A PHILOSOPHY OF ACADEMIC LIBRARY SERVICE

Developed By Dr. Jon Sparks For The Libraries He Serves

I believe that academic libraries should offer the materials, programs, and staff needed to serve the educational requirements of all sectors of the academic community. I further believe that this can only be accomplished effectively if five elements are present. They include: (1) customer service-oriented library staff; (2) active involvement in the academic life of the university; (3) technological methods, services and resources; (4) participative management; and, (5) fiscal responsibility.

1. Effective academic library service can be accomplished if quality service is consistently given to the academic library customer (university students, faculty, and staff). Library management must stress that library resources alone cannot do the job. Library service is a person-to-person business. Emphasizing individualized service is essential if academic libraries are to maintain their visibility in the academic community. Nothing a library does will provide the maximum effect necessary for customer satisfaction as well as the library staff’s awareness of the importance of customer service and the active promotion of library services to university students, faculty, and staff. Having all library staff realize that they also function as public relations people and library faculty serving as liaison librarians to the various teaching departments of the university is essential. Having a specific person designated as a library ombudsperson and customer/public relations coordinator is paramount in an academic library.

2. Academic library services cannot be provided in a vacuum. The academic library must be an active participant in the academic processes and curricular planning activities of the university. This includes the active involvement of library faculty with their liaison teaching departments, as well as the involvement of the library administration in the academic processes and curricular planning activities of the university. All library staff must understand their role in providing the library resources and services that are necessary for academic excellence.

3. The technological ability of staff and provision of technological resources is more important in academic libraries than in most libraries. This is due to the technological orientation of the primary users of today’s academic library: students. University students will usually move toward the use of electronic resources even though the print or media resource is, perhaps, only fifty feet away. However, the continued importance of print materials in scholarly publishing (both monographs and serials) and print/media materials used by university faculty makes it evident that academic libraries must continue to provide all types of scholarly materials: print, media, and electronic. The four driving forces affecting the publication of academic research (advancement of technology, comatose state of scholarly books or monographs, increasing amount of electronic and serial scholarly publication, and static library funding) means that academic libraries, caught in the middle of the changing world of scholarly publishing, must continue to do more and more with less and less. There is no doubt that the concept of “instant access” to virtually any information from any place will continue to profoundly change the way academic libraries interact with the university world. This will change academic library collections, library services, the way librarians interact with university teaching faculty and students, and, eventually, the way university faculty teach.

4. No matter how large an organization, staff must have input. Participative management is crucial to the operation of an academic library program. The team approach to planning, both for short-term and long-range objectives, will better serve the library needs of an academic community. In addition to the participation of the library administrator, library staff, and any faculty-student library committee, assessment of library services by all university faculty and students should be established and they should be invited to make suggestions regarding library services. Participative planning and management, when properly done within the parameters of the existing organization, does not negate the important roles of the university administration and the university library administration.

5. Programs should be proposed, trial periods recommended, evaluative criteria established, and decisions reached on the data collected. No program should continue if it is found to be lacking in necessity and/or validity. Fiscal responsibility means not only operating within the parameters of the allocated library budget, but also refusing to continue to perform ineffective library services simply because they have always been done. Modern academic librarians should continue to think “outside the box” of traditional library resources and services and never refuse to provide innovative and needed library resources and services simply because they have never done it that way before.