Hi Don,
As your question concerning the future role of the university academic library (AL) is wide open, I’ll add my interpretation by aiming towards it through the looping trajectory of my design study. Hopefully, it’ll offer a different perspective.
In his book Together, Richard Sennett investigated how people who have conflicting interests, are unequal, or don't understand each other might engage in difficult, constructive cooperation. This can be seen as a sub-text explaining the condition of academics stuck in the funnel of their university academic discipline and its spaces, trying to engage in externally relevant knowledge exchange. Sennett's view was that cooperation rests on a set of dialogic skills that can be learned and have to be sustained, yet contemporary society has been weakening those skills in distinctive ways while our need to help address complex social problems has increased. Concurrently, the role of design in society, helping to address a broadening and systemic range of issues has been increasing, largely due to its capacity to consider multiple perspectives and to facilitate and communicate diverse ideas for creative purpose in a non-threatening, non-partisan manner.
In this light perhaps there is a need within universities for Libraries to ameliorate disciplines for the greater good of knowledge exchange on behalf of society and its citizenry. For instance, if the library could be a champion of multidisciplinary thematic challenges - in a neutral academic space, this might be a good way forward.
My doctoral study looks to understand the nature of ‘fairness between citizens’ (FBC) to address the issues of sustainability applying a new transdisciplinary theory of design that I term design as civics (DaC): A citizens’ shared social practice operating within the local community.
However, in trying to operationalise DaC, to appreciate how to understand and integrate (FBC) within design conjectures, the study’s aspirations to work directly with local socially orientated organisations on their self-identified complex sustainability projects, failed.
Suffering from what I describe as a lack of reputation with the community who have little knowledge of the School of Design, and none of myself, I was left in the position of learning how to be a boundary spanner (Williams 2002).
To such ends, I negotiated with Newcastle City Council (NCC) and City Library Newcastle (NCL) – a public institution with a unique reputation within society – and also a value-rational organisation to undertake a joint goal project.
Our coordinated challenge was the design of a ‘maker space’ (akin to MIT’s fablab). This project represented NCC and NCL’s drive to redress the UK’s ‘digital divide,’ alongside my study’s new concern for formalising with the Library the use of its shared space as an infrastructure of active engagement (doing and making), knowledge and learning practices for supporting DaC in partnership with a local University through its School of Design.
Greeted warmly by all, the funds, political will and so forth are missing.
Thus, my journey arrives at one notion for the future role of the AL. If we understand as a significant role of a university, its AL, academics and students, is how to improve the lives of its city’s citizens – what I understand as engaged scholarship (Boyer 1990, 1996 and linking with the politics of Boyte 2005) – the AL may be suited as a non-partisan boundary spanner. Thus, activating its human and social capital with its financial and infrastructural strength which facilitates drawing all of the above together within a non-partisan ‘civic space’ to answer societal questions.
We know societal issues are ‘wicked problems’ requiring a multidisciplinary and pragmatic stance. Drawing on the social reputation of libraries generally, alongside the AL librarians noted skills and training in dealing empathically with ‘all walks of life’ – hopefully including the rivalry and self-interests of today’s academic silos that Boyer identifies – while significantly they are discipline agnostic, represents an opportunity.
The AL, providing a mutually trusted new 'civic' space for collaboration, seems ideally suited to help negotiate and navigate the tensions that will undoubtedly reveal themselves in bridging the gaps between citizens and academia. A civic space capable of generating Mode 2 knowledge that is reflexively politically accountable to the community (Gibbons et al., 1994 p.3) in a manner advancing Rittel and Webber’s call for an “argumentative process” for answering ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel & Webber 1973 p.162).
The AL’s roles in defining and managing the bridging process, the knowledge and practices required to orchestrate and support ongoing citizen and academic/student research endeavours, including the digital and physical manifestations of such work, subsequently informing the academic librarian discipline, pedagogy and the developing nature of AL infrastructures.
Moreover, the network scaling effect I consider within my own ideas for DaC’s practice within public libraries around the world, in the context of presentation to the University of California Librarians, with its ten institutions, presents such an opportunity from the get-go.
I think that sums things up. Thanks for your time, but I would appreciate your thoughts on this perspective.
Kind Regards,
Paul
Paul Emmerson BA, MA, MRES, PhD Research Student, School of Design Northumbria University, Newcastle. UK
Boyer, E., L. (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Boyer, E., L. (1996). The Scholarship of Engagement. Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1(1), 11–20.
Boyte, H. C. (2005). Reframing Democracy: Governance, Civic Agency, and Politics. Public Administration Review, 65(5), 518–524.
Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.
Sennett, R. (2013). Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation. London: Penguin.
Williams, P. (2002). The Competent Boundary Spanner. Public Administration, 80(1), 103–124.
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