The Disruption of Universities – and Libraries
The week before last I both attended and gave a talk at the Institute for Computer Policy and Law. There was an interesting thread on how IT is disrupting universities, and university libraries, that ran through a number of the presentations. For this post, I’m going to draw on material from three of those presentations: Randy Katz on The Other Policy Challenge: Scholars, Scholarship, and the Scholarly Enterprise in the Digital Age, James Hilton on IT Policiy for CIOs: What They Want and Need to Know, and my own talk on Wrenching Change: Why a Research Library Needs a Chief Technology Strategist. The first two talks are available online from Cornell’s streaming media server – just click on the links.
James Hilton did a nice job of framing the disruptive impact of IT, and he identified three critical effects:
- Unbundling: This is the disruption of long established business practice. Newspapers, music, and publishing are three industries where IT has destroyed the vertically integrated business models that sustained them. The Internet, where the marginal distribution cost of digital media is essentially zero, means that payments for paper newspaper subscriptions and the physical distribution of music albums can no longer support the large fixed costs inherent in the existing models. As Hilton pointed out, there is nothing more bundled than higher education.
- Commoditization: This is where price becomes the only significant factor in a product. Here, new technologies have been able to ride huge growth curves. Email service is already a commodity, and Amazon EC2, S3, and other Software as a Service (SaaS) providers are rapidly becoming commodities. Music companies and musicians are trying to get away from the commodity 99¢ MP3 through concerts, limited edition albums, and other high margin products. In the higher education space, both Kaplan and the University of Phoenix are seeking to commoditize the delivery of instruction. To compete, universities must build on and emphasize their unique advantages in face to face learning, social collaboration, and social/physical interaction. They need to get the basics done much more efficiently.
- Consumerization: This is the process of bringing technology to consumers at a level that everyone can use. Examples abound: Facebook, YouTube, GMail, and Flickr all efficiently and effectively deliver services to very large numbers of consumers. None of these services provide user training, helpdesk support, or consulting. People just use them. Universities and libraries both need to look at how to leverage existing consumer services and how to provide consumer level services that are not expensive to use or to support.
Randy Katz posed the provocative question “Will the digital revolution mean the end of traditional higher education?”. He pointed out that technology was already transforming scholarship: it can now be done anytime, anywhere, and any way you want. Digital resources can end the “busy-ness” of scholarship: going places, searching for records, transcribing, assembling, and so on. Scholarly communication used to be slow, and now it’s instantaneous. Technology has truly liberated scholarship. When it comes to education, there is also a huge transformation. Randy also cited both the University of Phoenix and the death of traditional newspapers as warning shots across the university’s bow. Riffing on a question from Tracy Mitrano, he asked “In the face of the cloud, what is the glue that holds a campus, a scholarly enterprise, together?” He suggested that the successful university of the future may not be a place, but rather an idea instantiated in a physical and virtual architecture. Randy also emphasized the need for universities to identify and build on their unique characters and operational philosophies.
In my own talk, I looked at some areas of disruption that are particular to the research library. The most obvious is the non-locality of digital information resources. It’s no longer necessary for library users to come to the physical library for access to information – now, almost everyone starts with Google. We’re faced with the commoditization and consumerization of information discovery and delivery. In this environment, how do we make sure that all our unique resources are actually discoverable on the net, and that the Cornell community can discover and obtain all the resources that we hold and pay for?
The second challenge I focused on was how to manage academic technologies in the face of tumultuous change in IT. Almost every institution has a different allocation of responsibility for academic technologies among central IT, the library, and other campus organizations. Typically, this is the result of personalities and historical artifact. To get the right division of effort, it is critical to identify each group’s core competencies and match those with the necessary support functions. In general, central IT and the library will divide responsiblity somewhere near the middle of the axis running from IT to scholarship, although that can be a hard line to draw. For the library to address its academic technology responsibilities it must: 1) provide disciplinary understanding and expertise; 2) become fully aware of and engaged with modern IT tools and services; 3) ensure access to and the long-term preservation of information resources; and 4) collaborate closely with campus experts in IT.
The third area I discussed was the preservation of the scholarly and cultural record. Digital technology brings with it some huge preservation challenges: the diffusion of information resources; the need to manage research datasets; and the need to preserve information within and out of the cloud. As a library, we need to embrace the curation of web information resources, support scholarly communication, and collaborate with other research libraries to ensure the efficient provision of services. Like universities, research libraries will need to focus on their own unique areas of strength, and look to increasing efficiency or outsourcing commodity services. In the face of hugely disruptive forces, we must figure out how to deliver, and pay for, the critical services that research libraries provide:
- Preserving the scholarly and cultural record
- Ensuring open access to all knowledge – even when it is controversial
- Enabling users to discover the information that they seek
- Supporting creativity, scholarship, and critical thought
In his talk, James Hilton drew a nice distinction between services that are essential and services that are strategic. Running the university payroll is essential, but it is not strategic. We all need to look at our activities and figure out how to provide what is essential for the lowest cost and at the greatest efficiency, and how to invest our attention, energy, and resources in the things that are strategic.
