ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Wiley Dyer and the library as information processor

By Sarah Barbara Watstein Head, Reference Division Hunter College

The ACRL President’s Program in New York last June took a fresh look at a controversial case study.

By now, many academic librarians nationwide have been involved, directly or indirectly, in the examination of the issues surrounding the rapid introduction and integration of technology on the mythical campus known as Garfield University. Some of us participated in this examination on October 28, 1983, at a Tri-Chapter ACRL Symposium entitled “Life on the Technology Express” (see C&RL News, January 1984, pp.9–10). Others participated in this examination on June 30, 1986, at the ACRL President’s Program in New York also entitled, “Life on the Technology Express.” This article focuses on the two Garfield University programs and provides some background on their development.

Garfield University and its dilemmas

Easily recognizable to most ACRL members are several of the most vocal characters and details in the controversy engulfing the Garfield University campus in suburban Clifton since the inauguration of President Wiley Dyer. At the helm of the Heathcliff Library on the Garfield University campus is Ely Berrien, director of the library for eighteen years. Other notable library personnel are Mr. A. Keen Buch, assistant director for public services, and Minnie Roebuck, head of cataloging, and chair of DEPOT, Director’s Executive Panel on Technology. Other University notables are Irwin

B. Moxie, director of the Garfield University Computing Center, and Katherine Kaufman, member of the Garfield University Board of Trustees and State Representative from the Clifton District.

What is the controversy all about? Why did WPUR-TV’s “Focus on Clifton,” for example, send one of its best interviewers, Stephanie Hendricks, to examine the turmoil surrounding Garfield? At issue is the reorganization of information services at Garfield. It is President Dyer’s intention to reorganize virtually all Garfield operations according to his belief that the university is an information processor. He advocates assigning each function on campus to one of five groups: input, storage, processing, control, or output. Dyer contends that the library is essentially an information processor as most broadly defined, which resembles the university’s computer system. Aware of the growing competition among the university library and various information processing, communication, and emerging control technologies, Dyer has begun to rethink basic questions concerning the library’s purpose, proper functions, and possibly even its reason for existing. In his provocative article, “Rethinking the Academic Library,” Dyer questions:

“Must the library, for example, be a building or even a place? If so, is it one place, several, or many? If more than one, ought these to be differented among input-output, storage, and processing functions, in some other way, or not at all? If it is not a place, should the special identification of ‘library’ be retained? Should this library serve all campuses in a region? All campuses of the same type? All those in the country? Perhaps in the world?”¹

Behind these questions is Dyer’s belief that “emerging technologies promise eventually to change drastically if not eliminate the justification for the library as traditionally conceived.”

The controversy is genuine (the characters struggling to understand the University’s and the Library’s future as projected by President Dyer), the issues are complicated, and the occasion was memorable—the 1986 ACRL President’s Program.

Roots

The 1986 ACRL President’s Program had its roots in November 1982 when the President-Elect of the New Jersey Library Association’s College and University Section (an ACRL Chapter), and the Presidents-Elect of the Delaware Valley and the Greater New York Metropolitan Area Chapters of ACRL met to discuss the possibility of a Tri- Chapter ACRL meeting in the Fall of 1983. The objectives of this meeting were to select a site for the meeting, brainstorm for topic selection, and review price considerations. Given chapter sizes, it was felt that a Tri-Chapter meeting could potentially attract 300–600 people. Equidistant to Chapter members in the metropolitan areas of their states, Princeton University was selected as the meeting site. Suggested topics were wide ranging, and, in fact, it was not until March 1983 that program format and content really took shape—a shape which was, at that date, a “first” for ACRL meetings.

Wiley Dyer (James Beniger) discusses the future of Garfield University Library at the ACRL President’s Program.

Symposium participants were asked to read through various documents in advance of their arrival at Princeton. These documents contained both important and tangential information. They included a description of Garfield University, a reprint of Wiley Dyer’s provocative paper, “Rethinking the Academic Library,” various librarians’ memos and position papers, related articles from Garfield University publications, and other, nonlibrary, Garfield inter-office communiques.

At Princeton, participants were asked to imagine themselves as people “vitally and vociferously interested in the decisions being made at Garfield regarding the future of recorded information in a highly technological setting.”² In short, participants were asked to share, insofar as the case permitted, common experience from which to consider life on the technology express.

The focus of the symposium was the examination of the structure, processes and control of technology. The centerpiece for the day’s program, a library-oriented case study designed on the Harvard Business School Model, was distributed in advance to registrants. The case was highlighted during the symposium, and used both as a vehicle for group discussion and to facilitate the examination of the choices facing all academic and research library staff who are affected by the forces of technology.

The symposium schedule included a welcome to Princeton by Donald W. Koepp, Princeton University Librarian; greetings from ACRL by Carla Stoffle, ACRL Past President; a keynote address by Irving Louis Horowitz, Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor of Sociology & Political Science, Rutgers University; presentation of the case; general analysis of the case in small group discussions with library leaders; functional analysis of the case in similar groups; and a closing address by James Beniger, then assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University.

From Symposium to President’s Program

In the late Spring of 1985, members of the Tri-Chapter ACRL program planning committee were invited to accept appointment as members of the 1986 New York Annual Conference Program Planning Committee. The Committee’s charge was to replicate the Tri-Chapter symposium for ACRL’s national program, in New York, on June 30, 1986.

The Committee had slightly over a year to meet this challenge. Components of this challenge included: a more geographically diverse audience; an audience significantly more familiar with the furor over technological turf and the mission of the academic library; a half versus a full day program; a program schedule which must allow for an annual business meeting, a break, and Librarian-of- the-Year Award presentation; a program which would be embedded in a national conference versus a symposium with no competition; and national versus predominantly “local” organizational support. Given the midtown location of the Conference and limited acceptable facilities in New York City, the Committee was also faced with the challenge of “local arrangements”—a challenge of a different nature than working out site details in Princeton!

Reviewing the program schedule, examining all Garfield documents from 1983 and targeting ones needing revision, identifying a keynoter, coordinators, and discussion leaders, clarifying the viewpoint of those who would attend the program, and redoing public relations strategy constituted the focus of early Committee meetings.

As in 1983, registrants received a packet containing various documents in advance of the program. Documents included a profile of Wiley Dyer, a description of Garfield and its Library, reprints of key Dyer articles and addresses, diverse interoffice memos, and copies of relevant op-ed columns, letters to the editor, editorials, etc., from Garfield publications. The majority of documents concerned the role of Garfield’s Librarv in a world where, according to President Dyer, information on campus will flow in all directions at once.

Participants were asked to imagine they had consented to serve on an advisory panel at Garfield. As their predecessors in 1983, they were expected to grapple “with the tangled issues on the border between the traditional academic library and the information technologies and consciousness emerging elsewhere on campus.”³ In Garfield University Trustee Katherine Freylinghuysen’s message to participants she pleaded, “we are seeking your counsel to help everyone at Garfield think through the future.”⁴

The revised program schedule began with a brief annual business meeting and a keynote address by Rutgers Professor Irving Horowitz.

Introduced as a person who “values values” and one whose “ideas are often valued,” keynoter Horowitz focused on the broad subject of the communication of ideas. In particular, he examined the complex problem of access—to knowledge, information and data. This examination included both a comparison of the political, ideological, cultural and legal characteristics of democracies and dictatorships, and a comparison of the characteristics of market and planned economies. In addition to redefining the problems of access as political and economic issues, Horowitz also established these problems as geographic and technological issues. His address provided participants with a context for their deliberations, for, at the heart of the Garfield dilemmas is the justification for the Library as traditionally conceived—in terms of its role in accessing information.

After the keynote address, participants were then asked to retire to Garfield University and to “analyze its approach to the onrushing information age and to share (their) wisdom about how to hook on to what’s coming down the track.”⁵

A Garfield University case videotape eased participants into their new roles. It consisted of a segment of WPUR-TV’s “Focus on Clifton” program on the Garfield situation, with interviews of several of the most vocal people in the controversy. Stephanie Hendricks, the reporter, spoke with Ely Berrien, Irwin B. Moxie, Katherine Kaufman, Mr. A. Keen Buch, Minnie Roebuck, and Terry Cloethe, a typical Garfield student.

Discussion by “Garfield University Consultants” followed the videotape. Participants were seated at tables of ten, each led by a discussion leader familiar with the implications of each case, and were assigned to tables by type of library they worked in— 2-year college, 4-year college, small university (under 5,000 FTE students), large university (5,000 FTE students and over). “Notes” sheets were provided that facilitated listing of the issues under the following categories: economic, historical, technological, educational, political and personnel. Each participant was also asked to note suggestions for the future of Garfield University.

The discussions were lively. Participants vigorously responded to the challenge of Garfield’s dilemmas, reflected upon by Horowitz, as captured by videotape, and as presented by the case documents.

Discussion leaders were asked to summarize the discussions at their tables, noting those issues identified as most critical, most important to solve, most widespread, and hardest to solve. A space for discussion leaders to record quotes worth saving was also provided. Summary sheets were handed in to James Beniger, associate professor at Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, who offered reflections on the case and a closing address.

Dyer/Beniger

Confusion, surprise and wonderment marked the surprise visit of Wiley Dyer. Acknowledging that he was “somewhat nervous,” Dyer confronted what he perceived to be an “undue” amount of hostility coming from the audience. He began his remarks with a confession, tracing his own problems with librarians to his having been spanked as a child with an academic library book which had been checked out by a male and renewed by his father. He proceeded with liberal doses of free advice from his forthcoming book, A Good Library is the Cat’s Pajamas. Before turning to the dilemmas at hand and his summary comments, he announced that he would soon be posting library director Ely Berrian’s position, and hoped a less absent-minded individual would be successfully recruited and hired. Dyer then summarized comments from each type of library represented.

His own remarks consisted of an elaborate justification of his belief that libraries are, by tradition, set up to do the information processing function outlined in his numerous articles and speeches. He used the example of the Library Bureau of Boston, established by the American Library Association in 1876, to drive the point home that indeed, ALA had pioneered the information technology business 110 years ago. A second example used to prove his point was ALA’s role in the launching of the computer industry some 90 years ago. Throughout, Dyer reiterated his belief that what is happening today, at Garfield, and at participants’ libraries is the “libraryifying of post-industrial society, not the computerizing of libraries.” Dyer sees the dawning of the computer and information age not as a threat to librarians, but as “the final and ultimate opportunity to the profession.” Enthusiastically hailing librarians as the “original information scientists,” he challenged his audience to rethink not only Garfield’s but their own library’s future.

Responses to Dyer’s remarks ranged from loud and raucous cries expressing disapproval to bellylaughs and snickers. The 1986 ACRL President’s Program could not have ended with remarks by a more controversial, exciting, and stimulating figure than Wiley Dyer (a.k.a. James Beniger).

From 1983 to 1986, from a day-long symposium to a half-day President’s Program, Garfield and its characters and dilemmas are still with us, and worthy of our individual and collective concern. The boomerang has returned—successfully—to its starting point.

Modemless computer access at Lehigh

On August 4, 1986, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, began using an InteCom IBX/80 campus-wide integrated voice and data communications network that may be unique in higher education. The network replaces the university’s Dimension 2000 phone system and provides data access to both campus and remote computers without the need for individual modems.

The network is now providing 9000-baud access to the Lehigh University Libraries’ online catalog from every office, laboratory, classroom and student residence room. The libraries implemented the GEAC catalog, circulation, and MARC management modules in August 1985, when the new E.W. Fairchild Martindale Library and Computing Center was opened.

A total of 4,200 voice ports and 6,700 data ports serve a population of 4,400 undergraduates, 1,900 graduates, 400 full-time faculty, and 700 administrative staff in 126 buildings on the campus. The network is closely integrated with the university’s microcomputer program. Every full-time member of the faculty has been provided a Zenith microcomputer and there are several hundred more available at public sites, including 73 in the university libraries. Lehigh does not require students to buy microcomputers; rather, it is encouraging them to do so by presenting attractive prices through the campus microcomputer store.

This fall the libraries are greatly expanding their training program in end-user database searching to enable faculty and students to take advantage of the new ease with which both their catalog and external databases may be accessed via the network. Other library applications on the network include an online list of recent accessions.

Notes

1. Wiley Dyer, “Rethinking the Academic Library,” case study article, January 1985. Typewritten.
2. Welcome from The Case Study Group, October 28, 1983.
3. Welcome from Sharon A. Hogan, June 30, 1986.
4. Letter from Katherine Freylinghuysen, June 5, 1986.
5. Welcome from Sharon A. Hogan, June 30, 1986.