Last week, Tutt Library had a day-long retreat with other “academic support” groups on campus, including members of the IT department, the Writing Center, and other components of the Teaching and Learning Center, which is physically located in the library.

One of the sessions had us responding to this prompt:

What is your vision, or possibilities that you see for the future, that reflect/support an integrated learning support services model? Where do you see us presently relative to your vision, and how do you feel about it?

I was on a pre-selected panel for that one, so I had time to put together my thoughts beforehand. I seem to have lost my notes, but here is the gist of what I said.

First (I said), as we discuss this in late summer, I think it is safe to say that there is not a single student or faculty member who is, at this moment, saying to him- or herself “Gee, I hope the library and IT department and Learning Center staff are preparing an integrated learning support services model.”

There very well may be, however, a student thinking “I’m dreading doing the research for my senior thesis this year because I can never figure out where I am supposed to search for articles,” or “I bet I have to take my new laptop over to the help desk some time when they are open; I wish I didn’t have to do that.”

But in order to find out what they are thinking, we need to talk to them. We need to ask them questions, and then ask them more questions until we know what they really need. We are already doing this, of course. The IT department did a student survey of what their top priorities should be, and near the top was “offer an electronic reserve of articles and other readings that is better than the Library’s current E-Res system.” That’s a start, but what does “better” mean? Faster downloads? An interface that is easier to use? Or do they just hate having to print all those articles themselves each semester? Without more asking and listening, we could spend a lot of time solving the wrong problem.

When I think of what I would like to see integrated, I think of the back end of our many web services. Like many libraries, when we want to provide a new database or web-based service, we don’t build it ourselves; we go out and license an existing product. As a result, we have many scores of databases, electronic journals, and specialized services, such as ERes and RefWorks, and most of them don’t play very well together.
I think if the library had a programmer/database expert who was dedicated to the library–not full time, perhaps, but enough to understand our problems and concerns, and to understand MARC and Z39.50 and other library-specific formats and protocols–we could go a long way toward addressing those problems. As an example, Sian Meikle at the University of Toronto Libraries has presented a system for adding a direct export link from your OPAC to RefWorks (PPT link). But the system involves writing a script in PHP or Perl or another scripting language. Perhaps some day I’ll be able to do that myself, but right now I’d have as much luck coming up with a magic spell to get the records out of the catalog.

Lastly (I said), I think of what OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey has been writing about on his blog when it comes to what he calls intrastructure. Intrastructure is a term Dempsey uses “to talk about the apparatus of peer to peer interaction”; I think you can also think of it as integration at the user’s level.

Dempsey says “The emerging integration challenge is integration with the systems environment of the user.” (From Systems in the Networked World.) I take that to mean that each student or faculty member of the College already has their own way of collecting and organizing information. A student arriving on campus probably already has a blog on LiveJournal or Blogger, probably already has a Gmail account (with more storage and a better web interface than their college account), and generally has established patterns and preferences. They are used to web services and applications like Amazon, or eBay or Flickr that are much better at insinuating themselves into a person’s life than our catalogs and databases and other services.

I think we need to look at how we can better work within our users’ existing behaviors and assumptions about how the web works in order to get our information chocolate into their intrastructure peanut butter.