Do we need academic libraries? Or more correctly, "Is a library an absolute prerequisite for a degree-granting institution of higher education, or is it instead an indicator of some level of quality above an acceptable minimum?" Now that is a provocative question to ask a group of academic librarians! I don’t know if Oswald Ratterary, Assistant Director for Constituent Services and Special Programs of Middle States, understood just what kind of a reaction he might receive when he sent a letter out last summer to head librarians at Middle States member institutions asking that question. I think most of our colleagues, including myself, saw the question as an opportunity to articulate the need for libraries (and librarians). Some, however, (and I know this because some responded to me) reacted as if Oswald’s letter indicated a change in Middle States strong support of academic libraries. Some thought the question silly. Some librarians were indignant that the question was even asked.

The first part of the theme of my ACRL Presidency is "Celebrating our Successes." We have much to celebrate. We have developed academic libraries that are the envy of the world. In the past twenty years we have computerized our catalogs, digitized our indexes and abstracts, and are now rushing to acquire electronic full-text databases--and to have them accessible not only throughout our campuses but into the off-campus residences of our students and the homes of our faculty members.

What have been the results? Many of our traditional measures of our success are down. Our students are coming into our buildings in smaller numbers; our gate count is down. Fewer students are asking for reference assistance; our reference questions are down. And, fewer students are checking out books; our book circulations are down. Now this may not be true in every library, but it is true in many academic libraries. We should celebrate our successes, but our traditional measures of success suggest something else.

The other part of my presidency’s theme is "Confronting our Challenges." I know Oswald is a friend and supporter of libraries. He is giving us an opportunity to confront our challenges. With all the time, money, and expertise expended on technology, are our students now using the library’s resources with more sophistication? Are they writing better papers? Are the faculty members requiring students to make more educationally productive use of the library? The answer is far from an unqualified "Yes."

For all our successes, we are being challenged by the notion that academic libraries in their traditional form might not be needed at all. Let me put it another way. The question is [given] "the limited use which the majority of college students make of the library. . .whether we need these large libraries if present teaching methods continue?"(Branscomb, p. 8). Some of you may recognize that I just quoted Harvie Branscomb from his classic work Teaching With Books, published in 1940. More than three generations ago, Harvie Branscomb, after examining a number of circulation studies conducted during the 1930s, concluded "Undergraduates do not make very much use of the college or university book collection" (p. 37).

Patricia Knapp, twenty years later in her classic study at Knox College (a traditional liberal arts college), concluded that the library "functions in support of a minority, at most a third, of the courses offered . . .. I would add now that it functions as a library in this the fullest sense of the word, in support of a very small minority of these courses. These courses, about ten percent of those offered, are small, advanced, and elective." (Knapp, 1958, p. 832). So much for any "golden age" when students flocked as independent, self-motivated learners to the academic library.

My point is that Oswald is not the first person to raise this type of question. The same folks who may not be happy with Oswald for asking the question may be even less happy with me. Study after study has revealed that only a minority of students checks out books from the library during any given period of time. The first article I published almost twenty-five years ago was titled "The Academic Library: Unused and Unneeded?" (Hardesty, 1975/1976). I based it on a master’s paper I did at the college where I was working as a reference librarian at the time. Over half the students never checked out anything during the period of time studied. I did the study the old-fashioned way---manually. With our computerized circulation systems, we can readily do these studies, but we probably do not want to know the answer. Perhaps it is not even an interesting question anymore.

Also, twenty years ago Alan Kent and his colleagues used the then recently developed automated circulation system at the University of Pittsburgh to discover that more than 40% of 36,000+ books had not circulated outside the library during their first six years of availability (Kent, et. al.). Highly criticized at the time (Borkowski and MacLeod), librarians have not rushed to replicate this study at their institutions. However, I did similar studies (both published) at two small liberal arts colleges, and I found similar results (Hardesty, 1981; Hardesty, 1988).

No one will dispute that technology has had a tremendous impact on academic libraries over the past generation, and few will disagree that this impact has been positive. Because of technology, academic libraries have evolved from card-based catalogs and print-based periodical indexes to online public access catalogs (OPACs) and online periodical indexes. Increasingly, digital journals and books have supplemented the traditional print sources housed in physical library buildings. Often members of the academic community can access these digital publications without regard to proximity to the physical library building or its hours of operation. The availability of digital information made available by libraries through paid subscriptions, combined with the growing amount of digital information available free via the Internet has created, for some, the mistaken impression "all information is available electronically"(Miller). Therefore, perhaps it was inevitable that someone would ask, "Does a degree-granting institution of higher education need a physical library (and librarians) for accreditation?"

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the largest professional association representing academic librarians, is, of course, vitally interested in this issue. The issue, however, is not only of significance to academic librarians but has consequences for the entire academic community and for society in general. It calls into question the very meaning of a college degree from an institution accredited by a regional accrediting association. Because of the importance of this question to academic libraries, I wrote a paper last fall that the ACRL Board adopted as a position paper at its Midwinter meeting (Hardesty, 2000; http://www.ala.org/acrl/ academiclib. html). Most of the points I will make today come from that paper.

I think we have a considerable challenge before us. I have spent the past twenty-five years in traditional liberal arts colleges, which, no doubt, has shaped my perspective. There are only about 150 liberal arts colleges left in the country, at least by some count. In aggregate, all of the students enrolled in such colleges would not fill one of the larger football stadiums of the Big Ten Universities. Even at these liberal arts institutions, the number of humanities majors--the traditional users of the libraries, has dropped considerably in recent years. Between 1966 and 1993 the percentage of humanities majors in Liberal Arts I institutions declined from about 40% to about 30%; in Liberal Arts II institutions it went from about 25% to 10% (Connor, http://www.aale.org/connors.htm)

"Between 1979 and 1994, among all bachelor’s degrees in higher education, three majors increased five to ten-fold: computer and information sciences, protective services, and transportation and materials moving. Two majors, already large, tripled: health professions and public administration. Also already large, business management doubled. English, foreign languages, philosophy and religion all declined." As did history (Connor). "Times, they are a changing." Not only have I spent my career at an endangered type of institution, my undergraduate degree and one of my graduate degrees are in endangered subjects. I majored in history and political science with a minor in English, and I have a master’s degree in history. You probably should not listen to me because with this kind of arcane background how can I possibly understand what is going on now. What do I know?

Nevertheless, being educated in the humanities, I think we can make a pretty good logical and emotional case on behalf of the necessity for libraries. There is something about me that says that should be enough. However, I am also trained to some degree in the social sciences. The focus of my doctorate in library and information science was in the evaluation of academic libraries. I sat through more statistics courses, which I actually liked, and research and evaluation design courses than I can recall twenty years later. I am uncomfortable with a justification of libraries on just an emotional or logical basis. I think a justification on that basis leaves them vulnerable in this age of accountability. Nevertheless, I think we are in trouble when we have to justify the library on an empirical base.

I say that because we have trouble even justifying the positive impact of four years of college on an empirical basis. I recently hunted up and perused through what I think is still the seminal work on the subject, Pascarella and Terenzini’s How College Affects Students. In this book, which is almost 900 pages long, the authors examine hundreds of studies exploring how college affects students. The library, I will note, is not mentioned even once in the index. About two-thirds of the way through they try to summarize their findings. Here is a summary of their summary "Our conclusions about how college students change are the same as Berelson’s about human change: ‘(1) some do, some don’t; (2) the differences aren’t very great; and (3) it’s more complicated than that.’" (p. 556). I don’t find that a particularly comforting answer, do you? Particularly when we are asking parents to take out second mortgages on their homes to send their sons and daughters to our institutions.

And what do accreditation agencies want us to do? I do site visits for reaffirmation teams for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. They, as I believe Middle States does, want us to focus on student learning outcomes. We must demonstrate "regular and systematic evaluation" and show that we have "closed the loop" by using the results, which sounds very reasonable. Inputs and process, which we are pretty good at since we count everything, have very low priority. The Southern Association, in its wisdom, does not dictate how we evaluate. They say that would be too confining. However, I think the real answer is they don’t have any better idea how to evaluate what we do than any of us out practicing in the field do. We are all just kind of muddling through right now as we try to justify ourselves to parents, boards of trustees and regents, legislators, accreditation agencies, and, most important, the general public.

Just what does a college degree signify? What does a student really need to do to obtain a college education? To obtain a college education, does a student need face-to-face contact with classroom faculty, fellow students, and librarians? To obtain a college education, does a student need to experience the benefits offered by physical classrooms, laboratories, theatres, galleries, and libraries?

From my obviously unimaginative and limited background, I would say, "Yes." However, there are lots of folks today giving other answers in this age of distance education. At a recent American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) conference I heard Patricia Cross give a paper on the portrayal of colleges students as reflected in the thirty years of Change magazine. The first period was the period of student unrest of the 1970s. She then described the 1970s as the period of open enrollments. What struck me was how colorfully she described this period. From the demographics at the time, we knew how many individuals would turn 18 in coming years, and the predictions in the 1970s were for serious shortfalls in enrollments. The College Libraries Section of ACRL even had a committee charged to develop a policy, which it did, on what to do with the libraries of colleges that were closing. Therefore, as Cross said at this conference held in California, institutions of higher education went after the older student, the nontraditional student, the less capable student, with "all the planning, forethought, and sensitivity of the California Gold Rush." What we are doing now in distance education, in my humble opinion, makes the rush for the open enrollments of the 1970s look like, in comparison, as orderly as the Soviet Army marching through Red Square on May Day.

If you do not believe me, just read the Chronicle of Higher Education. You probably know that a few weeks ago Michael J. Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, announced he is going to donate $100 million dollars to "create an on-line university that would broadcast courses taught by famous people" all over the world—at no charge to students. ("Online" p. A45)). My secretary asked, "Who is going to grade the papers?" In the April 24^th issue of Newsweek was a story about Unext.com, a new Internet University, which is spending up to one million dollars per course for distance education (McCormick). Perhaps the question is not "Do we need physical libraries?" but rather, "Do we need physical colleges and universities?" While we may worry about the for-profit organizations, such as the University of Phoenix, how many nonprofit institutions of higher education have spun off for-profit units? And none of our organizations exist to lose money.

Should, for example, a college degree signify that a student has been prepared to locate, evaluate, and use information in order to become an independent and continual learner? If the answer is "yes," can one become a lifelong learner without access to a physical library and the services of librarians?

If the answer is not obvious, it is because I think to some degree we have gone down a slippery slope from which there is no return. The 19^th century ideal of Mark Hopkins at one end of the log and a student at the other end of the log has long given way at most institutions of higher education to a post-World War II reality. The instructor is too often an ill-prepared, over-worked, underpaid teaching assistant at one end of the lecture hall, and the student is often one of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of others sitting at the other end of the lecture hall. Any assignments, particularly at the lower levels, may be designed to keep the student (and his/her numerous fellow students) out of the library.

So, is there a difference between the library needs and educational outcomes of this student and the faceless student 500 miles away receiving the same lecture via videotape or Internet? I think it would be hard to demonstrate a difference. If neither the on-campus nor the distance education student go beyond the textbook and other prepackaged materials, both are being cheated out of the opportunities to receive a true college education.

We recognize that some courses and even some major fields of study are legitimately not dependent upon the library. A first-year course that might heavily depend upon the textbook or reserve readings in the library may be little different from pre-packaged curriculum materials made available to a distance education student. We accept that an undergraduate mathematics major, for example, may make little use of the academic library in his or her field. How far out do we expand this idea? To all courses? To business? To biology? To history and English?

A curriculum that consists largely of pre-packaged materials devoid of opportunities and requirements for independent study and interactive research possibilities may be little more than a series of first-year, entry-level courses. While accumulating credit hours, students moving through the courses do not develop an increasing sophistication in the skills and abilities needed to be a lifelong learner.

Can a model of electronic access to information resources be provided that is equivalent to traditional campus-based print materials? For some courses, the answer may be "Yes,"--just as for some courses traditional print materials are not needed. However, for most major fields of study at even the undergraduate level the answer is still "No." How long this answer will remain valid is an important question. Academic librarians recognize that currently available digital resources have serious limitations in supporting an entire curriculum. Relatively few of the millions of journals and books that fill our academic libraries have been retrospectively converted into digital formats, and there is no evidence that a significant percentage will be in the foreseeable future. In addition, there has been little evidence of any abatement in the current publication rate of print materials, and most remain unavailable digitally.

Therefore, the student who has access to only digital information has access to only a very fragmented and incomplete portion of recorded human knowledge. It is fragmented because the creation of digital collections is not based on the interests and needs of the classroom faculty and the collection development skills of librarians. Digital collections most often are based on the willingness of publishers to make their product available in that format. Two situations can result. An institution may offer only those courses that available databases support. Or, an institution may offer courses not adequately supported by information resources. Neither should be acceptable for an accredited institution.

In addition, the contents of many electronic databases remain unstable. Contracts between vendors and producers are often short-term. Electronic journals available one year may not be available the next. Academic librarians can readily testify to major resources being available one day through a vendor and not the next—with no advance notice.

In contrast, the traditional print collections of the academic library are highly shaped by the interest and needs of the classroom faculty. Faculty members have the opportunity to recommend for purchase materials that allow their students to explore the topics of their particular classes in more depth. Through the collaboration of classroom faculty and academic librarians, access to resources can be provided that can lead the student beyond the classroom. Our distinctive library collections are, in part, what make our individual institutions distinctive. There is no national ministry of education in this country that dictates the curriculum for all the institutions of higher education.

Considerable effort is also made to preserve and make accessible these collections. An entire range of journals will not disappear with the flip of a switch. At this point, access only to digital databases is hardly equivalent to access to an adequately supported academic library. Are these concerns being addressed? How soon they will be resolved remains to be seen.

Can a transregional or virtual institution provide equivalent access to traditional library resources through formal agreements with traditional institutions for access to their traditional libraries? There is a long history of cooperation and collaboration among academic libraries, and technology has further enhanced this collaboration since most academic libraries now make the electronic record of their holdings available online. However, some institutions have come to rely all too heavily on the largesse of institutions that have expended considerable resources to support the library needs of their own students. Accrediting agencies should look carefully for evidence of abuses. Some institutions directly or indirectly encourage their students to rely on inappropriate libraries, such as the local branch of the public library, a community college library that does not support upper-level courses, or the library of a four-year institution that does not support a particular program. Even institutions with appropriate collections may drop programs and reduce acquisitions below an appropriate level. Finally, through the lack of guidance and the provision of adequate libraries, distance education students often find their ways to libraries for which there are no formal arrangements. Libraries once open to the public are closing their doors to all but their currently enrolled students because they cannot afford to support institutions that are not providing their students with adequate library resources.

In preparing for this talk, I contacted the University of Phoenix librarian, David Bickford. He quickly responded by sending me via overnight delivery a copy of their "Learning Resources Handbook." He also asked, "If [it] may be possible for me and/or our Associate Vice-President for Research to attend the conference…if you have a desire to have the University of Phoenix represented on a panel, please let me know." I have been at a couple of meetings where representatives from the University of Phoenix were there. They neither have horns growing out of their heads, nor are they insensitive to what others think of them. Let me quote, however, from their "Learning Resources Handbook" under the section "Strategies for Locating Articles Not Found Online." "The document may be available in hard copy at a library near you. You may wish to check the main library in the major city nearest you. If your local library does not have the document, it may be possible for your local library to procure it from another library using a service known as interlibrary loan." How do you think some University of Phoenix students will interpret that statement? You might ask the California State University campus library director I recently talked with who recently had a branch of the University of Phoenix open across the street from her library.

Development of independent learning also does not end simply with providing access to information resources. A librarian, knowledgeable in the identification, location, and evaluation of information resources, must be available to guide students in the use of the library, whether it is in print or in digital formats. The vast increase of information has created a need for more—not less—guidance in the use and evaluation of information. Students uninitiated in the complexities of information retrieval and evaluation are often confronted by an overwhelming amount of useless or inferior information from the Internet. They often make little distinction between information from those refereed scholarly journals available digitally and the digital equivalent of vanity press publications. To the chagrin of their teachers, many uninformed students accept convenient information, whether appropriate or not, at the expense of appropriate, but less convenient information. Left alone, students may perfect inappropriate information retrieval and evaluation techniques under the misconception that they are obtaining the benefits of a college education.

As you may know, Bell and Howell is now marketing its ProQuest Academic Edition directly to students. You can call up on its website (http://ae.proquest.com/aegate/tour/ae2.html [no longer active as of September 18, 2000]) and it will say "Research current newspapers, magazines, and journals. Thousands of them. Online. Without leaving your room. How cool is that?" One of the screens says "Behind all of those topics are articles—millions of them from the best newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals in the world . . . From U.S. News and World Report to The Economist to USA Today to Rolling Stone. Academic Edition has the best resources for your research." Can anyone identify which among these titles is a scholarly journal? They also have a Recreational Reading Channel. It "brings you the latest buzz on music, television, movies, sports, hobbies, and more. The best part is, you won’t get tested on this stuff!" So what does it cost? $19.95 a semester. Not a bad deal at first glance. Let us see, if all 1,200 students at Austin College subscribed to it for two semesters, the annual cost would be…$47,880! We are not going to pay $48,000 to give our students access to it. No wonder Bell and Howell is marketing directly to students—and telling them that everything they need is right in their dorm room on their computer. They don’t need to go to the library.

Let me make you a little uneasier. I used to think that to rely on digital information was to leave out an entire genre of information—books. However, the more I read about netLibrary the more I have to rethink that reservation. However, do you know about Questia? There was an article about it in the April 13^th issue of the Wall Street Journal (McWilliams, "Questia’s Aim") and also recently in the Houston paper (Goldberg, "Selling Virtual Volumes"). It is a brainchild of Troy Williams, who is a 27-year-old Harvard Law School Graduate. He got this idea, so he says, as an undergraduate and as a law school student at Harvard when, like many others, he loaded up on coffee and camped out at the library to complete a paper due the next day. To quote the Wall Street Journal, "The 27 year old now thinks panic-stricken students will be a hot market for Questia Media Inc., his Houston-based start-up that aims to launch a Web site later this year with 50,000 online and annotated titles geared to liberal-arts students." He is quoted as saying, "We believe this service will be indispensable for students to do their papers."

If you do not think this will happen, it gets better. He has $45 million dollars from investors and is expecting to raise $210 million dollars. (The Library of Congress has raised, I believe, only $44 million so far for its American Memory Project). He now has more than 200 employees, who identify acquisitions and code texts. He plans to have 250,000 titles online within three years (which is supposedly more than in 80 percent of the academic libraries in the country). In contrast to netLibrary, where one book is accessed at a time, Questia will offer a complete research service with rights secured directly from publishers so an unlimited number of people may access a given book at a given time. Who are some of the publishers? The University of North Carolina Press, the University of Hawaii Press, and the University of Nebraska Press are cited. It will make money for the University presses—some of whom are desperate for revenue. How are they selecting titles? They are not saying—a trade secret!

Most importantly, it is marketed directly to students—not to libraries! What is the pricing? Not set yet. Let’s see, if you were sending your son or daughter off to a college that costs $15,000 to $20,000 a year in tuition or more, would you pay $500 a year for access to this database? How about $300, $200? What is the magic figure?

Charles Henry, the library director at Rice, is cited in one of the articles, so I contacted Chuck (almost a neighbor by Texas distances) by e-mail. He responded, "Questia’s impact will most likely be on small academic libraries, rural libraries, and high school libraries; those that don’t have the budgets or the history of large-scale collection development. Questia should become a complementary, rather than a competitive, service for those schools over time. Questia’s goal of having online about 250,000 encoded and linked texts within the next three years sets it apart from any current enterprise that I know of; the scale and breadth of the online resources would be unparalleled. Again, most larger university libraries would have these available."

With all due respect to Chuck, I disagree. I think it will have an impact on all sizes of academic libraries. Where was Troy Williams a student when he got the idea? —at the institution with the largest academic library collection in the country—Harvard University.

While I have worked at small liberal arts colleges most of my career, I attended large research universities as a graduate student - the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Indiana University. I remember at Indiana University walking from the main library to the education library to the business library to find materials—in the cold and snow, uphill, both ways!

Do we need physical libraries? The pricing of Questia is not yet available, but if priced right, there will be lots of undergraduates at all types of institutions who will think they don’t need a physical library. I find it amazing that tens of millions of dollars are being spent largely predicated on the idea that students wait until the last minute to write papers. Was it H.L. Mencken who said, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." And what a novel idea to have the students pay for library resources directly. That will catch someone’s attention.

What are chief business officers reading? For some reason I happen to get in my office a subscription to Business Officer published by NACUBO. The April 2000 issue has a long article on Webster University, a one-time small Catholic women’s college in St. Louis, which has gone online "through an intelligent and relatively inexpensive application of computer technology" (Chase, "Webster University Goes Online Big Time," p. 35). I grew and up and have lived in the Midwest most of my life, and I never heard of Webster University until this article. It now has 15,000 students, 1,400 FTE faculty, and an annual operating budget of $85 million dollars with 68 sites in this country and six foreign sites. So how does it provide library services to these sites? At one time it had 50 satellite libraries with an average collection of 400 to 500 books. The author of the article wrote, "Today, [the library director’s] world is decidedly different. She’s said goodbye to most of the shelves of books for which she was responsible, and Webster’s faculty and students have said hello to computers and printers, … to more than 60 searchable databases and 7,500 full-text periodicals plus everything available on the Web. (emphasis added). If they can’t find the full-text article they want online, all they have to do is speed off an E-mail to the main library. A day or two later, they’re reading the hard copy fax of the article. . . . The university has acquired an extensive virtual library and has been able to retrain existing staff and even add one new position the new system requires (to oversee the worldwide delivery service of documents), without significantly adding to is operating costs. Moreover, phasing out journal subscriptions and book collections at satellite campuses yielded savings, which Webster used to expand the main library collection and databases. These, of course, are available to all Webster’s 80 campuses, either electronically or by document delivery" (Chase, 35). Do we need physical libraries?

The University of Phoenix and Jones International have received most of the press recently. However, there is another organization I have run across twice in making accreditation visits. It is IPD (the Institute of Professional Development), also based in Phoenix. It appears that this for-profit organization affiliates with small, rural, poorly funded, church-related institutions struggling to survive. In some cases, they have sought out IPD. IPD will recruit non-traditional, older students (over 23 years old) for the colleges and set up remote sites in the larger cities in their state. At these sites, through largely (almost entirely) part-time faculty, in the college’s name, degrees will be offered at the associate, the bachelor’s and the master’s level, usually in such subjects as business communications or business administration. The regular faculty members are able to supplement their usually modest salaries by preparing the syllabi for the courses. The classrooms are well equipped and the entire facilities are rather attractive, usually in contrast with the main campus. In fact, the facilities looks like corporate training facilities—the type of facilities with which most of the students are probably familiar.

What about the library? The libraries at the two remote sites I visited in February each had about 300 books (fewer than one in twenty ever checked out). They also had current issues of about a dozen business-related periodicals, and a half a dozen or so computer terminals providing access to the state-provided databases, which included ABI/Inform and some other good databases. One of the sites had more than 400 students, which is more students than the main campus has. Who was in charge of the library? In both cases, technicians. In one of the facilities, more than a 100 miles from its main campus, the technician, was a nice, hard-working, earnest young man all of probably 23 years old, with his highest degree being an associate degree. Was this acceptable to the Southern Association---absolutely not! Do all the colleges around the country who are affiliated with IPD operate this way? I don’t know, but I went two for two in my visits.

I also did some research on Jones International, which is accredited by North Central. Jones International is the creation of Glenn Jones, a multi-million-dollar cable mogul out of Denver who is on a mission. He wants to make Denver the distance education capital of the world. And he has support from some librarians. Ed Garten, library director at the University of Dayton, served on the team that accredited Jones International. Ed wrote an article in the January 2000 issue of Library Issues titled "The Virtual University: Lessons for the Mainstream." He also wrote a chapter in a book I recently edited (Hardesty, Books, Bytes, and Bridges), so I e-mailed him with some questions. He responded, "I was the chair of the comprehensive evaluation team that recommended full accreditation for NCA for Jones International. This was a ‘groundbreaking’ decision, as you can imagine and opened NCA up to criticism from some quarters. Nevertheless, many (including myself) would maintain it’s a fine place and the wave of the future." Ed, who also has a divinity degree, added, "Jones has more money than God." In fact, Glenn Jones has a lot of money, and he has given over a million dollars to the Library of Congress for its digitalization efforts. As a result, he is a founding member of the James Madison National Council of the Library of Congress. Later this summer, the Library of Congress is sponsoring a conference to showcase both its digitalization efforts and those of other national libraries. Who is footing the bill for this conference? Glenn Jones.

What kind of library resources does Jones International provide? Ed responded, "Jones has its own ‘home grown’ library called the ‘E-Global Library’ which, within the next few months, they plan to market as a stand-alone product to organizations that are starting their own ‘universities.’ Kim Dority is the librarian for Jones, on retainer, and is the visionary behind this web-based library. The E-Global Library basically consists of licensed databases, links to free Internet information resources, an e-mail capacity to get in touch with Dority as ‘reference librarian,’ and various pathfinder-type devices Dority has created. In some ways it is a library on the cheap, but still meets the needs of a school that is, at present, a fairly small niche market offering only two degrees."

After that message, I contacted Kim Dority, and she sent me a copy of a manuscript she has written titled "The Electronic Global Library of Jones International University" which will be published in Advances in Library Administration and Organization later this year. She also responded, "I would argue strongly that we do, indeed, continue to need academic libraries -- scholarship thrives in the rich resources that are brought together in a well-endowed and managed campus library. But I would suggest also that the profession needs to take a leadership role in exploring alternatives to traditional academic libraries in those situations where it is impossible for a student to travel to the host institution's library. I am not convinced that any of the models (including the e-global library) currently in existence for supporting online learners have found the ‘perfect solution’; rather we are in a position of trying to create, from the technologies and knowledge currently available about online learners, the best possible solution given the tools available to us today." I thought that a refreshingly candid answer. Actually, the work she has done in linking sites is pretty impressive. Also, her advice is well taken for somebody like me who occasionally sounds like a Luddite.

The New York Times did an article on Jones International and compared it with Harvard University (Edmundson, "Crashing the Academy"). The author compared Harvard’s tuition at $21,342 with Jones’ tuition at $3,750, and I thought whom are you kidding? Who would select Jones International over Harvard University? Then I looked at the enrollment. Harvard has 6,609 undergraduates; Jones has 12. Obviously so far not many are. I guess when one is rich, one can indulge all kinds of fancies. I have not seen the latest enrollment figures for the Western Governors’ University, but it has been pretty small. However, the University of Phoenix is another matter. The Jones International University president is quoted as planning to expand to beyond its current two degrees and 18 certificates. "We’re nimble and entrepreneurial." And she added, which should be message for the accreditation agencies, "Accreditation has opened many doors."

The traditional academic institutions of the United States have expended considerable resources to develop academic libraries that are the envy of the rest of the world. Individuals from all over the world seek to come to the United States to study because of the quality of our academic programs—supported by our academic libraries. The Association of College and Research Libraries recognizes the importance of innovation and the opportunities offered by technology. However, the Association of College and Research Libraries is also aware of current and past abuses of nontraditional programs (Noble). Therefore, the membership of ACRL, as I wrote in the position paper, strongly urges the regional accreditation agencies to exercise carefully their responsibilities and to proceed most cautiously in the accreditation of transregional and virtual institutions. We believe that the collections of traditional academic libraries and the services of librarians are vital for students in obtaining the benefits of a college education. Therefore, the offerings of these institutions and the distance education offerings of traditional institutions both should be evaluated by the same rigorous criteria applied to traditional educational programs. To do less not only puts academic libraries at risk, but also misleads the American public as to the true meaning of a college degree.

Let me make one final observation in conclusion. Many of the transregional and Internet institutions appeal to members of the business community and offer degrees in subjects like business communications and business administration. I cannot speak for all of them, but I have seen some of the programs in accreditation visits. They design programs so students will not have to use the library. The students are not becoming familiar with the literature of the discipline. They are trained for the present, and this concerns me.

At the end of his book, The Crash of 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith tried to respond to the obvious question, "Will it happen again?"—a question that should be on the minds of more than a few people given what the NASDAQ has been doing in recent weeks. His answer is "Yes." He wrote, "The chance for recurrence of a speculative orgy remains good." He went on to state, we will forget, we will rationalize. To quote him, "Among the first to accept these rationalizations will be some of those responsible for invoking the controls. They will say firmly that controls are not needed. The newspapers, some of them, will agree and speak harshly of those who think action might be in order. They will be called men of little faith." (Galbraith, p. 190). I am a person of little faith when it comes to thinking that we do not need libraries and librarians. To those who control the accreditation process, I say we still need libraries and librarians. Not because I think we are educating business leaders and others who will forget and therefore may rationalize disastrous courses of action. I am a person of little faith in education without libraries and librarians—because one cannot forget what one never learned in the first place!

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