1.    Refinements to the 2009 Strategic Academic Vision

For a variety of reasons, the UC Merced Library was absent from the 2009 Strategic Academic Vision. This proposal refines that absence by bringing the library into the picture.

 2.    Important research questions in your field:

1. What is the future of scholarly information in terms of its economic model (institution pays, author pays, end-user pays, etc.), formats (print, digital, other), distribution (commercial, government, institutional repositories, self publication), and connection to systems of academic rewards (hiring, awarding of grants, promotion, tenure)?
   
   
2. How will the academy manage vast amounts of research data through the entire data lifecycle of collection, analysis, sharing, discovery, and archiving?
   
   
3. How will the university develop research-ready students who have the skills to discover, access, evaluate, and apply information throughout their scholarly, professional, civic, and personal lives?

The above questions apply to every research discipline because all disciplines require information to fuel new research and produce new information as result of that research.

Looking beyond the questions of interest to the library in its role as part of the research infrastructure of the campus, the library could also become a locus for research. Because the library can be studied from organizational, economic, cultural, technological, or educational perspectives, UC Merced researchers are welcome to focus their attention on the library rather than, say, choosing to study a remotely located business, educational institution, or cultural heritage organization. An example of the kind of research that results from studying an academic library is Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons’ Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester.

Beyond serving as a locus for research, the UC Merced Library is interested in the possibility of research partnerships in which student researchers (graduate and undergraduate) working under faculty supervision team with UC Merced librarians to work on meaningful research projects that benefit from the inclusion of librarian expertise. Just a few examples of possible areas of research include: data curation, archival projects, bibliographic analysis, digital humanities, educational assessment, instructional technology, computer science, and economic analysis of information markets. Ideally, the library would have the resources to fund full or partial support for graduate students who wish to research topics of mutual interest to their faculty advisors and the library.

3. Resources that are needed

As existing degree programs are expanded and new programs created, it is necessary that the strategic planning for those programs factor in the cost of information resources in the same way that the costs of faculty lines, graduate students, spaces, and equipment are factored in as part of the planning process. The library is ready and willing to work with faculty planners to create realistic cost estimates based on the information resources to be used and how those resources will be used. For some programs, it is possible that existing information resources are more than adequate to handle a major expansion; for others, such as a medical school, the obligation for information resources could run to $1,000,000 per year or more. What the campus cannot afford to do is plan for growth of academic programs and cross its fingers that the existing information resources will be adequate to 1) support UC-level research and 2) satisfy outside accreditation bodies.

The entire campus is in need of a robust technological and administrative infrastructure for the support of academic data. The technological elements include a greatly improved internet connection between the campus and the rest of the world (currently it is 1G, 10G is minimal, 100G is desirable), some capacity for local data storage, and large amounts of cloud-based data storage (roughly 20% local and 80% cloud). On the administrative side, the library will need additional staff and resources for curating data throughout the data lifecycle. Creating a strong data infrastructure will require collaboration between campus researchers, Campus IT, Office of Research, and the library.

In order to serve as a research partner as well as meet the campus’s on-going—and growing—needs for library collections, instruction, student study space, data curation, and archives, by 2020 the library will need to add eight academic librarians (or such academic-librarian-equivalents as archivists, metadata specialists, data curators, instructional technologists, etc.), twelve career-staff positions, and fifty part-time (@ 15 FTE) student employee positions. Of the career-staff positions, a few of the more specialized technology positions might be shared between the library and campus IT. In addition, the library will need significantly increased collections funding to support additional faculty and students, new programs, and inflation in the cost of information resources.

Well before 2020 the library needs to begin reclaiming space in the library building, as the quality of the library’s public spaces are already seriously degraded due to overcrowding. The bulk of the reclaimed space will be used for student individual study and group collaboration, while some space will be needed to house additional librarians and library career staff. In addition, the library will need workspace for faculty/library/student collaboration; for example, workspace for digital humanities or data curation. Beyond the existing library building, the creation of two or three library common spaces dispersed across campus would create enough student study space to take the campus to 2020 and possibly as far as 2030 depending on future growth. 

4. National programs that are most closely aligned

The traditional metric for the academic research library was once the number of volumes in the stacks. This metric, which was based on the notion of a comprehensive, stand-alone, just-in-case collection, has been rendered obsolete by the spread of digital information, the interlinking of library collections through bibliographic utilities and consortial library catalogs, and a changing information marketplace. When Harvard University admits (as it did in 2009) that “a single institution cannot capture, document, and make accessible the world’s record of scholarship, and Harvard is no exception,” it is safe to say that the era of the comprehensive, stand-alone, just-in-case library collection has passed. Providing a right-sized printed-book collection focused on the real needs of UC Merced students and researchers will be both a challenge and a goal for the library until such time—should that time ever come—that the printed book no longer has a role in the research university library.

Even in the case of digital information, sheer numbers are a less-than-perfect metric. UC Merced Library provides the campus with access to approximately 70,000 online journals and nearly 4,000,000 e-books. Impressive, yet meaningless if those are not the journals or books actually needed by UCM researchers and students. What matters is providing the needed information resources to the person who needs them at the time of need, and achieving this goal is the aspiration of UC Merced Library. UC Merced Library’s robust Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service is an important component in providing access to information resources not readily available on campus or online. Although ILL comes with a significant cost, the fact that it is demand driven makes it an extremely precise way to meet real information needs. Interestingly, for the previous four years the library has been a net lender (i.e. the UCM Library lends more to other libraries than it borrows from them) whether measured against other UC libraries or all libraries.

UC Merced Library stands out among academic libraries in the way it has re-thought the role of the library in developing research-ready students. The library’s efforts to employ online technology so as to hybridize both information-literacy instruction and the provision of reference services, its use of peer-focused models of providing services to undergraduates, and its redefinition of the role of the academic librarian have all been recognized in the literature of librarianship.

It is likely that the academic libraries of 2020 will look more like the UC Merced Library of 2013 than the UC Merced Library of 2020 will look like the academic libraries of 2013 (and before). For example, the UC Santa Barbara Library is undergoing a major expansion that will result in fewer books in the library, a recognition of the fact that library space for study and collaborative learning is more valuable than space for books. To become a true peer of academic libraries in 2020 and beyond, the UC Merced Library will need sufficient funding to:

• sustain access to existing and new subscription-based information resources (principally journals) essential to UC-level research;
• invest one-time monies in the acquisition or creation of non-subscription-based digital information resources;
• develop a right-sized print-book collection focused on the real needs of UC Merced students and researchers;
• invest in new models of scholarly publishing (such as open-access publishing) that have the potential to drive down or eliminate the cost of subscription-based information resources;
• curate data and other non-commodity information created by UC Merced researchers;
• hire sufficient staff to do all of the above, provide public services, and develop research-ready students through in-person and online instruction.

5. Important campus metrics that are met

The information, data management, and instructional support needs of faculty and graduate students are essentially identical. Assuming the library can meet the needs of faculty researchers, it will meet the needs of graduate students. While the information needs of undergraduates partially overlap with the needs of faculty and graduate students, some part of the undergraduate information need falls outside of that overlap. Providing information to meet undergraduate needs will require an on-going commitment of library collection funds.

Since the opening of the campus in 2005 the UC Merced Library has included the development of research-ready students among its top-priority goals. Meeting this goal involves providing in-person instruction, developing technology-based learning tools, and making it as easy as possible for UC Merced students and researchers to discover and access information without instruction or assistance from library staff (though such assistance is certainly available when needed). The growth of campus has already outpaced the library’s capacity to provide in-person instruction, so the development of technology-based learning tools will be essential for serving 9000 undergraduates. In its revised outcomes for undergraduate education, WASC has called out information literacy as a priority. Meeting this standard will require not only the resources and knowledge of the library, but also the collaboration of faculty and lecturers in all disciplines. This collaboration cannot be in name only, but must include the integration of information-literacy instruction and assessment in courses up and down the curriculum and across all disciplines.

Assuming that the library has the funding and staffing to provide to the campus the right information resources, a robust data curation service, and the foundation for developing research-ready students, it will help the campus improve its measures relating to research productivity, graduate student involvement, undergraduate retention, and graduation rates.

"The library force is seriously overworked, the building is overcrowded."

     --Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President, University of California, Inaugural Address, October 25, 1899

     Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.