What will happen with
electronic information in liberal arts colleges? How will digital media be
linked into teaching and learning? The answers will come from experiments that
connect teachers, learners, and researchers in classrooms, laboratories,
libraries, offices, dormitory rooms, or wherever they are with information
sources on and off campus. In order to plan our own evolution intelligently, we
need to know what peer institutions are doing and thinking, and what
possibilities for collaboration are on the horizon, including both bilateral
cooperation and opportunities for participation in broader initiatives within NITLE
and other consortia.
Information management is a substantial part of teaching and
learning. Colleges supply their faculty, staff, and students with a broad range
of tools to carry out these activities, and computers are now central to many
of them. Washington & Lee (like all liberal arts colleges) has huge
investment in hardware, and provides access to all corners of the campus, and
links to the world outside. Our library systems distribute full text and
database services. We (like other places) explore the uses of computers in
classrooms, and expect that students and faculty and staff will use computers
in more and more aspects of their work. The conduits are in place, the basic
skills are fairly well developed, and there is a level of expectation that transformative
events are about to happen. Every electronic innovation opens unforeseen
possibilities, generally producing ever greater floods of information and
widening the array among which teachers and learners can choose. The next steps
must be integrative, and will link the various constituencies, but it is not
clear who is responsible for their conceptualization, development, and
implementation.
Seven interlinked problems summarize the challenges and
opportunities that my sabbatical visits are intended to gather information
about:
- The
proliferation of digital information is changing teaching and learning. Users must
navigate among a broadening array of kinds of information, available in
multiple media. The much greater volume made readily available by the
ubiquitous Web makes it necessary for information seekers to develop
evaluative skills and learn to winnow. At the same time, most faculty and
students are active creators of digital information, most of which
remains in the private domains of disk drives, but the Web offers the
possibility of global distribution.
- Tools
must be built to manage this flood of digital information. Any active
creator has the continual need to collect; to store, organize and curate;
to manipulate, query, and analyze; and finally to deliver or communicate
what has been created. These were once desktop tasks performed on
freestanding computers, but networking and Internet access allows many of
these activities to be carried out via active Web pages which connect to
databases, and thus make the results distributable.
- Teachers
and learners need to become fluent users of the tools which are
transforming the information landscape. New media require new kinds of
support, for users at all skill levels.
- Libraries have to incorporate digital information into
their operations. The image of the library as a center of campus life is
carefully nurtured at most colleges, but the traditional venues of reference
room, book stacks, study carrels and circulation desk are now partial manifestations
of the information services that the library provides, and more and more
information transactions take place outside the library’s walls. The nascent
digital library is distributed (accessible any time and any place) and is
partly built by users, as they contribute and interlink their work. In the next
decade the growth of the library’s digital collections will probably come as
much from locally-produced contributions as from purchased and licensed
resources, as professors and students digitize, create, and archive material,
including maps, images, and databases. The library must prepare to manage
digital traffic in both directions, developing routines for managing the
metadata for this flood, and for supporting access to and use of collections which
include a great diversity of media. The library and the sources it provides and
mediates will be more closely linked to classrooms, offices, and dormitories
than before.
- Interdisciplinary
programs have special information needs. In liberal arts colleges, it
is often interdisciplinary programs, established to pursue teaching and
learning in areas that go beyond the tools, perspectives, and mandates of
traditional disciplines and departments,
that are the leading edge in articulating the demand for new forms
of information resources. They are often creators of information, and
there are no ready answers for who should be responsible for curation and
support and distribution of what they produce.
- Extramural
collaborations and consortia are becoming more common and more important
to the mission and operations of liberal arts colleges. Communication
needs and resource-sharing opportunities at a distance pose challenges in
libraries and classrooms. Many interdisciplinary programs also have
significant off-campus components and are involved in consortial
collaborations. Such programs need access to broad ranges of information
resources, including such digital resources as imagery, spatial data,
sound, and video, which must be organized and made accessible to users who
are not specialists.
- Liberal
arts colleges all have the same basic problems in meeting these demands,
but few clear models for how to solve them. Whatever the solutions
are, they are likely to come from liberal arts colleges as worked
examples, and are likely to be the outcome of collaborations that cross
administrative boundaries.
The college library is the
prime candidate to manage the flood of new media, which includes imagery and
the spatial data necessary for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), external
databases, and the information streams that result from research and
collaboration activities. College libraries can be at the center of teaching
with technology by redefining and enlarging what they do, and by substantially
expanding their collections and their connectivity. Most liberal arts college
libraries are unprepared (in terms of staffing and technical skills) to take on
these responsibilities. The tools required to manage and distribute digital
resources need to be researched and developed to suit specific situations, and
students and faculty must learn their use. More broadly, college libraries need
to develop the vision to plan for new roles that are being forced on them by
evolving technologies.
Washington & Lee is suited to a national leadership role
in digital library development by a combination of environment and skills. The
university’s scale (1600 undergraduates, 160 undergraduate faculty) facilitates
personal contact and collaboration, and Strategic Plan initiatives provide
broad institutional support for innovation. An increasingly diverse and
international student body, interested in new combinations of majors and
programs, is raising the profile of off-campus internship and overseas study as
a natural part of the four-year experience. Replacement of retiring senior
faculty is bringing many new professors to the campus, many of whom have
substantial teaching experience and active research programs that require the
coordinated support of library and computing staff. New programs and new ideas
of disciplinary definition are producing requests for expanded digital
resources.
To summarize the background
which led to development of the sabbatical proposal: since my arrival at
Washington & Lee in 1992 I have worked on a succession of evolving
electronic issues, discovering, developing and disseminating new technologies
and applications, first as a reference librarian and for the last six years as
Science Librarian. My prior experience of 18 years as professor of Anthropology
equips me to understand the problems of the classroom teacher. I have worked on
digital library issues as a consultant to the ALSOS Project and as instructor
in a Computer Science course (Digital Libraries, with Tom Whaley). In the last
four years I have explored GIS extensively, including workshops, conference
presentations (EDUCAUSE, Associated Colleges of the South Information Fluency
Conference, Gettysburg College Instructional Technology Conference, ESRI
Educational Conference), fact-finding visits to more than a dozen campuses, a
visit to ESRI, participation in Associated Colleges of the South planning and
research for GIS development, consultancies at other institutions, and
classroom use in courses I taught in Human Geography and Anthropology of East Asia.
I am also a consultant to the Environmental Studies Brazil project, and
traveled to Brazil in April 2002 to discuss digital library issues with
consortium members. Barbara Halbert of ACS has suggested that I might become a
“circuit rider” for the consortium after the sabbatical.