Pivoting to an Open & Engaged Model for Smaller Academic Libraries before the Cliff Forces Our Hand

Those of us in smaller institutions are keenly aware of the coming demographic cliff that portends enrollment troubles ahead. Many of us are experiencing an all-hands-on-deck moment in search of more students and better solutions, all the while we see neighboring competitors doing the same, and like us, holding their breath for positive results. Each time our news sources bring us word of layoffs or restructuring somewhere else, we hear about precipitating enrollment causes, diminished organizational capacity, and, all too often, loss of teaching faculty and support staff.1 

Likewise, where academic libraries are concerned, we learn of cuts to the library staff amidst a larger set of institutional cost-containing measures underway. Such reductions are typically preceded by years of reduced library database and journal subscriptions, unfilled staff lines, and flat or declining budgets that ultimately failed to stave off the larger organizational downward spiral. When the damage is surveyed, the end result is an academic library that struggles in service to its longstanding mission centered on: collections and resource curation; instruction in how that knowledge is organized and accessed; and the provision of an environment that champions inquiry, critical thinking, and intellectual engagement with diverse resources and viewpoints.

The noble story from within the library often revolves around trying to do the same or more with less in service to a longstanding value proposition that those remaining in the library seldom have the opportunity to address. Collections, library systems, workflows, and other resources do not simply vanish when exigent circumstances result in the rapid dismissal of library staff at a moment when library management is acutely concerned with preserving organizational knowledge in hope of patching up the enterprise to make it all publicly presentable once more. After the perilous moments come the challenging years, when an academic library attempts to resist forces of inertia and depletion even while subscription budgets continue to fall, personnel lines are lost after departures, and increasing costs for service and database subscriptions bring ever starker forced choices. 

Amidst all the change that imminent or looming fiscal crises bring, leadership seldom stops to take stock of what is an increasingly fraught value proposition for the smaller academic library that is proving ever more expensive to keep delivering on the same mission. Stated more plainly, there is simply less library to go around against a backdrop of varying demand for traditional services from students, faculty, and staff. Beyond keeping the lights on and the dwindling subscriptions paid, a new mission and model for academic libraries is needed and a more open and automated future holds much promise for libraries willing to embrace a socially-driven future in a vastly more accessible and open scholarly realm.

The Pivot to Open Access

The success of the Open Access movement in the US has recently come under attack by insiders disappointed in its inability to solve three critical shortcomings that plague modern, toll-access publishing: equity, affordability, and accessibility (see Anderson, 2003). Yet progress to date on equity where smaller academic libraries are concerned tells a different story where the vast amount of available OA scholarship is increasingly sufficient to meet the needs of teaching institutions without stringent promotion and tenure, but they are simultaneously hampered in accessing, if not cut off altogether from, affordable OA publishing. The problem and solution can be envisioned as:

1. smaller academic libraries that fit this profile can and should investigate just how much of their subscriptions they can walk away from in favor of OA access, and;

2. funds can and should be reclaimed from any savings to ensure greater accessibility to OA publishing for faculty at smaller institutions. 

What does OA have to do with a new value proposition for the modern, smaller academic library? Everything, as OA presents a new business model and ROI for smaller academic libraries that are brave enough to question whether collections and their organization still constitute the core of our identity as knowledge organizations. We believe that smaller institutions have much to contribute to the Open Access publishing domain as both readers and authors. We also believe that the existing library paradigm centered on toll-access collections, legacy IT systems that support these and other collections, and traditional librarian skillsets are diminishing in value as Open Access solves the longstanding unsustainability problem of the traditional subscription model for the kinds of institutions implicated in this framework. Moreover, the pivot to open is fully underway and seems poised to continue disrupting institutional practices at academic libraries, both large and small.

Librarians are well suited to become key players in this transition in terms of helping students and faculty adapt to a much more open world. So, if this is the crossroads smaller libraries find themselves at, how can we pivot away from the old organizational story of loss and constraint and embrace a new narrative around engagement and purpose in a new, more affordable era that, nonetheless, will continue to be marked by the inevitable diminishment of available resources?

Put another way, can we in libraries envision a future that does not look like the past?

The answer to this question, as we see it is, yes, but we need help from those outside and within. Few provosts and presidents, frankly, know the right questions to ask and struggle with the insight to pierce to the heart of the matter. The library that long timers in higher education knew when they were graduate students often remains the mental form for what their institution’s current library should assume. Alongside these legacy assumptions, libraries, like every organization, get caught in systems and stories that self-perpetuate and self-propagate in service to organizational stability across time. 

Where smaller libraries are often beset by:

• A sunk-cost fallacy that favors specialized systems that require specialized knowledge, we posit a library staff that prioritizes unique, locally-held needs as central (see Dempsey, 2017) to a new mission around open scholarship, college affordability, and campus community building. Central to this new mission is a new skillset for knowledge professionals that is informed by engagement, facilitation, and risk taking;

• An internal organizational focus that often prioritizes existing workflows, we center engagement of stakeholders in a continual values-based dialogue that drives a dynamic set of evolving services (see Corrall, 2023);

• Legacy subscription costs that forever bring yet more forced choices, we recommend creating a flexible, affordable, and lightweight Open Access search, access, and publish infrastructure that fully serves undergraduate research needs and supports faculty pedagogy and research practices with available OA content as well as just-in-time solutions. Open Educational Resources and their role in college affordability can likewise be an important factor in this conversation (see Schroeder, 2021). 

Lastly, we urge library and senior administrative leaders to consider holding conversations now about what a future of sharply diminished resources and services will look like. To that end, the following questions are intended to spark dialogue and debate about what may well be a contentious topic. Libraries are no stranger to change and have masterfully adapted from print to electronic but what we are recommending is perhaps on a different level altogether. Experienced leaders know to tread cautiously and this is one of those areas. Questions might include variations along the following:

• What is the crossroads that our library finds itself at in this stage of its evolution?

• What is the story about your academic library you hear your students most often telling? How does that contrast with the narrative the faculty and staff hold? And yours? Finally, what is the story the academic library team is telling and what is their attachment to it?

• What does a barebones library that runs on Open Access content look like at our institution in terms of readership and publishing OA content?

• What doubts and reservations do each of these stakeholders have about an Open Access future? 

Nothing is harder than change but leaders at small institutions that are poised to survive know know that the coming years hold nothing if not change and adaptation. The library often makes the least noise on a college campus and, other than the challenge of figuring out next year’s budget, libraries appear to run on auto-pilot to those on the outside, thanks to the hard work of the team within. But as institutions across the country look to drastic cuts to keep the ship afloat in challenging and dire circumstances, sustained organizational focus and effort to pivot to a more affordable and open future now for the academic library could pay substantial dividends down the line. Institutional leaders, assured that their academic library is as efficient, streamlined, and effective as possible, could rely on their library as a nimble asset capable of engaging stakeholders and innovating solutions as the institution navigates the challenging waters ahead rather than seeing it as yet one more unit to trim.