ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

September 15, 1999

 

 

Higher Education Trends
  • Universities, as institutions, do not adapt quickly or easily to changing trends or needs. New corporate entities have created competition for higher education, particularly for distance education.
  • In a society so dependent on information, there is a critical need for lifelong learning and continuing education.
  • Technological developments have offered a wide range of new ways to teach. More and more courses are offered partially or entirely electronically. These developments have also contributed to the tremendous growth in distance education.
  • Universities are expected to raise more and more of their funding from private sources. In addition, they must justify their costs in terms of outcome measures closely linked to efficiency and productivity.
  • Increasingly, higher education institutions are evaluated according to corporate measurements, appropriate to the "for profit" business world. Many in academia are concerned about this trend.
  • Increasingly, students are accessing electronic information resources from a distance. Librarians have less face to face interaction with students in the Libraries at a time when the information landscape has become more complex and difficult to consult efficiently and effectively. Library user education will be more and more important.
  • More collaboration and teamwork is required in the work place. More courses require students to collaborate on group projects as part of their coursework. The library has become an important place for these students to meet and work collaboratively.
  • Pullman offers limited employment opportunities so there is very little turnover in staff positions within the WSU Libraries.
  • The profile of future students will reflect an increasing diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, age, etc. More and more students will experience higher education at a distance.

 

Librarianship Trends
  • Demographic studies of librarians indicate that the profession is aging rapidly and large numbers of librarians will retire in the next 5-10 years. Competition for hiring library school graduates includes software companies and others with deep pockets. The need to attract, hire and retain talented professionals is key to the vitality of academic libraries.
  • The library profession is changing to emphasize the librarians role as team leader, project manager, and coordinator. The philosophical emphasis is on arranging for access to information rather than direct contact with users.
  • "Maturation" of the automated environment: we’ve largely gotten past the work and the confusion of switching from manual to automated systems. Going along with this is the library staff’s increasing level of comfort and expertise with automated systems. In these respects, we are in better shape to meet some of the challenges than we were 5-10 years ago.

 

Trends in Scholarly Communication
  • The nature of scholarly communication is changing - becoming more interdisciplinary and internationalized, and is experimenting with new forms of reporting its findings. For example, the scholarly journal as we know it today, especially in the areas of science and technology, may disappear.
  • The publishing industry is in major transition. This is leading to changes in pricing structures and questions about access to and archiving of electronic resources. The World Wide Web has become a major resource for students (high percent of freshmen say the Web is their primary information source).
  • The Internet has become a primary means of communication but is facing complicated issues such as an Internet tax, access and privacy.
  • Challenges to intellectual freedom are increasing and copyright issues are becoming more complex.

 

Societal and Economic Trends
  • The rate of technological change continues to accelerate requiring the Libraries to maintain an acceptable program of hardware and software upgrades and employee training.
  • The increasingly rapid rate of change in our society has led to expectations for instant results.
  • Democratization of the work place requires more participative decision-making.
  • The loss of individual institutional buying power coupled with the increased availability of electronic information resources have led to more consortial agreements among libraries.
  • In our society, information is a highly marketable commodity. Libraries are experiencing increasing competition as primary information service providers.
  • Although most library budgets have increased, their buying power has declined at a time when demand has increased for new publications and services.