For awhile now, I’ve been mulling over the work that we do in my department of the library. This is in part due to some strategic planning for big changes, planning for a department retreat, and engaging in leadership training. Whenever I find myself asking what it is that we do as health sciences librarians and why we do it, I always end up pulling a book off of my shelf, Access to Medical Knowledge: Libraries, Digitization, and the Public Good. Written by Frances K. Groen in 2007, it is a thoughtful treatise on these very questions.
Frances had a long and distinguished career in medical libraries, culminating as the Trenholme Director of Libraries at McGill University. She was a president of the Medical Library Association and recognized professionally in both the United States and her home country of Canada. I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting with Frances on several occasions and invited her to speak at the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries, Inc. (NAHSL) in 2015.
But back to her book. In the preface she states, “This book was written as an attempt to understand why librarians, whether working in the health care environment or in the academic milieu, make the choices and develop the services that they do. Are they guided by principles or values within a conceptual framework, or are they merely responding opportunistically to a variety of influences – institutional, social, technical, or political?” These two sentences have stuck with me for years and I bring them to mind regularly, particularly when I’m in a place like I find myself now, i.e., planning and leading (or at least trying to).
Frances’s career and study led her to believe that our profession has 3 core values (in my words): (1) ensuring access to quality information to anyone needing it, (2) empowering and educating people to use that information, and (3) preserving knowledge from the past, for the future. Whenever I think about what we do and why we do it, I run it through “The Groen Test” to see if it measures up.
One big issue facing librarians like myself who work in research support and scholarly communications is the push towards open science and the 2022 OSTP Memo that will mandate that the outputs of all federally-funded (United States) research be immediately and freely available to the public starting in December 2025. The repercussions of this mandate will be many and they will be large. I think a lot about how we will tackle it. I think about who will pay for it. I think about structures and processes being redone to make it happen and I think about how this will affect my library, especially my library’s budget.
I think also about other things that we do in my team – maintaining an institutional repository, publishing journals, maintaining a publishing platform, assisting with data management, helping to ensure compliance with funding mandates (publications, data, and more), generating and analyzing reports to demonstrate how research is disseminated, how it has an impact, and always teaching, writing, researching. So many of the things we’re doing now – or at least how we’re doing them – were not common in 2007 (some not even in 2017!), when Frances was writing, but I still run it through the test.
Open science, data management and sharing, and ensuring that we, as an institution, comply with mandates towards these things all clearly support the value of providing access to as wide a group of people as possible. Our institutional repository does the same, while also meeting the value of preserving the knowledge generated by our researchers, faculty, students, and staff. We constantly educate to empower our patrons, to help them find and discern information, and more recently battle the onslaught of disinformation. We help people know how to track their work, how to disseminate it more widely so that it reaches the audiences it needs to reach. This, too, is a means of empowering people to use information.
And so, I feel we pass the test and that the work we do still meets the values of our profession.
But … I’ve also been wondering a lot lately about HOW we do what we do. More specifically, I’ve been wondering if the longstanding belief that academic libraries operate freely, i.e., that we provide resources and services without cost to our users, makes any sense any more. A few weeks back, I worked on a bibliometrics report and a network analysis for a professor. It took a good bit of time, access to some expensive databases and tools, and my own expertise. And when it was done, I happily passed it along. For free. That is our modus operandi. In a way, it’s something that we have adopted as a deeply held value. But does it make sense? Particularly when we are faced with budget cuts and staffing shortages?
What if the library was a core service, like every other core service on campus, and charged for the work we do? I admit that I’m not sold 100% on that idea, but I am more and more convinced that we need to start looking at other models for our services, besides this historically free one. Especially as I think about non-funded government mandates towards open access, I cannot help but think that someone has to pay and it cannot be us. At least not without severe cuts into everything else that we do or more likely, elimination of services and resources all together. And that does start to mess with our values. Messy, it is.
Friday thoughts. I hope my readers have had a good week!
A Librarian by Any Other Name 
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