Sunday, January 5, 2014

Advanced Research for the Liberal Arts: the Library as a (entrepreneurial-ish ) Research Incubator

As we struggle with multiple concepts and assorted directions for library growth and development I keep coming back to the concept of the iterative, entrepreneurial research incubator. These would be spaces for students and collections of students and faculty (classes?) to camp out and develop, over time, experimenting approaches to original research in all areas of the academic program. That, I think, is what a library in the new age should spend its resources of time, effort, space and dollars promoting.

It’s a shot of industrial strength research skills and techniques both for finding data and turning it into analytic information for further testing and hypothesizing, the results of which are presented through compelling stories, images and sounds that capture and enthrall our attention and promote and deepen our understanding of the world, our history and our future.

If you buy into my concept of the new research or are at least modestly intrigued let’s just stop a moment and step sideways. This will be the easy part of the project. It’s also going to be the fun part, but there’s an associated hard part.

The hard part is the space between walking in the front door and signing up for the new research carrel. (Oh, did you notice that easy sliding in of the term research carrel? In my mind it’s more of a Silicon Valley corporate team space (of various sizes) decked out with advanced media devices and capabilities that a team could “rent out” for long/short time intervals. Well, that’s my concept at the moment.)

Back to the hard part. So much time and energy is lost to a student in that limbo time between the front door and starting an advanced project in research. We treat the building much as a department store used to do. There are “areas” that serve differing types of products (LC numbers) or experiences and we let the customer wander through the racks perhaps librarians answering questions about color, size and where the dressing rooms are – maybe really technical questions about the ice maker in the door – until they drift over to the checkout counter and make a purchase, then leave.

The new library environment should be aggressively interactive, we should approach and confer, advise and direct, discuss and evaluate and most of all collect data about the experience, the process and the outcome. We’re a service organization, but deliver that service at only a few touch-points none of which we track deeply enough. It’s that concept of tracking a customer as they turn into a user and what makes (promotes) that happen most effectively and can you polish that experience to be more enjoyable and productive.

I wonder if we utilize the data we already have? We know who checks out a book, but I would suspect we treat that as privileged data. Or the printers? No one gets to see it. Wouldn’t it be useful to let a professor or advisor know that some of their students have never used the library and who they are. That’s the power of big data, oddly it can be quite personal, yet used responsibly.

As for the entrepreneurial research spaces? Well that’s the easy/fun part isn’t it. We’ll have a good time deciding what’s in those spaces, how it’s arranged, how big or small they are and how do you get to use them – useful, useable, affordable, sustainable.

gunther – November 29, 2013

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