Included here are excerpts from three documents focused on the future of the library and relevant to the CODE committee's planning effort. The documents excerpted here are:

• Report of the Library Planning Committee (1997). The complete report is available at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~provweb/libraryplan/libraryindex.html

• Master Planning Study for the Fondren Library (1999)

• Fondren Library Renovation and Expansion Technology Program (2000)

Omissions have been noted with [...].

Report of the Library Planning Committee

[...]

The vision outlined here for Fondren Library seeks to expand its role in supporting research and teaching at Rice University as well as its potential national role. Given the rank and status of Rice University, this library can become a national beacon where the new ways of accessing and using information are explored, where the complicated relationship between print culture and digital media, as well as their policy implications, are routinely discussed, analyzed, and brought to the attention of a wider public. This public should include our students, who must begin to think critically about these issues as scholars, citizens, and future leaders. The library can and should become a catalyst for a much needed organized voice in higher education--a voice that could articulate the complex needs of teaching and learning communities as integral to the national good.

As expressed throughout this report, many problems and issues attend Fondren Library. They include a variety of external forces that, in contrast to times past, will have enormous budget, organizational, and program implications. These influences, played out mostly beyond the hedges, will have a powerful effect on the development and long-term strength of the libraries at Rice University. Copyright law, global intellectual property issues, telecommunications policies, the increasingly risk-averse reaction of computer corporations in a volatile and less competitive market place, the metamorphosis of the academic publishing industry, and the historical tendency to treat technological advancement more as a commodity than as a creative tool for educational enrichment all these forces will help redefine the function and structure of late twentieth-century academic libraries.

In addition, those who steer the course of library development librarians, faculty, administrators, and students must also confront recent dynamics within the culture of the academy that will similarly force us to reconceptualize the function of the library. These include the sustainability of research universities and research libraries, the changing nature of authorship and authority, the reorganization of knowledge, and the intensification of questions about how students actually learn and who should teach them in a multi-media era.

For many years, Fondren Library has remained marginalized from the more formative activities and planning processes at Rice--a rather passive institution within a top-ranked university. If it remains so in the coming decade, simply reacting to the legal, cultural, and social transformations around it, it will always have to scramble to meet each disruptive surprise. It would be wiser for Fondren Library to shed its past and link its vision to the aspirations and talents of the university. The library should take on the responsibility of understanding and influencing those powerful forces that currently render its future so ambiguous.

Such new emphasis could have a profoundly positive effect on the quality of services in support of the library's primary mission to the Rice community and on the quality of staff, who should embody these aspirations. Fondren Library could become an elegant and flexible laboratory for its own evolution--a place where the idea of a library is studied, enriched, and transcended.

To do this, Fondren Library will also need to take on the challenges of "local" issues shortage of space, the need for improved services, the necessity of a more vigorous collection development program, recalculated budgets, and a larger staff with opportunities for professional enhancement that will help them shape and implement a grander vision.

In order to shoulder these tasks, the next phase of Fondren Library should include appropriate instructional space; meeting places for visiting scholars and students; programs of lectureships, workshops, and interdisciplinary seminars for the intellectual exploration of these themes; a program of internships for foreign librarians; advanced technologies for archiving and disseminating the results of these programs; and means of strengthening ties to business, industry, political organizations, the government, and prominent libraries and institutes in the United States and abroad, including national libraries.

A vision such as this must inform the development of a library plan. And that plan, in turn, should emerge from an ongoing planning process that links the library to global transformations, to the university's strategic plan, and to the changing needs of Rice faculty and students. Such a plan should guide the improvement of collections, the allocation of staff, the utilization of space, and cooperation with other institutions.

[...]

Information Technology and the Library

The emergence of powerful, small, and economically-priced computers, interconnected to each other through high-speed networks that span the globe will profoundly affect the ways in which knowledge is acquired, shared, and managed in the academic community. As has already been mentioned, Rice can exploit advanced information technology to remedy several of the widely-recognized deficiencies of our library collections and operations.

All those initiatives focus on Fondren as it is today. But if we use information technology only to improve current operations and resources, without rethinking the nature of teaching and learning, we will achieve very limited results. We will, in effect, be using computing to make more efficient the scholarly processes that were developed centuries ago. Rice needs a second, complementary way of thinking about the interplay of technology, teaching, and learning.

We should treat important aspects of planning for the library as seeing possibilities that are invented rather than discovered. With new technology we can create radically new models of scholarship and teaching. But we will be challenged to loosen mental constraints of current practice so we may see ways to use technology to enhance individual and organizational effectiveness.

Recently some companies have come to understand the behavioral aspects of technology and have "re-engineered" or "reinvented" the corporation. Because of the complexities of the interaction of technology and work, they have found re-engineering fraught with difficulties. In the case of the library, Rice should expect no less. Even recent precedents, which are amply documented, may not serve as reliable guides to the future because culture, institutional beliefs, and practices may deflect technology from its intended use. Not all organizations that have undertaken this transformation have succeeded. Nonetheless, Rice should meet this challenge head on because, like other organizations, the University and the library can emerge transformed, far better prepared for the future.

Examples of ideas that are relevant to this second, and transformative, view of the library include:

• the emergence of virtual communities that expand the scholarly communities supported by books, radio, television, and movies. Networking can replace transportation with communications, giving teachers and students interactions with remote centers of expertise. Already networking is crossing, and even dissolving traditional educational boundaries. Virtual communities may realize other benefits as well from reductions in the cost of current functions, the attainment of a higher standard of work, or through a radical redefinition of work itself.

• the proliferation of multimedia documents that will challenge paper as the preferred medium of representing knowledge in many domains. Just as virtual communities break bounds of space and time, multimedia documents break sensory constraints. Such documents would engage more of our senses with webs of textual, graphic, video, and audio elements that would support new educational communities.

• the transformation of knowledge, as powerful computer graphics bring imagery to the forefront of teaching and learning. The extensive use of visualization will induce a shift toward a more metaphorical, image-based knowledge. With modern graphics, even text itself, with its changeable fonts, is a form of visualization.

Rice needs to view information technology both as an aid to current practice and as a new conception of the library. Without the latter, a technology strategy will rigidify the past. When we think about the future of the library, we should keep uppermost the behavioral aspects of computing the interplay of people, process, and technology.

We must also keep in mind the impact of public policy affecting the library's digital technology. As publishers and libraries move quickly into a digital environment, new critical issues have arisen about fair use of copyrighted materials. Will libraries, for example, have to pay-per-view in order to access digital materials? There is a very real danger that as policy makers develop new guidelines and laws to deal with digital sources, this scenario will come to pass. If it does, fair use and interlibrary sharing will disappear and the costs of accessing materials will be even higher than in the days of an exclusive print culture. Fondren library should be as proactive with regard to technology policy, just as it should be toward the implementation of technology. It needs to pursue these issues vigorously in the public arena, in concert with other libraries and educational institutions. Fondren can become a forum for public discussion of these issues through lectureships and workshops that will influence public policy. Rice need not be the recipient of technology policies that are beyond its control; it can be the shaper of national strategies for using digital technologies for the public good.

To create such a view of the transforming possibilities of technology and of Rice's role in the public arena, to give it life among faculty, students, and staff will be difficult. For it will require not only the development of new skills and expertise on the part of information users and providers, but it will call for imaginative new conceptions about the nature of knowledge, how it is acquired, how it is used, and how it transforms individuals, communities, and nations.

Master Planning Study for the Fondren Library

Findings and Emergence of Fundamental Issues

During the many conversations with the architects and members of the Rice community, the following observations were made, some of them often repeated. These findings included:

[...]

Measurement of libraries is no longer solely gauged by holdings and collections but also by its services, access, and utilization.

• Resident expertise must be of paramount importance. The brightest and the best must be the first experts encountered when one enters the facility.

• Staff must adapt to new user needs.

• The "new" library must be designed around methodologies of inquiry. It must be capable of adapting readily to rapid change.

• In the future, excellence in library resources will be measured not only in terms of holdings but also in terms of how efficiently and accurately materials can be identified and provided to the user from within and without the Rice library system.

• The library needs to be that place where students go to ask complex questions. Consequently, the space, its organization, and the management model of the library staff must be redesigned to support the achievement of this ambition. The library must foster an environment supportive of the asking of these complex questions.

• There must be clarity of spatial and service organization, a logic to accessing services and collections.

This library should demonstrate and exhibit itself as a more vigorous and vital contributor to the academic experience at Rice.

• The library must be organized to support and display interdisciplinary and collaborative study.

• The library must complement the facilities of the Colleges and rovide quiet, efficient, well-equipped study and research space for undergraduates and graduates. The height of student activity is nighttime and weekends.

• The library must help to negotiate the boundaries of knowledge. The architecture of the library must articulate the sense that users are connected to something bigger than themselves and their particular project; they are embarked on a journey rather than seeking a destination.

• The library must assist in distinguishing "messages" from "information" and also assist patrons in determining the quality of information that floods the internet.

• The library should physically counter the trends toward fragmentation and specialization. It should make visible the intellectual activities of research and investigation.

• There should be full integration of undergraduate, graduate, faculty, staff, and guest usage; that is, the library should create a true academic center.

• The measure of the library will be manifested in the thinking of Rice graduates.

The library is a teaching laboratory and a community resource.

• Printed materials will be a part of the library for the foreseeable future. The nature of the collections will be driven by the needs of many, including new faculty and new disciplines. The present "troughs" in the collection, and new ones to be identified in the future, must be remedied.

• Although the library's collections must improve, off-site materials will be increasingly in requisition

• The library plays an important role in helping faculty to teach.

• Important social relationships can be supported and enhanced by the library, among all staff and patron groups. The library should be a place to mix and socialize as well as to study, a place to see and be seen, an intellectual commons for everyone.

• By its charter, Fondren serves the Houston community as a local resource as one aspect of its mission. Outside users must be considered and supported.

• The library should encourage the pleasures of reading, research, and intellectual activity, mitigating the Rice tendency to over commitment and offering a variety of modes of enjoying scholarship, such as lectures and symposia, audio and visual materials, exhibitions and receptions.

These comments and observations became the basis for the next phase of the planning process; they provided the planners with an opportunity to develop a program statement and preliminary diagrams conceptualizing a future library, one that would respond to and reflect the issues and visions articulated by the Rice community.

Defining the New Directions:
Concepts Shaping a New Kind Of Library

After almost a year of meetings, planning sessions, and follow-up conversations, the following have emerged as fundamental aspects of the new library at Rice. Taken together, they significantly redefine an academic library.

The new library at Rice will:

• Be organized around the act of questioning (i.e., is genuinely user driven) rather than by more traditional library departrnents;

• Reveal scholarly activity, not conceal it (e.g., allowing undergraduates to better appreciate how graduate students and faculty use a library);

• Foster collaboration among students, faculty, and library staff, and take the greatest advantage of the social aspects of learning at a residential institution;

• Consolidate traditionally distinct services and programs for ease of use and cost and operational efficiency;

• Create an open portal of intense immersion in needed information while offering the highest level of expertise of any library in the U.S.;

• Utilize new technologies to customize information delivery and knowledge management according to individual needs;

• Serve as a means to educate the Rice community about technology, information, and higher education, and to create an environment that fosters experimentation in teaching and research;

• Balance the need for a critical mass of on-site collections with efficient remote storage of less used books and journals.

The Nature of our Future:
Implications for Fondren Organization

These concepts essentially define a new kind of future for the library at Rice, one that is grounded in the needs of the user population and has as its main focus service to the constituent communities. This new approach, while often alluded to in other universities' library plans, will most likely be seen as having its florescence in the vision for the library at Rice. Given the schematic nature of reports such as this, one aspect of this rethinking must suffice: the act of questioning as a major determinate of new library organization.

Everyone approaching a reference desk or information point in a library usually has a question in mind. The question generically performs a vastly complex function: it formulates the boundaries of information that will be brought to bear on its solution. In essence, a question restructures the holdings of a library, internally and externally, narrowing the focus of exploration while having the potential to reveal new knowledge and contribute to new understanding. The individual, and perhaps subsequent generations, are recreated by this intricate act of questioning and follow through.

A traditional library presents an Aristotelian construct to assist in resolving a question. It is physically bounded, organized by format, subject matter, and other categorical framework (subdisciplines, size, and shape). The digital era disrupts these categories routinely; information can be gathered over the Internet in a way that is format-, category-, media-, and function-blind. The focus is content. The possible avenues of inquiry become much greater; the methods to model the question and manage a response become more complex.

In this respect, a new library will need to recognize the causality of traditional behavior while recontextualizing this behavior in a world where bounded information means very little and subject expertise is a secondary, though highly valued, attribute. A new library will need to anchor itself within a vast and protean technical ecology. This suggests a central information point that is staffed by those who are among the most sophisticated and highly trained individuals on campus. From this center, disciplines, formats, and other traditional categories will radiate and re-coalesce. As time passes, the non-linear morphology of information will increase and become the norm. This library, then, is the first step in a new evolutionary path, modeled on the epistemological aspects of questioning (and thereby rooted in user behavior), less on the inherited organizational compartments that determine contemporary design.

These conclusions, with supporting documentation, offer the University a rare opportunity to step out of a traditional mold, reflecting the bold aspirations of the University while setting new standards for academic libraries across the nation. In order to accomplish this it is recommended that the next steps include the appointment of a design architect, the formation of a project team and, when sufficient funding is attained, the construction of what should prove a firm yet flexible foundation for the next century at Rice.

At the same time, the library and the university should begin to concertedly plan for a new Digital Library, the electronic-based services and programs essential to the success of the new physical manifestation outlined in this document.

Fondren Library Renovation and Expansion Technology Program

5. TECHNOLOGY IN THE NEW FONDREN LIBRARY

5.1 Emerging Digital Landscapes

5.1.1 The Virtual Library

Today the virtual Fondren Library exists in embryonic form as the Library's Internet and Intranet pages and the information resources it provides in electronic format to its users. By the time the new Fondren Library is completed, the Library may well exist in two forms - a physical building and a virtual counterpart. Users of the virtual Fondren will stroll down virtual stacks, perusing the spines of virtual books and delighting in the type of opportunistic discovery. that was previously limited to the physical world. Pulling a book from the virtual stack will not simply reveal its cover, but will open a doorway into the contents of the book itself. Stepping through will lead to who knows what adventures.

5.1.2 The Digital Library

The digital Fondren Library is the physical component of the technology systems that will emerge from the re-design of the existing spaces in the Library. The new Library will be provided with a digital nervous system that will stimulate the flow of knowledge throughout the facility. Technologies will be embedded throughout the building, supporting communication between the systems located in the Library, the personal communications devices carried by its patrons and the global resources óf the Internet and its successors. Systems will align themselves to perform a particular operation or function and will then dissolve their alliance on completion of this task, information will flow seamlessly between the Library and its patrons and barriers to learning, collaboration and education will disappear.

5.1.3 The Digital Outdoors

The digital landscape will not stop at the perimeter of the Fondren Library - it will be present across the Rice Campus and beyond. However, since it is likely that, upon its completion, the new Fondren Library will be one of the most technologically sophisticated buildings on the Rice campus and will cast a corresponding long shadow on the digital landscape at Rice.

5.1.4 Challenges

The emergence of these digital landscapes raises a series of challenges to the designers of the Fondren Library and the technologies that will be housed in it.

An important part to the success of the new Fondren will be how successfully the landscapes can be made `human' The systems should be designed to be used by humna beings, rather than having users being forced to adapt to the systems. Accordingly, the individual spaces and systems within the new Fondren must be designed without dictating how patrons of the Library will ultimately put them to use.

The landscapes should be `beautiful' (ref: A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander).

Given the explosive growth of the Internet and its usage by students, the issue of context becomes more important to the researcher. The point of view must remain visible and there is a growing concern that we over-privilege electronic information sources. Electronic searching is easiest, but it is the best way to seek knowledge? One obvious drawback with most electronic search mechanisms in use today is that they reduce, or even eliminate, opportunistic discovery.

Physically browsing the book shelves is important, since 'discovery by adjacency' is a valid part of learning. The creation of the virtual stack (similar to the concept of the Metaverse introduced by Neil Stephenson in his book 'Snow Crash' and also alluded to by Michael Crighton in 'Disclosure') is one possible method that could offer the benefits of the physical search and the convienience of the electronic equivalent.

Librarians help to bring context to a search. They also can provide a level of verification to the accuracy (truth) of a given source. However, a Librarian's resources, most important of which is time, is limited. The technology systems in the new Library should attempt to reduce the amount of mundane, limited activity that must be done by the Librarians and attempt to maximise their opportunities to interact with the Library's patrons.

Traditional Library engenders sense of awe / seriousness. Technology tends to under-whelm. How to balance access to information.

People have always struggled to communicate with each other. Traditionally, books have a 1:1 relationship with their reader. To date, with a few notable exceptions, computers have developed a similar (1:1) relationship. One of the. challenges that Fondren faces is how to use technology to facilitate collaboration.

5.2 The Guiding Lights for Planning; Technology

The new model for the Fondren Library is one of a collaborative, vibrant environment that acts as the Center of Learning for Rice University. The Library will significantly contribute to the learning process; by revealing scholarly endeavor and encouraging intellectual debate. The Library's technology systems must carefully balance the benefits of structured versus opportunistic information gathering, while understanding that the systems must be responsive to the ways that people will work in the future. In many ways the new Fondren Library will be a place to experiment and discover what the Library of the future will be like.

In order to ensure that the technology systems contribute to and enrich this environment, we have developed twelve principles to which each technology system implemented in the Library should conform. These principles are explained below.

Return to listing of excerpts

Home URL: < http://www.rice.edu/projects/code >
Copyright © 2001 by CODE.
Last updated January 2, 2001 by Lisa Spiro for CODE (Committee on the Digital Environment at Rice University).