jan05b.indd


creativity and leadership 
Ruth A. Pagell 

The more things change… 
The
past
as
a
signpost
for
the
future



Iwas pleased when ACRL President Fran­ces Maloy asked me to write a column for 
her on libraries and change, but somewhat 
less pleased when she went on to say that I 
had been around for such a long time that I 
could provide an historical perspective. 

So I will admit it—I have been a librarian 
for 30 years and an academic librarian for 25 
of them. In those 25 years, I have always had 
OCLC, performed online searching, and of­
fered “bibliographic instruction”; and for over 
20 years, I have owned a personal computer 
and used e­mail. 

Maloy has noted that: “We know that 
technology has been the major driver for 
change in libraries for over 30 years and has 
accelerated in recent years.”1 Paula Warnken, 
Associate Provost for Information Resources 
at the State University of New York­Cortland, 
documented changes over the past 15 years 
from an academic perspective.2 This article 
is a look back over the past 30 years from a 
very personal perspective. 

Challenges past and present 
Some of the challenges 30 years ago were 
the same as the challenges today: 

• the need to identify appropriate tech­
nology and not just do it because it can be 
done 

• the need to match the existing technolo­
gies to the needs and skills of our users and 
to the mission of our parent organizations; 
and 

• the need to raise the level of awareness 
of what we have to offer. 

Two things have changed in that time. The 
first is a series of changes in the educational 

environment, such as the pace of change, the 
learning and teaching styles of our two pri­
mary user groups—students and faculty—and 
the very nature of the university from the 
bastion of the ivory tower to an extension of 
a board room. Fundraising and rankings are 
two driving forces in top institutions; students 
and faculty are bought; state budgets are 
decreasing, and endowments are fl at. The 
cost of education keeps going up faster than 
family incomes,3 and technology and the costs 
associated with it become more pervasive. In 
addition to rising costs of both public and pri­
vate college education, we are also entering 
a period of declining numbers of college­age 
students, with the number of students aged 
15–19 peaking in 2008 and then falling back 
to 2004–2005 levels in ten years.4 

The second thing that has changed is our 
perception of ourselves. We at least articulate 
new roles as teachers and trainers, partners 
and consultants, resource managers and mar­
keting managers. We recognize that just storing 
the books is no longer a sustainable position, 
both in terms of roles and perceptions and in 
terms of the realities of physical space. 

Many things have also stayed the same. 
Thirty years ago, in my very first library job 
at my local public library, we were debating 
the costs and benefi ts—amazing that we 
actually did that—of bringing in OCLC. The 
selling point was supposed to be that, in 
the end, we would save money by requir­
ing fewer people to do the work. Maybe in 

Ruth A. Pagell is executive director of the Goizueta 
Business Library at Emory University, e-mail: Ruth_ 
Pagell@bus.emory.edu 
© 2005 Ruth A. Pagell 

January 2005  33 C&RL News 

mailto:Pagell@bus.emory.edu


manufacturing, technology solutions save 
money, but that was not the case then and 
it is not the case now for libraries. In fact, a 
recent Association of American Universities 
provost report complains that we have not 
seen the cost savings from technologies in 
libraries.5 This might be in part because we 
have not changed our organizational struc­
tures adequately to meet the environmental 
and technological changes. What the provosts 
are not seeing is that this is also the result of 
increases in programs and services that the 
technology has enabled. 

Regaining sight of our purpose 
Maloy makes the case for libraries playing 
an important role in education, and sorry is 
the state that we have to be reminded that 
this is a goal. But in the 1980s and 1990s, we 
became more enamored by the technology 
and lost sight of the purpose. Of course, the 
era of technology experimentation was bet­
ter than the era in which I entered academic 
libraries. That was the era of the library as 
the book repository, though that is lurking 
ever closer to the surface as we grapple with 
the print versus electronic conundrum along 
with on­ or offsite storage. 

I get tired of hearing how new and dif­
ferent everything is. Let’s put our work in 
perspective: we have always been driven by 
technology, from the invention of the printing 
press (which changed the nature of what we 
collected) to the invention of the typewriter 
(which improved the way we could provide 
access to what we collected). As we moved 
from manual production of cards to the elec­
tronic card catalog to the integrated library 
system, what I have seen is a focus on how 
these technological changes can make our 
jobs easier for us; therefore, our electronic 
card catalogs have looked very much like 
our fi le drawers. 

What I am seeing today is a growing 
awareness that we are not in the business of 
making our jobs easier but in the business 
of improving access for our users. While 
the terms customer­focused, user­centric, 
or customer delight might feel trite and un­

comfortable, we are at long last responding 
to our users’ needs. That, of course, is not 
enough. It was a perception of responding to 
user needs that led us through those gloomy 
years of just collecting and storing materials, 
hiding behind a desk for fixed hours, slowly 
dabbling with CD­ROMs, and creating print 
pathfinders that we displayed in our libraries 
for our patrons to come in and fi nd. 

I have been fortunate through my years 
of library work to have worked in places 
where tradition was not the norm. In my fi rst 
academic job 25 years ago, we were offer­
ing table­of­contents and document­delivery 
services to faculty, something many libraries 
are still not offering. During the mid­1980s at 
the Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, 
we worked closely with our partners in the 
information industry to try out new products 
and then share what we had learned by writ­
ing articles in publications such as Online and 
Database, more popular with special than 
academic librarians.6,7 We introduced do­it­
yourself end­user searching over 20 years 
ago, analyzed the confusion over full­text 
articles and full­text journals, and evaluated 
the strengths and weaknesses of cross­data­
base searching, which today goes under the 
more jargony name of “federated searching” 
but remains as primitive. 

What we learned then is what we are see­
ing in academia today: end­user searching is 
a huge success; trying to sort out the whole 
full­text coverage question was complicated 
then and more complicated now; and the 
challenges of doing any kind of sophisticated 
retrieval across files with different structure 
and different content, from images of articles 
to company directories to statistical tables, 
does everyone a disservice. What we have 
learned is that we do not have to be afraid of 
end users doing their own research, as long as 
those end users are not searching Google. 

Evolving roles 
Back in the day, as they now say, the librar­
ian always sat at her desk and pointed a 
user to the appropriate print index; the user 
determined which articles she or he wanted 

C&RL News January 2005  34 



and went off to find them. Then we became 
intermediaries. Only highly trained librar­
ians in select academic libraries searched 
sophisticated and expensive databases such 
as “Dialog” so the users’ access to a growing 
body of electronic information was depen­
dent on the librarian’s skill level and the us­
er’s budget. In many ways, we have put the 
user back in control of his or her information 
selection and retrieval by providing access 
not only to indexes but to articles not only 
on the library shelves but anywhere in the 
world our authorized users happen to be. 

It has also become more complicated, with 
more choices and with the embargoes and 
journal wars, and publishers and database 
aggregators fighting over who has access to 
what for what dates. We have stepped in and 
seen that we have a crucial role in training 
users either in groups or through individual 
consultations on how to use the resources. Our 
roles are changing from deference to faculty 
to partnering with faculty. Faculty certainly 
know their disciplines better than most of us 
but they cannot possibly keep up with all the 
changes in information technology as it applies 
to scholarly communication and teaching. 

I taught a business librarianship class for 
many years and focused on teaching students 
the basics of business theory and the many 
tools of information retrieval. A colleague 
who has not taught this course at his institu­
tion in many years asked what I would teach 
now, so I thought about what it is we—not 
only in business but certainly in general at 
Emory—are looking for from new librarians. 
To get an interview with our business library, 
you have to show knowledge of your subject, 
either through an undergraduate or graduate 
business degree, experience in another aca­
demic­ or research­based special library, or 
real­world experience in business, and show 
an understanding of the difference between 
research (which we view as consultation) 
and reference (which translates into “where’s 
the book?”). 

Subject expertise is becoming the norm 
throughout Emory libraries. Candidates also 
have to show that they have been innovative, 

creative, or proactive in their approach to 
service. These qualities will get a person in 
the door. But to be successful, at least in our 
environment today, the potential employee 
also has to be able to teach, present, or in­
struct—whichever verb you prefer. This goes 
well beyond the skills that are taught in library 
school or were required of us. 

For the 21st century academic librarian, 
two things are givens: the first is that our 
programs and services are dependent upon 
technology; and the second is that there will 
always be change at an ever­increasing pace. 
How the changes play out in our institutions 
should vary, based on the needs of our own 
users and the goals of our parent institutions 
and on our abilities to control and positively 
integrate the changes into our programs and 
services. 

The key is to embrace change as op­
portunity. 

Notes: 
1. Frances Maloy. “Creativity as Leader­

ship Strategy in Times of Change,” College 
& Research Library News 65, 8 (September 
2004) 444. 

2. Paula Warnken, “New Technologies and 
Constant Change: Managing the Process,” 
Journal of Academic Librarianship 30, 4 (July 
2004) 322–327. 

3. College Board. Trends in Col­
lege Pricing 2004, www.collegeboard. 
c o m / p r o d _ d o w n l o a d s / p r e s s / c o s t 0 4 /  
041264TrendsPricing2004_FINAL.pdf. 

4. Global Market Information Database, 
Euromonitor, searched November 2004. 

5. American Association of Universities 
Provost Session, OCLC Environmental Scan: 
Pattern Recognition, September 12, 2004, 
Newport Beach, CA, e­mail notes, November 
9, 2004. 

6. Michael Halperin and Ruth A. Pagell. 
“Free ‘Do­it­Yourself’ Online Searching … 
What to Expect,” Online 9, 2 (March 1985) 
82–4. 

7. Ruth Pagell. “Searching IAC’s Full­Text 
Files: It’s Awfully Confusing,” Database 10, 
no.5 (October 1987) 39–46. 

January 2005  35 C&RL News 

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