A New Year and New Decade with Persisting Challenges and Enduring Hope: A Message from Dean Edward Owusu-Ansah

We must be innovative in providing expanded resources and services even within challenging fiscal environments.

Dr. Edward Owusu-Ansah Dean of Cheng Library

As we start a new year and new decade, it is wise to reflect on the past year and decade, contemplate how far we have come, acknowledge the persistence of the challenges we face, be encouraged by the progress we have made, and embrace the opportunities that lie ahead. I would also like to take this opportunity to wish the entire William Paterson community the very best in the new year and much success in the new decade.

       At such a juncture, it is perhaps also appropriate for any library to reflect on the roles and directions of libraries throughout history and explore what the future might hold in store. Without delving into historical detail, one can safely conclude that the traditional definition of libraries as collectors, curators, and disseminators of information has held true throughout the ages. With the emergence of universities and the triumph of the thoughts and beliefs that have come to characterize societies since the Enlightenment, academic libraries have embraced the primary roles of service and empowerment: service to their clients and institutions, and empowering those who seek to acquire, use, and create new knowledge. This was the product of political and philosophical values that insisted that facts and theories about nature be decided by scientific standards common to all humans. Wayne Bivens-Tatum (Libraries and the Enlightenment,

2012) notes: “Libraries have always formed an important pillar of the Enlightenment, and they continue to do so today… without Enlightenment there might still be libraries, but without libraries there can be no enlightenment.” The liberating approach to knowledge creation and dissemination that became a defining characteristic of an age that refused to link science to tradition and put it within the reach and purview of all human beings would also lead to the university model that would be most responsible for the birth of the contemporary academic library.

The support for inquiry and scientific thinking that the enlightened university library was created to support and champion saw its full realization in the birth of the German research university that the scientific thinking of the likes of Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling and others inspired, culminating in the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810. It would later lead to the emergence of the American research university model that began with the founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876. For a historical and philosophical approach espousing the need to share knowledge, to investigate, examine, and debate, such as the Enlightenment, it is perhaps no surprise that libraries would become foundational. The college and university libraries that were established after Johns Hopkins in the United States, have virtually without exception adhered to this research support role throughout the ensuing 144 years. The emergence of large and comprehensive collections and availability of space for study and research became a natural byproduct. The library as knowledge center also became a research and learning center, a place where the conduits of knowledge and the seekers and creators of knowledge intermingled, allowing for browsing and serendipity to expand even further the scope of discoveries.

However, the exponential growth of scientific literature would eventually lead to an information explosion which combined with developing economic challenges facing information providers such as libraries would eventually overwhelm even the best funded institutions. The initial tendency to own as comprehensive and complete a collection as possible would give way to augmenting owned resources with providing access through licensing. Blagden (“Opinion Paper: Access Versus Holdings,” 1997) noted in reviewing the shift from ownership to access in academic libraries: “It is no longer feasible nor desirable to expect each institution's library to provide for all the research needs of its staff and students." But even the desired hybrid solution of combining ownership with access would become financially unsustainable and libraries would come to embrace the wisdom of collaboration and resource sharing. Valerie Horton and Greg Pronevitz (Library Consortia, 2015) echo the sentiment and concede the historical precedent: “No library stands alone. Library cooperation goes back to the 1880s and is a long-standing tenet of the profession. Collaboration is strongly rooted in most of our current activities. Even Harvard University has stated that no library is big enough or rich enough to go it alone anymore. In these days of scarce public resources, there is a strong belief that libraries need to justify every tax dollar received and that collaboration helps libraries extend the value of every dollar spent.” The collaborative imperative is now well established. But academic libraries across the country still have a long way to go to make meaningful and effective collaboration a reality.

Cheng Library understands the need to explore ways to make available as thorough and complete a body of mankind’s accumulated knowledge as is feasible within the fiscal and technological constraints and opportunities of our contemporary environment, in support of the intellectual and disciplinary pursuits of the University. We grapple with these issues daily. We seek to establish collaborations and joint solutions with libraries in New Jersey and across the nation.  Some solutions require financial commitments, some do not. The leveraging of proximity and shared goals combined with the reality of financial constraints led to joint action involving five of our state libraries to expand the scope of resources for our users, share expertise, and use our combined potential for the good of all our members. This collective effort by William Paterson, Stockton, and Rowan Universities, The College of New Jersey, and The New Jersey Institute of Technology represents a new and promising approach to collaboration and resource sharing among New Jersey state schools. The five institutions continue to explore how to best work together to maximally benefit their faculty and students. In this case, cost savings was a critical factor and the collective actions ensured reduced overall costs for the institutions.

There are also other forms of collaboration and resource sharing opportunities that involve consortia memberships and attendant fees, which properly engaged can expand significantly our available pool of information resources and achieve great cost efficiencies. Cheng Library continues to explore such possibilities as well. Whether selected solutions to providing the information resources to support the academic and research enterprise of our universities do or do not require additional financial investment, the critical goal for every academic library is to be able to provide adequate resources, effective services, and efficient operations. The overwhelming question remains: How well are our decisions and actions serving the information and knowledge needs of our clients and institution? We understand that these are challenging times and that we must be innovative in providing expanded resources and services even within challenging fiscal environments. We know, as Irene Gashurov and Curtis Kendrick (“Collaboration for Hard Times,” 2013) remind us, that “If we don't join in creating the future, we may find that the future does not include us.” We invite you, as members of the William Paterson University community, to be a part of this conversation.

Yes, it is a new year and the beginning of a new decade, but your library’s commitment to the charge to provide the resources, spaces, and programs that facilitate the teaching, learning, research endeavors of this university and the general higher education enterprise is enduring and permanent. We look forward to communicating with you as we serve you. We look forward to a year and decade in which our collaboration with other libraries and organizations will strengthen our collections and availability of the information and knowledge you need to support the enlightened academic goal of knowledge creation, facilitation, and sharing. We look forward to a year and decade of collaboration with you to identify your specific needs, and to determine how best to satisfy them.

Happy New Year!

February 06, 2020