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The changing pattern of research and learning in higher education

As part of a university or college, the academic library is not an end in itself. It supports research, learning and scholarship, and it has always had to adapt as research and learning behaviors change. However, in the current network environment, this change is uneven and uncertain and poses great challenges for libraries.

“I assume that university libraries will adapt to change in education and research institutions as they are transformed through the digital revolution.”12 However, as we have seen in our discussion of trends in the social and technology landscapes, learning behaviors of young people—both students and faculty—have changed a great deal, and the institutions supporting their research and learning for the most part have not changed to accommodate the newer members of this community.

“The current generation of scientists is much more familiar with PubMed and Google than the contents of their library shelves.”13

Infrastructure changes

There is a growing investment in learning management systems to mediate and manage the learning experience. Learning materials are being produced in various digital forms and need to be managed. Faculty are creating, analyzing and using digital resources in many ways. Scientific research is being transformed and there is huge investment in large-scale computing infrastructure to support new modes of working. Change may be slower in the humanities and social sciences, but is significant.

In general, the system of scholarly communication is being transformed in unpredictable ways.

Universities are taking a stronger interest in managing their own digital assets, and, in making them more widely available, the library has the opportunity to become involved at various stages, looking at taking on broader institutional asset management responsibilities.

Research is increasingly being carried out in groups, and across historically defined disciplines and also across institutions.

The library is becoming more engaged with the research and learning behaviors of its users, and is supporting them at more stages in their work. Libraries are working in new partnerships with faculty and students and developing new models of academic support.

Libraries, academic computing, administrative computing, educational technology and sometimes the campus bookstore, media services and university press are increasingly being gathered organizationally under one senior university administrator. Where such alignment is not organizationally enacted, libraries and other services are recognizing their overlapping interests and the need for partnership.

“I see a great opportunity for the next five years for a more rigorous and pragmatic partnership between librarians, IT professionals and scholars. While that may sound obvious, it really has not been done.”14

And finally, there is an emerging emphasis on integration among systems that support learning, research and administration, and a corresponding interest in campus architectures, repository and portal frameworks, and common services such as authentication and authorization.

This technological movement is changing the way faculty and students access, create and use information resources and is creating new support challenges. Among these are questions of how best to support the life cycle management of learning materials; how to develop greater systems integration among learning management, library and administrative systems; and how to diffuse information skills throughout learning activities.

Computing and its supporting infrastructure have evolved steadily and rapidly for 50 years, but the impact on scholarly research methodologies has become particularly evident as these changes have surfaced in ubiquitous personal computing capabilities and high bandwidth connectivity.

Grid computing (http://www.gridcomputing.com) is a strong manifestation of these trends. This community promotes the development and advancement of technologies that provide seamless and scalable access to wide-area distributed resources. Computational grids enable the selection and sharing of geographically distributed computational resources. The idea has become popular in a variety of academic research environments, including computer science, molecular modeling and drug design, biophysics and high-energy physics.

Impact on the sciences

The impact in the sciences has been greater than in the humanities and social sciences. The ambitious recommendations of the NSF Cyberinfrastructure Advisory Panel15 give an indication of directions science and technology research might go. The report points to the major opportunities for research that emerge from the ubiquitous availability of broadband computing, from the generation of massive amounts of data and from visualization and simulation. It highlights the strong trends in current research towards federation of distributed resources (data, content collections and computing facilities) and distributed, multidisciplinary expertise.

Currently these trends are exemplified in projects and programs involving aerospace research, earth sciences and ecological studies, physics and energy research, biomedical informatics and advanced computing initiatives. The close connection of research and education is particularly critical in this context. Success will depend on providing high-quality educational opportunities necessary to the support of any advanced work. But in addition, the expanded scope and intrinsically distributed, multidisciplinary character of these trends will present particularly novel challenges that must be met with innovative educational technology and management and funding. The report also identifies fundamental risks that imperil such progress, including the loss of poorly-curated data, lack of standardization of data formats and poor coherence among IT research, the IT industry and domain science.

The panel proposes the establishment of the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program to be funded at an annual level of US$1 billion to address these opportunities.

Home page of the International Poster Collection, created by the Colorado State University Libraries and the Department of Art.16

Impact on the humanities

Research in the humanities is changing as well. Though its scope and character are on a smaller scale than the massive, distributed science research projects, humanities and social science research increasingly rely on the availability of information on the scholars’ desktops.

The proliferation, especially in the humanities, of new varieties of scholarly artifacts—software, interactive components and multimedia objects—presents novel impediments to discovery, access and preservation of such materials. Wendy Lougee points to the importance of new collaborations between cultural stewards and scholars as essential to the survival of the objects of their stewardship.17

The shift of librarianship from a role of service provider to collaborator will be particularly important if the many new varieties of scholarly output have any hope of being cataloged and therefore disclosed to potential users, and preserved in ways that will sustain their value to future scholars.

Libraries and archives contain many of the primary materials upon which research in the humanities is based. However, access to these materials is often inhibited by limited or absent cataloging or finding aids. This makes the collections available to those who already know about them, or who come across them serendipitously. This in turn limits scholarship or teaching based on those materials. It is clear that there is still a major descriptive challenge ahead for libraries, which will involve looking at descriptive practices and looking at greater investment in collection-level description.

Access to materials

The policies and techniques for capturing, sharing and preserving scholarly assets are as yet undeveloped, but Abby Smith18 classifies approaches to these problems in two categories:

• Enterprise-based model—essentially, institutions assume responsibility for preserving and managing these artifacts, perhaps in the institutional repository.
• Community-based model—third-party stewardship that emerges from a community or discipline. ARTstor is an example of this model.

The underlying challenges and opportunities share common threads, including the obvious themes of rapid technological change and how such changes influence the needs and expectations of researchers and users. Perhaps the deeper themes, however, involve the social and institutional changes necessary to effect the transition from traditional resources, tools and services for support of scholarship to the digital, distributed, seamless environments that will be necessary in the future.

Research and Learning Landscape:  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8