Yielding the Middle: the Decline (and Fall?) of the Academic Library

From where I sit I can see Gibbons "The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" on my bookshelf.  It seems pretentious to claim to understand all the factors that led to Rome's collapse, though many historians has attempted to do so.  Equally pretentious would be my assessment of the decline (and fall?) of the Academic Library.  I have blogged before about academic libraries, sometimes optimistically and often not.  Librarianship is experiencing a sea change no doubt, and times are hard for academic libraries in Canada.  When my own library opened its new building in 1989 there were 19-20 staff; when I joined the library in 2000 I think there were 14 staff and a small army of part-time students.  Now we have 10 staff; a handful of students, and an a growing belief that if anyone leaves they will not be replaced.  I'm not a stats guy but I see where this is heading. 

When I scan the national librarian jobsites (FIMS, FIS, LibraryJobs, CLA) I believe I see a disquieting trend: a rise in the percentage of part-time or term academic librarian positions, and the downgrading of existing positions to lower paying entry level (a form of ageism but that is another post.)  I regularly provide job references for new library school graduates and I know it is a hard market.  Collection budgets, once protected from cuts, are now relentlessly being whittled away.  Some might like to describe this as a re-tooling to be a new lean mean fighting machine.  I think it is something else.

I fear as a profession we are yielding the middle ground.  I'm referring to the Ackoff's Data-Information-Knowledge hierarchy where data are those disorganized facts and observations that becomes usable information when given structure and context and thus meaning.  Knowledge then might be thought of as information applied; where experience, skills, and information are combined to address a problem.  I do these concepts an injustice by my brevity but you get the idea.

Data was the domain of researchers; they created data, managed it, structured it, and created new information.  Then that new information became the domain of librarians, who created structures to preserve it and make it accessible.  Ideally practitioners would take that new information we provide and use it in applied ways for the good of society.  Again an over-simplification.  There were gaps in the system, not all that info got into the hands of practitioners which is why there is a new emphasis on Knowledge Mobilization. 

In the information age, information access is big business, and academic libraries lost their monopoly.  We began to scramble to find a new role, increasingly yielding that middle ground to the Corporate Information Services offering "comprehensive one point of access", and looking instead to the other sides of the pyramid.  Academic Libraries have seen an opportunity, as research data has grown in size and complexity, to become curators of that data.  But they aren't the only ones, and we have no monopoly.  My non-sensitive research projects, for example, are housed on commercial project management sites.  They offer shared access and scalability tools beyond the capacity of most Canadian academic libraries.  Open Access repositories offer some possibilities but how many repositories does a country Canada's size need.  As positions like data analysts become the new hot career choice,  Library/Information Schools who may be facing declining enrollment are focusing more on data, as are the faculties of Management and Computer Science.  The other growth priority is knowledge management particularly in business, though this has not attracted the attention of academic libraries. 

I wonder what comes next.  What will the campus look like A.L. (After Libraries)?  What do librarians do when libraries become simply student centers?  If they have technology skills they migrate to university IT departments.  If they have field research or project management skills they can slide into research centers.  Many will simple retire or drop out.  Perhaps I am being needlessly morose and melancholy, but I have another 19 years until retirement.  I need to be thinking ahead.