College and Research Libraries


Myths and Realities: 
University Libraries 

D. Kaye Gapen 
This theme paper examines the current rate of change and makes projections of future rates of 
change in order to attempt a separation of myths and realities. The phenomenon of change is so 
pervasive in our literature and so ever-present in our daily lives that we must learn more effec-
tive adjustment techniques. In her "Law of the Situation, " Mary Parker Follett proposes a 
continual process of reconceptualization of ''what business you are in. '' The times require this 
of us. They also require that we examine ''models'' of change to use as appropriate. The Stages 
of Growth model is particularly appealing since it characterizes organizations as progressing 
through a series of stages along a continuum. As university libraries move along their contin-
uum, it seems clear that as organizations they will become evolutionary, nonhierarchical, en-
trepreneurial, and horizontal. This growth sequence will require librarians to become more 
involved in the process of scholarly communication. 

e are going to talk today about boat came back again and called, ''Get in 
some myths and realities sur- the boat; we'd like to save you!" And he 
rounding the present and fu- said, "No, I trust in the Lord, I'm going to 
ture of academic libraries. We stay with my house." (The Deep South is 

will be considering technology, the para- in the Bible Belt, you know.) And so they 
dox of imaging the future, change, models came one more time, not in a rowboat but 
for dealing with change, and personal and in a helicopter; the water was up to the 
organizational characteristics that can roof, and the man was on the roof sitting 
help us decipher and deal with both the there clinging to his chimney. The pilot 
myths and the realities. said, "Sir, sir, come into the helicopter, 

To set the stage, let me tell you a little we want to save you!" And he said, "No 
story. I've been in Alabama now two and a thank you, I trust in the Lord, I'm going to 
half years, and during the course of this stay here!'' Well, sure enough, he 
presentation you'll probably hear a few drowned. The )Vater came right up over 
Alabamaisms; but this story was very the top of the house, carried him away, 
popular a couple of months ago when we and he drowned. He went up to Heaven, 
were getting a lot of rain in the South, and and he said to St. Peter, "Look, I want to 
it may have even gotten some national know just what's going on here. I trusted 
press. In Louisiana, the rivers were flood- in the Lord and I drowned." And Peter 
mg. A man was in his house, the water said, "Well, we sent you two rowboats 
was coming up to the door, and some peo- and a helicopter." I'm sending rowboats 
pie in a rowboat came up. They said, and a helicopter today. So let's just take 
''We'd like to rescue you; get into the some of these comments in that vein, and 
boat.'' And the man said, ''No, I trust in know that we can trust in the Lord, we can 
the Lord, I'm going to stay here." As the test the myths and ,the realities, but there 
water kept rising, the people in the row- are some things that we can do, too, to af-

. D. !<aye Capen ~s un!versity librarian at th~ University of Wisconsin-Madison 53706. She was university 
Izbranan at the Unzverszty of Alabama when thzs paper was presented at the ACRL Third National Conference, 
April4-7, 1984, Seattle, Washington . 

350 



feet our own futures. Of course, this story 
tells us it is very important to know when 
to trust in the Lord and when to take the 
salvation that is offered. 

Let me share a quote with you that is a 
little lengthy, but nevertheless important. 
''There is no need to expect that with the 
application of knowledge and skill things 
should always turn out right.'' [This sen-
tence reminds me of my roommate in col-
lege who was a teaching assistant for 
freshman English for two years. She had a 
plaque in the kitchen that read, ''You can 
be sincere and still be stupid."] "Instead 
there is a growing recognition that it is 
necessary and responsible to arrange all 
human and organization resources so that 
they are future-responsive, so that they 
act in the present out of a concern for the 
future, i.e., the task is to enlarge our 
awareness of what is happening and what 
might happen. This means becoming 
learners as persons and organizations. It 
means learning how to become learners, 
and to be learners we must become em-
bracers of error. 

"The competent person is one who de-
signs his or her activities to provide the 
maximum amount of feedback about what 
is happening in order to detect and re-
spond to errors. Competence, then, is 
measured not by skill in avoiding errors, 
but by skill in detecting them and in acting 
on that information openly so that all can 
continue to learn about where they are 
and where they might go-about what 
kind of world we have created for our-
selves and what we might do toward re-
creating it. It follows that an equally cen-
tral criterion of competence is the ability to 
facilitate learning error embracing, and 
awareness of one's self and others." 

This statement comes from a book called 
Failures in Organization Development and 
Change, edited by Philip H. Mirvis and 
David Berg (New York: Wiley, 1977). The 
last fifteen years have provided an ex-
traordinary learning experience in which 
we have had ample opportunity to facili-
tate learning and embrace error. 

If we look back to the middle or late six-
ties and the early seventies, we see the im-
plementation and development of the 
MARC format. The MARC format is a 

University Libraries 351 

machine-readable, bibliographic format. 
It's the basis by which our records are nu-
merically described and communicated. 
It's our primary communications format. 
The presence and refinement of that for-
mat allowed us to develop large online 
utilities: OCLC, RLIN, WLN, and so 
forth. And this, in turn, was paralleled by 
an increasing amount of cooperation and 
networking. The MARC format also has 
served as a basic communications and bib-
liographic format for our own online sys-
tems. Increasingly, we see either the im-
plementation of online systems or some 
consideration and planning being given to 
the implementation of online systems in 
libraries: online catalogs, online circula-
tion systems, online serials control, and 
online acquisitions. And, again, for states 
such as Alabama, there are more local net-
works and agreements. 

In addition to local online library sys-
tems, we have also seen the growth and 
expansion of online database searching 
for reference service-both bibliographic 
and textual. We've seen interlibrary loan 
through the national bibliographic sys-
tems and now through regional and state 
cooperatives. We've seen growth, more 
recently, in video and audio-video tech-
nology that allows images to be transmit-
ted digitally the same way as bibliographic 
information is transmitted. And, of 
course, one of the major changes that af-
fected libraries directly has been the im-
plementation of AACR2, a cataloging for-
mat that was developed and designed 
clearly to integrate cataloging more effec-
tively into a computer environment. It is 
likely that we will see continuing changes 
in our cataloging and subject classification 
standards if we are to be responsive to 
what we are learning about the online en-
vironment and user patterns. 

We have seen, therefore, significant 
changes, and we've seen the rate of 
change accelerating every year. We've 
seen changes in library job skills both for 
people presently working in libraries and 
people coming into libraries; we've seen 
the level of responsibilities change, partic-
ularly in the support staff positions. We 
have increased responsibility, changed 
job descriptions, and upgraded positions. 



352 College & Research Libraries 

We have paid for those upgraded posi-
tions primarily by cutting out lower-level 
clerical staff positions. And so what we of-
ten have in many academic libraries is 
fewer people, but at a higher level of re-
sponsibility. The nature of work that is ex-
pected of the professional librarian has 
changed, too, moving toward manage-
ment, planning, and the more difficult cat-
aloging and reference tasks. 

We've also seen some changing organi-
zational patterns, and I believe that we 
will see more. We have seen responsibili-
ties combined with people moving from 
specialist to generalist. We have seen 
changing regional and cooperative pat-
terns and, increasingly in the last five 
years, the growth of economic and legal 
concerns related to networking and coop-
erative development. 

We know from our experience what 
change is and how we feel as we face 
change, act it out, and are acted upon by 
it. It would be useful, however, if we had a 
more formal definition. This one comes 
from Gordon L. Lippitt in a book called 
Visualizing Change: Model Building and the 
Change Process (La Jolla, Calif.: University 
Associates, 1973): "Change is any 
planned or unplanned alteration of the 
status quo in an organism, situation or 
process; and planned change is an in-
tended, designed, or purposive attempt 
by an individual, group, organization, or 
larger social system to influence directly 
the status quo of itself, another organism, 
or a situation.'' Organizational change is 
''any planned or unplanned alteration of 
the status quo which affects the structure, 
technology and human resources of the 
total organization.'' 

Today we are going to try to answer the 
question of what we will do with change 
in academic libraries and how much of it is 
myth and how much reality. Based upon 
my experience as a library director over 
the past three years, I believe that in the 
future, it will be the individuals, the 
groups, and the organizations that, by 
manipulating their physical and social en-
vironments, by contributing to planned 
change, by coping with obstacles and per-
sisting toward their goals, will tip the scale 
toward continuing the viability of librari-

September 1984 

anship and, ~deed, the betterment of hu-
mankind. Those who are less adventure-
some will be easily sidetracked or defeated 
by obstacles and will become victims of 
change. 

In the presentation today, first we will 
look at the future and decide whether or 
not we can separate the myths from there-
alities. Second, we will ask ourselves the 
questions posited by Mary Parker Follett's 
''Law of the Situation'' in order to do a lit-
tle reality testing. Third, we will talk about 
whether or not there are "models" of 
change that might be of use to us in work-
ing through ever-constant change. Fi-
nally, we will examine some of the begin-
ning strategies for implementing planned 
change. 

THE FUTURE: 
MYTHS AND REALITIES 

Let us begin by looking at the future. 
The following statement is made in Fail-
ures in Organization: "The secondary and 
tertiary consequences of the interactions 
of technology with the rest of society make 
predictions of the impact of all external-
ities impossible .... We are unable to 
control the processes of change, and we 
are unable to predict the consequences of 
our efforts to control them.'' 

On the other hand, we have the story of 
the ninety-year-old couple who went to a 
laWyer to see about getting a divorce. The 
lawyer was surprised and asked why such 
an old couple was getting a divorce. The 
couple replied, ''We have been having 
trouble for a number of years, but we 
wanted to wait until the children died." 

We are faced with the very real paradox 
that when the future occurs it will be real, 
but today the future is a myth. At the same 
time that we know we cannot predict what 
is going to happen, we feel that we can 
wait too long to act and that all of our 
ideals and hopes can die before we act. In 
our daily lives then, we try to do both. 
Later I will discuss how models of change 
can help us meet the future, since we can-
not predict its reality. I will also share with 
you an exercise in selecting among the 
various myths. We will try to "image the 
future." 

I've had four opportunities in the last 



year to do some forecasting for the future 
of librarianship. The first one occurred last 
summer at UCLA, where I attended a six-
week program at the library school with 
eleven other librarians. We had an oppor-
tunity to do some research and talk about 
some of the basic problems and challenges 
in libraries today. I am going to share 
some of that with you regarding possible 
courses of action in libraries. The second 
opportunity I had was an evaluation meet-
ing of the Bibliographic Services Develop-
ment Program (BSDP), which was funded 
by the Council on Library Resources. The 
evaluation of the BSDP program, which is 
occurring this year, is designed to assess 
what has happened to date in biblio-
graphic control and networking and to es-
tablish priorities for the next two years. 
The third opportunity was with an ad hoc 
committee of OCLC ARL librarians com-
ing together to make a beginning attempt 
at formulating the most important thing 
for research libraries in tenns of OCLC de-
velopment. And, finally, we will quickly 
review some of the strategic planning that 
OCLC is doing, looking ahead into the fu-
ture. 

I want to share with you, first, a general-
ized look at the future that is broader than 
the library-specific world, but brings in 
many elements that I think we will find 
common to our own experience and that 
parallels much of what the future of li-
braries might contain. I am reading, in the 
course of working on this models-for-
change idea, a book called Megatrends 
(New York: Warner, 1982). The author, 
John Naisbett, talks about major trends in 
the world today. 

The first major trend is that we have 
moved from an industrial society to an in-
formation society. We have a waning 
economy based on the industrial society, 
but we have a developing economy based 
on information. 

The second major trend is that we are 
moving from forced technological change 
to the infusion of high technology that is 
combined with "high touch." And I will 
come back and tell you what he means by 
high touch in a moment. Third, we are 
moving from national economies to world 
economies. Fourth, we are moving from 

University Libraries 353 

the concept of centralization to the con-
cept of decentralization, with these trends 
existing not only politically, but in our cor-
porate business world, our religious struc-
tures, and our social institutions. Fifth, we 
are moving away from the concept of insti-
tutional help to the concept of self-help. 
Sixth, we are moving from a representa-
tive democracy to a participatory democ-
racy. Seventh, we are moving from the 
concept of hierarchies to the concept of 
networking. Eighth, we are moving from 
the North to the South. And, finally, we 
are moving from the either/or situation to 
multiple options in terms of what we can 
do as people and what we can do as corpo-
rations. 

The following are some of the specific 
points that Naisbett made. We can think 
of examples throughout that would carry 
these concepts into libraries. 

The new wealth is know-how. We are in 
a transition between economies, and en-
trepreneurship is booming. The growth of 
small businesses is also booming. The in-
formation society is an economic reality. 
There are innovations in communications 
and computer technology that will accel-
erate the rate of change by collapsing the 
information flow. The information flow is 
how long it takes somebody to find out 
something. Today, you can know five 
minutes after something's happened on 
the other side of the world that it has oc-
curred. And that's having an enormous 
impact on communications and the rate of 
change. 

New information technologies will first 
be applied to old industrial tasks, then will 
gradually give birth to new activities, 
processes and products. In libraries, 
we've seen the new technology applied to 
old bibliographic tasks, but now we're go-
ing to see emerging databases and ap-
proaches to access that we haven't really 
envisioned before. In this literacy-
intensive society, when we need basic 
reading and writing skills more than ever 
before, the education system is turning 
out an increasingly inferior product. 

The technology of new information is 
not absolute. It will succeed or fail accord-
ing to the principle of high tech/high 
touch. High touch concerns the fact that 



354 College & Research Libraries 

we like being together with other people. 
We do not like dealing only with ma-
chines. So as we increasingly rely on high 
technology, at the same time we ask peo-
ple to play a greater role in what we are do-
ing. We are drowning in information, but 
we are starved for knowledge. We have so 
much information floating around that 
people don't know what to do with it. 

We are moving from the specialist who 
is obsolete to the generalist who can 
adapt. We must learn to balance the mate-
rial wonders of technology with the spirit-
ual demands of human nature. Again, we 
need to be together as people. Strategic 
planning is going to become an increas-
ingly important tool, but strategic plan-
ning is worthless unless there is first stra-
tegic vision. We are building from the 
bottom up. People whose lives are af-
fected by a decision must be part of the 
process of arriving at that decision in poli-
tics and in corporations. 

Change occurs when there is a conflu-
ence of both change in values and eco-
nomic necessity, not before . Hierarchies 
remain, but our belief in their efficacy does 
not. More and more we are thinking that 
the hierarchical organizational patterns of 
the industrial age are not appropriate to 
the things that we are doing today. Net-
works are people talking to each other, 
sharing information, ideas, and re-
sources, and the important thing is not the 
networking but the process of getting 
there. (Many of the points that are made in 
Megatrends are also made in another new 
book called In Search of Excellence (New 
York: Harper, 1982), which talks about the 
same thing-major corporations that have 
continued to demonstrate excellence be-
cause they have a different set of values 
and a different set of operations than we 
have seen in the past industrial, hierarchi-
cal age.) We will restructure our busi-
nesses into smaller and smaller, more en-
trepreneurial, more participatory units. 

Megatrends concludes with the observa-
tion ''that the computer will smash the 
pyramid. We created the hierarchical, py-
ramidal, managerial system because we 
needed it to keep up with people and the 
things people did. With the computer to 

September 1984 

keep track, we can restructure our institu-
tions horizontally.'' 

Now that we have set the larger stage, 
what were the results from some of the 
other groups that I mentioned? We will 
start with UCLA. The Management 
Change subgroup arrived at four princi-
ples that we felt were going to be impor-
tant. First, organizations in the future 
have to be fundamentally flexible, they 
have to be scientifically skilled, they have 
to be actively proactive, and they have to 
be profoundly people-oriented. After ex-
ploring some basic principles, we next 
talked about steps that had to be taken in 
the next five years in terms of the library's 
major administrative functions. I'm not 
going to tell you all of the things that we 
had forecasted in any of the major func-
tions but, instead, will share selected parts 
with you. Under plant, we will undertake, 
in the next five to ten years, a strategic re-
view of plant utilization and remodeling. 
We will remodel facilities as required for 
the maximum utilization of technology. 
Under staff resources, we will reorient all 
staff at all levels with the changing nature 
of libraries and information networks. We 
will develop programs for the regular, pe-
riodic reassessment of librarians. We will 
enlarge the responsibilities of librarians 
with much more outreach. We will in-
crease the educational requirements for li-
brarians. We will increase the proportion 
of the support staff at the upper levels, 
which means we will probably continue 
the trend toward fewer people, but with 
higher classification of job responsibili-
ties. We will make staff at all levels 
computer-literate, we will increase the use 
of part-time and work-at-home personnel 
at the lower levels. We will strengthen the 
collegial nature of library faculty. We will 
expand and strengthen staff development 
programs. We will undertake periodic full 
review of all library positions and classifi-
cations. Under budget, we will establish a 
new budget criteria category for access 
costs; that is, we now, most of us, charge 
people for online searches, at least for the 
cost of the search if not for the cost of the 
staff support. We think the likely trend 
will be that library budgets will be allo-



cated to pay all costs, and that allocation 
will occur through discontinuing some of 
the paper subscriptions and substituting 
full online access that the library will pay 
for. We will develop ongoing outside sup-
port for traditional library collections. We 
will develop a balance sheet and other ac-
counting instruments for library and cam-
pus information resources. We will work 
the cost data into campus information pol-
icy. We will obtain approval for ongoing 
programs for amortization of library 
equipment. 

Under information resources, we will in-
stall marketing programs for online text 
acquisition and electronic journals sup-
plied through the library. As faculty mem-
bers and students have a greater opportu-
nity to go directly to the information 
databases, outside of what has been tradi-
tionally found in the library books and 
journals, we want the library to be a part of 
that chain. We will increase expenditures 
for access services and for nonbook mate-
rials. We will begin and expand the tele-
facsimile and its offspring. We will pro-
vide for more precise responsive subject 
specialization. We will revise collection 
development policies in light of changes. 
We will utilize optical videodiscs for build-
ing collections and for preservation, prob-
ably phasing out the purchasing of micro-
forms as other formats are substituted. 

Under services, we will phase in no-
charge database services for our primary 
clientele. We will inaugurate a campus 
document delivery service that can pro-
vide both physical documents and telefac-
simile transmission. We will provide 
twenty-four-hour-a-day physical access to 
resources and selected services of the li-
brary. We will provide remote online ac-
cess to resources and services. We will in-
vestigate and add new information 
services. We will insure library participa-
tion in planning and installation of local 
area networks on campuses. We will in-
corporate the ''special library model'' in 
planning and evaluating library services. 
Basically, the special library model is a 
phrase for what special libraries are able to 
do in working with specialized clientele, 
in knowing their interests and your re-

University Libraries 355 

sources so that you provide the informa-
tion rather than the access to the biblio-
graphic description. 

Under organization, we anticipate that 
we will loosen the library organizational 
structure. We will increase the acceptance 
by the library director and staff of uncer-
tainty and risk. We will be more aware of 
the importance of mentoring. We will ex-
pedite decision making at the lowest pos-
sible levels. 

Now let me move on to the BSDP review 
meeting. We thought that BSDP should 
address, first, networking at the national 
level, so that we have some way of estab-
lishing the computer links for our separate 
databases. That means that not only can 
OCLC's computer talk to the Library of 
Congress, but that Dickinson's computer 
can talk to the OCLC computer or to the 
Library of Congress. Through those tech-
nical links, we would have access tore-
sources that we now can only dream 
about. That is one of the first BSDP priori-
ties. 

The second is that librarians, through 
their own work and the work of leader-
ship groups such as the Library of Con-
gress and the Council on Library Re-
sources, would begin to develop models 
of the electronic campus that include the 
integral role of the library in information 
transfer. The electronic campus, or wired 
campus, is not as good a descriptive label 
as we need. What this means is that as 
campuses face the need to communicate 
more effectively, we are going to establish 
cable networks from office to office to 
classroom. Those cable networks, which 
are now called local area networks (LAN), 
will also be part of telephone systems so 
that people in the classroom can go to the 
library computer or can go outside to other 
computers. Those LANs will transmit, not 
only word processing information on 
campus, but a more effective electronic 
mail delivery service. We will see an in-
crease in communications and a decrease 
in the amount of paper. Eventually there 
will be broadband networks that will also 
allow us to transmit video images. That 
:q:teans our online catalogs will also have a 
component for storing our bibliographic 



356 College & Research Libraries 

information, our catalog records, and the 
content of our collections and catalogs on 
videodiscs. When that occurs, people can 
access the images on that videodisc in the 
office or in the classroom: Libraries have 
been ahead of the game in terms of some 
of these high-tech developments, and we 
can build on that and grow if we are proac-
tive. 

The ad hoc committee of OCLC ARL li-
brarians arrived at similar priorities-
national networking and the ability to 
make the library a part of a LAN on the 
campus. 

And, finally, OCLC has been working 
on strategic planning and thinking about 
the future. I would like to share a few of 
these areas with you: 

1. videotex 
2. telecommunications networks 
3. electronic mail 
4. facsimile transmission 

The implications of this imaging are 
many. In considering further which might 
be myth and which reality, I would like us 
to consider an excellent question de-
scribed in Megatrends. Mary Parker Follett 
was a business consultant in the early 
1900s. She proposed the "Law of the Situ-
ation.'' In applying this law, you ask your-
self what your business really is. When a 
situation changes, you do one of two 
things: you reconceptualize what busi-
ness you are in, or you conceptualize what 
business it would be useful for you to 
think you should be in. When change is 
constant, this reconceptualization also has 
to be constant. 

And if we look at what we have done in 
libraries and what our image is of the fu-
ture, I would put to you that we have been 
in the package delivery system. We have 
stored and delivered books. Application 
of the "Law of the Situation" tells us that 
the next level of business for us is the in-
formation delivery business. And that 
means we will do some things very differ-
ently than if we were in the package deliv-
ery business. We are in transition from 
one to the other. And there's room for 
great entrepreneurship. 

When I made this point at a meeting not 
long ago in Pennsylvania, Joan Bechtal 
from Dickinson College said that even 

September 1984 

more important than information delivery 
may be the fact that we are in the '' conver-
sation" business-facilitating scholarly 
and other conversation. 

So we have the future and all it might 
hold. We know from our experience thus 
far that the implementation of technology 
and other changes sometimes results in 
very real personal and organizational con-
cerns and problems. At Alabama over the 
past three years, we have been going 
through a number of significant changes, 
partly in order to try to "meet the future" 
and partly to address the present. I knew 
that there had to be techniques for struc-
turing and facilitating change, but we 
were all so busy killing the snakes that we 
didn't have time to plow the field. 

One of the things that we were sup-
posed to do in the work at UCLA was 
some sort of research. I decided to see if 
there was a way to address more effec-
tively the changes being implemented in 
libraries. The major point to consider here 
is that while the future is a combination of 
myth and reality that can only be directly 
addressed as it arrives, we can practice a 
very substantial reality by developing our-
selves and our organizations in order to be 
future-responsive, so that we act in the 
present out of a concern for the future, so 
that we can become learners and embrac-
ers of error. I want to share with you the 
work that I did on models of change, real-
izing that it's much harder to do it than to 
talk about it. 

If we look at change and models of 
change, we see a wealth of literature in the 
social sciences. Building a model of an ac-
tivity or happening is useful in that it pro-
vides us with a conceptual framework for 
thinking about some complex interrela-
tionships. A model defines. It has to be 
symbolic representation of a lot of layers 
of complex activity. A model of change 
has to be able to detect multiple causation 
within the forces that are involved and the 
complexities that exist. A dynamic model 
of change must indicate the forces influ-
encing the situation over a period of time, 
and it has to have feedback loops. 

A change model will be goal oriented, 
and the results of the application could 
and should be evaluated. The function of 

\ 

·' 



the model is heuristic in the sense that it 
has to be adapted by experience during 
the course of its applications. In this way, 
the model can grow as your own experi-
ence grows. 

I am going to share with you some of the 
models I uncovered this past summer, in-
cluding a very interesting organizational 
model, and list some of the individual-
oriented personnel models. The purpose 
of each of these models is to describe and 
guide the dynamics of change for both 
people and organizations. With a set of 
these models in place, it is possible to be 
future-responsive, proactive learners in 
dealing with change. We can organize so 
that we respond to change no matter what 
that change is. This is the essential reality. 
We can review past decisions in order to 
enlarge our current options by asking the 
proper questions. We can analyze our past 
errors in order to provide contingency 
plans for future action. And finally, we 
can emphasize looking ahead and not 
looking back. We do not have to be con-
tent with monitoring our environments; 
rather we will search them through long-
range planning and through internal and 
external feedback processes. We will be 
more likely to know who likes whom, 
how, and why; what emotions are likely 
to be felt depending upon the hat being 
worn; and what levels of participation are 
likely to result in successful organizational 
and personal life. 

At UCLA we spent most of the six weeks 
discussing how to change and how to get 
people to change. The most basic division 
of thought had to do with how much peo-
ple could participate in decision making, 
how much responsibility they could be 
given, and when one led and when one 
pushed. Every day we used some "model 
of man," or perhaps several models. We 
employed some notion about what a man 
or woman is and how he or she works. 
Whether we made our models explicit or 
not, we did form expectations about how 
others behaved toward us or would re-
spond to something we did. We were not 
aware, in the beginning, that this phe- . 
nomen on was described in the literature. 

What is emerging in present behavioral 
science studies is an open system model of 

University Libraries 357 

man. There is no one proponent or hy-
pothesis for this particular concept, but 
the major thrust of such a model is the 
transactional nature of people-rather 
than being passive agents reacting to stim-
uli, people are viewed as active and proac-
tive agents, purposive in nature and 
problem-solving organisms. Also, in this 
model, each individual selectively per-
ceives and interprets the influences of en-
vironment and the configuration of differ-
ent factors and forces. This is not the 
model that is traditionally characteristic of 
the industrial age and its hierarchical orga-
nizations. 

While finding out about this open sys-
tem model of man did not exactly resolve 
our UCLA disagreements, it was a real 
eye-opener for me. With a model of the in-
dividual in place, the question of further 
model selection and approaches to change 
fall much more readily into place. This 
particular model of the individual is exem-
plified again and again in In Search of Excel-
lence. 

With this in place, then, I would like to 
share with you, first, an organizational 
change model called the Stages of Growth 
model. This model seems especially ap-
propriate to the context that I have been 
building in the course of this speech in 
that the model characterizes organizations 
as progressing along a continuum of 
stages of growth. There are two kinds of 
managerial approaches that affect the or-
ganizational growth: steady state and evo-
lutionary. Steady-state management is 
one in which you have an operations basis 
of strategy. You look at what you are do-
ing right now and just try to do it better. 
Growth with this strategy is limited. Evo-
lutionary, entrepreneurial management, 
on the other hand, takes the strategic ap-
proach, which considers current opera-
tions as one part of overall growth strategy 
that can encompass the possibility of di-
versification through acquisitions into 
other businesses as well as investment 
into existing operations. Other compo-
nents of the model include single or multi-
ple and related or unrelated services or 
products. Basically, however, growth 
along the continuum is characterized by 
diversification (or movement into multi-



358 College & Research Libraries 

ple product lines) and by evolutionary, 
entrepreneurial management with a rich 
and varied strategy. This sort of move-
ment emphasizes a different organiza-
tional approach to management, which 
departs dramatically from the traditional 
pyramid of control. While the success of 
this approach results somewhat from the 
environment, the managerial factor is piv-
otal in the change process described by 
this model. This description-model-
seems to me appropriate to our present li-
brary environment and describes how we 
might control and direct change. 

What are some of the other models that 
apply more specifically to individual as 
opposed to organizational growth? This is 
basically a list, but you can get a feeling for 
their tenor. There is a model for human re-
sources development that brings together 
what happens for the individual, what 
happens for the organization, what hap-
pens for groups within the organization, 
and what occurs in the interaction be-
tween those forces. There's a model for 
management development. There's a 
problem-solving model that incorporates. 
the participation of all the people in the or-
ganization in dealing with the problems, 
demonstrating how to build goals for the 
future. There's a model for describing ele-
ments in the helping process; that is, how 
we as humans deal with one another and 
help one another grow within the corpo-
rate environment. There's the model that 
we all know about-Theory X and Theory 
Y. There's a group-change model, and 
there's another one called the framework 
for planned organizational change. All of 
these models are realistic and appropriate 
to our present and future library environ-
ments. 

Let's come back to some specifics. We 
are information workers, and we are right 
there in the forefront of the information 
society. In high technology, we provide 
the high touch. Most of us who work in 
public services and who interpret the li-
brary for people are the high touch. Those 
of us who work in technical services are 
high touch, but in a slightly different way. 
Faculty members and students will con-
tinue to look to us for high touch as long as 

September 1984 

we will take the role of providing it. I think 
our greatest possible competitors are com-
panies that will begin to provide informa-
tion and will be very adept at using people 
in addition to the high technology. But for 
today, libraries are high touch. We also 
bring a consistent humanistic commit-
ment to the provision of knowledge. We 
have always believed in the provision of 
information regardless of the ability to 
pay, and that's an issue of growing ethical 
importance as are the continuing concerns 
surrounding censorship. Libraries will 
continue, but the "Law of the Situation" 
suggests that their nature will change. Li-
brary organizations will become evolu-
tionary, nonhierarchical, entrepreneurial, 
and horizontal. All this means that each of 
us will participate more in discussions and 
decisions. We can be the centers for schol-
arly communication, the organizers, and 
we will be the people who provide the 
special library's model service to the cam-
puses that we serve. Everyone in this 
model will have greater responsibilities 
and greater accountabilities. And that will 
continue to change also. As you partici-
pate, your responsibility to participate 
grows, and it just keeps cycling upward. 

Our organizational units will head to-
ward generalization rather than speciali-
zation. And eventually, we may all be or-
ganized along the lines that Hugh 
Atkinson at the University of Illinois 
keeps talking about: the primal tribe. His 
position is that groups of people larger 
than twelve usually don't get along very 
well, but that a group of twelve or smaller 
is· just large enough to provide some ex-
citement, and not so large that you can't 
do some changing. 

Some management techniques will 
change. We will have long-range plan-
ning, I think, in all libraries in the next five 
years; this will occur from the bottom up 
and the top down and come together in 
the middle. That long-range planning will 
allow us to buy the future in a way that we 
do not now. And a key point that is made 
in all of the reading I have done so far is 
that American business strategy has been 
short-range (profit-oriented) rather than 
long-range ("developing the corporation 

.;.., 



in order for it to be more productive in the 
future"). When I consulted at Dickinson 
College in 1979 on what they were going 
to do with their online catalog, I told them, 
"Don't develop your own catalog, buy 
somebody's-buy the software, buy the 
hardware." You'll have all kinds of trou-
ble with the computer center, it's expen-
sive to develop, and all of that. This last 
year, as I have put together these 
thoughts, it seems to me that the most im-
portant thing that librarians can do in the 
next year to two years is to have the closest 
possible relationship with their computer 
centers. Presidents of institutions look at 
two areas on their campuses when they 
have to spend big bucks: they look at com-
puter centers and they look at libraries. 
And if we have to fight with the computer 
center for resources, we are probably go-
ing to lose. If we can have close relation-
ships, we are more likely to succeed to-
gether. Now, for a variety of reasons, 
Dickinson is working with the computer 
center to develop their system. Joan Be-
chtal said, "You're probably going to 
think we've had to do the wrong thing." 
My feeling is that it has ended up as a 
savvy, long-range collaboration that 
might set the stage for the computer cen-
ter and the library together to become the 
information providers for the campus. It's 
a logical way to look at the information re-
source allocation, and it's the best kind of 
arrangement to develop into the informa-
tion society that we've been talking about. 
That kind of long-range planning will be 
very different from what we've done in 
the past and will require some short-term 
decisions that differ markedly from those 
we have been making up to this time. 

Further management improvements 
will induce budget allocation models that 
will be different from what we use now. 
We will have a different way of looking at 
our job descriptions and other personnel 
concerns. In the past, most library job de-
scriptions have been contained within the 
library. I think we are already seeing more 
and more job descriptions for career staff 
people, and sometimes even faculty mem-
bers and librarians, that relate to other in-
formation people on campus. I think 

University Libraries 359 

we're going to see much more across-the-
university job description going on, and 
we need to be very active in describing 
clearly and accurately our job responsibili-
ties and performance standards. We will 
see a difference in evaluation. There will 
be higher standards for evaluation, I be-
lieve, because we're going to be paying 
more and we're going to be working at 
higher levels of responsibility. We will 
participate more in those evaluations, and 
the evaluations will probably be more real-
istic. We're entering the time when in 
higher education we've got reports such 
as A Nation at Risk, which is demanding 
greater professional accountability. We, 
the people, the taxpayers, are demanding 
that teachers teach better. That kind of ac-
countability is going to spread into other 
public service areas, so that accountability 
for us is going to be a higher prerequisite. 

Staff development is going to become 
increasingly important. We're going to 
look at education and our own develop-
ment in our organization as a lifelong 
learning process. I think we are going to 
see more seminars on time management, 
stress management, computer literacy, 
wholeness, the ability to listen, and so 
forth. 

Research will become even more impor-
tant. We have to be able to buy the future 
by investing in future-orientation. Librari-
ans have to put money into research in ad-
dition to what occurs in library schools 
and the work funded by the Council on Li-
brary Resources and other such agencies. 
Tomorrow's research needs to be 
information- and high tech-aware. 

Our own human expectations will 
change. We're going to look differently at 
how we spend our time. I don't believe 
we're going to be "9 to 5" much longer. 
We're going to look at the work cycle dif-
ferently. We're going to work at the office 
part of the time, and I think we're going to 
work at home part of the time. We're go-
ing to look at productivity differently. I be-
lieve we're just going to have a more open 
view toward how we can increase produc-
tivity or how we can evaluate it. We're go-
ing to look forward, we're going to be 
more participative, and I believe we're go-



360 College & Research Libraries 

ing to take more risks. Every person who 
works in a library is going to be taking 
more risks in the next five years. Stepping 
outside our comfortable hierarchies can be 
an uneasy move. The models will help us, 
but they can't do it all. We have to partici-
pate, we have to say what we think; we 
have to put some of our responsibility on 
the line and be assessed by the people we 
work with, and that's not so easy. We 
have to be open and show initiative and 
courage, and those are qualities that are 
difficult at times to develop. 

The fact is that our cool models exist 
hand in hand with hot cognitions. Most 
models call for rational scanning of alter-
natives and the calculation of probable 
gains and losses-i.e., cool models. But 
hot cognitions result in limitations stem-
ming from imperfect information, human 
impatience, and the difficulty of adding 
into our equations the emotional compo-
nents· of hope and fear, not to mention our 
unconscious projections and fantasies. 
There is no final resolution of our hot cog-
nitions (for which we should probably be 
thankful), but it is important that they be 
right out there in the front as we assess our 
various models. 

Now what does this mean in terms of 
some beginning strategies? First, librari-
ans have to establish the Stages of Growth 
model for the university and the library. 
We are part of our universities and col-
leges, and unless we know how they're 
going to change, we can't be as active and 
reactive as we need to be. So we have to 
examine where the university is going. 

· One path for public universities, for exam-
ple, is in the direction of more cooperation 
with business-more specialized delivery 
of teaching and research resources. We 
see such a development in Alabama, and I 
think it is likely to spread. We have to 
adopt the appropriate management style, 
and I think in the case of libraries it has to 
be evolutionary and it has to be entrepre-
neurial. And all of us make that happen. 
We have to establish a strategic planning 
mechanism within the library to include 
present operational issues, the evolution-
ary management strategies that are going 
to develop, and management training and 

September 1984 

education. Staff training and education 
are important. We have to look at areas of 
diversification and ask that ''Law of the 
Situation'' question in departments and 
in the library as a whole. We have to estab-
lish evaluations and feedback loops, and 
we have to have an appropriate timetable. 
And we have to begin to do this today. 

Knowledge about something does not 
necessarily mean that there will be some 
intelligent action or change. In change we 
usually find a situation that involves ex-
perimentation, risk, insecurity, challenge, 
fear, and courage. There is a need to rec-
ognize that change always involves a pro-
cess of confrontation, which involves the 
areas of knowledge, skill, and values. We 
must recognize that planned change can 
take place in a number of different areas: 

1. Knowledge change area-generali-
zation about the change experience, cog-
nitive or conceptual understanding about 
the change. 

2. Skill change area-the incorporation 
of new ways of performing through prac-
tice of the changed behavior. 

3. Attitude change area-adoption of 
new feelings through experiencing suc-
cess with them. 

4. Values change area-the adoption 
and rearrangement of one's beliefs (need 
for confrontation, search, and coping). 

In conclusion, let me share with you one 
-last thought. You and I as people are our 
most important assets. In the book The 
Universal Traveler, A Soft Systems Guide to 
Creativity, Problem Solving and the Process of 
Reaching Goals (Los Altos, Calif.: W. Kauf-
mann, 1976), we are told how we can learn 
to be creative thinkers. You may not think 
you're very creative, but creativity and 
looking toward the future are learnable 
and valuable skills. We can be creative 
people, creative thinkers, creative chang-
ers. There are five steps toward develop-
ing creativity. 

The first one is self-discipline, or free-
dom from pride. Pride is used here as a 
general term for the hang-ups associated 
with the lack of self-discipline. To be able 
to hold your head up high is countercrea-
tive behavior. To be concerned about 
change is equally alien. Both are traits that 

·."" 



detract from the positive attainment of 
goals. 

The second step is the belief in one's 
ability to succeed. You simply need to be 
confident and to go on regardless of what 
happens. 

The third one is constructive discontent. 
You have to be careful with this one since 
it is right on the borderline between de-
structive and constructive. But construc-
tive discontent is very positive. 

University Libraries 361 

The fourth is wholeness. And we're be-
ginning to see much more emphasis on 
and understanding of wholeness today. 
It's everything that we sense and know 
and how we approach things-what's our 
view of life, what's our view of people? 

And the fifth step is the ability to escape 
from habit. There are good habits and bad 
habits, and we need to review all of them 
in order to escape from the bad habits and 
keep the habits that are good.