Schwartz.indd The University Library and the Problem of Knowledge Charles A. Schwartz The problem of knowledge, on the broadest level, is that the scope, spe- cialization, and cross-disciplinarity of the research enterprise have long surpassed any overarching framework.The key question, on the campus level, is whether the development of research collections by the library is aligned with the university’s strategic aims and overall institutional development. A straightforward (though uncommon) way to make the university/library relationship more effective in this regard is for the library to have a meaningful role in the academic program review process. This essay describes such a role, singling out the particular situation of some 40 predominately undergraduate institutions that have been reclassified as research-level in the Carnegie scheme. As a rule, when a university’s institutional identity or ambition outstrips its library’s capability, collection development is bound to become a campuswide concern. i le is known, in a systematic way, about the effectiveness of the university/library re- lationship. Among the chief concerns is the library’s dual ability to support advanced research and doctoral programs. Underlying such concerns and pervading higher education is the general problem of knowledge: learning about and having access to scholarly information, which has been subject to rapid growth and increasing specializa- tion since the 1970s or so. On campus, the key question is whether the development of research collections by the library is aligned with the university’s strategic aims and overall institutional develop- ment. Although this is an area in which means and ends are complex, there is a straightforward way to make the uni- versity/library relationship reasonably effective (coherent and productive). The main complexities involve money and attention along with knowledge. Money is complicated by the uncertainty of optimum levels of investment across the disciplines. A ention is complicated by the inconsistency of faculty spans of interest in the library. The problem of knowledge, however, is more funda- mental and intriguing. The scope, spe- cialization, and cross-disciplinarity of the research enterprise have long surpassed any overarching framework. Such complexities heighten when a university is at an uncertain stage of institutional development. The broadest example involves some 40 large but pre- dominately undergraduate universities that have found themselves reclassified Charles A. Schwartz is Associate Director for Collection Management at Florida International University; e-mail: schwartc@fiu.edu. This article benefited from several reviewers: John Budd, Deborah Grimes, Kyle Perkins, Marie Radford, Lee Shifle , and Steve Wiberly. 238 mailto:schwartc@fiu.edu The University Library and the Problem of Knowledge 239 as research-level in the changing Carnegie scheme since 2000.1 In general, when a university’s institutional identity or ambi- tion outstrips its library’s capability, col- lection development is bound to become a campuswide concern. The straightforward way of aligning the university/library relationship with the problem of knowledge and its a en- dant complexities of money and a ention is for the library to have a meaningful role in the academic program review process.2 Such a role is uncommon. Although pro- gram review has become the standard framework of institutional development, the library’s presence in it is rare or per- functory nationwide. This essay does not lead to precise prescriptions for structuring university/ library relations (so much depends on local institutional cultures). Nor does it delve into the array of collection-devel- opment specifics for particular fields (for that ma er, library reports and program self-studies at the author’s institution are online).3 It makes some observations that, when combined with a university’s own needs and ingenuity, may be generally useful for judging whether a standard process to assess research collections would strengthen program review and refine institutional development. The Problem of Knowledge The problem of knowledge is expansive, leading to various approaches. Readers may recognize it in terms of the recur- rent call—harking back to Alfred North Whitehead’s classic dictum on the “fatal disconnection of subjects that kills the vitality of the modern curriculum”—for a more coherent undergraduate education.4 A few years ago, Stanley N. Katz, in an es- say on the “pathbreaking, fractionalized, uncertain world of knowledge,” extended that call to the need for a more coherent relationship between the university and society.5 A different aspect of this diffuse problem is that studies of the university system are unable to provide an overall account of its most distinctive contribu- tions: scholarship and scientific discovery. This knowledge gulf is rarely articulated (the main description of it is the first footnote to Derek Bok’s 1986 treatise on Higher Learning).6 Nonetheless, its gen- eral parameters—the key dynamics of growth and complexity in the research enterprise—are well known. One is the shi from physics to biology (allied with mathematics, computer science, and en- gineering) as the crucible of innovation in the sciences.7 Another, older dynamic is the rise of centrifugal forces in the hu- manities that are represented by special studies programs: women’s studies, eth- nic studies, cultural studies, and so forth.8 In the social sciences, however, there is no particular pa ern, other than Clifford Geertz’s broad postulate of a “reconfigu- ration of social thought [in] our notion not so much of what knowledge is, but of what we want to know.”9 An accumulation of details about such dynamics would simply dissolve in the notorious difficulties that sociologists of science encounter when trying to map pa erns of influence and interaction in the scholarly communication system. Yet, explorations may be gainfully handled at the campus level: in library-faculty collab- orations to develop research-level collec- tions. The success of such collaborations depends on the library’s ability to provide assessments that have practicality or use- ful simplicity. Practicality stems from the structural properties of the various litera- tures. Notably, such properties show why the problem of knowledge for the library is less severe in the social sciences than in the sciences or the humanities, though the social sciences have undergone the same kinds of transformations of specialization and cross-disciplinarity. Library Centrality in Institutional Decision-Making Although university aims for program reviews have had shi ing emphases with changing times—from curtailing costs in the 1970s, to improving quality in the 240 College & Research Libraries May 2007 1980s, to refocusing and repositioning the institution’s civic engagements since the 1990s—the essential purpose should be to set budgetary priorities. Successful “program reviews are more for resource reallocation than program improve- ment” since curricular issues tend to get exercised rather than resolved.10 Where reviews are not accompanied by budget- ary reallocations, the criticism is that the review process reflects merely a logic of appropriateness (that such things ought to be done) rather than a logic of consequences (in which programs are asked to justify activities and their costs in relation to institutional objectives).11 The library’s goal is to be in the central- ity of institutional decision-making for academic affairs. Centrality is broadly defined as the “quantity and intensity of a department’s relations with other departments on campus” on the theory that “central departments survive be er than peripheral ones in times of financial stress.” For our purposes, it means spe- cific inclusion of research-level collection assessments in plans to align programs with the university’s strategic aims and overall development. In reality, university administrators seem to have li le interest in librarians’ participation in activities associated with high-level institutional decision-making.12 Useful Simplicity and Scholarly Significance As noted earlier, the library’s success in the program review process depends on its ability to provide collection as- sessments that have useful simplicity. At odds with that is the library’s inclina- tion to produce reports that compile all information resources that might bear on a program. Such exhaustive accounts serve as symbols or signals of organiza- tional competence. They suit accreditation statistics but fail the “so what?” test for institutional planning. Reports of useful simplicity lay the groundwork for such decision making by identifying resources that are evidently significant in the schol- arly system but not in the collections, for consideration by the faculty. Significance in the scholarly system is gauged in part by citation-impact journal rankings. This approach to structuring scholarly literatures leads to contrasting pa erns of library-program collabora- tions. In the sciences, the sheer numbers of ranked journals, together with their narrow specializations and high prices, require the faculty’s expertise in title deci- sions. For example, engineering has some 800 citation-ranked titles spread over 14 literatures. The proportion of those titles that are held by the library is not a useful finding for institutional planning. The practical outcome is the number and ag- gregate cost of the remaining titles that are identified by the faculty as priorities for collection development. Across the sciences at my university the same parallel pa erns emerged: the library holds about 40% of all the jour- nals in a given citation-ranked literature, and the faculty selects about 10% of the journals not held as acquisition priori- ties. In our experience, a library journal collection in the sciences of roughly half the ranked titles per relevant program is a reasonable benchmark of cost-effective- ness for research productivity. An essen- tial consideration is whether the faculty would be as selective if assessments were initiated solely by the library rather than under the aegis of program review (the office of the provost). In the social sciences, library/faculty collaborations are eased by the less de- manding properties of the citation-ranked literatures. The fewer numbers of jour- nals, along with their broader subject ranges and lower prices, enable the library to operate rather autonomously. Indeed, against the general ambiguity of the prob- lem of knowledge, a project to complete the holdings of all ranked social science journals relevant to campus programs would be a plainly intelligent move to faculty and university administrators. Even a budget-constrained university library could afford such a project by http:decision-making.12 http:objectives).11 http:resolved.10 The University Library and the Problem of Knowledge 241 limiting it to the subset of journals that have rankings in multiple fields. It is in the humanities that the library and the faculty are most dependent on each other. The library is even more re- liant on the faculty’s knowledge of the specialized journal literatures than in the sciences, given the lack of measures of publication significance in the humani- ties. For its part, the humanities faculty nationwide must regard the library pro- fession as an unreliable costakeholder in the scholarly communication system, since library expenditures for scientific and technical journals have displaced book acquisitions in the humanities to the extent that some fields are consid- ered “endangered species” in publishing circles. Resolving Dilemmas of Program Review Such problems in the humanities were re- solved with one program at my university. It is an interesting case in being the excep- tion to an otherwise general dilemma. On the university level, the ground rule of the program review process nationwide is that reallocation is the main source of flex- ibility in the face of budget constraints. Yet, for the library, nearly any reallocation of acquisition patterns—to create cost savings to afford new resources—gets mired in the cross-disciplinary gridlocks of programs and literatures. The excep- tional case is religious studies. Being the one nonscience discipline with certain sizeable intradisciplinary literatures, it has the singular freedom to reduce large segments of domestic book acquisitions to afford more journals, international books, or other resources. Another general dilemma of the program review process lends itself to a unique library solution. Program review is not intended to provide immediate buys for an academic unit. It is all about benchmarking and strategic planning the next fiscal year. Yet any review effort should be consequential, not merely a ma er of appropriateness. The library alone is in a position to deliver, in the midst of some program reviews, concrete results through cost-effective initiatives. Given the gridlock of cross-disciplinary literatures, the main source of budget flexibility is to cut print subscriptions to afford an online-journal package or a more comprehensive database. The Complexity of Attention in Academic Affairs While the case for the library’s role in program review is clearest for universities where collection development and insti- tutional development are badly in need of alignment, established research universi- ties might well consider pu ing collection assessments under the aegis of the overall academic planning process. A principal factor is the problem of multiple, chang- ing claims of a ention in campus affairs. It is not likely that the library can summon on its own—for scores of programs, with- out a formal university structure—the involvements of the faculty necessary to develop research collections. No faculty of any program or field is expected to be impartial or altruistic in the resource allocation process. Nonetheless, the faculty everywhere has an overriding interest in moderating and prioritizing its needs when the program review is held under the auspices of the office of the provost (or a similar authority)—for fear of appearing unreasonable or unwise in such a public se ing. It is the library’s job to combine the programs’ disparate needs into a collections budget or plan that addresses the university’s strategic aims within the overall need for equity among the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Collection Development and Organizational Adaptability Moreover, the typical pa ern of library- faculty relations—a lot of brief encounters about specific things that crop up—is not a good strategy for gaining broad compre- hension of research interests and needs. The problem of knowledge calls for a strategy 242 College & Research Libraries May 2007 of increasing the scale of discussions.13 In- dicative of that strategy, the Computer Science department in its program review recommended that the library focus on a series of collection development projects in emerging fields (starting with bio- informatics). Accreditation bodies, for their part, tend to be more interested in such regular pa erns of library/faculty collaboration than in the library’s ability to acquire everything. Any series of program-review col- lection assessments will lead in a few years to a fairly comprehensive plan. Such a plan will address optimal levels of investment for the various disciplines and the associated challenges of research productivity and Ph.D. production. It will be reasonably cost-effective, given the faculty’s evident selectivity of priorities for acquisition in their respective fields. However, this is one of those areas of management in which specific outcomes are less important than the ways that the process gives meaning to an ill-structured problem. The real value of any long-range plan is that it promotes organizational adaptability and fosters an evaluation ethic. Collection Development and Institutional Maturity An appreciation for financial complex- ity in collection development may well depend on institutional maturity. Whereas libraries with a traditionally undergraduate orientation regard collec- tions in terms of a curricular “service,” research libraries understand the loosely coupled nature of means and ends in what James G. March terms knowledge inventories: “Does society ‘overinvest’ in library books? In research? In infor- mation? Optimizing on investments in knowledge is particularly troublesome because the costs and benefits of knowl- edge are distributed quite differently over time and space.”14 Such diffuseness invites biases and blind spots in resource allocations, such as reactions against spe- cialized resources for unidentified users or future generations. Indeed, without an appreciation for research collections as knowledge inventories, developing libraries are likely to put new funds into old, undergraduate routines. Conclusions We should distinguish between scholarly assessment and the scholarship of assessment. Scholarly assessment is micro level; it focuses on specific fields and collections. By contrast, the scholarship of assessment is macro level; it is a systematic and rather abstract inquiry into the knowledge infrastructure of such inquiry.15 This essay falls in the la er category. It does not cover the subtleties of the problem of knowledge for particular fields. It focuses more broadly on the general need for uni- versity/library institutional arrangements to manage the problem of knowledge (without a empting to cover all aspects of this diffuse problem, such as the role of the library to transform student learn- ing or the sea change of financing and preserving scholarly information in the networked environment).16 No essay can lead to precise prescrip- tions for structuring university/library relations. Just as all politics is local, each university will use its own needs and ingenuity to find an appropriate role for the library in program review. The essential point is that, while much depends on local institutional cultures, some universitywide structure is needed to provide the kind of collective expertise that the complexity of research collec- tions warrants. Beyond that, the tenor of library/faculty collaborations will be as varied as the academic programs, their literatures, and resource markets. Nonetheless, certain pa erns are likely. In the sciences, the faculty will want to focus on acquisitions of unranked as well as ranked journals in emerging fields (since the citation-impact methodology is somewhat biased in favor of established journals). In the humanities, the faculty will want more international books. And in the social sciences, the faculty will http:environment).16 http:inquiry.15 http:discussions.13 The University Library and the Problem of Knowledge 243 likely press for complete holdings of the and attention, program review is the ranked journal literatures. structure that is best suited to improving While no institutional arrangement can university/library adaptability and mak- actually resolve the problem of knowledge ing research-level collection development and its a endant complexities of money a more intelligent process campuswide. Notes 1. The classification scheme of higher education by the Carnegie Foundation for the Ad- vancement of Teaching (www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications) was reformulated in 2000 and again in 2006. The 2000 version was more striking in terms of tensions between institutional identity and library capability. In that version, 40 formerly Doctoral-II universities were li ed into the top Doctoral Research-Extensive category. The median library collections budget of those 40 is barely $2.8M, whereas the median of the 113 other, more established universities in that tier is over $7.2M. A more telling demarcation is that only the 113 are members of the Association of Research Libraries. Thus, the bo om-quartile position of the 40 was stark. The 2006 reformulation of the Carnegie scheme was intended to get away from overt rankings. Nearly all ARL institutions are in the new top-most tier of Research Institutions—Very High Research Activity category. The 40 universities once in the bo om quartile of the former Research-Extensive category are mostly in the new second-top tier of Research Institutions—High Research Activity category, with a few in the new third-top tier called just Doctoral/Research. While the 2006 version may blur the tension between institutional identity and library capability, the conventional ambitions of any large-scale university—for expanded doctoral programs, for increased Ph.D. production, and for greater research productivity—will continue to make collection development a campuswide concern when problems arise. On the 2006 Carnegie redesign, see Audrey Williams June, “Col- lege Classifications Get an Overhaul,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 52, 26 (March 3, 2006): A25–27. 2. The massive literature on program review completely overlooks the role of the library. A few studies that may be of interest include David D. Dill et al, “Accreditation and Academic Qual- ity Assurance,” Change 28 (September/October 1996): 17–24; Alan E. Guskin and Mary B. Marcy, “Dealing with the Future Now: Principles for Creating a Vital Campus in a Climate of Restricted Resources,” Change 35 (July/August 2003): 10–21; Karl E. Weick, “Management of Organizational Change among Loosely Coupled Elements,” in Paul S. Goodman, ed., Change in Organizations: New Perspectives on Theory, Research, and Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982), 375–408; and Jon F. Wergin, “Waking Up to the Importance of Accreditation,” Change 37 (May/June 2005): 35–41. 3. Library reports and program self-studies at the author’s institution, Florida International University, are archived at www.fiu.edu/~opie/progreview_archives.htm and summarized at h p://library.fiu.edu/files/about/Long%20range%20plan.pdf. While collection assessment methods have remained fairly consistent over the years, there have been some changes in topical emphases: less a ention now goes to benchmarking comparisons with other universities; more a ention is accorded distinct resources and services (e.g., the digital collections center and geographic information systems); and a previous section on inflation in the scholarly communication system was dropped for the sake of brevity. 4. Vartan Gregorian, “Colleges Must Reconstruct the Unity of Knowledge,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review 50, 39 (June 4, 2003): B12; and Susan Frost and Rebecca Chopp, “The University as Global City,” Change 36 (March/April, 2004): 44–51. 5. Stanley N. Katz, “The Pathbreaking, Fractionalized, Uncertain World of Knowledge,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review 49, 4 (September 20, 2002): B7. 6. Derek Bok, Higher Learning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1986), 2, note 1, cited in David Damrosch, We Scholars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1995), 46. 7. Joel E. Cohen, “Mathematics Is Biology’s Next Microscope, Only Be er; Biology is Math- ematics’ Next Physics, Only Be er,” PLoS Biology 2, 12 (December 2004): e439; and Lynn Arthur Steen, “Mathematics and Biology: New Challenges for Both Disciplines,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review 51, 26 (March 4, 2005): B12. 8. Louis Menand, “The Marketplace of Ideas,” American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 49 (2001) at www.acls.org/op49.htm; Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Pr., 2000); Peter N. Sterns, “Expanding the Agenda of Cultural Research,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review 49, 34 (May 2, 2003): B7; and Ken Wissoker, “Negotiating a Passage Between Disciplinary Borders,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review 49, 34 (April 14, 2000): B7. www.acls.org/op49.htm www.fiu.edu/~opie/progreview_archives.htm www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications 244 College & Research Libraries May 2007 9. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), ch. 1. 10. Cli on C. Conrad and Anne M. Pra , “Designing for Quality,” Journal of Higher Education 56 (November–December, 1985): 601–22, at 609. 11. James G. March, A Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen (New York: Free Press, 1994), ch. 2. 12. Deborah J. Grimes, Academic Library Centrality: User Success Through Service, Access, and Tradition, Publications in Librarianship no. 50 (Chicago: Association of College & Research Li- braries, 1998), 44, 101, 107. On the importance of linking investments in information resources to the effectiveness of particular academic programs, see Bonnie Gratch Lindauer, “Defining and Measuring Library’s Impact on Campus-wide Outcomes,” College and Research Libraries 59 (November/December, 1998): 546–70; and Sarah M. Pritchard, “Determining Quality in Academic Libraries,” Library Trends 44 (winter 1996): 572–94. 13. March, A Primer on Decision Making, 243ff. 14. March, A Primer on Decision Making, 247. 15. Trudy W. Banta, Building a Scholarship of Assessment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), x. 16. Institute on Higher Education, Project on the Future of Higher Education at www.p e.org/; and Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Revolution in the Library,” The American Scholar 66 (spring, 1997): 197–204 on our now confronting “two revolutions—an intellectual one and a technological revo- lution, which bear an uncanny resemblance to each other and have a symbiotic relationship to each other.” webster university library perry dean rogers | partners architects agnes scott college library agnes scott college library 177 milk street boston massachusetts 02109 t 617 423 0100 f 617 426 2274 w perrydean.com Designers for Libraries & Academic Institutions http:www.p�e.org ANNOUNCING: CRO2 Choice Reviews Online – Version 2 Comprehensive Content Improved Interface 115,000 Searchable Reviews More Personalization Enhanced Search Capabilities Web Exclusives CRO2 will replace both the Password and Site License Editions of ­ ChoiceReviews.online, combining the best features and functions of both versions! ­ FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT WWW.CRO2INFO.ORG http:WWW.CRO2INFO.ORG