MIT Libraries Strategic Plan

2005-2010

Introduction | Challenges and Opportunities In the Next Five Years | A Framework to Consider the Future | Strategic Directions for the MIT Libraries

Introduction

During the next five years, the MIT Libraries will make choices that will shape information services to the Institute for the next quarter century. Decisions will be made that will affect the life and work of hundreds of junior faculty, thousands of graduate students and post-docs, and that will be experienced in full or in part by no less than nine undergraduate classes. These decisions will be thrust upon us by changing times and unavoidable circumstances, and we will accept responsibility for making them because information service is our domain of expertise.

Between 2005 and 2010, the Libraries will be obliged to decide whether digital information resources can, and under what circumstances should, be relied upon as a permanent record of research and scholarship.

We will be forced to come to grips with the Libraries' long-standing space constraints, because those constraints increasingly hamper student work, penalize important disciplines, and force operational inefficiencies upon us and the community.

The needs of the Institute's students and faculty will require us to devise and sustain better ways to integrate our digital and physical information resources. We will chart new paths in librarianship by offering MIT's own digitally formatted work to our community and the world as readily as we deliver the relevant information work of the world to MIT.

We will invent a new organizational structure that will enable us to design and deliver information services that are based on the needs of our broadly networked interdisciplinary community, rather than on the requirements of a 50-year old geographical footprint.

And we, like MIT, will expand and redefine our culture of excellence to include assessment.

The Libraries' future will build upon existing strengths.

First, we will find direction in our mission statement:

The mission of the MIT Libraries is to create and sustain an intuitive, trusted information environment that enables learning and the advancement of knowledge at MIT. We are committed to developing strategies and systems that promote discovery and facilitate worldwide scholarly communication.

Second, we will rely on our exceptional staff and our remarkable culture of innovation, responsiveness, and collaboration. We will collaborate across the Libraries, with Institute faculty and staff, with MIT's academic and administrative departments, with colleagues in peer institutions, and with interested parties in industry. Our goal will be to design services, to research key problems and to develop solutions that will contribute to charting a path to the future for the nation's great research libraries.

The strategy outlined in these pages should be viewed not as a prescriptive plan, but rather as a road map. We know that we must - and will - advance from the year 2005 to the year 2010. The stakes are high; our mission is clear; the responsibility is ours. So even though the exact route may not be obvious in advance, like an intrepid Boston commuter we will seek insights from our community and rely on our road map to guide MIT's Libraries into the future.

Challenges and Opportunities In the Next Five Years

We can be certain that a number of challenges and opportunities will be presented to the MIT Libraries over the next five years. We can also be certain that we don't know today all that will confront us between now and 2010. What is obvious, however, is that dealing with known and emerging challenges in a climate of finite resources will oblige the Libraries to be clear about their priorities, and to articulate to the MIT community the basis of those priorities.

At a minimum, the Libraries will deal with opportunities and challenges arising from three domains. The first of these domains is that of information technology, including new forms of information resources and research communication as well as traditional publishing. A second domain is that of the Libraries' "customers", i.e., the students, faculty, researchers, visitors, and administrators, who rely on the Libraries' information resources and services for their work and their productivity. Still other challenges and opportunities will come to us from the context of MIT's larger institutional goals and priorities.

information resources | users of the information resources | larger institutional environment

1. Challenges and opportunities in the domain of information resources:

We can predict with certainty that there will be more of everything for the Libraries to manage.

More digital content, in more formats and in more media
More MIT-generated material, extending notably beyond the Libraries' traditional collections responsibilities
More tangible print content
More multi-media content
More data and more data types

Because the MIT Libraries have been building an applied research program, we are actively engaged in the development and testing of the tools that will be needed by next-generation research libraries. Despite these and others' efforts, we anticipate that the tools available to manage information resources across multiple domains will lag continually behind the production of content itself. This reality will make the tasks of discovery, maintenance, and preservation even more challenging.

The complexity of purchasing, licensing, harvesting, and managing access to information resources of all kinds will increase, presenting a second challenge in this domain. Alternative publishing experiments will proliferate. The Libraries further anticipate that the copyright environment will continue to present substantial challenges and may, in fact, become even more problematic for education and research settings.

As more services and resources are delivered over the network, network information services themselves will become a critical capacity for the Libraries. The roles of( managing and providing secure and stable access to network information services will become as essential a service to the community as are the resources supplied via the network.

To cope with this growth environment the Libraries will need storage capacity, information/data management skills, technical expertise, and creativity. At the same time, all research libraries, including the MIT Libraries, will rely, increasingly on the collections of other research libraries to meet the needs of their communities. Building the systems and maintaining the relationships that facilitate this new reality in a manner that provides benefits to MIT faculty and students will be yet another focus of the Libraries.

2. Challenges and opportunities in the domain of those who use the information resources of the MIT Libraries:

During the next five years, students will continue to arrive at the Institute with highly variable exposure to and levels of expertise in the evaluation and use of research-level information resources. Although MIT students are often fairly sophisticated in their use of computing technology, their skills at finding and interpreting research-level information lag notably. In the future, the ability to locate, filter, evaluate and use information will become an even more important and necessary skill set for students to master. Mastery will be needed both for their success at the Institute and for their careers thereafter.

Faculty will continue to have widely differing views about (and familiarity with) the digital information resources in their fields and in the fields of other disciplines, but overall acceptance of digital formats and delivery will increase. As familiarity and acceptance of digital formats increase, there will be demand for greater integration among and across the information services provided.

Students and faculty alike will use more types of devices and more portable devices than ever before to download, manipulate, and manage information resources. At the same time, students' understanding of intellectual property issues, ranging from plagiarism to copyright law, will be an increasingly important component of their practical and ethical education.

3. Challenges and opportunities in the larger institutional environment in which the MIT Libraries fulfill their mission:

The use of course management systems will become the norm at MIT, and the majority of faculty will settle into using a far smaller number of such systems than is currently the case. If the experience of peer institutions holds true at MIT, demand for electronic reserves and deeper learning information resources support will increase as courses migrate onto the Institute's network.

OCW will evolve from being a special, grant-funded project to being a core, mission-based element of MIT's educational programs. Improving and standardizing the workflow and interoperability between and among the related systems of OCW, Academic Computing, IS&T, and the Libraries will become imperative if these interlocking activities are to operate cost-effectively and for the benefit of faculty and students.

In particular, streamlining infrastructure and workflows for faculty in the overall domain of educational technology will become increasingly critical. Assuring the persistence of electronic courses, capturing digital educational objects in a manner that facilitates their appropriate reuse, and assuring the easy interoperability of the Libraries' licensed and digitized information resources with MIT's course management systems are among the urgent challenges facing the Libraries.

New strategies and techniques for teaching and learning will continue to emerge from the faculty. Virtual laboratories and virtual instruments will become more common at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. MIT's network environment (wired and wireless) will expand in reach and robustness, and the Institute will continue to view openness and visitor network access to be desirable social attributes. At the same time, MIT's network will continue to be a target of hostile Internet-based attacks, leading to tension among the conflicting values of openness and security.

Over the next five years, MIT will develop multiple, specialized digital storage and management systems, only some of which will be operated by professionally trained systems staff. Life-cycle management of digital documents and data will therefore emerge as an increasingly important institutional priority.

A Framework to Consider the Future

The MIT Libraries sit squarely at the evolving intersections of education, research, publishing, and information technology. Each of these domains is in flux, and several are highly volatile. While it will be important to monitor and influence each of these domains to the extent possible and appropriate, it will be equally important for the MIT Libraries to attend simultaneously to the basics of their mission.

Education at MIT

MIT's deep, rich library resources will increasingly provide a critical distinction to both teaching and research-based education at the Institute.

Comprehensive collections provide a sense of a discipline that cannot be grasped from a sampling of resources.
Students who have access to comprehensive collections documentably learn more deeply and perform more rigorous and thorough bibliographic research than those who do not.
Interdisciplinary research is greatly facilitated by strong, interrelated collections and collecting strategies.
Basic research skills are better taught and learned when strong collections are available.

At the same time, MIT's commitment to educational innovation can be expected to have a significant impact on portions of undergraduate education at MIT. These initiatives arise from such activities as

dynamic pedagogical change (experiential freshman courses, writing and communication, d'Arbeloff-funded experiments, GIR review)
educational technology (virtual instruments, TEAL instruction, education at a distance)
network-based instruction functionality (Stellar, SloanSpace, One-to-One Computing, OCW)

These two notable trends joined together most recently in the context of the recommendation by the Task Force on Student Life and Learning that the Libraries engage more explicitly in helping students to acquire lifelong skills in locating, filtering, evaluating, and using effectively the wealth of information available to them. Over the next five years, educational innovation and educational technology can be expected to continue to have a significant effect on the Libraries as they expand and focus their unique instructional role at MIT.

Meanwhile, the scope of MIT's educational influence in the world will continue to evolve as OpenCourseWare, DSpace, the MIT Press, Technology Review, MIT World and similar initiatives play a continuing role in bringing increased global visibility to MIT. In the paper-based world, the historical role of the Libraries and Archives in helping to define MIT's educational distinction to the outside world was focused largely on the strength of the physical collections as they relate to the disciplines in which MIT excels. The MIT Libraries' future role will be to blend the strengths of the Libraries traditional assets with our current innovative initiatives, to provide a model for the support of teaching and research-based education in the digital information age.

Research at MIT

In the disciplines that are important to MIT, more and more research is being conducted and/or documented in digital environments. In the short run, the proprietary nature of these environments will make results sharing among researchers more difficult. In addition, in the future, the nature of the organizations and structures that will enable scholars to communicate advances and researchers to share results is still an open question.

National and international initiatives, such as the Science Cyberinfrastructure, and the national Humanities Cyberinfrastructure, have begun to shed light on the emerging needs of scholars and researchers for support in data-intensive research domains. These needs present opportunities for the MIT Libraries to work with faculty on important issues where MIT has special skills and/or knowledge to bring to bear. The MIT Libraries have considerable expertise and experience that can contribute productively to the support of such research interests at the Institute.

Publishing and information technology

The current climate for scholarly and research publishing is turbulent. Traditional publishers (both commercial and society) have developed business models that rely on rates of inflation and conditions of use that will be unsustainable for universities in the long run. There is an important role for the MIT Libraries in working with faculty and the MIT Press to develop reasonable alternatives to the current scholarly communication conundrum. Similarly, there may be opportunities to advocate for and/or support national and international experiments that suggest alternatives to the current publishing environment.

A related challenge will be presented to the Libraries in devising ways to maintain the digital record of advances in intellectual fields of strategic importance to MIT. With the retrospective digitization of publisher-owned back-files of books and journals, the published record of peer-reviewed scholarship and research is moving inexorably into contract-controlled private ownership. A second open question in this digital future thus relates to the role of research libraries in general, and the MIT Libraries in particular, in the long-term responsibility for preserving and making available the record of research and scholarship.

Still another serious challenge in the digital preservation arena relates to the mission of the Institute Archives. As the record of the Institute itself, and of the individuals whose papers the Archives collects, migrate into the digital domain, the Archives will be required to devise ways to maintain digitally formatted administrative and personal records. This work will affect both records management and all manner of archiving of the Institute's history and accomplishments.

Attending to the basics

Throughout the next five years, the MIT Libraries will attend to the basics of their mission, even as they conduct research and experiments to inform the future.

› MIT students and faculty will continue to need access to the most relevant information resources, under the most responsive conditions, available in the most amenable circumstances, and through the most useful interfaces possible.

To fulfill this enduring responsibility the Libraries must select and make available essential information resources, and insure that students and faculty can find what they need to use within the timeframe they need to use it. We must strive to give them virtual and physical spaces that make it easy, productive, and pleasant to work - either individually or in groups - with the information resources we provide.

› MIT's intellectual output and historical contributions must be captured and managed for the benefit of current and future students, faculty, administrators, and researchers.

To accomplish this goal the Libraries and the Institute Archives will need to understand the ways the Institute conducts research, generates records, and documents results. Whether the output is a thesis, a laptop full of email and Word documents, an OCW course, a database of recorded scientific data, a peer-reviewed preprint, or the technical or working papers of a department or lab - to name a few - the Libraries and Institute Archives will ultimately have the challenge of managing this output across the useful life cycle of each work and medium.

› The Libraries will provide the MIT community with the appropriate quality and quantity of instruction - in groups and to individuals - in our areas of expertise.

To meet this responsibility the Libraries will need to work closely with faculty and administrators in a variety of forums to design instructional and orientation programs. Instruction in the 21st century will range from in-person and online orientations for the Libraries' print and digital resources, to classroom support for MIT faculty, to instructional programs for students that teach the skills of information seeking, evaluating and interpreting. Just as importantly, the Libraries will need to continue to consider innovative ways to provide the high-quality, cost-effective instruction that was historically delivered through traditional reference services.

› The financial and human resources that are made available to the Libraries to deliver on their mission must be deployed wisely and well, for the benefit of MIT.

To comply with this obligation, the Libraries will need to continue to advocate for space that can be managed effectively and efficiently. Likewise, they will encourage the Institute to provide multi-year materials and technology budgets for the Libraries, so that thoughtful and effective resource allocation decisions can be made.

Support from central Resource Development for the Libraries' fund-raising priorities will also be essential; as will flexibility in job design, and reasonable levels of staff development.

The Libraries will continue to embed the discipline of assessment in our decision processes, and we will rethink the systems and structures we use to manage operations and provide services to the MIT community.

Strategic Directions for the MIT Libraries

The strategic directions to be pursued by the MIT Libraries between 2005 and 2010 are simple to state and complex to execute. In particular, success in advancing these strategic directions will be difficult to accomplish with our current organizational structure. It will be necessary to consider what organizational changes will be required to embrace the opportunities and confront the challenges presented by this strategic plan.

1. Focus on providing immediate, quantifiable benefits to faculty and students in the Libraries' domains of responsibility.

a. Continue to be a core element in the activities of education and research at MIT.: i. Provide high-quality instruction in the use of information resources.
ii. Develop virtual services, including information resources support, that achieve the same standards of excellence we expect for our in-person services and physical collections.
iii. Make readily available to faculty and students the information resources needed for their work.

b. Support and enhance user self-sufficiency in physical and virtual access.

c. Improve the Libraries' physical spaces to support learning, research, and community.

d. Support and reflect MIT's growing diversity and interdisciplinary focus and strengths.

2. Leverage the expertise of our staff, and the information resources we manage.

a. Strengthen and build connections between expert staff and users.

b. Enhance the usefulness of the Libraries' significant physical collections as an asset in the digital age.

c. Provide rich digital collections, targeted specifically to MIT's research and education programs, and supply effective tools for their use.

d. Focus on delivering services and assisting users, and seek efficiencies in managing operations.

e. Simplify and standardize across the library system wherever possible to facilitate interdisciplinary research by users.

3. Work to shape the future

a. Provide leadership to inform and mobilize the MIT community in the area of scholarly communication and copyright.

b. Conduct research that advances understanding and increase useful options in the digital information domain.

c. Implement systems and programs that demonstrate and/or enable new approaches to information management.

d. Advocate in political and professional arenas for outcomes that benefit MIT's teaching and research and further the mission of MIT and its Libraries.