Here are a few portions from both documents that help to summarize the report.
Harvard’s library system now includes 73 separate libraries with 1,200 full-time employees, 16.3 million volumes, 12.8 million digital files, over 100,000 serial titles, and millions of manuscripts, photographs, musical recordings, films, and artifacts of all kinds, making it by far the largest university library in the world.
Core Recommendations of the Task Force
1. Establish and implement a shared administrative infrastructure.
2. Rationalize and enhance our information technology systems.
3. Revamp the financial model for the Harvard libraries.
4. Rationalize our system for acquiring, accessing, and developing materials for a “single university” collection.
The Harvard University Library system needs to rationalize the manner in which all parts of the University collect and provide access to materials, and orient its focus more clearly toward ensuring access, as opposed to the current default model of building collections by acquisition.
5. Collaborate more ambitiously with peer libraries and other institutions.
Harvard should enhance its efforts to work with other libraries and cultural institutions to build a sustainable information ecosystem for the 21st century. In some cases, this collaboration will mean building upon existing efforts to work directly with partner institutions, such as MIT. In other instances, this collaboration should include entering
into new or expanded consortial arrangements, such as BorrowDirect.
Much More After the Click
[Snip]
Having evolved organically over the centuries, the library network developed many autonomous units attached to departments, research centers, and schools. While highly distributed decision making undoubtedly contributed to the rich and varied development of Harvard’s collections, it has also contributed to dissimilar library policies and practices, to incompatible and different modes of operation, to the inhibition of flexible and forward-looking responses to intellectual and technological opportunities, to impeding the University’s ability to aggregate its buying power even in the face of monopolistic journal publishers, and to incurring increasingly unsupportable costs.
[Snip]
Even during the recent years of endowment growth, the libraries struggled to collect the books, journals, and other research materials desired by current faculty and students and to develop holdings so that future generations of Harvard scholars would have the same excellence in resources that our predecessors have bequeathed to us. The reasons for these difficulties are multiple, but include the steadily rising prices of monographs and journal subscriptions (serials), the costs of providing both electronic and paper versions of many of these resources, the expansion of the University’s intellectual horizons to new areas of study, the chronic weakness of the US dollar as the demand for international materials
continues to increase, and the explosive proliferation of both printed materials and electronic media required for scholarship now and in the future.
[Snip]
Perhaps most destabilizing to our operating model is the digital revolution. Though it is still in its early stages, it has already penetrated nearly all aspects of research and teaching. In the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences, faculty and students relate to libraries in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Indeed, all domains of academia are changing their relationship to libraries, to librarians, and to information, often involving technologies and ways of working that cannot readily be predicted from moment to moment.
From the Statement:
Steven E. Hyman, Harvard University Provost, writes:
The report of the Task Force on University Libraries is a very thoughtful document about an extraordinary system. But it is also a stark rendering of a structure in need of reform. Our collections are superlative, and our knowledgeable library staff are central to the success of the University’s mission. The way the system operates, however, is placing terrible strain on the libraries and the people who work within them.
[Snip]
Widely varying information technology systems present barriers to communication among libraries and stymie collaboration with institutions beyond our campus gates. Our funding mechanisms have created incentives to collect or subscribe in ways that diminish the vitality of the overall collection.
Libraries the world over are undergoing a challenging transition into the digital age, and Harvard’s libraries are no exception. The Task Force report points us toward a future in which our libraries must be able to work together far more effectively than is the case today as well as to collaborate with other great libraries to maximize access to the materials needed by our scholars.
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
