Library Policies and Operations Committee, 2008-09

In 2003, the Faculty Senate approved the creation of a new standing committee of the Senate - the Committee on Library Policies and Operations. Its scope and charge was approved by the Senate as:

The Committee will consist of seven faculty from across the University who collectively utilize the range of Library resources and services. In addition, the Dean and Director of the University Libraries shall serve as an ex officio member. To facilitate continuity of policies and responsiveness to faculty needs with respect to information resources, delivery, and utilization across the University, the Committee shall also establish continuing liaison with the Senate's Standing Academic Policy, Information Systems Policy, and Policy Oversight Committees.

This Committee shall be concerned with policy issues involving libraries' strategic planning, infrastructures and resource adequacy, collections development and maintenance, program and service development, and other matters of concern to the faculty as the institution strives to achieve and retain status as a top one hundred teaching and research university.

This Committee shall also act as a forum for discussion on matters related to the Libraries and may act as an advocate for the University Libraries.

The charge of the 2008-09 Senate Committee for Library Policies and Operations was as follows:

Implications of the introduction of RCM; Implementing the Academic Plan; Scholarly communication and latest developments in the movement; and Methods for assessing faculty library needs, including improvement of feedback loops, via the best tools and methods.

General Library Overview As part of its standing charge, the Committee reviewed the general budget and current operational priorities of the library. It was unanimous in welcoming the appointment in December 2008 of Will Wakeling as Dean of Libraries, after what had turned out to be an extended period of interim leadership.

It noted that the Library had, as requested by the Provost, implemented a 2% cut in its current year budget, and had achieved this primarily with savings from lapsing salaries and reductions in operating costs.

The Committee noted that the Library’s FY09 collections budget included a special provision, on a recurring basis, to cover the additional costs of the newly acquired Web of Science, a key multi-discipline research database for which many faculty had long been advocating. It also observed that the collections budget contained $333,000 in one-time money as an inflation-proofing supplement to offset the 2009 increases in journal subscription prices. While this served to fend off the need for yet another journals cancellation exercise in the current year, the Committee expressed concern that more cuts will certainly be necessary if some renewal of the one-time supplement, together with some additional protection for next year’s inflation, is not put in place for FY10. The Dean of Libraries indicated that an information-gathering journals review will indeed need to go ahead in Spring 2009, in any case, as a precautionary measure in advance of any budget announcement for FY10.

It was also noted that the Library’s article-related interlibrary loan borrowing had increased considerably in volume over the last few years. This was interpreted as both an indicator of increased research activity, and as a measure of the fact that the current collections were falling short of meeting faculty information needs. The Committee encouraged the Dean to continue the Library’s active investigation of alternative means of satisfying these needs, using document delivery and “pay-per- view” as supplements to the building of collections. Pilot projects in these areas were currently under way.

The Committee confirmed that the extension of the Library’s opening hours to 24/7 during term time had been warmly welcomed by students across all colleges.

It also noted that the Library had been engaged in the early planning phases of a new development on Snell Library’s 2nd Floor, provisionally named the Interdisciplinary Center for Creative Practice. This would offer a technology-rich venue for interdisciplinary teaching and learning.

Implications of the introduction of RCM The Committee met with Judith Pitney, Vice Provost for Budget, Planning and Administration, in order to ascertain the implications of RCM (responsibility centered management) or, the new “hybrid” budgeting system that the University will be implementing on campus. The Provost has convened a special committee to review this budget process on campus, with anticipated implementation to occur as a shadow system in 2009-2010, and become full implemented in 2010-2011. Ms. Pitney provided the Committee with a copy of Edward Whalen’s book, Responsibility Center Budgeting, which many at the University are using to learn about this method of budgeting and planning.

Under this new budget system, the Library is treated as a “cost center” that is integral to every facet of the university, and it is seen as the single largest public good on campus. While the concept of a “public good” is not explicit in the practical details of the new Northeastern budget model (in its draft form, at least), it is a standard characteristic of public goods within this general budgeting model that they tend not to generate a lot of revenue yet effect all students and faculty on campus. Thus, their costs are typically born proportionally across all campus units, schools and colleges, based upon some measure such as the campus units’ share of the overall costs of operation or their share of the total number of students and faculty FTEs.

The Library must communicate with the various units in order to provide services that best respond to their areas of research and specialty, so that units will see that their share of the investment that is taking place on their behalf is being appropriately applied for their own good as well as the general good. What resources is the Library acquiring with the funding ultimately derived from the units? How does the Library grow with new areas of academic excellence? How can the trajectory of the Library operating budget grow with the demands on its resources and changing technologies?

The gap between “taxes” collected from individual units in order to support the Library and its budgetary needs will be filled in by the Provost’s Office, in what often is called a subvention.

Judith Pitney pointed out three main challenges that face the Library under the new budget system:

1. The need to build greater awareness and transparency of the Library’s resources base 2. The need to enhance the NU community validation for the need of the Library 3. The need to integrate into NU academic planning the Library’s role in interdisciplinary study

At Northeastern, the Library has been operating in an RCM budget environment for several years. The NU Library can learn from some their best practices. However, there are also unresolved issues as to how licenses can or cannot be shared between the two libraries.

In these difficult economic times, it is clear that the Provost views the Library as an important and crucial public good. In the recent presentation of the 2009-10 budget, SVP Jack McCarthy announced that the Library’s budget would be protected when other budgets may be cut. In addition, the Dean of Libraries has been a member of the new budget committee, and has clearly been involved in the decision-making process as the University moves into its next 10-year plan.

The Library’s Implementation of the University Academic Plan The Library’s present three-year Strategic Plan covers the period 2006-2009, and expires June 30 2009. The Committee supplied extensive input to the Library as it went about compiling its new Strategic Plan for 2009-2011. Committee members reviewed draft documentation covering the Library’s proposals for implementing the University’s Academic Plan, and submitted additional suggestions. Members attended and contributed to the environmental scanning element of the Library’s planning retreat in February 2009, and reviewed a draft of the new Strategic Plan currently under construction. The following summary of the Plan is intended to highlight some of the key elements, and their connection with the Academic Plan.

A primary goal of the Library’s Strategic Plan, speaking to several elements of the Academic Plan, is to improve discovery, that is, to enhance the ability of users to search and locate information. One of the first steps toward achieving this goal is the development of more intuitive, seamless processes so that users on their own can acquire information from all available sources. This requires procedures that are straightforward and powerful. Researchers should be able to search digitally from anywhere, through a variety of platforms such as laptop computers, and i- phones. The payoff for students and faculty will be significant. Students studying abroad and faculty conducting research in other locations, for example, will have an effective, user-friendly means of conducting off-site research. Of course, various costs will be incurred in the development and operation of an improved discovery system. Licensing costs for offsite access, for example, will increase.

A second key goal of the Library’s Plan is to improve the delivery of information, and to provide data anytime, anywhere, from all sources. This might include, for instance, the ability of researchers to acquire immediately a copy of an article or book that is not available through Northeastern. There are significant costs to providing these kinds of services, however, and careful tradeoffs will have to be made, balancing such priorities as collections acquisition with the need of students and faculty for quick response times. It may be that some of the costs associated with these services will have to be born by departments and end users. On the other hand, savings achieved through enabling researchers to be more self- sufficient will free up Library personnel to meet related demands such as enhanced inter-library loan capacity. The achievement of this goal will require specifically the acquisition of new digital collections, new software, and new technologies and locations such as print-on-demand kiosks.

A third goal is to develop the Library’s capacity to serve as a “knowledge creation laboratory” by acquiring and developing physical and virtual tools. A specific example is to establish an Interdisciplinary Center for Creative Practice (ICCP) in Snell Library, a project in which the Library has been working closely with several Colleges of the University. Among the translational and interdisciplinary payoffs will be, for example, an enhanced capacity to support gaming and game design (e.g., for digital art and design, medical or engineering purposes). Various other techniques for the visualization and management of relationships among data and variables will also be facilitated. It should be noted that these facilities will significantly benefit both curriculum development and translational research, as illustrated by new academic programs that will prepare Northeastern students for positions in the burgeoning gaming industry (gaming that helps understand and manage important areas such as public health).

A further goal is to create and sustain a comprehensive program for digitizing collections, services and tools. As one illustration, by digitizing the Library’s extensive archival holdings related to civil rights in the Boston area, the Library can provide an important service to social justice organizations in Northeastern’s urban setting as well as to organizations and researchers globally who are interested in these issues. Additionally, this can help leverage the reach and impact of faculty research by making the Library, in the form of its digital archive IRis, a repository for faculty papers and other publications as well as student projects.

A fifth key goal is the promotion of transliteracy, so that students and faculty can acquire greater understanding and fluency in a wide variety of tools for interpreting data. More broadly conceived than traditional information literacy, these transliteracy skills will help insure that our students can use cutting-edge text and visually based technologies essential for career success and will help empower faculty with greater options in their research.

A further goal is linked to fostering the development of interdisciplinary communities, an important component of the Academic Plan. For example, in addition to having research guides linked to specific disciplines such as political science, additional guides can be developed for such overlapping and interdisciplinary topics as “sustainable energy” and “global warming”. The Library can also become a clearinghouse for interdisciplinary information.

A seventh goal of the Library’s Strategic Plan is to build community. One aspect of this endeavor is to leverage Northeastern’s membership in academic enterprises such as the Boston Library Consortium or to forge new relationships to facilitate collaborative research. Another dimension of this goal is to increase the number and usefulness of connections between the Library and other entities within the University. With respect to the broader global community, we can strengthen our outreach by such methods as increased funding, advocacy and support for open- access publication.

Finally, the Library intends to refine and develop a new cohesive budget strategy for the allocation and expenditure of the information resources (collections). The range of options is increasing and many important decisions must be made. Of central importance is to find effective ways of prioritizing options, for instance in choosing between hard-cover books and print on demand. This will require significant input from faculty.

Overall, the Committee finds the Library’s Strategic Plan under construction to be comprehensive, attentive to the latest technologies, and well-aligned with the University’s Academic Plan. It is imaginative and resourceful and takes into account the limited resources confronting the University. We consider the goals of the Library Strategic Plan to be quite worthy of the support of the Faculty Senate.

Open Access The desire to open up free access to published materials continues vigorously. An important element of this lies in the expectation that the costs to libraries of maintaining access to collections of research journal subscriptions can be significantly reduced. The average price for a 2008 subscription to a chemistry journal has risen to $3,490, with many titles in science and technical subjects now costing over $10,000. Northeastern University devotes over $4 million annually to its subscriptions budget. The Open Access (OA) approach can help to displace this cost by creating journals, primarily electronically based, that are "open access" in the sense that readership is not dependent on the purchase of a subscription. The expenses of producing such a publication, using software in a non- profit environment, can be a fraction of a traditional trade journal. For example, faculty at Northeastern University already manage a high-quality, fully OA, peer- reviewed journal, "Annals of Environmental Science”i on a minimal budget.

The Committee read articles and attended seminars on the subject. In an OA journal based out of the LIUCii University in Castellanza, Italy called the European Journal of Comparative Economics (EJCE), Cavaleri et al. wrote a paper entitled "Publishing an E-journal on a shoe string: Is it a sustainable project?iii" The article notes that the publication of a large proportion of all academic work is concentrated in a few commercial publishers. Essentially it is oligopoly and supporters of the open access approach say it doesn't need to be. Peter Suber, a strong advocate of OA who recently lectured at Harvard Universityiv, noted that the creators and relayers of knowledge and information (academic authors) desire that their work reach the largest audience possible, that libraries desire to satisfy the requests of their researchers for relevant information, and that both desires can be more readily satisfied by widespread adoption of OA. A measure of the progress being made is that the Directory of Open Access Journal announced in March its registration of the 4,000th OA journal.

This approach to OA, the creation of new publications or the conversion of existing ones to a new business model not based on subscriptions but on a variety of other funding sources, including institutional, foundation, grant and author payments and support, is one important facet of OA. The other major facet, which the Committee recommends to Faculty Senate for urgent local adoption, relies on faculty and researchers taking stronger ownership and control of their own . A large number of publishers already routinely and automatically allow authors to retain the right to mount peer-reviewed versions of their articles and publications on personal websites or web-based digital repositories, where they are openly accessible. A further group of publishers, while not promoting the option, will readily allow such activity if it is requested. Some important grant-giving bodies, most notably the National Institutes of Health, already have such deposit requirements in place.

The Committee examined the proposition that a consolidated agreement by faculty members and researchers at Northeastern to secure their rights in this area and to allow their publications to be deposited in the University’s existing digital repository, (managed by the Library and called IRis), would bring about significant benefits. It concluded that such a policy would contribute to the wider dissemination of knowledge, improve the visibility of faculty research, contribute to higher citation rates, and benefit the University’s overall reputation. It would also add an additional layer of security to the long-term preservation prospects of these publications, in circumstances where the ability of publishers to guarantee such preservation is not a given. Finally, it could contribute positively to the exchange of information and the identification of potential for interdisciplinary activity on campus by providing a searchable database of research activity, as represented by its appearance as published output. It did not escape the Committee’s notice that both Harvard and MIT faculty have recently approved policies which accept and promote this proposition.

The main inhibitors to the widespread adoption of an OA approach are two: profit and tenure decisions. Scholarly publishing is a multi-billion dollar business with many vested interests dependent on the business of spreading information at a profit. Meanwhile, tenure decisions center on publication. Thus, publication has a perfect mate: academia. The tenure and promotion process depends on publication in journals as an assessment tool. The number of publications per year count. For example, in Engineering there is an expectation of 2 peer review publications annually. Many OA journals are young, their peer review processes, however rigorous, have not necessarily yet been hallowed by tradition, and their prestige, like that of new journals launched on the traditional subscription model, may remain to be established. In this area, the Committee sees an opportunity (represented in the resolution below) for the University tenure and promotion committees to adopt an approach which recognizes the important changes taking place in the underlying business models of scholarly publication, and declines to confuse the quality of scholarship with the mode of its publication.

Library Needs Effective communication between faculty and library staff is essential to achieving the goals established in the University Academic Plan. Faculty research as well a curriculum depends upon high quality library resources. Identifying these resources is a joint responsibility shared by library staff and faculty. The two must work closely together.

On January 20, 2009 a subcommittee of the Senate Library Committee met with Associate Dean of Libraries Lesley Milner, Librarian and Administrative Operations Manager Elizabeth Habich and Research and Instruction Librarian Rebecca Merz.

From this discussion it became apparent that the Library is moving ahead on a number of fronts to enhance communication. The Library seeks faculty advice in a variety of ways. Among the vehicles Ms. Milner described are:

Faculty serve as their departmental liaisons to the Library and work closely with their library counterparts, to manage the material and digital resources for their department and/or school. Faculty request materials for purchase, inform the serials cancellation process, and work with librarians on the departmental accreditation process. Faculty participate in vendor trials for prospective purchases to inform librarians of their interest in new products. Faculty facilitate the inclusion of librarians on their departmental meeting agendas.

Many faculty choose to participate in special informational programs sponsored by the Library such as the new faculty orientation reception, the scholarly communications program, and author talks.

Faculty often take the opportunity to interact with librarians who attend university and departmental receptions and department sponsored special topic lectures. Faculty interact with librarians as they serve together on University wide committees such as the UUCC, Honors, New Student Committee, Teaching with Technology, and the Women’s Studies Group.

The Senate’s Library Policies and Operations Committee serves in a formal advisory capacity regarding the Library’s services and resources.

Faculty often consult with librarians to facilitate the faculty member’s use of library instruction, course reserves, and use of media and archival materials in their course assignments. Valuable feedback from faculty has resulted in significant changes to the Advanced Writing in the Disciplines and Freshman English programs.

Faculty participate in focus groups related to new services such as the DMDS.

Faculty and librarians co-author grant proposals.

Assessment of Faculty Needs:

Many of the faculty gave of their valuable time to participate in the Library’s national survey, LibQUAL, which is conducted every three years. Their responses to the questions and added comments are invaluable information to directing future services.

During the NEASC accreditation visit faculty met with a member of the visiting team to discuss library matters.

Collection Assessment plans have been distributed to departments for input by the faculty. These plans are to be reviewed and regularly updated.

Faculty often consult with reference librarians for research support from the reference desk, by phone, email.

A formal plan for improving communications with the faculty was a major part of the Library’s strategic planning for fiscal years 2006-9.

The Library continues to expand its efforts to improve communication. The Library has identified additional avenues for communication and it has begun to implement and improve librarians’ awareness of what the faculty want from the Library and to evaluate Library services.

The Library is exploring better survey tools to gather immediate feedback from faculty on the effectiveness of the Library’s support of their research and teaching. The Library is planning the use of a pop-up short survey at the critical use points on the library web site to gather user comments on satisfaction with the various products and services, as well as additional focus groups.

The Library is expanding its efforts to have library liaisons included in departmental meeting. Several of the departments have benefitted from having their library liaison present information and discuss issues at their departmental meetings. This year the Library is offering this opportunity to more departments.

Another key effort this year is the development of a short, three to four question, survey for assessing the Library’s efforts at effective communication. This will also be another vehicle for faculty to offer suggestions for improvement.

Clearly the library has taken a number of important initiatives. The subcommittee recommends that the library staff also consider:

1. Organizing focus groups from various academic disciplines to discuss relevant issues 2. Creating an electronic newsletter 3. Surveying interlibrary loan users on adequacy of Snell collections 4. Working more closely with departments to insure proper library orientation for new faculty, undergraduates and graduate students.

RESOLUTIONS

Resolution #1:

WHEREAS in 2008 the Faculty Senate passed a resolution supporting open access, and urging faculty to negotiate with publishers in order to retain their publication and rights,

BE IT RESOLVED That the accepted manuscripts of all scholarly works published by University Faculty be henceforth made available on the Library-administered Northeastern University digital repository site Iris no later than twelve months after the original publication appears, subject only to those residual restrictions posed by publishers on the publication of such scholarly works.

Resolution #2:

WHEREAS tenure and promotion reviews depend in part on the evaluation of published scholarly works,

BE IT RESOLVED That tenure and promotion committees should consider scholarly materials published in peer-reviewed, open-access journals as part of the tenure and promotion dossier. Tenure and promotion committees should continue to consider the comparative quality of journals as part of the criteria for promotion and tenure, regardless of their format.

Respectfully submitted, April 10, 2009, members of the 2008-09 Senate Committee for Library Policies and Operations.

Anthony P. De Ritis, Chair, CAS-Music John Casey, CCIS William M. Fowler Jr., CAS-History Harlow L. Robinson, CAS-Modern Language David E. Schmitt, CAS-Political Science William M. Wakeling, Dean, University Libraries Ronald J. Willey, COE-Chemical Engineering

i http://www.aes.neu.edu/about_the_journal/editorial_board/ ii http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/oal/navigation_student.exchange/where/LIUC.html iii Cavaleri, P.; Keren, M.; Ramello, G. B.; Valli, V.; Periodico mensile on-line "POLIS Working Papers" - Iscrizione n.591 del 12/05/2006 - Tribunale di Alessandria: Dipartimento di Politiche Pubbliche e Scelte Collettive – POLIS Department of Public Policy and Public Choice – POLIS, 2009; Vol. Working paper n. 132.