The Status and Future of Canada’s Libraries and Archives CARL’s response to the Consultation Questions of the Royal Society of Canada’s Expert Panel, presented by Executive Director Brent Roe. October 4th 2013 1. What is your mandate and who are your members? CARL provides leadership on behalf of Canada’s research libraries and enhances their capacity to advance research and higher education. It promotes effective and sustainable scholarly communication, and public policy that enables broad access to scholarly information. The Association’s current members are the 29 major academic research libraries across Canada together with Library and Archives Canada and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI). Please refer to Appendix 1 for more detailed general information about CARL. 2. From your collective perspective, what challenges or issues are most prominent for your organization today? By way of a response to this question, I would note that in 2012, CARL member libraries adopted a set of Strategic Directions 2013-2016, which are provided in full in Appendix 2. These serve to give a general sense of the major challenges that CARL is asked to address for and with its member libraries. Please refer to the “Some Recent and Current CARL Interests and Activities” portion of Appendix 1 for a list of more specific concerns of CARL and what has been done recently by way of addressing them. 3. What do you anticipate as future challenges (by 2020), and how do you see your membership contributing to address them? Given that 2020 is only about six years beyond the present date, it is likely that many of the same challenges addressed in some way in the 2013-2016 CARL Strategic Directions will remain challenges for both CARL and its member libraries to deal with. Inasmuch as CARL, as an association, has not formally speculated with its members on the more distant future of research library concerns, CARL cannot offer at this time an “official” position on such potential challenges or on what it would do to address them. Nevertheless, in consultation with the CARL Board, CARL Executive Director Brent Roe has assembled in Appendix 3 some potential longerterm challenges for Canadian research libraries. These are not at this time endorsed by the members of CARL, but are provided for thought and discussion. CARL members will be discussing longer-term challenges and opportunities for Canadian research libraries at their November 2013 Fall Meeting and an “as was said” report will be provided for the Panel’s further consideration. -2- 4. What would your organization be doing if funding were increased? And what are you not doing because of cutbacks or reduced funding? CARL, happily, has not experienced significant setbacks in funding as an association, although a number of its member research libraries have experienced institutional budget cuts in recent years. Nevertheless, there is much (or much more) that could be done by CARL as an association with an increase in funding. The following are proposed only as a few examples.  Develop and provide more training institutes for the staff of Canadian research libraries on emerging services.  Contract with professional researchers to produce studies on particular emerging themes or problem areas.  Contract with persons who could broker and coordinate joint initiatives in particular areas where these would be strategically valuable (e.g., research data management or scholarly communication projects)  Coordinate and collaborate on projects with similar organizations in other countries.  Directly fund the operation of projects that further strategic aims of the association, e.g., a more-fully developed harvester of OA content, an OA journal portal, digitization projects 5. How does your organization relate to Library and Archives Canada (LAC)? Or, in your view, how should LAC relate to major archival and librarian organizations? LAC is a full member of CARL, with the important exception that it (and its individual participants in CARL) does not participate in any advocacy-related discussion or activity toward government. It has been helpful to have LAC as a CARL member over the years inasmuch as LAC often has a role to play in research library projects with the universities. The university libraries may be helpful collaborators with LAC-initiated projects as well. As CARL is a forum most importantly for Canada’s research library leaders, it is desirable that the Librarian and Archivist of Canada be personally involved in CARL discussion insofar as this is possible. LAC’s continuing support of and involvement in Canadiana.org has been and will continue to be important. Beyond CARL, in the broader Canadian library and archival community, LAC has an abiding leadership role and the fora that it can provide bring together both the library and archival communities, which does not occur nationally in other contexts. The research library community considers it important that LAC be involved internationally both as a research library with other key research libraries and as a national library organization among other national libraries. In a similar vein, the Librarian and Archivist of Canada, in addition to leading an organization within government, has also traditionally been, in Canada, a certain “honorary” leader and representative of the Canadian library and archival community both in Canada and abroad. The person in that role, then, ideally has standing in, and the respect of, the library and archival -3- community, and in return embraces this aspect of the position. 6. What other information would you like to add? None at this time. Appendix 1: A Brief Overview of CARL The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), “the leadership organization for the Canadian research library community,” includes as members the 29 larger university libraries in Canada and two major federal library institutions (Library and Archives Canada and the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information). In general, CARL provides a forum for discussion (in both English and French) among the directors of its member libraries, coordinates joint projects of the member libraries, and advocates on behalf of Canada’s research libraries in the interests of research and higher education. It should be noted that our two national institution members do not participate in the advocacy discussion or activities of CARL. The representatives of the CARL member libraries are normally the library directors, but others, e.g., associate university librarians or subject experts, participate in CARL committees and project work. CARL is a not-for-profit corporation operating under the (federal) Canada-Not-for-profit Corporations Act (S.C. 2009, C.23). It is also a registered charity. An elected Board of Directors of six member library directors governs the Association. All Board terms are two years in length; the Vice-President automatically becomes President (currently Gerald Beasley, Vice-Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta). Operations of the association are managed by an Executive Director, Brent Roe, since 2008, a librarian by profession. CARL’s staff of four currently works in a downtown Ottawa office inasmuch as it interacts with both the federal government and other national organizations with interests in libraries, research and higher education. The annual budget of the Association is currently about $750,000, most of which comes from membership dues. Member libraries occasionally make special contributions to particular projects. CARL is itself a member of the Canadian Library Association (CLA), l’Association pour l’avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation (ASTED), the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and Canadiana.org; it is an associate member of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) and the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS). CARL is a supporter and active participant of Research Data Canada, the Digital Infrastructure Leadership Council and the Canadian Consortium for Research. The larger 17 CARL member libraries are also members of the (US-based) Association of Research Libraries (ARL), with which CARL works closely, so the directors of those libraries also meet and network in the context of ARL membership meetings and committee activities. CARL also maintains frequent contact with the four regional university library consortia in -4- Canada (COPPUL, OCUL, CREPUQ and CAUL), of which all CARL university library members are members of one or another. CARL’s activities are guided by a strategic plan, the most recent “Strategic Directions” covering the years 2013-2016. The current Strategic Directions focus on “advancing the vision of Canadian research libraries” by helping its membership to redefine the research library collection and services, collaborate nationally, and develop their roles in university community engagement and internationalization; on “building the capacity of Canadian research libraries” by facilitating the sharing and preservation of research collections, the development of new library expertise, and the surmounting of resource management issues; on “promoting the value of Canadian research libraries” by developing outcomes measures and assessment of library services, and building the role of the library in research; and on “supporting access to research” by coordinating research data management initiatives, promoting Open Access and new forms of scholarly communication, and representing academic and library interests in information policy. A list of recent or current projects appears below. CARL provides a number of regular services for its member libraries, including a library statistics collection and management service and coordination of LibQUAL+ Canada; preparation of a weekly e-mail alert of reports, articles, and events of relevance to research libraries; responses on members’ collective behalf to federal government consultations; a program of letters, briefs and visits to government officials on information and research policy issues; support for institutional repository development and promotion of member Open Access activities; a program of librarian research grants and special achievement awards; resources for the sponsoring of member-promoted events consistent with Association aims; production of awareness brochures, a website, annual reports and statistical reports; and so forth. Some CARL projects have developed into separate ongoing enterprises. The CARL-developed Canadian National Site Licensing Project, begun in 1996 for negotiation of digital content licensing on behalf of most Canadian universities was incorporated as the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) in 2001. The 2006 CARL-originated AlouetteCanada project for the discovery and coordination of digitization projects across Canadian memory institutions merged with Canadiana.org (formerly CIHM), an earlier CARL-originated microfilming/digitization organization, to form a new Canadiana.org, incorporated in 2008. Some Recent and Current CARL Interests and Activities Open Access to the results of publicly funded research      Worked with federal granting councils in planning a stakeholder consultation on a potential policy Supported development of the Coalition of Open Access Resources (COAR) Developed recommendations for CARL, CRKN, and research libraries on how they might best promote Open Access; following up on recommendations Ensuring that all researchers in Canada have recourse to an Open Access repository Consulting with Canadian journals on journal sustainability with Open Access An infrastructure for the preservation and sharing of research data   Developed a model of what such an infrastructure may look like and cultivated the interest of research support organizations Supporting the development of Research Data Canada -5-  Working to develop a network of local and regional data management projects Balanced copyright and understanding of copyright by library staff     Prepared letters, briefs, visits encouraging the passage of Bill C-11 on copyright modernization Held teleconference with expert lawyer Wanda Noel on the implications of recent Supreme Court decisions Wrote letters to encourage Canada’s support of the WIPO treaty for the blind Prepared letters and visits to express our concerns about potential copyright implications of trade agreements Access to broadband Internet for all Canadians; Internet privacy; federal government funding of research and its indirect costs; federal government support of national research support institutions  Prepared letters, briefs and visits to express our concerns recommendations for government policy and programs Development of the research skills of academic librarians   Planned and held Librarians’ Research Institutes (2012 and 2013) Offer two research grants for librarians’ research each year Development of research data management skills of academic librarians   Planned and held an Introduction to Research Data Management Services course for librarians Facilitating a “community of practice” among librarians beginning to deal with research data Awareness of library directors of developments in libraries and scholarly communication around the world    Organized a study tour to China for library directors in 2011; organizing another to Brazil in 2014 Produce a weekly “E-lert” for library directors and their staff Organize spring and fall membership meetings for member exchange of ideas and experiences Facilitation of library assessment    Organized pan-Canadian consortial runs of LibQUAL+ in 2010 and 2013 Carry out an annual collection and reporting of Canadian research library statistics Planning a Canadian Library Assessment Conference in October 2014 -6- Understanding of trends in research library human resources (HR)   Sponsoring a 2013 research libraries version of the national library HR study (“8Rs Redux”) Held a program for library directors to explore HR issues Greater mutual and public awareness of local research library special collections   Surveyed member libraries on needs and priorities; projects being defined Undertaking a census of information and potential digitization project on the Chinese experience in Canada Support for digitization of Canadian historical documentation  Providing ongoing funding and governance support of Canadiana.org; supported communication efforts around the major LAC-Canadiana.org digitization “Héritage Project” -7- Appendix 2: CARL Strategic Directions 2013 - 2016 In a research, teaching and learning landscape transformed by technological, demographic and socio-economic change, Canadian research libraries are adopting innovative strategies for acquiring, preserving and sharing knowledge. CARL represents and actively supports the many new and expanded roles for research libraries identified by its members. Specifically, CARL advances the vision, builds the capacity and promotes the value of Canadian research libraries while supporting improved access to research. 1 Advance the Vision of Canadian Research Libraries Redefine our research collections and services As academic resources in a growing number of formats become increasingly diverse, interdisciplinary and aggregated, CARL helps its members redefine their collections in ways that serve new teaching and research strategies and new areas of academic endeavour. 1.1 Strengthen the national role of the research library network As its members identify and coordinate initiatives that extend beyond local and regional boundaries, CARL offers support to Canada’s critically important national heritage, research and higher education agendas. 1.2 Promote community and international engagement CARL members increasingly expect to contribute to, and derive support from, communities and community organizations that exist outside their specific academic or institutional context. CARL represents its members accordingly, and creates partnerships and opportunities for information exchange that support a vibrant programme of collaboration and engagement. 2. Build the Capacity of Canadian Research Libraries 2.1 Facilitate collaborations to share and preserve Canada’s research collections CARL members play a critical part in the stewardship of research resources that support scholarship, policy-making and innovation. CARL explores and supports new collaborations between libraries and with other research organizations to attain more cost-effective methods for this stewardship. 2.2 Develop expertise for new and emerging roles As change in research, teaching and learning continues to accelerate, becoming increasingly computational and extending globally, CARL supports the development of libraries that include a wider variety of expertise and professional backgrounds. 2.3 Help members address resource management issues -8- Transformations in research and higher education converging with socio-economic changes require new, evidence-based approaches to leadership, the effective management of libraries and the successful development of new library programs. CARL provides a forum for members to address these issues and exchange best practices. 3. Promote the Value of Canadian Research Libraries 3.1 Support and develop more outcomes-based measures to demonstrate library impact on research, teaching and learning CARL coordinates the development of library-related metrics and tools relating to academic success, research outcomes, success rates for grant proposals, etc. 3.2 Facilitate the assessment of library services Through the delivery of assessment-related programming, information sharing, and support for relevant research, CARL supports members as they use outcomes-based evidence to establish the research library’s ROI (return on investment) and other measures of its value. 3.3 Expand the role of the library in research CARL and its members develop strategies, alliances and metrics to increase the number of opportunities to be research partners and to showcase library contributions to successful research initiatives. 4. Support Access to Research 4.1 Coordinate research data management initiatives Recognizing the value and potential of research data and data-intensive research to transform scholarship fundamentally, CARL coordinates efforts around awareness and advocacy, support and training, access and discovery, archiving and preservation, and virtual research environments. 4.2 Promote open access and new forms of scholarly communication CARL plays a leading role in promoting the ongoing transformation of modes of scholarly communication and the values of equity of access, broad dissemination and long term preservation of research that underpin the open access movement. 4.3 Represent the interests of the academic community in the information policy arena CARL is a major national voice for the interests of the academic community in information policy and a balanced and fair approach to copyright and intellectual property issues. -9- Appendix 3: Additional observations Some observations assembled, in consultation with the CARL Board, by Brent Roe, CARL Executive Director, regarding potential longer-term challenges of Canadian research libraries. It should be noted that the following observations, while assembled in consultation with the CARL Board, are provided simply for thought and discussion, and have not been endorsed by CARL members. These comments are not meant to be definitive or considered researched conclusions. CARL members will be discussing the question of longer-term future challenges (and even opportunities) for Canadian research libraries at the CARL Fall Meeting in November 2013, during which other and different observations will no doubt be generated, which we will be pleased to share with the Expert Panel in an “as was said” report at that time. Scholarly Communication There remain, and will remain for some time, some major problems (for research libraries) in the area of scholarly communication. Because the end-users (university faculty, most importantly) are not exposed to the high price of subscriptions and licenses for access to the scholarly journals that they need, and because the library would pay high a “political” price on campus if it cancelled journals perceived by faculty to be important, the library is under pressure to continue to pay the inflationary prices demanded by some large international commercial (and even some society) publishers. To avoid doing so is made even more difficult when the libraries pay for large indivisible bundles of a given publisher’s journals. The development of consortial licensing in Canada will have helped to control the price inflation to which individual libraries, in a licensing environment characterized by non-disclosure clauses, would be especially vulnerable, but price increases that are higher than the general inflation rate remain an issue. Open access, which while certainly offering the important and primary benefit of enlarged access to research articles, has been embraced by libraries also with a vague hope that it might eventually exert some downward pressure on journal price inflation by lowering the value of the subscription-based published journal the more its individual articles are available to end users elsewhere online for free; so far this has not clearly occurred, but may yet. The development of fully open access journals in many fields should be helpful inasmuch some of these journals may viably compete against some subscription journals for manuscripts. Canadian research libraries are already supporting the publishing of dozens of open access journals; the longer-term funding and staffing this hosting activity remains a question for many libraries. CARL has current initiatives touching on some of these challenges (see Appendix 1 and 2), and will serve as a discussion forum for research library directors as they consider what more might be done. Information Technology Information technology (IT) continues to evolve and will certainly do so well into the future. Transitioning to new technology or integrating new technology is costly and skills-intensive. While Canada’s research libraries generally have good IT support, staff time is limited and the particular knowledge and in-house skill necessary for establishing a particular new technology -10- may not be immediately available. In some areas and to some extent, organizations such as CARL can play a role in developing and providing training programs on particular technologyrelated themes of common interest, though this is generally not aimed at technicians. In areas that are more specific to library contexts, the libraries will continue to need to liaise with the library and information programs around more formal curricula insofar as the technical skills are seen as particularly relevant to library applications. Cost of Access to Content The “knowledge explosion” continues such that there is ever more scholarly content being published, still most importantly as journal articles and books. Aside from the growth in traditionally published research content, there is also a growing interest in and availability of datasets of many kinds, which can be expensive to acquire or access. As many research libraries find their distinction in their special and archival collections, meeting the cost of acquiring, processing, and preserving these rare or unique materials is an ongoing challenge. Even without the journals pricing problem, research libraries must be selective and cannot afford access to all the content that their researchers, instructors and students need to consult: library acquisition budgets have not generally been growing faster than the general inflation rate, a situation unlikely to improve unless the economy markedly strengthens. With newer formats, e.g., data, there are costs not only in the acquisition of content, but also in the building and maintaining of services to facilitate their use. With analogue formats, the storage of growing collections has been a challenge for research libraries for some time, with some creating storage facilities in lower-cost locations for lower-use materials, whether as individual libraries or in a consortium of other libraries in a region; while these may somewhat alleviate the need to build expensive new library buildings, they represent significant costs in themselves. In confronting these challenges, it will be worthwhile for Canadian research libraries to continue to find ways to coordinate their acquisitions and ensure that effective resource sharing is allowed for under digital content licenses. CARL will provide, again, a key forum for such discussion among Canadian research library leaders. Workforce Skills As research libraries set out to provide new content formats or new services (e.g., research data management) to their campus communities, they often find that they do not have the necessary knowledge or skills for this in their current staffing. As it may not be easy to hire someone with the appropriate skills in an emerging area, it may be necessary to have current staff develop the needed skills, the training for which may require considerable time and money. Approaches to the sharing of skilled personnel among research libraries, when such personnel are rare, might be explored in a context such as CARL. The need for newer skills in the research library workforce entails a number of additional challenges aside from cost. If new technical skills are to be hired into a library, there can be question as to whether the new staffing must be a librarian or can have other qualifications. If the new staffing has other qualifications, it is often not obvious where they fit in the library’s human resources scheme: if they do work in many respects similar to that of librarians, should they also have the “academic” designation (and privileges and responsibilities) as librarian -11- colleagues? Then again, the academic/faculty model of librarianship itself is established with widely varying thoroughness across Canadian research libraries. There is as well a concern among some librarians that the librarian profession is devalued when, in certain circumstances, skills are found from outside of professional librarianship. The library and information studies programs are challenged to evolve their curricula quickly enough to respond to all the needs experienced by the libraries for professional librarians with knowledge and skills in emerging areas. Libraries and organizations such as CARL will need to remain in contact with the professional education programs. The “best” approaches to these library workforce development questions will likely be quite local, but CARL, again, can provide a forum for the exchange of ideas. Information Policy Copyright law affects the cost for research libraries of providing content to their communities; it also affects the uses that can be made of content whether in the library or elsewhere on campus. While the Copyright Act amendments of 2012 where generally helpful for research libraries, especially with “education” being designated a fair dealing purpose, the ultimate effect of the overriding legal protection of technological protection measures remains to be seen. With the 2012 amendments, the Copyright Act will be reviewed in Parliament every five years, with each review bringing the risk of retrenchment—but also the possibility of further improvements if research libraries can identify and effectively advocate for their needs. WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, may also have some positive influence: it is currently studying library and educational exceptions and there is early discussion of a potential treaty mandating minimal exceptions in these areas (with model provisions provided by IFLA). Canadian libraries will need to strongly encourage the Canadian government to support progress in WIPO in this still very tentative process. That user rights protection can be agreed upon by governments working through WIPO, was recently demonstrated in the case of the treaty on copyright exceptions for visually disabled persons. In the next few years there will likely be international trade agreements signed and put into operation in Canada by the federal government that will contain copyright provisions. Perhaps the greatest risk in such provisions is a lengthening of term of copyright from Canada’s current 50 years after the death of an author to the US-favoured 70 years. If such a provision is agreed to, Canada’s public domain will cease to grow for 20 years, which will have an immediate and severely limiting impact on digitization programs. All libraries and library associations have an interest in making their views on this known to government. Canadian Internet policy will remain a matter of interest to research libraries for the foreseeable future. As universities grow their online educational offerings (including even MOOCs— massive open online courses), as research becomes ever more based in multi-institutional teams and ever more data-intensive, and as libraries provide ever more digital content to their users, a high-speed broadband Internet is crucial for research, teaching and learning, whether this links institutions (through the CANARIE network) or links institutions to individuals (through the commercial providers). In Canada, there remain distant and rural areas without truly effective broadband access, and even in the city, there are those who cannot afford good Internet access. -12- While the federal government’s repeated attempts to pass “lawful access” legislation have not come to fruition so far, the revelations of massive government monitoring of telephone and Internet traffic in both the US and Canada with the compliance of Internet service providers and social networking companies have shown that the privacy of the reader, a long-held principle of librarianship, may be limited or even illusory. The library community will need to consider the importance of this matter and express its concerns to government, likely over the long term. Research Funding and Infrastructure Supporting Research is a major raison d’être of research libraries; as a part of the university research enterprise and out of the general culture of libraries, they value knowledge and its application in building a healthy and prosperous society, so they participate in and promote the discovery of knowledge through research. From this point of view, research libraries have a general interest in research funding, whether federal or provincial, which is at risk at times of economic restraint. In a more specific and direct sense, the federal Indirect Costs Program (ICP) has been helpful to Canadian research libraries; they will have a continuing interest in seeing this program enlarged or, at very least, continued, as it has been helpful in acquiring researchimportant content or developing research support services. The granting agencies not only fund research, but can have considerable influence on the practices of researchers, promoting open access and research data archiving and preservation. As well, in Canada, because such programs as the SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals program, the granting agencies can influence the practices of journals. For CARL as an association, some elements of federal government research “infrastructure” are of particular interest as CARL members (LAC and CISTI), but research libraries also want to see these, as well as other such elements (e.g., Statistics Canada, the National Research Council generally, the research units in various federal departments, the federally-funded Canada Foundation for Innovation) well supported: they do work important for Canadians and they provide both data and support for the work of university researchers. Continuing advocacy will be necessary on these themes by research libraries and organizations such as CARL. Library and Library Organization Profile It remains a challenge to document the ROI (return on investment) of a research library and its importance for research and learning outcomes, but research libraries will need to continue to experiment in this area. In the “digital age,” libraries also struggle to some degree against an invisibility problem. They risk being seen as a good thing, but not necessarily central in modern times by some faculty and administrators (who may rarely need to enter the library), by some students (who don’t realize that many of the materials they have access to online are provided by the library—although libraries remain favoured study spaces), and by some of the public, including some decision-makers (who think that “everything” can be found on the open Internet). The situation has already been changing, but society at large (and even the academy at large, in the case of research libraries) has had an impression that libraries just quietly go about obtaining content and helping their users. The result of this is that they are not always thought of in terms of projects that are technology or business intensive and have often been invited to the discussion table as an afterthought. Yet certainly the research libraries (not to mention others) have shown -13- that collectively, they can manage impressive technology and business operations. The libraries will continue to need to be assertive of their place in questions of information management, digital infrastructure, and scholarly communication; if they are not, there are other parties, whether on campus, among research service organizations or in the commercial sector, that will. The fragmentation of the library community in Canada is a consideration; there is a large number of narrow-focus or overlapping associations and library-initiated service organizations, all with their own independent boards and secretariats that compete for funding and volunteer leadership. There is considerable organizational overhead and time spent by leaders in negotiating interorganizational roles and ad hoc collaborations. It has been suggested that more coherence, in some form, might be brought to the situation. This is a theme that will likely be considered in various library fora in the coming years. Canadian Association of Research Libraries Tel. 613.482.9344 600-350 Albert St. info@carl-abrc.ca Ottawa, ON www.carl-abrc.ca K1R 1B1 -14-