The Challenge of Quality in an Academic Library :
Synergy in the information future

By Jerry Seay

A paper delivered to the Swedish Quality Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden on November 19, 1997

God Morgon. Mitt namn ar Jerry Seay of the College of Charleston Library in Charleston, South Carolina. I am pleased to be here today to share with you the ways TQM is impacting the field of academic libraries. Just as the business world has experienced, academic libraries have been on a long learning curve as we explore how best to adapt TQM principles to our unique patron/educator relationship.

You see, in our academic world, we do not have "customers" in the sense that the business world does. We have "patrons" who come to us needing expert guidance and training. It is our job as educators to lead the patrons on a path of increasing skills and improved methods of gathering information and evaluating the quality of that information.

A patron who has taken advantage of the opportunity to learn from our expert reference librarians will find that by the time he graduates, he has been led step-by-step from academic dependency to independence. He will have the skills and knowledge to research independently, and the discernment to seek out the highest quality of information available.

Our challenge, of course, is to best serve our patrons by staying abreast of current information trends, and by effectively and efficiently transferring this knowledge to the patron.

Interestingly, Total Quality Management provides a model that academic libraries can adapt to our unique patron/educator relationship. This is important because in our information age, changes are happening so rapidly that we are left racing for a way to master the latest developments before the newest one can hit us. It's a bit like swimming in the surf at the ocean. The breakers keep coming one after another, and you do everything you can to keep your head above water and stay out of the undertow.

As you can imagine, the struggle of anticipating change, accepting change, and adapting to change is no different in the academic world than in the business world. Those of us in academic libraries are taking a hard look at TQM practices and weighing the pros and cons of using TQM as opposed to our present operating systems, or perhaps as opposed to one of any number of different management theories and models.

If you've already been on this learning curve, you can appreciate what we are going through. There are academic supporters of TQM, academic skeptics of TQM, the apathetic, the preoccupied, the clueless, and the TQM opponents.

There is something that needs to unite these groups, however, and that is the immediate need for all information service providers on the university campus to coordinate our efforts. Pressures of time, money, and resources are making it critical for us to unify under a management system that allows us to focus on common goals.

Thus, our college's library, computing services, and office of media and technology will jointly be impacted by the implementation of TQM.

We are moving towards unification not a moment too soon. Competition is arising from the for-profit business sector, and we must ensure that as educational professionals, we are the ones providing the highest quality of service available to patrons.

Allow me to take a moment to share with you what specific types of services the College of Charleston's library provides. We must be able to access, master, and train others in the operation of a wide variety of media sources and databases: the internet, web sites, CD-ROM databases, online data, local area networks, e-mail, and last but not least, printed periodicals and books. (We still actually have paper books and journals.)

The faculty and staff at my library are deeply committed to providing these services efficiently and effectively. This is why our interest in TQM is growing and evolving into action. We at the College of Charleston are venturing forth with TQM principles and processes, and we are doing our best to learn from the successes and failures other educators and business people have had before us.

As I delved deeper into this issue I noticed two developing trends related to academic libraries and quality management. I call them "backlash" and "synergy."

I mentioned a few of the "backlash" folks a moment ago. They were our TQM skeptics and TQM opponents. Some of the more moderate ones will politely sit and let you give a song and dance about TQM, then they will fold up their chairs and go back to work. At the more vocal end of the "backlash" spectrum, there are those who rattle sabers and declare war on any soldier carrying a TQM flag on the workplace battlefield.

There is even a backlash to the backlash -- those holding fifty meters of rope and chasing after TQM opponents, shouting they will hang them all by the neck until dead if they don't adopt TQM this very instant!

This backlash against the whole TQM movement by some in academia has been at least partially fueled by a similar recent reconsideration of the real value and merits of TQM philosophy by some in business and industry. I refer specifically to the International Quality Study, a joint project between Ernst and Young and the American Quality Foundation and the studies done by Arther D. Little Inc., and Rath and Strong. These studies, as indicated in a September article in Management Science, "seem to indicate that many firms feel that their quality improvement efforts had not significantly boosted their ability to compete; most programs need a clearer focus to generate better products and services; and a fairly low percentage of the firms have been successful in implementing key elements commonly associated with effective TQM programs (Hendricks & Singhal p. 1258)." I hasten to add that in the same article Hendricks and Singhal point out that these studies do not use empirical evidence, and "the highly publicized International Quality Study did not provide any statistical data on the effectiveness of TQM programs (Hendricks & Singhal p. 1259)." In fact it is the point of their article to reveal that empirical evidence does indeed exists that actually supports TQM as improving operating performance.

But back to academia's backlash. Despite the many examples of academic institutions and libraries successfully implementing TQM practices, there exist opponents to this management strategy that, though happy in the belief that some in business are reconsidering TQM, are trashing the quality movement for wholly different reasons Of course, there are the basic concerns that mirror the same fears faced by industry when TQM was first implemented there. Many fear that it is only another management fad. Those in management fear a loss of control over their employees. Employees fear that management will not give them the proper support to implement the strategy or fear reprisals for recommending change. TQM is not a quick fix and many in management and employees are concerned with their ability to maintain the TQM course over a period of time fraught with increasing financial pressure.

But, beyond these standard objections in academia is the major criticism that TQM or any business strategy does not lend itself to the nonprofit sector. Words like "customer" are still associated with business and industry and are nearly abhorrent to many in higher education. Many fear that business methodologies have no place in the special environment of academia, that these methodologies will sabotage not only the delivery of education, but will erode the professionalism, power, and prestige of the faculty.

These opponents of using TQM or any of it's practices in higher education are radically opposed to the idea that higher education can learn anything of value from business as far as management goes. Clemson University English professor Roger Rollin is one such person who echoes many an educators disdain for using business methodology in an academic environment. He writes, "When such modes of thinking [modern methods of business management] becomes current, it is only a short step toward perceiving faculty as 'employees' and students as 'customers' at best, at worst as mere 'revenue producers (Rollin p. 15).'" Rollin greatly dislikes the idea of students as customers, writing, "if students are reduced to customers and faculty to employees, it follows that education is a product. And those who produce it are expected to exhibit productivity (p. 15). Mr. Rollin can see no parallel whatsoever with productivity in busines s and in higher education. He concludes, "our students are not our product, nor are our research and scholarship. Therefore, a college or university s profitability cannot be measured. Even if higher education is regarded as providing a service, no reliable method for measuring the quality of that service exists. [Education is] a phenomenon more akin to a spiritual than a commercial enterprise. It has a language of its own. And that is not the language of biz-speak (p. 17)."

Besides opponents of TQM in academia in general, are those who are vibrantly opposed to using TQM or any other so called vogue business techniques in an academic library. These opponents are concerned with the loss of professionalism that they fear TQM will cause. Giving voice to this concern is Allen Veaner in his article "Paradigm Lost, Paradigm Regained?" He admits that he is "very critical of all business management derivatives" as "they tend to be deterministic, highly reductive, and transient." Veaner is concerned that adapting what he calls "vogue management methods" like TQM will further blur the line between the responsibilities of librarians and library support staff to the point that there would be no distinction between what librarians do and what (non-degree) support staff do. Veaner really has problems with the idea of empowerment and with Donald Rigg's ( a vigorous proponent of empowerment) statement that TQM "empowers people by trusting all library staff to act responsibly and giving them proper authority." Veaner writes, "I have problems with his suggestion that one should 'trust everyone to act responsibly.' If that could be done....the work of library personnel officers would be confined to simple, bureaucratic tasks - paper pushing at best - and a staff of self-supervising employees would require no managers ( Veaner p.398)."

To which I reply simply, "Duh." Am I missing something here? Is this not our ideal goal? Imagine an organization able to function with self-supervising employees, without middle managers. Imagine what could be accomplished. What a concept. He goes on to say, "If we adopt or adapt inappropriate techniques [such as TQM] we risk reading ourselves out of existence, or at best marginalizing our profession (p.398)."

I reply, rather, that if we do not quickly adapt proven management techniques such as TQM to the situations in academic libraries, librarians run an even greater risk of marginalizing our profession, because someone else in the private sector will learn to do it better than we can, at less cost. Perhaps there is a problem with the distinction between what staff workers and librarians do. I, for one, am quite tired of changing ribbons and paper in computer printers But, throwing out a technique that allows both professionals and non-professionals to do their jobs better is certainly not the answer.

Mr. Rollin asserts that no reliable method for measuring the quality of higher education exists and therefore management strategies that emphasize measuring quality should not be used in higher education. I think Mr. Rollin and Mr. Veaner are missing the whole point of TQM. The implementation of the quality management strategy does not require that an institution or organization be transformed into a profit hungry business that seeks to reduce faculty to employees and students to customers. On the contrary, TQM practices are an attitude of doing things that allows all people, be they faculty, staff, or administration, to realize the full potential of their efforts by focusing on what it is that they are doing and solving the real problems, not just becoming adept at quick temporary fixes. Empowering people in the library does not, or does not have to, as Veaner implies, blur the line between faculty and staff responsibilities. It instead gives both groups power to perform their respective duties more effectively.

The people who ardently believe that using business TQM in academe is hazardous are viewing the situation through the traditional academic management paradigm. (you knew I had to get that word in there). It is a paradigm which is quickly becoming outmoded, which says that academic institutions are so fundamentally different that any other institutions or organization that management techniques employed outside of academia will not work in academia.

Daniel Seymour in his book On Q: causing quality in higher education, quotes Robert Nordvall. "It is very difficult to institute change in an institution [ colleges or universities] where little perceived need for change exists (Seymour p. 79)." Seymour adds, " In many ways, our college campuses have institutionalized the old maxim" 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'; while at the core of never-ending improvement is another, equally venerable, maxim: "Standing still is moving backward (p.79)."

The big difference I believe, in what colleagues like Rollin and Veaner see in TQM and what I see in TQM is as simple as the difference between the tactical and strategic application of quality management. Strategically, that is the big picture over the long haul, all organizations apply the quality management processes similarly. Georgia Tech University, for example, "started its program using techniques based on those of Milliken & Company, winner of the first annual Baldridge National Quality Award (Boelke p.63). The library "developed its own model of CQI," which I think anyone involved in the quality process would recognize. It included "1) involving everyone on the staff, 2) identifying internal and external customers; 3) improving customer satisfaction; 4) customer interaction and feedback; 5) providing value-added services; 6) encourage innovation and efficiency; 7) communicate openly; 8) identify and implement staff training and development opportunities. (p. 63)" In short, your basic TQM strategic process. Even the most die-hard Rollin and Veaner disciple could hardly argue with that. So what is their beef?

The day to day, street-level, tactical application of TQM freaks out many in academia and causes them to demonize the entire quality process. Note the fear that "students will be reduced" to mere customers and faculty to mere employees, as if students will be required to stand in line for education and faculty to use punch cards to clock in and out of work. This academic backlash is also rooted in the fear that somehow TQM will reduce the professional status of faculty and librarians. Recall Veaner's worry that there will be no distinction between what librarians and support staff do: As if adopting TQM will somehow create a form of library socialism in which everybody does the same thing. And in all of this is the fear that middle managers and department heads will loose their jobs because they will no longer be needed. How terrible it would be if we could indeed "trust everyone to act responsibly" in their work as a result of enacting TQM practices. Why, we'd throw thousands of managers out of work! Too bad such a result is not seen in the good light for what it is. These former managers freed to become facilitators of a continually improving process.

The differences in TQM application in Business and in Academic Libraries
There are differences in the ways business and academic libraries approach the quality process. Education, as Rollin points out, is not our product. But, despite what he believes, education is, indeed, our service, in spite of the fact that it is a service that must be implemented tactically different that that of a business.

Consider the typical customer/provider relationship in the business world. The customer's goal is to, with the least effort/hassle, procure the best product or service at the least cost of doing business. To attract and maintain customers, the provider strives to supply a superior product or service while saving the customer time and effort. Additionally, the provider desires the customer to depend on him in a long-term and often contractual relationship. Ideally it is more cost effective for the provider to maintain repeat customers -keeping his current customers satisfied - than to necessarily gain new ones. Businesses that constantly turn over completely new customer bases generally do not stay in business very long.

Contrast this to an educational environment where the customer (student's)) success can only be achieved through the student's willingness to expend, not avoid, effort. And unlike the business provider's quest for a long-term relationship, the educator's goal is to free the patron from dependency on the relationship and thus loose her as a "customer." Here the goal is to provide for (educate) the customer, send her on her way (perhaps never to see her again) and then start over with a brand new customer. Educational institutions that do not keep a fresh batch of students (customers) coming through their institution do not generally stay in business very long.

Thus, the unique student/educator relationship presents an academic library's greatest challenge: To foster independent thinking by providing resources and research training tailored to the customer's efforts and educational needs. The customer may not, and in the case of undergraduates usually does not, know what she needs. Sometimes she may not even know for sure why the library is there.

Last summer a young student timidly approached me at the reference desk. She looked around, a bit confused and said quietly to me, "Sir, I just checked this book out."

"Yes?" I said somewhat confused myself as to why she was telling me this.

Then she told me. "Well, I was wondering if it would be all right if I read it in here."

I did manage to fight back the urge to say, "No, you checked it out, now you take it out of here!" Instead, I assured her that it was perfectly all right for her to read her newly checked out book in the library. She apparently never knew that for centuries the library had traditionally been a place where one read, as well as checked out, books.

In the article in Library Trends we addressed this issue of "the customer is always right" by stating that "for years, reference librarians in academic libraries have made the distinction between giving the student the "answer" (what the student actually wants) and teaching the procedures for finding what the student needs (what we think the student needs) (p. 466)." In effect, we make choices for the patron that the patrons themselves would not make. The library staff, therefore, may operate contrary to the expectations of the library patron (customer). We admitted clearly that the idea "that the customer is always right" is not as pervasive in libraries as it is in the business world (Seay, Seaman & Cohen p.466). We do not, or at least we try desperately not to, just give the information to a student that she craves. Despite some students' desire for us to "just give it to them," we strive to teach them to eventually become independent of our services.

This is at times very frustrating to students on the night before papers are due. Believe me they would gladly pay us to just give them the information they need. I daresay any commercial business who persisted in informing its customers that it knew what was best for them, despite the customer's protest, would long remain in business. But, it is in the business of education to lead them to what they desire, not give it to them. That is an essential tactical difference between education and business.

This is not to say that we should ignore all the wants of our customers, or even most of them. Di Martin, Deputy Librarian at the University of Hertfordshire states that as librarians, we tend to always think that "we know best. We know what they should be asking for (Marlin p.42)." Well sometimes we do, at least usually on specific matters or questions. But, there is the issue of how the patron' overall experience and learning style is taken into consideration. This leads into the second trend which I have noticed: the synergy of information organizations.

The Changing Nature of Academic Libraries
In early November of this year, librarians (including myself), publishers, vendors, and others in the field of providing information in academic environments gathered in Charleston , SC for the17th annual Charleston Conference. The theme of the conference was "learning from our mistakes," and much discussion was had about how our profession was trying to adapt to the fast paced change that is occurring in the digital age. We discussed many vital topics: The trade publishing crisis, collection development: paper vs cloth vs digital, electronic vs paper journals, how do end users actually use us, how do we manage the different areas of paper vs digital publishing, how do we preserve increasing backlogs of information that exist on different media that is quickly outmoded and unreadable, what exactly should we preserve in the first place - everything?

Throughout the three day conference I detected a growing uneasiness among the participants that perhaps we in the academic sector of the information industry are not exactly sure of our role in the global information economy. And if we are sure of our role, we are at least uncertain of our effectiveness. As developments on the web and in technology in general spiral onward to who-knows-where at an increasingly frenetic rate, as the commercial sector takes on an increasing part of education, as individuals gain wider access to unmediated and unreviewed sources of knowledge/data/information, and as subscription and book costs rise even as costs for easily obtainable but unstable digital information fall, librarians are wondering where they fit into all of this. Of course, librarians are not the only humans wondering where they fit into all this chaos of data. But, being overwhelmed and confused in the "information age" adds an especially painful bit of concern to any of us who claimed to be information professionals.

Now, certainly librarians have a good idea of where they want to fit into this information age. Traditionally we have been the gatekeepers of the sum total of human knowledge. Direct descendants of the cloistered monks of the middle ages (as we liked to see ourselves), who preserved the knowledge that others would destroy and disseminated the knowledge that others would horde. We were the keepers, the mediators, the dispensers for knowledge and the teachers, the navigators, and the guides for the access to and use of that knowledge.

That was in the days that resulted from the Industrial revolution - when human wealth revolved around, as George Gilder recounts in his book Microcosm, "regimented physical labor, natural resources, crude energy sources, and massive transport facilities ." As Gilder continues, " today, the ascendant nations and corporations are masters not of land and material resources but of ideas and technologies."... " The global network of telecommunications carries more valuable goods than all the world's supertankers. Today, wealth comes not to the rulers of slave labor but to the liberators of human creativity, not to the conquerors of land but to the emancipators of mind (Gilder p. 17-18)." Technology is transcendent and evolving rapidly. As someone once said of the web, but which could be applied to all digital technology, "the only thing that it changed is everything."

Change. Change is good. But, I must add, only to those who don't loose their jobs because of it. Those persons who loose their effectiveness are doomed to loose their jobs. Those organizations that loose their effectiveness in today’s fast paced/high-tech world are doomed to be overwhelmed and eventually replaced. Organizations strive to maintain their effectiveness -their quality of service- in order to remain viable, to remain in business.

"Based on a reading of professional attempts to sort this out, it would appear that the terms quality and effectiveness are being used to mean the same thing." So writes Sarah Pritchard of Smith College in Massachusetts. This same thing being "achieving a quality of service that satisfies to a high degree the information and research needs of faculty, students, and other users: that contributes demonstrably to the success of the institution's educational and developmental goals: and that accomplishes this in an operationally effective manner (Pritchard p. 574)."

Maintaining operational effectiveness. Today academic libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their effectiveness alone. The fact is, they can not do it as an independent entity. Gone are the days when the library was a singular redoubt of knowledge that stood alone as the stone repository of a university's stored knowledge- a warehouse of books and journals. Today's virtual library encompasses virtually the entire world in an interconnected net of fiber optic cable, satellite up links, and wide area networks. The library is no longer the center of the knowledge universe. With the world wide web, each individual is himself the center of a web of information. This means that the way an individual learns is radically changing.

The New Student Patron
TQM is customer centered. In order to center your service on your customer, you must know your customer. We as academic libraries must reevaluate how we serve our patrons in light of the changing way patrons are perceiving and learning in today's increasing technological society.

Donald E. Riggs, of the University of Michigan, in his article Strategic Quality Management in Libraries writes, "After many years of providing excellent service to users, librarians have fallen short in their understanding of how their patrons actually learn. Library schools have been remiss in not focusing a course or two on the theories of learning. Librarians should have a better grasp of, for example, the theory of cognitive learning. The recent arrival of the online public access catalog has reaffirmed the need for a better understanding of the patron's learning patterns. Interaction between the human and the machine is a complex endeavor and one that requires more research (Riggs p. 94-95)."

The students we serve today are qualitatively different than students of 20 years ago. Their expectations and their ways of learning are vastly different than the students of the past. A recent article in American Scientist notes that IQ scores internationally are rising (Neisser). One theory is that our increased exposure to visually rich mass media---television, computers, video games -- has enabled us to perform better on spatial-visual tests. The theory states that the ability to interpret different forms of information from different media and make some kind of sense of it is what these IQ tests actually test for. The human population has been subjected to an increasingly fast and changing type and amount of media information over the past 50 years. This change in their media environment, so goes the claim, has actually trained human beings to do better on IQ tests. Increasingly, technology, then, is not just changing what we think and know, but it is affecting how we think and come to know.

How does and will this affect education? Could it be that students who see and react to their environment in ways radically different than their past peers require radically different methods of teaching? In this light it seems clear that types of education that utilize technology, specifically multimedia approaches, will be more effective than simply using the traditional methods of education.

How does this affect academic libraries? Technology has greatly raised the expectations of library patrons. Students are no longer content to wait two weeks for interlibrary loan to deliver a book or article from afar. We are lucky today if the student is even satisfied with the paper books and articles that are in our own library. When told that it may take at least two weeks to receive an ILL article, a typical response is, but, don t they have a fax machine? Students raised on video games, music television, and fast food view information retrieval vastly different than the generation before them. They want to look it up in electronic indexes (don t even get near those ancient paper indexes), on CD-ROM or the Internet, and they want the full text of the article or book downloaded and printed in front of them in a matter of moments. If it does not happen, they are very disappointed. It matters not that the library system is not set up to deliver to their expectations They know it is technologically possible. Therefore, they want it. I often observe that the computer was supposed to bring us a paper-less society. On the contrary, we are using more paper now (to print out downloaded articles) than we ever have in our institutional history.

Certainly we must still teach traditional basic search strategies and methods in the library. Even students raised on fast food must be convinced of the great benefits of a full course meal. But, we must realize the great change that the information age has wrought in our patrons. Technology is affecting both how a student learns and how she perceives, and anticipates this education. The very way people are perceiving is changing. Higher education, and therefore academic libraries, simply must change with them if these institutions are to remain effective. This is where synergy comes in.

How the "New" Academic library is evolving into a symbiotic partnership with instructional technology and how TQM is playing a major role: The new synergy.
How are academic libraries to change to meet the demands of this new student? The answer is not new. In fact, it is already happening in some institutions of higher education. It involves using total quality management to facilitate the synergy of university information organizations.

In an ongoing online discussion of what the future of higher education will be like, the University of Michigan School of Information, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation, initiated the Vision 2010 project. In most of the possible future scenarios developed in this project the commercial sector had replaced academic institutions as the primary provider of advanced and ongoing learning by the year 2010 (Vision 2010). Where does this leave academic libraries? It leaves us loosing to the commercial sector who will prove to be able to adapt faster and with more quality management and service than the traditional academic library. Simply put, if the academic library as an institution does not embrace total quality ways of management and education, it is almost assured it will be eventually replaced, or at least marginalized, by an organization that does. What to do?

The answer to this is the most exciting thing happening in the information field. I believe that the very future and viability of academic libraries as an institution and the information business in academia in general turn on this point. One of quality management s most powerful tenets is the emphasis on team building and empowerment. This must be the future of all knowledge organizations. Total Quality Management and the philosophy that it embodies is essential as a methodology to foster/import/promote/facilitate the communication, common goals, and merging or virtual union of all departments on campus that store, process, access, and provide information. This includes the academic library, the computer center, and the instructional media technology center.

That's a point worth repeating, and I think I will. Total Quality Management and the philosophy that it embodies is essential as a methodology to foster/import/promote/facilitate the communication, common goals, and the virtual union of all departments on campus that store, process, access, and provide information. This includes the academic library, the computer center, and the instructional media technology center. These separate departments are beginning to work together to create a new synergy.

The necessity for this cooperation was recognized several years ago. As early as 1990 (ancient times in the information field) Robert Heterick, Vice President for Information Systems at Virginia Tech, spelled it out clearly. I quote Heterick directly:

"In an era in which the cost of chip technology is decreasing at about 25 percent per year -- and the cost of higher education continues to outstrip the rise in just about everything other than medical care -- we should be aggressively seeking targets of opportunity for that technology. That suggests a campus information architecture that brings into close working relationship, and an even closer strategic planning partnership, information sources, control mechanisms, and distribution channels. In the academy that means libraries, computing centers, communications networks (voice and data), printing and publishing activities, as well as broadcast and closed-circuit television."

Sort of sounds like the library taking over everything on campus doesn't it? Or conversely, the computer department, or the campus TV station taking over the library, one or the other taking over everything else. At least, that is how many people who value their turf in the short term see it. It takes the long view and a radical shift in vision to see differently: to see sovereign departments and organizations in a "virtual union" : a synergy of forces.

See, that is where the paradigm of managing by TQM, CQI, or whatever you want to call the so called "quality revolution," is vital to this change that has to occur. Because, either we who live in this information architecture cooperate with our fellow information architects on campus, or we end up competing with them, and thus vastly diluting our effectiveness and power. The eventual result not hard to imagine. As Ben Franklin put it so succinctly at the start of the American Revolution, "If we do not all hang together, we shall certainly all hang separately."

TQM helps in this virtual union, this new synergy, by being the process of change that is used. Paradigm shifts. Oh, how I wish I had come up with that idea. It is such an elegant concept. But, I didn't. Thomas Kuhn did, or at least popularized the notion, in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn described the evolution of science in shifting paradigms, shifts from the traditional viewpoint into whole new ways of thinking about something (Kuhn). Such elements of change are, as we know, certainly not confined to the field of science.

Libraries used to be buildings where students came to read magazines, check out books, get entangled in microfilm, and access all the information they needed for any research paper. Campus computer departments traditionally held control of hardware and software concerns, supplied the air-conditioned rooms full of banks of computers, and supplied all the on-campus expertise involving anything related to computers . Media, communication or a/v departments handled all audio-visual needs, any closed or open circuit television broadcasts, as well as most of a campus's instructional technology needs.

But, all of that is changing - fast. What we are on the verge, indeed, what we are experiencing at this very date is a paradigm shift in the way information is accessed, viewed, stored, and brokered, who does it, and how it is done. In the digital age information is no longer just the domain of the library. Patrons need not even come into the library to access much of what the library offers. They can access it from any computer lab on campus, or from any computer connected to the Internet for that matter. The sum total of a university's computer expertise is not ensconced in the computer departments, indeed, nearly every department (I did say "nearly") has some significant degree of computer software, hardware, internet, database, and you-name-a-computer-thing expertise. Media and communication support departments have lost their monopoly over media and communication support. Instructional technology knowledge, equipment, and use is now spread all over the place. It is very nearly part of the background.

The Academic Library of the Future: The Information Arcade
Allow me to insert a brief vision of the future academic library. As technology increases and students acquire more and more access to data and resources, they are increasingly using the technology to assemble and present their final product. Though student papers are still the current mainstay of student output, increasingly students are turning to digital methods to produce their "papers." In the future a student will not just come to library to look up resources for her paper and then go back home to put all her note cards together in the form of a traditional paper. A student will use the library as an "information arcade" where she can sit down at a computer workstation (formally a domain of the computer department), access all manner of media, both optically stored and online (formally maintained by the library), rearrange and assemble it into a presentation/paper, (with software formally the domain of the instructional technology department) and copy it to a disk (or the storage medium of the day). In short, the library has become a simple focal point of the campus information system: the place to assemble and manipulate all information from the integrated network of information available.

The point being: the patron does not care where the information comes from, who generates it, stores it, or manages it. They just want it. Gerald Bernbom associate director of University Computing Services at Indiana University writing in Cause/Effect late last year said, "User services may in time become the greatest driving force for convergence among librarians, archivists, and information systems managers. As networked information technologies begin to offer the appearance of an integrated world of information, users will expect the reality of such integration ( Bernbom )."

Synergy of Cooperation
Why, not join forces as information architects to work officially in concert? "The lone ranger style of working will not work in the future." writes Carole Barone, associate Vice Chancellor -Informatin Technology at the University of California, Davis. "We need each other! Complex tasks and rapid change require collaborative effort to succeed. Chaotic environments require mutual support. The best and most creative and effective answers to problems are the result of synthesizing many ideas and viewpoints (Barone)." Using the tenets of TQM, the various departments on campus who store, process, access, and provide information can and should cooperate to their mutual benefit and survival to facilitate, coordinate, support, and promote the overall common information purpose, mission, and goals of the university.

The academic library can be the leader in bringing a campus s information services together. The academic library possesses the knowledge and training of information science, the expertise in teaching information skills, and the faculty clout and organizational ability. With these ingredients already firmly in place, the academic library is well positioned --not to take over the jobs of other information departments--but to initiate and facilitate cooperation among them.

This is the synergy of the new academic information environment. Synergy is a resulting force that is greater than the sum of its parts. According to Daniel Seymour, synergy is the single organizational dynamic that makes professional bureaucracies move in a specific direction. (Seymour p. 32) Moving in one specific direction, as a synergistic force, is what will reenergize academic libraries and all other academic information/ knowledge organizations of the future.

Time does not permit me to go into detail about specific examples of how this is already happening on academic campuses. Don't just take my work for it. I draw your attention to the links on the web page for this paper for such examples. Suffice it is to say here that it is already happening and, like most things having to do with technology, it is happening at an accelerating pace. It is all part of what Geri Bunker of the University of Washington Libraries calls "customer centered collaboration (Bunker)." Thus, the customer centered approach of TQM is found firmly embedded in the future of the synergistic collaboration between academic libraries and other campus information and instructional technology departments.

Conclusion
In the preface to his book Microcosm George Gilder quotes computer scientist pioneer Carver Meed who said, "Listen to the technology and find out what it is telling you (Gilder p. 11)." In an age when we seemed to be driven as well as overwhelmed by the technology around us it may very well pay to stand back and "listen to what it is telling us." For as concerning the architects and archivists of information technology, what it is telling us is, I believe, very clear. The future of the academic library lies in using the tenants of the quality revolution to facilitate the virtual union with those academic departments that store, process, access, and provide information and informational services.

I believe this concept has been even better explained and stated by Robert Heterick, Vice President for Information Systems at Virginia Tech. When I came across his paper on the internet I got so excited I accidentally logged off my computer. Heterick not only says exactly what I hold near and dear to be true, but he also sources two of my favorite books, George Gilder's, Microcosm as well as Kuhn. Of course, I could not end this lecture without letting Heterick have his say, again. He says it so well, I decided to let his words speak for themselves.

"Microprocessor technology has clearly demonstrated that it is the idea, not the physical embodiment in artifact, that has enduring economic value. The surrogate of the library as a physical place, the computing center as a collection of machines, and the network as an assemblage of wires are weak concepts in the age of the microcosm. Viewed holistically, the information triad of libraries, computers, and communications [and here I would add "instructional technology"] can play the role of Maxwell's Demon in releasing the latent energy of the talented people in our educational system. A focus on the client served rather than the action enabled is far too limiting for the age of the microcosm."

According to C.A. Hughes libraries "must re-invent and reposition themselves for the information age and the next century or gradually lose their relevance ( Hughes p.139)." A comparison of campus priorities: The "logical" library in an organized anarchy. We desperately do not want to loose our relevance. Fortunately, if we act now, we can do something to forestall such an event. The spirit of cooperation and the vision for change that strategic total quality management provides is the best way for academic libraries and their sister knowledge organizations to "re-invent and reposition themselves" for the next century. The synergy produced will be the best hope that academic libraries have been given to not only survive, but rejuvenate themselves in the digital age into the next millennium. (I knew if I tried hard enough I'd be able to get the word millennium in there.)

Thank you. Tack sa mycket.