How can university libraries stay relevant during a digital age, when books are downloaded on eReaders and information is ubiquitous?
According to Geneva Henry, university librarian and vice provost for libraries at the George Washington University, they need to evolve.
“If we’re going to grow, we’re going to change. We can’t be stagnant,” she said during a presentation at Friday’s Faculty Senate meeting, where she outlined her vision for the future of GW libraries.
She acknowledged that libraries are no longer the sole “destination for information”—but with a little innovation, libraries of the 21st century will still be hubs for learning, collaboration and research, she said.
Ms. Henry, who joined GW in July, is responsible for planning, directing and overseeing all operations of GW’s Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, Eckles Library and the Virginia Science and Technology Campus Library.
The university’s Strategic Plan was something that drew Ms. Henry to her current role at GW, she said on Friday. She outlined how her strategies and goals for GW libraries align with the four major themes of the plan: innovation through cross-disciplinary collaboration, globalization, governance and policy, citizen and leadership.
“When I was interviewing for the position, one thing I was asked to do was read a draft of the plan and think about where the library fit into it,” Ms. Henry said. “I got very excited, because it just had library written all over it.”
Ms. Henry’s primary ambitions are to get research back into the libraries, focus on special collections, collaborate across campus and the greater community, engage librarians in teaching and learning, and create an environment that will help students be competitive in a 21st-century job market.
Putting research “back into the library” is her top priority. She said she does not wish to drive faculty to the library when they “don’t need to be there,” but rather, she wants librarians at GW to be more engaged with researchers—helping them to discover information, organize big data sets and facilitate connections with other faculty members. In addition, the library can offer shared research facilities, which will, in turn, encourage and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration.
“Certainly we’re not going to have the wet labs and the really specialized research equipment,” Ms. Henry said. “But when you just need a computer, a data lab—that can reside in the library, it can be a shared facility.”
The 21st-century library, Ms. Henry said, will not be known for the number of volumes it holds, it will be “defined” by its rare and special collections, Ms. Henry said. That is why her second goal is to focus on increasing the number of unique and primary source materials that students and faculty would not be able to find elsewhere.
“The services and the special collections are going to give the library its identity,” she said.
Some new collections will be offered through collaborations with organizations in D.C. For example, GW formed a philanthropic partnership with the Chicago-based Churchill Centre to establish the National Churchill Library and Center at GW, which will be the first major research facility in the nation’s capital dedicated to the study of Winston Churchill. Ms. Henry said she hopes the special collections will give undergraduates the opportunity to become more engaged with research.
“When you’re working with primary source materials—and undergraduates do not get that opportunity very often, certainly not nearly enough as they should—it ignites a fire,” she said. “It sheds a whole new light, it energizes them, and it really makes them enjoy it.”
She encouraged faculty to bring their classes into the library, so students could take advantage of primary source materials and perhaps even identify research projects they could partake in.
GW librarians are already quite engaged in teaching and learning at the university, Ms. Henry said, to the point that the demand for them to be in the classroom is greater than the hours they can supply. Ms. Henry said she is working with librarians to create online modules and how-to guides so they will be able to assist more students, while freeing up classroom time for more in-depth discussions.
Ms. Henry’s final priority is to create a library that will provide the resources and teach the skills that students will need to be competitive in the job market. She said librarians at GW will work to provide tutorials and workshops that will teach skills such as video-making and geographic information systems, and she would like to create advantages such as a multimedia laboratory.
“Our students are expected to leave this university with a set of skills that 20th-century students were not expected to have, and for the most part, many of them still have not acquired those skills,” Ms. Henry said. “The library is a place where this additional education can happen in the context of the courses they are learning.”