Academic Libraries Led Universities Into the Socially Distant Era. Now They’re Planning for What’s Next.

When the pandemic hit in March of last year, administrators at Davidson College approached the library, which had instructional designers on its staff. Could those designers and other librarians help shift Davidson’s courses to an online format in the middle of the semester?

“It was all hands on deck,” said Lisa Forrest, director of Davidson’s library. “Even though the librarians may not have thought of themselves as instructional designers, I think everybody quickly learned that we were speaking a very similar language, and folks realized they all had a role to play in helping to transition those courses.”

Within a week, those courses were online. Within another week, the library had moved its student- and faculty-research consultations online, while working on other resources: The library ramped up its digitization efforts, book-retrieval and contactless book pick-up services, and self-checkout, including a service that allowed people to check out books from their phones anywhere in the library.

Forrest has been working to push the library to establish more digital collections and online services, and to do more outreach since she arrived at Davidson three years ago. The pandemic put those plans into overdrive.

“It showed us just how nimble and agile we can be when we need to be,” she says.

In fact, over the past year, academic libraries across the country helped lead their institutions into the socially distant era — in part because libraries had already spent decades figuring out how to offer online services and get information to people who rarely came into the building. In that time, campus librarians have also grappled with the symbolism and role of the campus library, a structure usually situated in a prominent place on campus.

In 2001, The Chronicle published my article about the role of the library building in the online era, under the inflammatory headline “The Deserted Library.” At the time, online resources were quickly supplanting paper materials, and some people wondered whether we would need libraries when patrons could get so many materials online. In a cover story that discussed the impact of that article many years later, Library Journal noted that one academic library director left her job at Bentley College when a senior administrator there came to the conclusion that academic libraries were obsolete.

That view, of course, was wrong. Providing paper books and journals is only one aspect of what libraries do. Libraries are social hubs on campus. They are increasingly the location of classrooms, auditoriums, cafés, makerspaces, virtual-reality rooms, business incubators, and more. And librarians themselves are increasingly reaching patrons outside their walls.

In the past year, when many academic libraries were now literally deserted, they continued to support students and researchers on campuses. The emergence of the internet changed libraries. Will the pandemic change them even more?

Permanent Shifts?

The library that emerges from Covid-19 is likely to value its digital resources and services even more than it does now, according to library directors and scholars of the field. It’s an overdue evolution, says Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator of information-literacy services at the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yes, libraries had robust electronic resources and virtual services before the pandemic. But at many of them, technology was still at the margins of their activities, and staffing roles were still very much oriented around analog services and collections.

“The assumption should be that people never use us in person, except sometimes,” says Hinchliffe. “The question is, will we go back to analog first and digital second, or will we remain digitally first with the analog in a complementary, important, but not front role? I see the potential for this shift to digital-first to be permanent.”

Most of the planning around how patrons will use their libraries focuses on what happens within a building, with remote services being a contingency if patrons don’t come in, says Hinchliffe. The pandemic was an experiment in accelerating those services without planning and under duress. Libraries need far more-aggressive outreach programs to patrons and more careful curation of digital collections and e-resources, just to keep the library’s expertise and resources in front of students and researchers.

“The more people work remotely, the less they seem to actually seek out the expertise of library workers,” Hinchliffe says. “If we wish to stay ‘in the workflow’” — that is, to borrow from the library scholar Lorcan Dempsey, to operate in the online environments where users work — “we probably need far more aggressive outreach programs than we currently have.”

On his blog, Dempsey has said that the pandemic should push libraries to offer a “holistic online experience,” apart from the physical space that now marks the value and identity of many libraries. “The forced migration online may mark a final transition into a more full digital identity for the library.”

Certainly, in many cases, librarians noticed that the challenges of moving materials and services online paid off, with more participation among students and professors in library activities. Susan Goodwin, associate dean for user services at Texas A&M University at College Station, says the pandemic response has offered opportunities to rethink the library’s processes and priorities. The librarians were already helping (and persuading) instructors to shift their course materials to more widely available online educational resources; the pandemic, says Goodwin, “only strengthened our resolve to continue to get the word out.”

Consultations and workshops also moved to Zoom, and librarians found they were engaging with more people, from farther distances.

“We had all these participants from other campuses that now suddenly were able to sign up for these workshops that they otherwise would have had to drive to,” Goodwin says. “I think our users are ahead of us. The faculty member in a distant building — we have a large campus — doesn’t necessarily want to have to come over to the library to talk to an expert about their research. They’d rather connect from their office.”

The same dynamic seems to be happening for events for the public as well. Before Covid-19, the library at the University of Rochester, like many academic and public libraries across the country, would regularly hold events with prominent speakers — and sometimes draw a meager audience.

“We’d have a Pulitzer Prize winner, but there’s so much competition for people’s time that if we happen to pick a night that something else was going on, we’d have 50 people,” says Mary Ann Mavrinac, vice provost and dean of libraries at the university. The library moved those events to Zoom, and started drawing 200 to 400 people for some of them.

“And they’ve been from around the U.S.,” Mavrinac says. She thinks the library could use such events to actively woo alumni and donors to support library projects, or the university overall. Consider the possibilities: Not just guest speakers, but discussions of items in the university’s special collections or interactive sessions with university scholars. “The engagement is incredible, and they feel really connected to the university.”

Complex Human Interactions

Convenience is key — and it has been for some time. Marie L. Radford, professor and chair of the department of library and information science at Rutgers University, says that one of her most-cited studies, from 2011, noted that people use virtual services because they’re the most convenient option, not because those patrons are in a rush, as many people had assumed.

Radford has studied virtual reference services for 15 years, and many of the librarians she surveys while studying the field have been offering person-to-person online services for even longer. If colleges move more of their own outreach and services to online platforms, they might learn something from the experience of their libraries over the past two decades, Radford says.

Online services might be more convenient, she warns, but they have their share of pitfalls.

“They seem deceptively simple because we live online now,” she says, “but what’s underneath there is the level of complexity about human interaction.” Unlike face-to-face interactions, online interactions give users an opportunity to drop away easily; those providing service on the other end have to be aware of engaging them. Radford’s studies indicate that patrons come to services like virtual chat with some anxiety — confusion about how to find the materials they need, or even what to look for — and making that human connection can be challenging.

“Now you ask a librarian, and we’re behind this little button,” she says. “They’re not really sure who they’re talking to, so you have to develop this rapport.”

Remote work could have impacts on the internal culture of library organizations as well, something library directors are already considering — with few answers at this point. At Rochester, administrators are just beginning to convene universitywide discussions about who might be able to work part or full time from home. This raises important questions about equity: If someone gets to work at home, is that a privilege? How do you extend that flexibility to people whose work is based in the office?

During the pandemic, Mavrinac, of Rochester, has hired several people to fill vacancies in critical positions at the library; she is skeptical that those people can be integrated into the culture of her university from behind a screen at home.

“Most of those people have never met colleagues in person, and they don’t have the same shared experience,” she says. “I wonder about the nature of human relationships.” Zoom is far too formal and requires scheduling, which are barriers; with everyone in the building, employees can serendipitously run into each other, and into students and researchers.

“There’s an informality about being on site,” Mavrinac says. “I’d like to understand more about how relationships are built. I like to think we actually do need face-to-face.”

Heart of the Campus

In many ways, academic libraries are among the most important public spaces on a college campus. A library building is often perceived as a campus’s “heart”; Hinchliffe prefers the term “front porch,” borrowed from the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, for the way it emphasizes the notion of community rather than collections. For much of the public, a library is a “third place” much like a coffeehouse or a bar — a space that is neither home nor an office, but where people can gather to socialize, work, or simply be alone in public.

Joseph P. Lucia, dean of Temple University Libraries, believes that many of the academic functions of a library can be conducted online. Surely, students will take advantage of that for convenience, and certainly many faculty members prefer to be off campus if not needed in the classroom, lab, or office. It’s not clear whether people will still prefer to work remotely after offices and public spaces reopen.

“We will have to work out what the social dynamics of the face-to-face environment look and feel like,” he says. “If fewer people are on campus every day, will some of that urban density that was the characteristic of Temple’s dynamism — just people everywhere — be diminished a bit? And what will the center of campus feel like?”

In the fall of 2019, Temple opened a new library building, the Charles Library. It was designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta and sits along a crossroads of that campus, in a spot that can sometimes feel as crowded as Times Square during the height of the day, says Lucia.

Space affects mind-sets — something that has been as true of libraries as it has of churches or prominent government buildings over centuries. One of the themes of “The Deserted Library” and a number of related and follow-up articles was clear: The “deserted” libraries were often drab, poorly lit buildings. New, well-designed or renovated libraries often led people to rediscover these buildings, and to want to hang out within them.

“The Charles Library is an environment where you walk into it, and it has a feeling, a lightness, a lifting quality that is inspiring,” Lucia says. “The design environment, the layout of spaces, the physical materials, and the way they fit together — the geometry communicates a sense of specialness. It takes from a deep history of library architecture, this notion that libraries should be spaces that inspire.”

The library was designed in part around the notion of the stoa in classical Greek architecture — walkways, lined with columns, that were public marketplaces and community spaces. It was designed to be a social space, but a versatile one that could change with the times.

If you go back far enough, to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, “libraries never were about books,” says Craig Dykers, a founding partner at Snøhetta, which also designed the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. They started as outdoor spaces, he says, then moved to semi-enclosed spaces. They were sites of legal debates and community space before they became “semi-sabbatical” places where people sit alone at a cubby.

“In recent history, we have broadened that definition to be actually much more like the ancient libraries of Greece and Rome, to be highly active places,” he says. “That type of action, that type of energy, that type of messiness is something the internet cannot replace, even in chat rooms. We’ll yearn for that after the pandemic eases our fear of being with other people, and we will once again reoccupy libraries.”