The challenge of the future for Learning Resources Services (LRS) is made more difficult by the fact that it must maintain the traditional roles of the library: to collect, preserve, and disseminate knowledge resources, while it expands its more recent activities in information technologies. [1] Failure to continue the past, maintain the present, and develop the virtual library [2] of the future will lead either to a failure to serve large numbers of existing users or set them up to become 21st century anachronisms. [3] While the idea of the "virtual library" is "starting to make the notion of the bricks-and-mortar library look at least quaint, if not yet obsolete," [4] there's more to a library than information, more to being a library than a warehouse for books, and more required of a library than providing the facts. The following is an exploration of the rationale and vision embodied in the program for a new Learning Resources Services facility for St. Cloud State University.

With the advent of electronic means of creating, storing, retrieving, and distributing information, libraries are being asked to expand their mandate of organizing and efficiently providing access to knowledge. Librarians and the users they serve are moving from an environment where data are plentiful but difficult to find, difficult to integrate into a task, and difficult to move between locations, to one in which data are abundant, readily integrated into different tasks and can easily be moved between locations. But data in and of itself neither implies nor provides knowledge; it is what individuals or groups do with the data, information, and knowledge contained in library resources that leads to further knowledge and, perhaps, wisdom. Librarians are positioned for and assuming increasing responsibility for designing and organizing digital information resources, and developing the maps, guides, and connections between and within traditional print and electronic resources. St. Cloud State University's Learning Resources Services has been building upon its library heritage and developing the skills, expertise, and systems to assure a course which will benefit the continuing information, knowledge, and education needs of faculty, students, citizens, and businesses of Minnesota. As Walt Crawford notes, "Libraries are not wholly or even partially about information. They are about the preservation, dissemination, and use of recorded knowledge in whatever form it may come so that humankind may become more knowledgeable; through knowledge reach understanding; and, as an ultimate goal, achieve wisdom." [5] The new library building program for St. Cloud State allows Learning Resources Services to continue to preserve, disseminate, educate, and encourage the use of recorded knowledge and provides the flexibility to incorporate the enormous changes in form and dispersion that are coming.

Librarians and other information professionals spend a significant portion of their time developing intelligent integration and application of information technologies to support and improve our dominant service ethic. The challenge of the future is to continue that tradition and expand the collaboration to create new knowledge environments and learner opportunities. Learning Resources faculty and staff are already involved in meeting this challenge. In collaboration with SCSU's The Write Place, LRS faculty are designing and organizing digital resources to promote writing skills. While primarily designed to expand on-campus access to The Write Place services, the resources are being made available to other post-secondary systems, public libraries, school libraries, and individuals and businesses through the Internet. Through several business partnerships, notably Komo Machine, Alliant Technologies, and Woodcraft Industries, faculty and staff are designing and creating interactive multimedia industrial and corporate training packages. In addition to identifying appropriate and valuable Internet resources and creating integrated print and digital "webliographies," LRS faculty and staff are involved in designing and managing Internet Web sites for the St. Cloud Area Chamber of Commerce and the St. Cloud Technical College. These projects are providing LRS with substantial knowledge in designing for electronic environments and alternative methods of storing and distributing digital information, including optical storage in CD-ROM and laserdisc, that can be incorporated into other library services and shared with other information professionals. Once thought of as something tangible, a book or an article, information now comes in a variety of formats and incorporates everything from transcripts to satellite images and downlinks to remotely accessed digital video and audio and electronic discussion groups. The implications are immense. "We do not advocate clinging to print-on-paper, images on film, or grooves on discs in cases when newer technology clearly offers better alternatives. Equally, we do not advocate replacing print-on-paper, etc., when new technology is less effective, more costly, or has other disadvantages." [6]

Population and information growth have fueled an increase in local demand for access that stretch local resources and requires inter-institutional cooperation. Learning Resources, the Great River Regional Library (GRRL), and the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange (CMLE) are partners in meeting the information needs in Central Minnesota. [7] Serving more than 250 regional public schools and hospital libraries, CMLE draws heavily upon LRS resources and services to meet educational, research, and recreational information needs. Housed within Learning Resources, CMLE also provides coordination between SCSU and other libraries to promote education and cooperation. Although having different missions and serving different populations, LRS and GRRL extensively share collections and have developed cooperative arrangements for the collection of video resources. On-campus demand for information is growing beyond the ability of LRS or other local collections to provide adequate resources. Easy access to the collections and resources of the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University expand faculty and student opportunities to find appropriate information locally. Without interlibrary lending and borrowing, largely dependent upon electronic information catalogs, such as PALS, LUMINA, and OCLC, and the physical exchange of resources through MINITEX, many faculty, students, and community members would be unable to have access to the information or knowledge resources they need. The new library building program provides for a closer working relationship between CMLE, the interlibrary and document delivery service, and circulation services.

LRS faculty and staff are exploring further areas for collaboration and cooperation. Faculty from the LRS Access Services workgroup have entered discussions with St. Cloud Technical College to explore the provision of processing and cataloging of resources for their library services. The successful implementation of this project could lead to similar arrangements with other technical and community colleges in the region. It also allows LRS to continue to provide regional leadership in the organization of knowledge for dissemination in any medium. LRS faculty are already researching what will be required when they assume "technical, collection, and service responsibilities for long-term support of digital collections." [8]

No single library can possibly hope to own everything local users may need; it is unrealistic to expect that every information need could or should be met by any single library or group of libraries within Minnesota. Scholarly inquiry is too rapidly becoming more diversified, more collaborative, and more specific. Nonetheless, the issue of ownership versus access is a false construct. With print resources, and to some degree with digital resources, ownership is access. Every decision to purchase a book, a periodical, a computer, or a commercial online service has an impact upon quality of access. Once we decide to defer an acquisition or delete it entirely, quality of access declines. Librarians understand this issue; users frequently do not. No amount of interlibrary lending (the pre-electronic virtual library) is capable of providing the same level of access quality as local ownership.

For the foreseeable future the printed book will not disappear for the obvious reason that it represents the most portable, economical, convenient, accessible, and user familiar storage and retrieval format. Print collections, both paper and microformat, will remain the primary means of storage for retrospective information and accumulated knowledge. SCSU has investigated several alternative storage options. Mass conversion of print or microform to another medium, for example digital, would be a job of enormous and impractical proportions and cost; nonetheless, some resources, especially those concerned primarily with data, may be more accessible in a digital format. On-campus remote storage of local collections or a shared regional storage facility have been discussed but deemed inefficient, costly, and potentially questionable prospects. Off-campus remote storage in a centralized facility shared with others in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system and the University of Minnesota is considered feasible for information peripheral to the institutional missions and items where retrieval time is not important. The solution embodied in the building program places 80 percent of current and anticipated collections in high density, open access, compact shelving. The remaining 20 percent of collections in traditional open shelves retains ownership and quality of access while emphasizing user space and decreasing overall building space requirements. Sufficient space has been allocated, if future funds become available to expand the compact shelving, to provide shared storage for regional information partners.

Printed books and periodicals will never be the best medium for disseminating many kinds of data and information. Access to resources contained in a library is vastly enhanced through online public access catalogs, despite their initial inability to take advantage of the digital environment and despite dreamy homages to card catalogs [9]. "The legitimate promise of electronic publishing is to provide better (that is, cheaper, more ecologically sound, more up-to-date, easier) access to certain kinds of text--replacing books and journals where books and journals have never worked very well." [10] Yet, electronic distribution of data and information, and prototypes of digital books and scholarly publications, will continue to grow rapidly. Spurred to a certain degree by media hype, many students and some scholars are assuming the current existence of a future for which librarians and other information professionals are laying a foundation. The overly compartmentalized limitations of format, platform, and discipline specific research tools may disappear in the future and fulfill the present expectations of naive library users. The new library building provides a flexible means of distributing power and data connectivity to accommodate change. Moreover, the program allocates more than 50 percent of net assignable square footage to users (reader space and workstations) and incorporates several interactive electronic classrooms. Both group and individual instructional space are required to fulfill the needs of both the graduate degree program and the information literacy instructional program needed to prepare students and users for accessing, assessing, and applying digital resources and integrating them with print resources. "Effective users of electronic resources must learn to surf the networks and to swim in information without drowning in data." [11]

Electronically accessible knowledge resources differ greatly from print resources. Most apparent is that electronic texts are not bound by constraints of local access; they can be used from anywhere, at any time, without a user needing to know where the item is geographically located. Further, more than one person can be using the same resource (electronic text or database) simultaneously. And, electronic resources can be revised, updated, rearranged, supplemented, reformatted, linked to and combined with other electronic resources. [12] As technology alters formats and access methods, new ways will emerge to retrieve information. While the dream of universal access to all remains remote, format integration and the implementation of interoperable standards (such as Z 39.50) promise to begin facilitating user access to a greater variety of information and knowledge resources.

Yet these developments will not alter the ownership versus access issue. The current argument favoring electronic access assumes continued free availability. Yet free or commercially-subsidized access has always been limited. Already we are beginning to see publishers and information producers charging for accessing or acquiring electronic products (either in magnetic tape, CD-ROM, or via the Internet), with many charging additional fees based on network distribution, student population, connected workstations, or a combination of criteria. The issue of ownership versus access extends into the electronic environment, with additional problems of assuring continuity of access, transferability of format, and archivability for the future. Librarians already challenged to preserve the fragile intellectual heritage contained in paper resources are anticipating the challenge of preserving future intellectual records in an ever-changing environment.

Further, if we are to avoid the drowning metaphor presented by Naisbitt, Crawford, and others, librarians and other information professionals need to develop more powerful tools to use electronic resources. Search and retrieve protocols (such as Z 39.50) allow the user to conduct a localized search and then extend that search to other systems. This is not a solution to drowning; indeed, incorporating more into the universe of available information promotes feelings of disorientation and being overwhelmed. This is the role of reference and library instruction; but we need to move beyond asking what and how and whom to teach and begin to ask how we participate in the expanded "virtual university" while maintaining focus on the affective aspects of change for users, faculty, librarians, and staff. [13] The new building program does not solve these issues, but it allocates sufficient research and development space to explore possible resolutions for these challenges and provides sufficient classrooms and labs to allow librarians and users to expand their intellectual resources to control the tools and filter the deluge of information.

In any teaching and learning environment, buildings that support library and information services must be seen as facilities whose designs are a positive aid to the process of instruction as well as inquiry. The designs must accommodate radical changes in the format, production, delivery, and storage of knowledge resources. Several design elements [14] of the planned LRS facility serve the needs of demanding, diverse, and dispersed user populations. The new Learning Resources Services facility has been designed to define and describe the functional areas that will allow an expansion of the University's perception of LRS as a facilitator of change and innovation. The goal of participating in the "virtual library" of the future is not possible without continuing collaboration with faculty, administration, students, and regional partners, without facilities to instruct and provide opportunities for users to access, integrate, and apply information critically, and without continued leveraging of existing and future resources to meet the technology-driven needs of the campus within the context of its mission.

The Library and Learning Resources Services facility of the future, which the program anticipates, will required LRS administration, faculty, and staff to be imaginative. The alternative is to lose control. LRS administration, faculty, and staff have already exhibited considerable imaginative response to economic and technological changes that have come from outside the library. Our challenge is to continue our tradition of investigating and integrating the future; the new LRS provides the space and environment to meet that challenge.

Footnotes

1 Most of these traditional roles continue into the future with digital resources. For example, "a broadly comparable pattern emerges for the preservation of paper and electronic resources," made more complex by the variety of physical media and the instability of format and access standards. The major change in the future resides in the library's role as a disseminator of information. While local storage of digital resources is not a necessary condition for convenient access, it may be preferable for reliability (including varying capacity and conditions of telecommunications and storage) and economics. See Michael Buckland (1992) Redesigning Library Serices: A Manifesto (Chicago: ALA), pp. 54-61. Return to text

2 The virtual library is "the concept of remote access to the contents and services of libraries and other information resources, combining on-site collection of current and heavily used materials in both print and electronic form, with an electronic network which provides access to, and delivery from, external worldwide library and commercial information and knowledge sources. In essence, the user is provided the effect of a library which is a synergy created by bringing together technologically the resources of many, many libraries and information services." Kaye Gapen (1993) "The Virtual Library: Knowledge, Society, and the Librarian," in Laverna Saunders, The Virtual Library: Visions and Realities (Westport, CT: Meckler), p. 1. Return to text

3 Heath, Fred. (1995) Information Technologies and Libraries: An Interview with Benjamin Sheperd. Library Administration and Management 10 (1): 4-8. Return to text

4 LaRue, James. (1993) The Library Tomorrow: A Virtual Certainty. Computers in Libraries, 13 (2): 14-16. Return to text.

5 Crawford, Walt, and Michael Gorman. (1995) Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness, & Reality. Chicago: American Library Association. p. 5. Return to text.

6 Crawford. (1995) p. 9. Return to text.

7 During fiscal year 1994, nearly 800,000 patrons used Learning Resources Services, including 30,000 "student" users and 4,500 "faculty" and "staff" users. Regional partners include

42 public libraries
10 college or university libraries
189 K-12 school media centers
24 special libraries, including Veteran's Administration, correctional, and hospital libraries

8 See Peter S. Graham (1995) Requirements for the Digital Research Library. College and Research Libraries, July 1995: 331-337. Return to text.

9 See, for example, Clifford Stoll (1995) Silicon Snake Oil , Mark Slouka (1995) War of the Worlds , and Nicholson Baker (1994) "Discards" in The New Yorker , Volume 70, Number 7, April 4, 1994, pp. 64+. A more reasonable approach, although filled with tangential rambles that weaken the overall discussion, is Stephen Talbott (1995) The Future Does Not Compute . Return to text.

10 Crawford. (1995) p. 71. Return to text.

11 Crawford. (1995) p. 85. Return to text.

12 Buckland. (1992) pp. 42-53. Return to text.

13 Abigail Loomis and Deborah Fink (1993) "Instruction: Gateway to the Virtual Library," in Laverna Saunders, The Virtual Library: Visions and Realities (Westport, CT: Meckler), pp. 47-69. Return to text.

14 The general architecture considerations requested of The Leonard Parker Associates in the SCSU Learning Resources Program Statement included:

Flexibility of electrical, LAN, and other wiring as well as internal space;
Interior Design that acknowledges human aesthetic, psychological, and ergonomic needs; that encourages ease of use and orientation, especially for the physically challenged; that provides an environment for inquiry, intellectual development, and creative production;
Acoustics that control undesirable noise while promoting group interaction and individual instruction;
Lighting that is practical, economical, and aesthetic;
and
Security for personal safety of users and staff as well as to prevent loss of library resources.
Return to text.

Other Walls Dissolve documents related to the new Learning Resources building program include:

St. Cloud State University Needs a New Library Because..., presents a summary of student and faculty concerns about the present building and hopes for the new.
LRS Project Comparison with Recent Library Construction Projects, compares the size, cost, volume capacity, and user seating for selected academic and public library construction projects completed since 1990.
New Learning Resources Services Project Data Summary, lists the major service and operations area contained in the building program. Closely related to this is the description of Functional Areas of LRS Building Program, a summary of comments from the building program.
Libraries: A State Investment, written by Jeffrey Scherer, AIA, for the Minnesota State University System, to inform legislators about the positive educational and social impact academic libraries in the State University System have beyond campus confines. Return to text.