Electronic collections and wired faculty - Resource Sharing in a Changing Environment

Library Trends, Wntr, 1997 by Tona Henderson, Bonnie MacEwan

INTRODUCTION

There is a natural relevance between academic faculty and research libraries. Without the wealth of resources available in the research library, faculty teaching and scholarship suffer. Without the primary constituency of the faculty, both direct and indirect use of library materials wanes. Each party relies upon the other. The characteristics and activities of an academic library are defined by this interdependent relationship with the faculty and by our desire to be relevant.

"The principal characteristic of a research library is an emphasis on primary resources for advanced study and research" (Mosher, 1994, p. 3). Library collections improve research and instruction by supplying faculty with the intellectual resources necessary to study and teach. Library collections also correct individual inequities in access and economics and provide a context for scholarly investigation and communication. While some scholars indicate that increasing numbers of faculty are circumventing libraries for direct electronic access, by far a larger number of faculty continue to rely upon the library for well-rounded, representative, and pertinent information. "It is only a handful of scholars who are bypassing their libraries" (Abel, 1991, p. 273).

For all its desired relevance, the academic library does not exist in and of itself. It is not an inherently relevant organization. Academic faculty orchestrate exploration of library materials for their own research and assign library projects to their classes. As changes in the research and instructional environment favor digital materials, the library remains relevant by ensuring collections that meet changing classroom and desktop needs. Ultimately, the relevance of the collection lies within its use to the faculty and to the efforts of their students. A collection unused, whether due to irrelevance or inaccessibility, is not a library collection so much as a packing list. In short, scholars do not exist in a vacuum of resources to use. Libraries do not exist in a vacuum of use. The question of how electronic collections affect faculty is essentially one of utility.

Based on strong mutual self-interests, interdependence, and complementary activities, significant changes in library collections inevitably produce attendant changes in faculty activities. Electronic collections ultimately produce wired faculty. At the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, like many others, electronic resources have exploded in popularity and use. Generally desirable for reasons of accessibility and availability, electronic collections have specific utility and, thus, relevance for faculty. The application and integration of electronic resources into teaching and research form a matrix of inquiry. In this article, discussion and examples of faculty, libraries, and electronic resources will focus on examples at the Pennsylvania State University. Issues with regard to electronic collections and the effects of copyright and computer skills on faculty will also be explored.

The Pennsylvania State University is organized in a way that gives special significance to the access provided by electronic resources. Only half the students, faculty, and staff of the university are located at University Park, the "main campus." The remainder are located around the state at other locations. These other locations are not separate entities in the usual sense but function as a part of the whole or, in the local parlance, one university geographically dispersed. The libraries function as a single entity with all librarians reporting to a single dean regardless of location. Students and faculty, at least in theory, have equal access to resources from all campuses.

TEACHING

Electronic resources can and do enable innovations in teaching. The University Libraries pursues a two-pronged approach to the acquisition and selection of electronic materials. First, the Libraries often acquires and makes available broad and generally useful materials. While at one time collection relevance meant acquiring maximum materials for a "just-in-case" scenario, electronic materials are now routinely acquired when they are most heavily, regularly, and generally used by the faculty and students. Based philosophically on a radical shift in collection policy (Shamber, 1996; Smith & Johnson, 1993), the practical result of this strategy is an increased relevance to the classroom faculty.

As a fundamental part of student research, encyclopedias are an initial entry point into the library collection. The heavily used and popular, Encyclopedia Britannica was acquired electronically to increase collection relevance to the teaching faculty. In just six months, from January 1996 to June 1996, the Encyclopedia Britannica was searched over 140,000 times by Penn State users. Access was made available through an agreement between Encyclopedia Britannica and the consortia of Big Ten universities, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). Collectively the users of the CIC university libraries searched the system almost 1 million times during the same six month period.