International Perspectives onAcademic Librariesedited by Philip J. Calvert and Rowena Cullen

● Introductionby Rowena Cullen and Philip J. Calvert

This is the first column of a regular series on International Perspectives onAcademic Libraries that will be appearing twice a year in the Journal ofAcademic Librarianship.

I t is hoped that this column will help broaden the jour-nal’s perspective outside North America; raise issuesfaced by academic librarians in the developing as well

as the developed world; and identify issues that are commonto all academic libraries, but to which the solutions mustsometimes be modified to suit particular countries, cultures,or economic environments. It should also be rememberedthat, although North American academic libraries are thedriving force behind much innovation in the LIS field andare the source of much new thinking in the discipline, librar-ians in other countries have sometimes to deal with certainissues before they become critical in the United States orCanada; hence, there will be times that the flow of informa-tion will travel in the other direction. Not all academic li-brarians have the funds, or indeed the freedom, to attend LISconferences at which informal networks become establishedand much trading of practical knowledge takes place, andmany librarians will find that journals such asJAL are theironly source of information about global developments inacademic librarianship.

This column will also serve as a channel for the commu-nication of ideas, aspirations, problems, and solutions beforethey have been publicized in formal conference papers orpeer-reviewed articles. Some columns will reflect on issuesaffecting academic libraries globally; others will focus onissues that particularly concern colleagues in one part of theworld. We expect that many of the issues raised in relationto one country will strike a chord far beyond nationalboundaries and that solutions proposed for one environmentmight have value and relevance for others.

To our colleagues in the countries of Asia, Africa, SouthAmerica and Oceania, as well as Europe and the UnitedKingdom, we extend an invitation to contribute to this col-

umn. In many parts of the world the reward systems for aca-demic library staff, including tenure and promotion, placeless emphasis on a “list of publications” than is common inNorth America, and as a result there is less motivation foracademic librarians in these countries to publish in formalchannels such as peer-reviewed journals. Perhaps more infor-mal channels, such as this column, will serve as a more con-venient and approachable forum to encourage academic li-brarians to communicate with colleagues around the world.

Columns such as this one also provide a broad overviewof the field that is often lost in the excellent and highly fo-cused but necessarily narrow research articles thatJAL hasbecome renowned for. Reports on specific practices or re-gional concerns will help place that research in context. Al-though they risk generalization and repetition, feature articlesencourage readers to raise their eyes to the horizon and tospeculate about the future while reflecting on the past andpresent. We hope this column will help to bring a touch ofthis breadth of vision toJAL along with the internationalperspectives that remind us that, in a global digital environ-ment, we all belong to one community of scholarship, en-deavor, and the pursuit of excellence in research and teach-ing.

In the global digital environment it might seem that allacademic libraries are grappling with the same issues andbeing forced into the same decisions. There is an element oftruth in this. Electronic resources are available globally andare readily accessible through the World Wide Web; schol-arly communication is more international than ever before;through conferences, electronic discussion lists, and e-mail,scholars maintain global networks and expect access to aglobal range of resources. At the same time, growth in thetertiary education sector around the world and the concomi-tant need for access to information resources place huge de-mands on academic libraries to both provide access to thoseresources and also to train faculty and students in life-longinformation literacy skills.

And yet, more now than ever before we recognize diver-sity, and with the recognition of diversity comes a realiza-tion that each individual that we serve is a customer and sohas the right to quality service. As a result, academic librari-

Rowena Cullen is at the School of Information Management,Victoria University of Wellington, Box 6000, Wellington, NewZealand ,Rowena.Cullen@vuw.ac.nz.; Philip J. Calvert is atthe School of Information Management, Victoria University ofWellington, Box 6000, Wellington, New Zealand,Philip.Calvert@vuw.ac.nz...

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ans around the world are increasingly conscious of the needto provide services that are targeted to the specific needs oftheir various customers, yet in many institutions they mustdo so with fewer and fewer financial resources. Sometimesthe twin pressures of trying to provide services for a moredemanding public but with increasingly inadequate fundingmust seem like being caught in an ever tightening vice.

Within the global environment each library must createthe right balance for its own community between access toglobal resources and the provision of local services, such asstudent study spaces and resources, research collections, ref-erence and information services, information literacy educa-tion, computing support, customized Web access, etc. Someare doing so within economic constraints that well estab-lished, well-funded libraries in North America and WesternEurope would find intolerable. In the creative solutions thatsome of these librarians employ to extend their services andprovide access to the global digital environment within thecontext of their own tertiary environment we hope that read-ers will find some exciting, innovative ideas.

One of the major factors affecting academic librariesaround the world is the varying structure of different tertiaryeducation systems, as each one develops to cope with theincreasing demand for higher qualifications. In some coun-tries, such as the United Kingdom, and in many other Euro-pean and Commonwealth countries, universities are, for themost part, state owned and governed. There is generally asecond layer of degree granting polytechnics and technicalinstitutes, and many countries have recently created new uni-versities from former polytechnics and technical institutesthat have reached an agreed standard of education and re-search. In other countries, for example, parts of Asia, SouthAmerica and the United States of America, there is a muchlarger proportion of privately owned institutions and col-leges, some of which are extremely wealthy and already ownor are able to purchase substantial library collections. Sys-tems of governance affecting academic libraries vary enor-mously as a consequence of these national education systemsand internal institutional management. National standardsand systems of quality assurance vary from country to coun-try, as does the status of the library within the institution,which can have a major impact on its ability to attract re-sources.

Aligned with this issue is the question of the professionalstatus of librarians, which varies greatly from country tocountry. Personal politics, that is, gender issues, the role ofnon-professional and paraprofessional staff, and varyingstandards in education for librarianship are interwoven withthe national politics in their impact on the status of the pro-fession and the perception of the contribution of library ser-vices to national research and educational output and thenational economy.

There are a number of other aspects of academic librarieswhere an exploration of common concerns reveals signifi-cant differences between countries. All libraries are dealingwith escalating costs, but there is a vast difference between amajor research library in Europe or the United Kingdom thatis having to reallocate resources to on-line services and,therefore, cannot maintain the depth of an international re-search collection in the way it would like and a library inthe developing world struggling to put together a monographcollection of even limited range, provide access to a few key

indexes and e-journals, and at the same time cope with afinancial framework in which adverse exchange rates meanthat the dollar, the pound, and the Euro are not only 3, 5, or10 times the domestic currency, but access to foreign ex-change is extremely limited. The headaches of acquisitionslibrarians in the West pale in comparison; let us not assumethat libraries in developing countries do not want and envythe resources of wealthier institutions. Somewhere in be-tween these poorer institutions and the great research librar-ies of Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Bologna, or Yale,Harvard, and MIT are most university and college librariestrying to find the right balance between monographs, jour-nals, indexes, and electronic publications (not to mention theneed to anticipate shifts in exchange rates and get the largebills paid before their own currency shifts adversely againstthe mighty greenback).

One solution to this problem widely adopted in NorthAmerican, European, and Commonwealth libraries is thesharing of resources through library consortia by whichmany libraries join together in geographic or subject basedalliances to purchase expensive resources that they can allshare. For libraries accustomed to well-developed interlibraryloan systems, and shared cataloguing data, this is a naturaldevelopment. Resource sharing as a solution is not always asreadily accepted in countries with different philosophical andpolitical systems. Unless governments intervene and imposesuch solutions, it is difficult for some libraries to rise abovethe local geo-political realities and benefit from resourcesharing. And some governments have very different priori-ties from library resource-sharing schemes. This is an areawhere academic libraries in developed countries could makea real contribution to world peace and the advancement ofhumanity by including one academic library from a develop-ing nation in their consortia agreements as a partner in bene-fits, if not costs. If pharmaceutical companies can make suchhumanitarian concessions with the costliest drugs for AIDSvictims, perhaps the major information vendors could followsuit. There are precedents in the South Pacific for academiclibraries in wealthier countries supporting their colleagues inthe tiny Pacific Island states with resources and training inthis way.

Academic libraries around the world are also grappling intheir various ways with constantly changing technology andthe need to balance the demands for new technology againstbooks and journals and the demands imposed by technologyon staff and users. But again, the actual day-to-day issuesfaced by libraries in different parts of the world vary. Theimplementation of technology varies from libraries that arenow on their fourth generation OPAC system, to librariesthat are striving to create their first OPAC in languages thatthe proprietary library systems of the world have never evendreamed of.

In many countries, leading academic institutions are onlynow starting to create cooperative indexes and national cata-loguing systems. In Nigeria, for example, university librariescommonly use a stand-alone PC running a system such asTINLIB as their sole automated resource. In Thailand, a na-tional bibliographic utility is only just becoming a reality.Academic libraries in developing countries can becometrapped in a Catch-22 cycle with their institution’s data pro-cessing department, in which the library has to retain an out-dated library system because the institution will not upgrade

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its main server, and the data processing people use the li-brary’s dependence on the old server as a justification formaking no change. Although the research published inJALmay not always seem relevant to these libraries, an opportu-nity occasionally to share their experiences and frustrationswith colleagues in the wider community will be salutary forlibrarians on both sides of this particular “digital divide.”

Technology itself is changing the ways in which aca-demic libraries operate and the relationship they have withtheir users. The way in which knowledge itself is orderedand accessed is changing paradigms of information storageand retrieval. The dominant concept of the academic library,of intellectual access dependant on highly organized index-ing systems and universal bibliographic control must co-existwith the self-referencing XML environment and meta-datasystems of the World Wide Web. Are national bibliographicdatabases, therefore, still an appropriate goal for academiclibraries in developing countries? Is there in the World WideWeb a new universal system of information storage and ac-cess that would be more easily implemented and more cul-turally suited? In the development in each country and cul-ture of the digital library, and in the way in which eachlibrary approaches the global digital environment, we maysee a marriage of universal principles of information servicewith local culture and customs. We’ll expect to see some ofthis diversity emerging as columnists over the years discussthe challenges that global digitalization is bringing to theirlibraries.

Globalisation has many unexpected impacts. Recent de-bates at IFLA and meetings of the Committee on IntellectualFreedom and Freedom of Expression have focused the li-brary world’s attention on the fact that for more than 50% ofthe world’s population, levels of freedom taken for grantedin western democracies still have to be fought for as basichuman rights. Many academic librarians, whatever their per-sonal opinions, work in environments where there are reli-gious and political constraints on the kinds of resources thatcan be held by the library or to which it can provide access.Even within the western framework some academics andlibrarians see the expansion of world trade and the tendencyof governments and industry to fund applied research ratherthan “blue skies” research as imposing constraints on thefree communication of ideas and expansion of humanknowledge that academic libraries have traditionally es-poused. Constraints imposed on access to the Internet, nowroutine in the majority of academic libraries throughout theworld to inhibit inappropriate use, and the constraints im-posed by economics of information, at both the macro level(the institution’s or the library’s ability to secure resources)and the micro level (charges to users, password restrictedaccess, etc.) will see intellectual freedom emerging as a ma-jor issue in academic libraries in the years to come and onewe expect some of our columnists will inevitably touch on.

All these factors affect the way in which the concept ofthe academic library is manifested in each environment. Andthe way in which libraries measure their performance holdsa mirror up to academic library culture, which is both glo-bally based and unique to each country. In different conti-nents the evaluation of library and information services fol-lows a different ethos and philosophy of service. It isinstructive to look at some of these differences. It wouldseem that academic librarians around the world perform

many of the same functions, such as collecting and organiz-ing books and other materials; lending some of those itemsto registered borrowers; answering questions about informa-tion resources; educating users in their use; and, more re-cently, providing access to electronic information resources.That being so, it should not be too difficult to write an inter-nationally accepted list of performance measures for aca-demic libraries.

The reality is very different. Far from being able to pro-duce an internationally accepted list, it is a struggle to pro-duce a list acceptable to all librarians within the same coun-try. Libraries, as we have seen above, differ in their roles,their parent bodies, their size and structure, their collections,their Internet access, their customer base, and so much more.And although there is an apparent commonality in function,there appear to be many differences at the specific level.Some countries, especially in Europe, have produced na-tional sets of performance measures, yet there appear to bedifficulties in gathering data from all academic libraries evenwhen the measures have been agreed. Given that there aredifficulties at the national level, it comes as no surprise tofind that there is, as yet, no significant agreement on an in-ternational set of performance measures, although IFLA haspublished a guide that has received some degree of accep-tance as a starting point.

In North America, service issues are beginning to pre-dominate over traditional forms of evaluation, such as statis-tical counts of resources or activities or the fulfillment ofobjectives. The customer care movement of the 1980s and1990s forced many retail and other service-based companiesto change the way that staff members treated the people theydepended on most, the customers. It was quite natural thatattention to customer service should begin in the private sec-tor, for the “bottom line” is a very unforgiving indicator ofhow well an organization is doing in the market place. Ashopkeeper, for example, has to keep the customers satisfied,or they will go to another shop, and very soon the businesswill go bankrupt. In the current global digital environmentwhere many other service providers besides libraries are of-fering their wares, along with individualized research serviceover the Internet, academic libraries are beginning to findthat they also must focus much more on satisfying their cus-tomers and marketing their services.

Much marketing literature of the 1990s emphasized theimportance of customer care, turning traditional marketingtheory on its head. The focus of marketing shifted from in-ternal concerns with product, price, place, and promotion toan external concern with what customers, both current andpotential, needed and wanted. It took a while, but eventuallythe marketing literature, especially the SERVQUAL instru-ment that uses gap analysis, was appreciated by library man-agers and information specialists, who gradually started toapply ideas about service quality to libraries. The importanceof service quality came to the attention of many library man-agers through articles published inJAL, and the role of PeterHernon,JAL’s Editor-in Chief, in raising such issues in thejournal and in his series of monographs for the ALA.

Academic library interest in service quality in NorthAmerica can be typified as following two streams, the appli-cation of SERVQUAL pretty much without alteration, andthe case study approach that uses an instrument based ongap analysis concepts, but much more attuned to an aca-

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demic library environment. Rather than go their separateways, the prime movers behind each line of thought re-mained in contact with each other, thus displaying the aca-demic library community’s capacity to work in a collegial asopposed to competitive way. Recent developments led by theAssociation of Research Libraries are bringing the twostreams together again, as attention moves from merely iden-tifying service quality to looking for ways to measure it.

The work of the ARL is merging performance measure-ment with concerns about service quality, and in the processit is giving academic librarians a new framework for think-ing about their mission and roles. But the ARL, in aggres-sively promoting ways of evaluating academic libraries inrecent years, has not overlooked work done in Europe andthe United Kingdom on other forms of measurement. In re-cent expert seminars, and in aligning itself in 2001 with the4th Northumbria International Conference on PerformanceMeasurement in Libraries and Information Services, ARLwill bring to the attention of many academic librarians inNorth America the work of their colleagues around theworld on a range of evaluative techniques, such as centralaudit (the citizen’s charter in the UK), benchmarking, thebalanced scorecard, advanced analysis of standardized statis-tical data, and recent work on impact assessments and theeconomic value of libraries, all of which contribute to ourunderstanding of the complex environment of the academiclibrary and all of which form a part of its evaluation.

Reemerging in this environment, as a way of capturingand reflecting diversity in the global as well as the localcontext, is the stakeholder approach to performance measure-ment in which the library focuses on the views of its various“stakeholders” about what the library “should be doing”rather than leaving it up to the library manager to make thatdecision. The stakeholder view of organizational effective-ness is easily aligned with service quality, and it was proba-bly inevitable that eventually the work on performance mea-surement in academic libraries should start to merge withresearch into service quality. We cannot stress too stronglythe need for instruments for assessing service quality to takeinto account the multiple stakeholders of the organizationand the diversity of the academic library community at thebeginning of the 21st century.

As a greater application of the tools for measuring servicequality spreads around the globe, we watch with interest to

see if different dimensions of service quality will emerge indifferent cultures. Intuitively, one can expect large differ-ences in attitudes to library service quality between, say anAnglo-Saxon culture and an East Asian one. We might ex-pect customers in the former to have strong views abouttheir “rights” to good service from staff members no higheror lower in social status to themselves, whereas in the lattercountries people are more accustomed to showing deferenceto authority. Even a brief visit to another country can resultin “culture shock,” as it was dubbed in the 1960s, and atourist from the west can be surprised to discover that shop-keepers in some Asian countries show rather scant regard forsome of the courtesies common in the west. You will notnecessarily be greeted as you enter the shop, you are seldomasked if you need help, you may sometimes be told you area rather ignorant person if you do not know this or that, butdespite all this the sales get made.

Do we experience the same attitudes in academic librar-ies? It is an intriguing question, to which we do not as yetknow the full answer. Initial research suggests that there aremany commonalities in attitudes to service quality in aca-demic libraries, both among library staff and their customers.This, perhaps, is a heritage of the global expansion of west-ern concepts of the academic library, defining both what it isand how staff should go about their business. Beneath thesurface there could be variations in attitudes to service qual-ity, and if there are then they will impact on library staffeducation program, assessment of library staff, what custom-ers are told they can expect from the library, and thus onmany of the actual operations performed at the critical pointof interaction between the library and its customers. Moreresearch, perhaps drawing on Hofstede’s dimensions of na-tional characteristics, could prove useful. If this proposal ispursued, the researchers need to be mindful of a point madeearlier, that diversity has to be recognized, and it might bedifficult to assess national characteristics in a country thatvalues the diversity of its people.

Exploring the differences between academic libraries inthe many and diverse cultures that make the world of inter-national scholarship, and the diverse cultures that now makeup each of our individual communities, along with the uni-versal principles of information service that continue toguide the work of academic libraries around the globe, willbe the focus of this column.

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