Educause 2009 - Understanding University Libraries

This morning was mostly spent in the first half of a session on libraries - billed as "a primer for CIO's on cutting edge library technology . An area that I badly need to understand better if we are to work more closely with our University library colleagues.

It's interesting, and turning out to be useful, but so far not quite in the way I expected.

Attendees seem to be a mix of librarians, learning technologists, IT people and various HE senior managers responsible for one of or a mix of these areas. The session was kicked off with a debate about IT's perception of the library and vice versa.

It became fairly clear quite quickly that stereotypes are alive and kicking and the debate did not really rise above the level of a polite slanging match. The criticisms of IT were the usual ones that are made by any area of any organisationwith poor capital project governance and an IT function that is not mature and not delivering: too slow, doesn't understand our needs, too busy, never answers the phone, is just there to say No, shouldn't be 'driving the business' (which is how my suggestion that IT can help identify and develop business requirements was interpretted!) - and so on.

At one point the discussion disintegrated into an enthusiastic compare and contrast discussion between librarians about different VLE platforms (along the usual open source v mainstream axle) and proved to be a subject that is clearly close to librarians hearts, at least the ones here. It finally fizzled out in agreement that IT and libraries just needed to work together better. I made the point that UDI is not neccessarily a sensible approach to a poor IT function, but I'm not sure it helped! :-)

We then had a presentation of two or three case studies of the development and implementation of various learning exercises, including an assignment. I was rather perplexed as to what this had to do with 'cutting-edge library technologies' - when the presentation finished we were split into groups to have a go at designing an assignment including thinking about aspects such as addressing the information literacy of the students. I was even more perplexed. Was I in the wrong seminar?

My group included several senior HE managers and we quickly discarded the task and had a useful and very informative discussion (at least for me!) about the function and role of university libraries vis a vie designing assignments or any other pedagogical activity. Light dawned at last!

Librarians over here clearly carry out the same sort of function as our Learning Development Services, including course design and development, learning development of both students and staff, student information literacy, course design, learning technology development and support, information management including support for pretty much all information and knowledge management processes related to any academic or pedagogical information, information quality, even higher level course design and structure. A staggering range of activities - all under the umbrella, I would argue (and did!), of knowledge management

If you take Nonanka and Takeuhci's classic knowledge creation model the Knowledge Spiral or SECI model then everything in the above list is pretty much an activity that supports one or more of the quadrants in the cycle (Socialising, Externalising, Combining or Internalising) - ie: supporting the flow of knowledge back and forth between tacit and explicit and the combination of different elements of knowledge together as part of that flow to create new knowledge - or new learning. I seem to remember this theory being positioned, when I studied it, as critical to the learning process.

Anyway - in our group we discussed this (sort of) as well as the impact of the nature of the institution on course design and the purpose of learning development etc, and impact of different academic governance structures of lack of them etc - and much more informative and interesting stuff besides.

Key learning for me from this morning: There are a whole host of knowledge management activities that are called various things in HE (... course design and development, learning development, information literacy, course design, ... etc see above) and the debate seems to focus around who should do them and who is responsible for them as they are variously spread across Faculty, Library, IT, Learning technologists, learning development etc, depending on the individual HEI, though there are some trends.

Who should do them seems a bit of a sterile debate to me. What I'm interested in is how do HEI's do them and how can new technologies help HEI's do them even better!

Maybe we'll get onto that this afternoon .....