Library Perspectives on the EDUCAUSE 2020 Top 10 IT Issues

Bringing in librarians' perspectives on the 2020 Top 10 IT Issues is a natural focus for EDUCAUSE. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), a joint initiative of EDUCAUSE and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), advances collaboration between library and IT organizations in order to promote the use of information technology to advance research and education.

Four library leaders contributed their thoughts.

Karim Boughida
Dean, University Libraries, University of Rhode Island

Salwa Ismail
Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology and Associate CIO, UC Berkeley Library, University of California, Berkeley

Sarah Pritchard
Dean of Libraries and the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian, Northwestern University

Keith Webster
Dean of Libraries and Director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives, Carnegie Mellon University

We selected three of the 2020 Top 10 IT Issues to represent the range of topics in which library expertise and initiatives could be important for an institutional IT program:

• Student-Centric Higher Education (#5)
• Sustainable Funding (#3)
• Privacy (#2)

For each issue, we asked the library leaders to identify challenges and opportunities for collaboration between libraries and the central IT organization.¹

Student-Centric Higher Education (Issue #5)

How are libraries working with the central IT organization to optimize students' experiences?

Webster: I’m trying to position the library as the primary non-classroom academic space here on campus. I want it to be the destination that attracts students whenever they need to engage in work. This is not about providing a glorified study hall with semi-decent coffee; it’s a recognition that the student life cycle embraces different types of learning activities, each with distinct space needs. Libraries all across the United States and internationally are creating maker spaces, often because these spaces are the latest cool thing. But if we can connect these spaces to academic programs, we have a much more serious mission and greater impact than just a hobbyist environment.

 

When students arrive on campus, they are in a formative stage, looking for guidance on how to be successful and to find their community. At the start of the semester, we try to create an environment at the CMU Libraries so that students are primed for success early in their studies. As the semester unfolds, there is a focus on laboratory and group work, so we are developing high-quality group study and maker spaces that are strongly linked with academic programs. We see more demand for individual study spaces as exams approach, so we disassemble group spaces.

 

That said, students also want natural light, coffee, and 24/7 availability. We think there will be an even greater demand for the library as a study environment into the future. At CMU, students from different colleges studying together in the same courses tell us that although they don’t feel comfortable going to a lab or classroom in another college, they are quite comfortable coming to the library. Being a discipline-agnostic space is an important draw for the library.

 

Another perspective is that CMU students are looking for the same type of information services that we are building for our researcher community. They are just as concerned about data management—finding data, using it, reusing it, and then making their own data available and discoverable. The skills in working with data are so paramount that the library is becoming known as a central destination for basic data science skills. We introduced our first credit-bearing data science course from the library this semester, focusing on the responsible use of data and the data lifecycle. That is a much more relevant contribution to the student experience than aligning our library catalog to the CMS.

 

A big challenge we face at CMU is that some of our community members have an instinctive desire for large, book-filled libraries that offer a tangible sense of scholarship that may not be available from other information sources. This remains a continued but diminishing demand from a subset of the community that is more strongly attached to what libraries were in the past. Part of our work will be to help our communities embrace a new version of libraries.

 

Pritchard: Our goal is to shape good general relationships with many aspects of the central IT organization; we can’t work on new approaches to student services if we don’t have shared understanding of how these interact with layers of faculty research computing, network security, and administrative platforms. At Northwestern, libraries and the central IT organization have a strong, collaborative relationship that has evolved over the last ten years. Those of us in the libraries are working in an ecosystem where we are engaged in an array of outreach and partnership with multiple campus units. We are coordinating across diverse academic units that may have their own IT staff, so it becomes highly complex to initiate and maintain constantly changing relationships. We’ve also been restructuring our liaison program so that librarians can more readily expand beyond just acquisitions—for example, to research data support, digital literacy, and OER.

Even if all of us on campus ultimately have a shared vision, the work is decentralized across campus, and implementing the vision and consistent policy can be a challenge. The ecosystem is both the challenge and the opportunity. It’s both an amoeba and a jigsaw puzzle. There are multiple pieces that tie together, but they are flowing.

Ismail: Libraries contribute a lot to an improved user experience as services are rolled out, ensuring that services are user-centric and providing a place for collaboration. It’s very important for libraries to coordinate with the central IT organization, and at the UC Berkeley Library, we’ve done this for a long time. One way is to provide seamless enterprise access to tools. Libraries already offer many tools for research and teaching and learning, and the central IT organization can help. Also, libraries often work with other campus units on pilots and then work with the central IT organization to scale them. This work runs the gamut, from very basic technological needs (e.g., access to specific software, logging in, printing, Wi-Fi support) to more complex issues.

Boughida: At the University of Rhode Island, we are now paying much more attention to student success and retention, partly as a result of less funding and partly because of how higher education itself is being questioned. The United States is not increasing retention, especially when it comes to underrepresented students. In terms of data analytics, libraries, the central IT organization, institutional research, and student affairs are all starting to pay attention to student data and are collaborating to see how we can use the data in an ethical way to help with student success and retention. The IT organization and libraries have been collaborating for decades, of course, but we are in the early stages of collaboration around issues of data security and privacy.

 

There is a traditional view of student success as information literacy. Although information literacy is crucial, student success pertains to the whole life of the student. We must help students navigate the institution, not just find resources. The libraries’ role in student success is larger, deeper, and broader than simply information provisioning and management. Student success and retention are part of our mission, and we are also trying to align with enrollment, counseling, and other student services. Student success and retention will depend on diversity and accessibility. If we want to be ready for this, if we want to take diversity, equity, and inclusion very seriously, we need to consider how we are offering services and which services. This will involve repositioning and moving outside our comfortable box.

At the University of Rhode Island, we’ve also been working on creating active learning spaces and more student-centric buildings. Some of the specialized spaces we’ve been developing, like our AI lab and maker spaces, are a combination of funding from the library, the provost, two colleges, and a foundation grant. We’ve also had to reallocate some library resources to do this. Our president and provost reward innovation. But we are asked to understand where we are identifying new priorities; if we are willing to fund them, then the provost will match the funding. We have also added 59 percent more seats in the library over the last few years—another way to support students and help them feel proud of the library. We’ve been slow to change for centuries. We’ve survived because we stuck to tradition. But that’s no longer the case; we’re no longer the gatekeepers.

Sustainable Funding (Issue #3)

How are libraries developing funding models that can maintain quality and can accommodate both new needs and the growing use of IT services in an era of increasing budget constraints?

Boughida: All of us in academic library administration struggle with the library funding model, and we all are trying to find a sustainable model. We have to reprioritize constantly. We have to work within constraints because the landscape is complicated. Colleges and universities cannot increase student fees and/or tuition forever. The library is part of the infrastructure of the institution, so library administrators have to work to support more and collaborate more. This applies in areas such as research and open data; we still struggle to find the best model to fund data management. But unless we have national help, we will never have truly regional or even national hubs for research data.

Ismail: An important thing that libraries are doing is to account for changes in users’ behaviors and then adapt services so that library budget models can change based on users’ needs. As users change their behaviors, current services may not be so integral, so how does the library shift? One approach is to look at predictive analysis and trends—what is happening with services and patterns of use—and then tweaking the budget models accordingly. In terms of basing our decisions on evidence, some of the data is easy to obtain, but some is not. We also need to find a balance between obtaining the information we need and protecting users’ privacy. Funding issues are about not just sustainable funding but also efficiencies of scale. Our models might stay the same, but our models can sustain those changes. At our university, some say we are innovative because budgets are tight, not because we have a lot of money.

There are also opportunities. For example, at the University of California, Berkeley, the Office of the CIO has launched a “Reimagining IT” strategic plan. Part of that plan is the “One IT” initiative, in which all of us on campus work together to advance the mission of the institution. This program works to ensure that we’re not duplicating efforts.

Pritchard: Architecting a model that is spread across all sorts of budget categories and differing departments making budget and personnel decisions in different ways at different times is very complex. It’s almost impossible to expect that we’ll have continuity in both services and expertise.

In an area like data management, which may include a number of both local and external stakeholders, documenting who does what is perhaps possible, but ensuring that the work gets done is not. At Northwestern this year, we’re celebrating the 150th anniversary of admitting women to the university—an event preserved through print records. What about 150 years from today? At present, we have no long-term strategy for collecting and preserving institutional digital content. There is opportunity for a more holistic sense of archiving, but budget fragmentation makes that problematic.

This question touches on quite a range of activity. The challenge in our environment is that Northwestern is both very innovative and very decentralized. We are constantly caught in the middle of evolving enterprises. Historical trends also shape things enormously. New concepts, like digital archiving, take a long time to socialize. Sometimes we have to pick and choose an initiative—we can’t do it all.

Webster: I’d love to say that at CMU we have a sophisticated, multiyear approach to funding, but we don’t; we’ve largely had to be practical. From the perspective of areas such as data management, campus research, and information systems, my approach has been to formulate a business case with our provost who funds our activities. This business case involved identifying the unmet needs I could see across campus and describing the cost of doing nothing. I presented a multiyear budget request to help faculty with their data, code, research, and documentation of their research. There was no scope in my existing budget for the costs to support those needs; it had to be a fresh ask. In many ways, I’ve spent twenty years waiting for the benefits (cost-wise) of electronic resources. I’ve seen only a constant need for more funding, and that means that I have had no savings available to fund new activities. Just as our technology is incredibly decentralized, so is our funding model, which means funds are much more constrained, so I’m talking to my fellow deans about a new approach to resource research support services.

Another thing we’ve been conscious of is the growth of interest in open science. There is a mindset, particularly among early career researchers, that it is desirable to use openly and freely available tools; we are trying to see what that means for us at scale. At this stage, once again, we are seeing more costs than savings. Applying open resources at the institutional level usually incurs some costs to further develop and integrate the platforms. But we hope that over time, open resources will lead to savings, as well as bring benefits to researchers’ productivity and impact.

In addition, we have been moving more to the campus cloud system rather than running a machine room in the library. Most of our library systems are now cloud-based, and our digital library storage has also moved to a cloud operated by campus computing services. We are hoping that will benefit our budget structure in the long term. I also think there are opportunities to work with the central IT organization on licenses for software applications across campus, rather than college-by-college deals—both in the negotiation and in the provision. In some instances, using a site-wide license instead of multiple licenses for software products on campus could result in cost savings.

Finally, we recently concluded a major transformative open-access agreement between the large, commercial publisher Elsevier and CMU. This agreement dissolves the traditional readership license and replaces it with a new model that incorporates scholarly research as an activity versus just readership. This is the beginning of a true shift in cost basis for publication of and access to journal articles.

Planning for future services means understanding the drivers of change today, in order to understand digital transformation. Almost anything is possible, but at a time of rising tuition costs, fewer research grant opportunities, and softening corporate sponsorship, how can academic libraries afford the future growth?

Privacy (Issue #2)

What role does the library play in educating the college/university community about privacy issues?

Ismail: Helping to educate the community about privacy needs to be a collaboration between the central IT organization and other groups on campus. One key step is to start conversations with constituents to help them understand what their data rights and data choices are and help them make more informed choices as both consumers and creators of user data. In the world of AI, how can we make sure that our constituents are aware of their rights and what is happening with their data? Libraries also need to balance these questions with the immediate needs of using data for reporting and predictions while maintaining anonymity and privacy. How do we find the middle ground? As we move forward, we need to be clear about the agreements we’re making, ensuring data compliance with faculty and student research and providing environments where privacy can be maintained but research is not disturbed or changed.

Libraries are partners in many initiatives on campus. All of us on campus have learned each other’s strengths; coming together makes for a stronger institution.

Webster: At CMU, we are looking to offer more programming on privacy issues—something that can be done from multiple places in the university without having people feeling overwhelmed. This includes helping stakeholders to better understand how their own data is being collected by the university and to be aware that the library and other parts of the institution are protecting their data, though there are risks too. There is a need for campus debate about what is possible and what is acceptable.

I’m co-chair of our data governance council. Building bridges between technical silos may be arduous, but building bridges between cultures is much more difficult as higher education institutions source vast amounts of data into data-informed decision making, from deciding on students for admission, to analyzing where faculty publish, to identifying at-risk students. Because the library is a neutral space—a trusted broker—I could imagine the library being the player that would aggregate data from across the institution.

Boughida: I’m the chair of the group for data governance at my institution, and I brought up this issue of privacy with student representatives. Many students were in favor of data being monitored to ensure well-being or to prompt mental health checks, but others were not. We need a balance between privacy, on the one hand, and access and openness on the other. Librarians often see privacy in black-and-white, but the issue is more complicated. I’m trying to be in the middle—valuing both privacy and student success.

Pritchard: The library has an emerging role of educating students and faculty to help them be good digital citizens. Students and faculty need to acquire the skill of managing their digital lives. At Northwestern, the library has been a part of two different grants—one related to learning analytics and another related to privacy—in which we have been interviewing students about their awareness of the data they are sharing through learning analytics systems and external sites. We’re also educating them about reusability, since many students are engaged in creating content and need to be aware of privacy issues related to intellectual property. We’ve been looking for opportunities to offer presentations, focus groups, and discussion sessions with students on these issues and to lead awareness in the policy issues of digital citizenship, “fake news,” and privacy.

Note

1. This is the second year that library leaders have been interviewed for their perspectives on the EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues. See Joan K. Lippincott and Karen A. Wetzel, with Peggy Ann Seiden, Jeff Steely, Kristin Antelman, and Jon Cawthorne, "Library Perspectives on the EDUCAUSE 2019 Top 10 IT Issues," EDUCAUSE Review, February 11, 2019. ↩

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Karen Wetzel is Director of Community and Working Groups for EDUCAUSE.

Joan Lippincott is Associate Director Emerita of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).