About 15 years ago, I was invited to participate in a strategic planning process at a prominent university located in southern Maine. I had recently been hired to oversee their new distance learning masters in Education program and had volunteered to serve as the university’s webmaster. The strategic planning process involved a series of focus group sessions with various faculty and administrators all run by a Boston-based higher education consulting group. Being very interested in distance learning and the potential for the newly invented “World Wide Web,” I was eager to participate and share my vision of the university of the future. Indeed the summer prior, I had taught a seminar on the “future of education” and had a chance to read up on what the futurists were thinking about. I remember the phrase “bricks and mortar to ‘clicks’ and mortar” having been recently penned and my long view was that universities that were investing in buildings and not into server silos were bound to fail.
When I had the opportunity to meet with one of the focus groups, most of the other faculty were rather traditional types who had graced the campus for many years and appeared to enjoy their roles as “sage on the stage.” There was quite a bit of skepticism about distance learning and even though I had a positive reputation for teaching in the traditional modality at that university, the majority of faculty didn’t really seem to value what I was doing.
When it came my time to talk, I chattered away about my views and how as an institution we needed to get out there and expand out “presence” on the Internet and World Wide Web, that we needed to build more server capacity and in particular, not invest in the large scale college library expansion program that was in the works. I remember the look of disdain on the faces of my colleague, but I pressed forward. I can remember one asking me if I really believed that there would come a time when traditional students would actually take distance learning classes in lieu of the campus-based, terrestrial offerings that then were the norm.
The gentleman who was leading the focus group appeared to welcome my vision and even though I suspect he was not suppose to shape the discussion, he gave me lots of clear messages that he thought my vision was indeed the correct one.
The library project did go forward, but on a much smaller scale. Fortunately, the director of the library was also a very smart guy and he and his staff had already seen the writing on the walls. In fact, he eventually became the vice president in charge of information technology at the university and shepherded through a rather dramatic number of technology advances in the next decade.
With this backdrop, I read the recent news story about the pending closure of the medical library at Johns Hopkins University. While this is a loss of tradition, it is clearly, as the title mentions, a sign of the times. The author makes this clever observation:
People don’t go to Johns Hopkins for appendectomies. They go there with rare and difficult conditions to seek help from the top medical minds in the world. If I’m at Hopkins as a patient and not to visit old friends and colleagues, I don’t want my team of physicians and residents to be searching through the stacks for possible answers or keys to my treatment. I want them to pull out their iPads and have instant access to the information they need to make me better.
Read the whole article “Sign of the times: Johns Hopkins shutters its medical library.”
———-
Photo credit: Image licensed through Creative Commons by Brett Jordan
This item also published on Maine CITE News.
