Fissuring in academic libraries?

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil (Harvard, 2014) elicited a deep-seated need to apply what he was saying to academic libraries, even though I am only on page 12. Fissuring involves 3 distinct strategic elements 1. A focus on revenues/core competencies 2. A focus on costs and 3. The glue, that of creating and enforcing standards (p. 11). So how does this illuminate academic library trends and changes to our librarianship? I’m going to jump around as I play with a response. FYI, librarians and libraries are two separate things in this post.

Core competencies: a focus on activities that add greatest value while farming out work to other organizations not central to the core mission. You then develop your brands and customer identification with the “library” in our case, on building the capacity to add new products or designs, on implementing economies of scale or scope in production and operation. Anything outside this gets shifted away.

Costs: Shedding employment relationships for many activities and the associated monetary/resource gobbling responsibilities (wages, benefits, supervision, etc).

Standards: You may jeopardize your relationships with your users/customers if your standards drop.

Let us start with the obvious and historically present (20^th century-), economies of scale. These have been around for a while, with LC, Dewey, MARC, RDA, CODOC, MeSH, etc. along with other work done by OCLC, Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, and Library and Archives Canada, among others. We continue to build on economies of scale with consortia and joint ILS’ and catalogues, joint collecting and even archiving, sometimes combined budgets and joint storage facilities. Libraries are also known to combine cataloguing efforts or to outsource cataloguing, share virtual reference, outsource serials management and serials or monograph procurement. I’m sure you will have others to add to the list as librarians continue to look for not just savings but increased knowledge and understanding of our tools, and the politics surrounding these tools, through combined efforts.

The principle of striving for excellence has given way under pressure (fissuring) to the principle of satisficing, while the latter, after being put under further pressure, has also given way. Meeting the lowest common denominator is slowly becoming the rule as it offers the least cost to third parties, and to libraries outsourcing and unable to enforce standards. Ultimately, capitalism and neoliberalism is responsible for the degeneration seen in academic libraries.

So what were/are academic libraries core competencies? I think (I hope) we are seeing a shift back to some work (concentrated in specific areas) residing with librarians as the things our users most commonly associate with libraries, the building (not that we can do much there), the collections and access are degenerating.  Many librarians were stripped of work and corresponding skill sets through outsourcing to third parties, and now there is a struggle to ameliorate the damage done to the library and through that outsourcing, the librarians. As some of the work returns (implementation?), libraries seem to be creating more back room (acquisitions, bibliographic/metatadata, IT services) work for their librarians, as third parties show themselves unable to meet standards. This reflects the tension between reducing costs, standards and negative impacts on core competencies of the library (access, collections) as a result of vendors unable to meet user needs and standards, since those are the priority.

•  Libraries are shedding costs, or their universities are, by outsourcing janitorial work to external companies (and the costs, as previously noted) but this does not take care of outdated computers, furnishings, design, bathrooms, and physical degeneration of buildings. Funding for the maintenance of the bricks and mortar of universities is now a critical issue in Ontario. Libraries are one of the locations on campus most students commonly visit and the degeneration of the library reflects badly on the university itself as it leaves a negative impression. Lowest common denominator may be that nothing gets fixed until the brick falls off the building, the glass completely shatters (as opposed to numerous cracks), etc.

• Inventory control. This is slowly being transferred elsewhere with what many librarians would say is an unacceptable error rate in both software, opac records, and even the availability of items. We may still create some of our own opac records (typically special collections or archives items) but for those who purchase them, in the latest move vendors are now licencing opac records and constraining what we may do with them. Instead of purchasing hard copy we are purchasing electronic or digital records, books, images, etc., or we may only be licenced for perpetual access to the content. In some cases we may be renting the content for a specified period of time. Also, even if we have paid for an item, the vendors retain the right to remove content and/or the item itself with no notice or even replacement. We no longer know what we have with any great accuracy and even less so, the users. Satisficing isn’t even being served by current inventory control, thus the move to dump inventory into Google Scholar (GS) where we have a better chance of students satisficing (though meeting the lowest common denominator is rather a sad statement about our libraries today). The electronic resource management (ERM) systems such as alma are the next attempt at inventory control with corresponding promises of more than satisficing, of being better than GS for local needs.

• Software. Varies. May be onsite maintenance of computers, LANs etc. software (and hardware) by technicians overseen by librarians, but the ILS or ERM typically is under the control of a different party. We are no longer able or perhaps allowed to create or modify software to meet our local needs or to even make different software speak with each other. ERMs and ILS’ create pre-established environments, bounded by intellectual property (IP) (software) protections, for recording data and accessing information, shaping what we are able to do based on others’ conceptions of what we should be able to do (where the least $ cost to create and maintain the software, and to protect IP, become the overriding concerns of the vendor, not customization). The principle of satisficing is in play as is meeting the needs of the lowest common denominator.

• Procurement. Mainstream culture and monoculture is well represented through offsite procurement, consortia procurement, or even onsite procurement centralized in administrative hands, or if luckier, in the hands of onsite committees. Satisficing seems to be the goal. The more stuff you get the more likely you are to actually get something useful. This is collecting based on the idea of the infinite monkey theorem. Look it up. Librarians, in protest and congruent with the recent history of librarianship, attempt to bring their expertise to bear to infill and represent smaller publishers, sub-cultures, alternate perspectives and budding/burgeoning cultural movements, along with the research and teaching needs of faculty and grad students, on exceptionally limited budgets.

• Supply chain. This is typically offloaded to third parties such as Coutts, YBP or even Amazon for single title purchasing, vendors do offer package purchasing. Consortia tend to create their own “supply chains” for their purchases as they tend to be direct procurement with publishers and electronic in nature. Interlibrary loans are now being offered through multiple avenues for print, microfiche, etc. and for electronic articles. One might make the argument this is the most successful part of getting stuff for the library user.

Based on academic libraries’ priorities (from my perspective), I would say work that involves faculty, staff and students, such as bibliographic instruction, information literacy, traditional liaison work (in its now minimal form), assisting faculty with their research, librarian research, library publishing through institutional repositories and textbook software (may or may not be outsourced), copyright clearance centres, administrative work around getting and providing access to electronic and digital, are core competencies of academic libraries.

What do academic librarians think they do? Where is the negotiation for control over work? How have we modified libraries core competencies? What do we think librarians competencies are? I shall think about this and the multitude of non-librarian created, promulgated competency statements by associations, libraries etc. But for now I ask why apply competency standards to librarians at all? To librarian work?

Did libraries and associations turn their focus re: competency standards to librarians and librarian work because a) they didn’t know what the librarians would do after stripping more traditional work away, b) they needed to look like they were actually in control, c) they moved into standards for librarians because that is what other libraries were doing, d) there were new jobs coming out and they were desperately trying to understand what those entailed, e) competency standards are an attempt to deskill and downgrade professionalism thus arguing for cheaper librarians or reduced number of librarians or no librarians at all? Thus we have potentially further reduced costs? Librarians, not standards, are the glue that hold things together. Standards, though, make it appear that anyone can do this work, just eat the ice cream marked collection development and voila! 

Feeling snarky.