clientele and, at times, concern for safety. But again, the values of service which are inherent in the mission of higher education must be weighed in making decisions on community access. Certainly access to the library can be extended to alumni, and to the spouses of faculty, staff, and students without an unreasonable drain on resources. The needs of independent scholars have already been mentioned. We must also consider our ability to contribute to the development of the community through information provision to our professionals and businesses. The economic health and well-being of the communities in which our colleges and universities reside must be our responsibility as well as that of municipal and civic leaders. How we act on our service values will depend on the variables of our communities, but our values require that we critically examine our potential service role in the community.

ACRL exercised our collective service values in planning, organizing and committing staff time to the multidimensional training project which received this year’s J. Morris Jones Award. Throughout the year, ACRL leadership has attempted to raise issues and build coalitions which are of service to ALA as a whole. Certainly there are elements of self-interest in these efforts. Without a strong ALA, all the divisions, including ACRL, are weakened in our national efforts. But the primary motivation underlying the decision to approach other divisions and the leadership of ALA on matters as divergent as the survival of the Office of Library Outreach Services and the possible reclassification of ALA staff is to be of service to the profession as a whole. It is my belief that we must continue bringing our service values to the fore when considering our role within ALA. ACRL is ALA’s largest division. We have resources and expertise which can help resolve ALA’s current fiscal crisis and provide our profession as a whole with the kind of healthy organization we enjoy as academic librarians. We have begun to suggest solutions for ALA’s problems rather than merely respond to the suggestions of others. This is an expanded role for an ALA division, which others are beginning too. Our service stance will require further delineation but our intent to be of service to our profession has been clearly announced.

The third values tradition influencing academic librarianship stems from our roles and responsibilities as professionals. Among the values we share with other professionals are a commitment to the maintenance and development of our professional abilities; a sense of responsibility and accountability to our profession and to our clients; and a desire to preserve and promote our profession and its services. As a professional association, ACRL places a high priority on action derived from our values and commitments as professionals. In fact, these values provide the framework for ACRL’s basic functions and structure: our journal and publication program, conferences, the chapters, sections, and committees, lobbying, and our continuing education courses. It is because we are a professional association, committed to the values common to the professions, that ACRL provides opportunities for members to develop their abilities. Commitment to the professional value of maintaining the abilities of practitioners has been a high priority of ACRL leadership in recent years as demonstrated by the development of our national conference program, ACRL funding of the chapters and our continuing education courses. Our professional sense of responsibility and accountability leads us to share with library colleagues the results of failures as well as successes. ACRL journals and our national and annual conference programs provide us with opportunities to do so on a national level. Our 32 chapters provide similar opportunities on a regional basis. The desire to preserve and promote our profession results in lobbying efforts with our local administration, with funding agents, and on the state and regional level with our elected officials for greater library funding, for legislation which enables us to cooperate more effectively and formally with other libraries, for an awareness of the library’s role in society. ACRL both supports individual efforts with information and advice and organizes efforts on the national level such as the testimony given by ACRL members at the regional hearings of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. ACRL also works closely with ALA’s Washington Office on the concerns of academic libraries and librarians.

Our values as professionals clearly mandate such activities. The issue which continually faces us as a professional association is the amount of support designated to those activities which clearly advance the individual professional as well as the profession. Should the cost of activities such as the continuing education courses or the national conference be borne completely by those who participate, and thus directly benefit? Should these activities be subsidized by the membership as a whole because they advance the profession? Or should those who participate in these activities pay fees high enough to generate income for the development of other programs? There is and will continue to be a natural tension which exists along the continuum of our values as professionals when they are applied to our Association’s program. We must truly probe and use these values when we attempt to achieve the balance between a fiscally healthy association able to undertake new programs and an association which offers its members affordable, readily usable opportunities.

The final source of academic library values which I will address is that of our social responsibility as individuals in our society. This is the area where personal values are quite likely to affect the intensity of our commitment to professional values. One such value to which we as a society have committed ourselves is affirmative action, an area where the strength of our values is currently being tested. Without the visible and firm commitment of our federal government and with the number of vacant or new positions continually shrinking, it may be all too easy not to extend the effort required to maintain a dynamic affirmative action program. We must continue actively to recruit minorities to the profession and for our libraries; to aid in the advancement of minority staff and women; to encourage them to act as role models for all our students; to develop programs facilitating the use of our libraries by minority students and others for whom the rights of our society may not be readily accessible. Our social responsibility should also make us particularly wary of participating, knowingly or unknowingly, in the limitation of the availability of new information technologies solely to the affluent. Academic libraries too must come to grips with the user fee question.

The values-in-action philosophy I have been discussing is epitomized by the naming of the ACRL Academic/Research Librarian of the Year. This award, funded by the Baker and Taylor Company, recognizes an individual member of the library profession who has made an outstanding contribution to academic or research librarianship and library development. I think of this award as an opportunity to reflect on the values of our profession as well as honor high achievement. This year’s recipient, Richard J. Dougherty, has, in the words of the citation honoring him, “in a short span of time … left his mark on academic librarianship and the library profession through his prolific writings, able administration and committed professional involvements.” Under his editorship, the Journal of Academic Librarianship has become a major forum for the exploration of all the professional values I have been discussing. He is a forwardthinking librarian willing to take on the issues which confront our profession, someone who can serve as a model for the entire profession as well as his chosen specialty and ours, academic librarianship.

As I said in introducing this discussion of the values of academic librarianship, I do not expect that all members of the Association share my perspective or particular values or even my belief in clearlyrelating actions to values. Yet I know that all of us do make value-based decisions. And I know that in the future we as academic librarians face serious questions related to professional identity and purpose.

In ACRL, we have an organizationally mature, strong professional association, an association in which, as has been pointed out, activities are based on professional values drawn from the traditions of librarianship, higher education, professionalism, and our individual societal responsibilities. We have worked very hard to achieve ACRL’s organizational strength and maturity. Our activities during the year have continued the Association’s structural enhancement begun with the Activity Model for 1990. We end the year more aware of our values as academic librarians and their implications for the Association’s future. The challenge which now faces us is the further development of ACRL’s role as a forum for the exploration of our values. I for one plan to continue looking to my professional association for reminders of important issues to be considered in day-to-day decision-making. I urge you to do the same.

Carla Stoffle President, ACRL

Letter

Moving Collections

To the Editor:

A few comments on Mr. Amadeo’s article on moving collections in the March 1983 C&RL News:

Marking: it is helpful to make a full plan of the area into which the books will be moved, identifying each range and section by a number-letter combination. One can then key the future location of books to this plan, working out the full location before moving a single book. A 3x5 slip with the range number, section letter and (if necessary, shelf number) can then be attached to each section. A tall colored slip bearing the new range/section/shelf code can then be inserted in the first book on each old shelf before moving commences.

Loading onto book trucks: contents of old shelves should be transferred onto book trucks one shelf at a time, never putting books from more than one old shelf onto a shelf of the book truck. Since truck shelves are frequently longer than stack shelves, a block (easily made of rolled corrugated paper) should be put on each truck shelf to reduce it to exact stack shelf length. The truck is then loaded top shelf, middle shelf, bottom shelf, then the other side top shelf, middle shelf, bottom shelf (not as in Amadeo’s diagram), wheeled to the new location and unloaded onto the new shelves as shown by the colored slip which bears the exact new shelf location. Loading one side and then the other permits much more rapid and efficient unloading with less opportunity for confusion than alternate loading/unloading. Care must, however, be taken to prevent over-balancing.

If the truck is to go a great distance or over uneven surfaces, it is wise to wrap the truck round from end to end with corrugated paper held temporarily in place with a little masking tape and secured by enormous rubber bands, carefully placed so that they bring pressure to bear on the shelf sides and not at all on the books. When we moved to Spencer Library (200,000 volumes, plus manuscripts, plus furniture, plus a press in ten days) this device allowed our book trucks to be rolled into an elevator, out the loading door, up a ramp into a van, and (after a short trip down and up a steep hill) down a ramp off the van, along a sloping sidewalk about 500 yards to the library door and to various locations inside a four-story building without the books taking any harm. They were rolled directly to the new shelf location and unloaded immediately so that the trucks could be returned for another load. Nothing was hurt and nothing was lost.

Another thought on loading: whether books can be loaded two facing rows to a truck shelf or not is a function of size rather than rarity. The two rows can be protected from one another during transit by the insertion of a book-high, shelf-long piece of acid-free matboard or binder’s board.—Alexandra

Mason, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence.■ ■