In this episode of CU at the Libraries, “In Conversation with Dean of the Libraries" we hear from the Dean of the University Libraries Robert H. McDonald about a new strategic plan, shared values, and the future of both online education and academic libraries at the University of Colorado Boulder. The transcript has been modified to accommodate the difference in medium. Press play to listen to this episode below or find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Claire Woodcock: “Before we get into it, I'd like to point out that you were appointed dean of the University Libraries in 2018, not too long ago. What attracted you to this campus and our libraries?"
Robert H. McDonald: “Well, I think the big attraction here for me was the character of the campus. We have a wonderful campus and a wonderful set of libraries. It's really the people and the places and the campuses that make the great institutions of higher ed of our country. Even in the first few months of working in my job, you could really tell that that was true in almost every case. We really have a wonderful campus here that has excellent strengths in sciences as well as in business and the humanities. And I really love a campus that has every part of information.”
CW: “And scenic views?”
RHM: “It's hard to forget the mountains when you get to see them everyday walking across campus.”
CW: “Right? It's perfect. So, I thought we could start with the big picture and then really hone in on what you're envisioning for the next couple of years.”
RHM: “From that kind of standpoint, it's really helpful to think about our new strategic plan process that you mentioned. One of the things I wanted to do in my first year here was looking at the current strategic plan and look at where we would see building a new one because it was about to run out in the 2020 timeframe. That was a key part of my first year here, working with the associate deans as well as my leadership team and the Deans and Directors Council to come up with a process that would be really inclusive for all of our employees as well as our key collaborators for the campus.
“I think we've come up with a new draft that will be really good for that. It's really values-inspired by the staff of the library and really has some great connections I think for our campus. Our key values for that are: Include, Empower, Connect, Learn and Inspire. And that really has the great values of a great public library. a great public university library. I think that's what we want to focus on in the next three years, figure out how we can build the bridges in each of those areas, for our students, our faculty, our staff and our key collaborators on campus.”
CW: “That's really exciting. And I'm sure that it's not easy, what with meeting deadlines and trying to please as many people as possible.”
RHM: “Well that's the hard part. You can't please everyone all the time, right? So, we were really in a good place to start this. We hired a consulting group to help us with it. Part of that was because they bring a lot of expertise in working with research libraries and part of it is because having an outside consultant keeps you on task and on your deadlines.
“What we've come up with here in this new plan really has the language, I believe, of the staff of the Libraries, because of that time we were able to spend doing that. We got some early ideas on where we wanted to go and then we refined them using the input of the focus groups. We had great turnout and attendance, pretty close to 90 percent. Even when we went to vote on key terms for the values, we got close to 100 votes on that. So, out of 150 to 160 people, that's really pretty good.”
CW: “So there were a lot of people engaging with this process, which is great. And a lot of good ideas were pitched by faculty and staff. How did you and the associate dean seek to prioritize the plethora of ideas brought forward and turn them into a collective set of values.”
RHM: “Well one of the key ways we worked on that was having the draft circulated for a while. Then we asked every department head to meet with their teams so they could go through it, raise questions that they had or talk about reordering things from a priority standpoint, even down to individual words and meanings and things.
“All of that was reviewed and looked at. A lot of changes were offered and made. If changes were offered that made sense, we generally adopted them. There were some times where people just didn't like specific words, and if there was nothing offered, well then, it might have stayed the same.”
Dean of the University Libraries Robert H. McDonald in the Earth Sciences & Map Library's pop-up studio.
CW: “Can you describe some of those values to us?”
RHM: “They really came from the focus groups and the values of all of our library staff. I really love it that was so big into inclusion. We really want everyone to feel at home in our facilities and feel like they can come to us and work with us on services and solutions, and that's important to me too. I really believe in having public universities available for everyone in the state and beyond. That's what we have here and that's what we want for people to feel included to feel like this is part of their home. They can come here and do research, they can use our online resources wherever they're at and feel like they can get the help that they need. And by doing that we're empowering people. I know a lot of people believe that all information can pretty much be found on Google now. Information, much like some of the other rare objects that we have on this planet, really comes at a price."
"Without great public institutions to help provide access, then we can't empower people to use that information to both create new knowledge and to learn." - Robert H. McDonald
RHM: “That's what we're trying to do here, connect people with that information, so that they can learn and then take that to the next generation. Inspire them to build upon the creative works, scientific research and other types of scholarly outputs that they might dream up while they're here. It's hard to empower people if they don't feel included.”
CW: “Absolutely.”
RHM: “We really need to be everywhere that the learner is. They’re on campus, they use our facilities. That's great. You know we have a lot of that pretty well covered.
“But, we could do more. It'd be great if we had a few more facilities that were open later hours like we do in Norlin.
“It'd be great if we could be in the learning management system where many of the learners are online, taking our courses. Whether we're there in their learning management system or whether we're just available online when they need us in the middle of the night when they're doing an assignment and they need to understand how to better find what they're looking for. It's all of those kinds of snippets of learning that we need to, first, be able to capture in a good way and then be able to spin out through many different channels, whether it's online, whether it's in person whether it's on the phone, occasionally people give us a call like that.”
CW: “I have a personal anecdote for you that I think supports your thoughts on this. When I was an undergrad I went to the State University of New York at Fredonia and I fell in love with our library, the Daniel A. Reed Library. Some of my fondest memories of school come from buying two large iced coffees and heading over to the library, finding a cubby to hole up in and just reading and writing and thinking without distraction other than that caffeine headache that would sometimes kick in.
“That library facilitated my exploration of topics that I care about and my growth as a lifelong learner. And it still makes me emotional to think about it, more so now because there are plenty of students who have a similar story to this as it relates to our libraries. Offering students a place to explore their potential is one of the greatest gifts that academic libraries can give to an institution. And I think that inclusively is at the heart of that.”
RHM: “So do I. I mean we have to be where our users are. We can't put up barriers to including them. We want to empower them, connect them to the information that we have so that they can learn new things and inspire others.
CW: Yeah absolutely. So how might the mission and values written into our strategic plan look in practice?
RHM: “Well in terms of the mission and the values there, what we're looking to do is really be open to enabling others to use the information that we have in our libraries to learn about new and exciting things, to create new knowledge. Whether it's creating a new experiment, creating a new type of object from a maker space, we want to be able to connect that for them and to be a hub for that for them. And that's what we see in these strategic directions.
“A lot of people have asked me, ‘where's the research part?’ Well, we have a ton of research going on on this campus. That's embedded in the mission of the university as a research university. We support a lot of that, we support a lot of the information that makes that possible. We support a lot of the scientists and humanists who are publishing in new ways that are more open and available to everyone.
“Those are the kind of things we want to bring together around this set of values so that everyone can really feel engaged when they connect with the libraries. That's what we want to do here, too, for the students, engage with them so that they understand they can come to us when they hit a stumbling block. If they're that kind of a student, maybe they never have to talk to us at all and it's great and they just get to use the many millions of dollars with information that we provide on an annual basis.”
CW: “The fact is that we have a lot of ambitious goals. What would you consider one of the most ambitious goals to be and how do you see us tackling it.”
RHM: “Well I think a key to understanding this strategic plan, most everything has been done in a pretty agile and iterative fashion. So, there's nothing preconceived by it.
“There are the big ideas that are out there and some of them are pretty ambitious, like seamlessly connecting our users to information. A lot of the stumbling blocks there happen because of multiple vendors that we have to deal with in gathering the information. Some of them don't want seamless access because it's in their best interest not to have it. Some of them do. We need to find a way to connect those for our users in better ways so that it's easier and easier to get to the information.
“There's just not enough spaces for students to study on campus. Library facilities are a key piece of having what we do have. We'd like for it to be the most inspiring that it can be for the students so that they want to come study want to use our information and connect with our services.”
CW: “So, I do want to shift gears for a minute because you were recently appointed to a new dual position with the university leading online education. I'd love to hear why you consider online education important to the campus and how this new organization is being structured?”
RHM: “The new role is senior vice provost of online education. Right now, we're in another agile process that we're using to work through some of the key areas that we want to pull into that new entity.
“There are three working groups on campus. One that's the online future state working group, one that's the continuing education future state working group, and one that's called the infrastructure working group. And all three are hard at work this semester identifying key components of areas to bring into the new entity for online education as well as keeping many of the services for continuing education operating.
“In terms of importance for the campus, it's vitally important that we build an infrastructure that can scale for enough students who want to basically take courses, certificates, or programs from our universities so that we can reach the rest of the state. We're in an area that's pretty dense being here close to Denver. There's plenty of parts of our state where they may be looking for the specialties that we have to offer and our degrees that they can't get where they're at. We'd like to see as many as possible available to those students as well as to many students who are in our region, our nation and even globally.
“A lot of what we're working on right now, both with our strategic plan in the libraries as well as an online education, is still a work in progress and it's been great. With all the support I've been getting both in the libraries as well as from colleagues and Continuing Education and the Office of Information Technology, it's this kind of support that we need to start thinking about the university as a whole and some of the key areas that we would like to do strategically as a campus in order to achieve our next goals for the long term in the next 10 to 20 years. And it's really delightful to work with so many wonderful people on accomplishing these goals.”
CW: “How do you foresee the future of academic libraries in terms of what they produce and the resources they provide in a constantly changing world.”
RHM: “So, in terms of the future of academic libraries, I think a lot of the work that we're doing in our office of Open & Digital Scholarship Services as well as with our partners on the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship are some of the key areas that libraries need to be actively building capacity for publishing data and for new models of publishing that I think we've yet to see in terms of how we go about that within libraries and universities.
“It's a complex ecosystem of scholarly publishing, but a lot of what we can do to help, I think, is the similar library skills we brought to bear and hundreds of years of archiving and collecting and providing access to information. We just need to find the right partners, at our campuses, so that we can provide that for all of our faculty in new ways. Because the sharing of the data, at some point, is going to be just as important as the sharing of the synthesis of the data in the scholarly article or in the monograph. What people are going to want to do is replicate those experiments and that scientific process over time. If they have the source material they can do that. If they don't they're just guessing at it.
“That's a key area that, I think, we're very strong in and that we connect with a lot of different research libraries around that level. I'd like to see us do more there. We've been very successful in working with our research computing group on campus to both develop regional, grant-funded programs that work with the Rocky Mountain Computing Consortium as well as some other kinds of deeper dive studies that we're working on right now with Ithaca S&R concerning use of data services by faculty on campuses, like ours, with our demographic and libraries.”
CW: “Thank you so much Robert for coming and taking the time to share your thoughts with myself and our listeners. We all appreciate your service.”
RHM: “Thanks Claire.”
This concludes our first season of CU at the Libraries. Be sure to listen, rate, review, and share our other episodes from this season. Thank you so much for tuning in. We can't wait to see you at the Libraries in 2020!