How and Why Libraries are Changing: What We Know and What We Need to Know

In November 2000, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) commissioned a white paper to initiate discussion of how and why libraries are changing. Eight academic library directors met with representatives from the DLF and CLIR in March 2001 to discuss the issues. The outcome of this meeting was a proposal to conduct research that will begin to fill significant gaps in our understanding and to better position libraries to meet the needs and expectations of academic users and university and college administrators. The white paper and the forthcoming research should be of interest to anyone trying to cope with or make sense of transformational change in academic libraries. To reach a broader audience, the white paper has been revised and updated for publication in portal: Libraries and the Academy. The article examines the importance of understanding how and why libraries are changing, analyzes the limitations and difficulties of traditional library performance measures, and explores environmental factors that may help account for why library use is changing. It concludes with an overview of research designed to develop an understanding of how user behavior and preferences affect demand for and use of library collections, services, and facilities, and a call to contribute conscientiously to the legacy of academic libraries and librarianship.

The Problem

Academic libraries are changing in response to changes in the learning and research environment and changes in the behavior of library users. The changes are evolutionary. Libraries are adding new, digital resources and services while maintaining most of the old, traditional resources and services. Finding and funding the appropriate balance of digital and traditional initiatives challenges strategic and financial planners. Library administrators feel pressured to respond to the transforming needs and expectations of users, and in some cases, are pressured by university and college administrators to account for their expenditures and demonstrate the outcomes they achieve. Data are required to respond to these pressures, find the appropriate balance, and plan for the future. Libraries need data to justify their existence, secure resources, advocate their initiatives, and know what's happening. We need data that illuminate not only how, but also why libraries are changing if we are to explain shifting patterns of library use, envision the trajectory of our evolutionary path, and win or bolster support for the changing directions of academic libraries.

What do we know about how and why libraries are changing? We know something about how libraries are changing, but with close scrutiny must admit that even this knowledge may be incomplete and uncertain. We know almost nothing about why libraries are changing because our traditional data collection practices tend to be myopic, counting selected activities within our purview and relying on anecdotal evidence about the larger context in which we operate as a basis for interpreting our data. If our discipline is library science, we've overlooked some significant independent variables that influence the dependent variables of library use.

Let's examine what we know about how libraries are changing. Traditional measures quantify a library's raw materials or potential to meet user needs (inputs), and the actual use of library collections and services (outputs). Input and output statistics reveal changes in what libraries do over time; for example, they provide a longitudinal look at the number of books purchased and circulated per year. Traditional approaches to measuring inputs and outputs focus on physical library resources. Libraries are struggling with what to measure and how to measure inputs and outputs in the digital environment. We currently have no standard, comparable data to assess digital library trends within or across academic libraries. Similarly, usage data from commercial vendors of electronic resources cannot be compared easily because they measure or define the data differently. Even input and output data on traditional library resources reflect these problems. The data that...