The Digital Library
Culture Morph
Technologists and librarians
are discovering that intelligent
organizational overlap is the
route to the digital library
of the future.
Historically, it's been an unavoidable truth:
IT people and library people have not been inclined to come to the concept
of service with the same view. For IT, it's been all about keeping the
servers and systems up, the websites going, and the help desk calls and
their turnaround times to a minimum. For library professionals, service
has meant keeping multimedia information and reference accessible;
books, tapes, CDs, and other sources in order; and the environment primed
for research and study.
At Rhodes College, Bob Johnson's merged IT/librarian team undergoes training to provide a single point of contact for most customer service issues-- research or technical.
Yet, in higher education today, the term "library" no longer denotes
just a physical place, nor does "IT" denote a job so behind the academic
scene that students are unaware it exists on campus.
The fact is, when these two essential campus areas work together well,
magic happens--and that is especially true in small, private institutions
of higher education.
Harmonious Culture Clash
At Rhodes College (TN), a 1,700-student Presbyterian-affiliated institution
near downtown Memphis, 1999 was a year that Bob Johnson remembers
well: That was when the library and IT organizations came together,
and Johnson was hired to manage both (in addition to institutional
research), as CIO and VP for information services.
"What we were trying to do here is realize the potential of the larger
group, as opposed to remaining in smaller groups that were working on
similar issues," he explains. The concept was a good one, but the transition
wasn't without its headaches, he admits.
"Before we moved into the building that we're in now, the organization
was split across four locations: the IT staff was divided between two classroom
buildings, librarians were in the library, and the administrative office
was in a building used for both classrooms and administrative functions.
There were aspects of that arrangement that didn't contribute to working well together, but at least we were
getting our work done," Johnson recalls.
"As soon as we came together [in the same
building], we increased the potential for
people to work together--and to quarrel."