Troy Swanson: Terra and Spencer, welcome to Circulating Ideas. As a community college librarian, I’m sure I am biased, but I’m excited to have you on to talk about this collection!
Terra Jacobson: Hi, thanks.
Spencer Brayton: Hey, Troy. Thank you.
Troy Swanson: Before we dig into the book, it would be great to learn a little bit about both of you. How did you get into libraries, and how did you get into community college libraries specifically?
Spencer Brayton: So I can jump in on that one. I was planning to get a PhD in history and be a history faculty member. Then I started working as an undergraduate in our college archives. The University Archivist became sort of a mentor for me and took me to visit a graduate school, a library school at UW Madison. And that’s eventually where I went, where I got my MLS. I had some family who taught in community colleges growing up. And so I kind of always wanted to be in that space. And so I was happy when I finally did.
Terra Jacobson: It sounds like I’m stealing Spencer’s same response, but very similar journey. I was studying history as an undergrad, looking at secondary education and didn’t seem to be like the right fit for me. And so I started working at our Swedish archives on our college campus and had some really great mentors there that helped me figure out the process, how to apply to graduate school, so I ended up going to Indiana University and getting my MLS there and also my MIS in social informatics, that was really fun. Then decided to later on work in a couple different library types, learned a little bit about community-based libraries and dorm libraries and really enjoyed that work.
And so when I came back to Chicagoland, I was applying for library jobs and got my first job at a community college and have never left since. I really loved it. I liked the mission of how we get to kind of work as a public library and also an academic library almost at the same time. And so that was really great and that’s how I got into community colleges.
Troy Swanson: Like, the rest is history!
Terra Jacobson: Seriously. It goes fast.
Troy Swanson: Well, let’s focus in on your book, which is exciting for me as someone in community colleges to see this work getting done. In chapter 18 Davis, who’s the author of that chapter, notes that community college enrollment is like 40% of the nation’s undergrads, so a big chunk of undergrads go to community colleges. But the research on community colleges is really underrepresented in the higher education literature. So is this book answer to that and can you tell us the backstory, like how did you decide to put this book together?
Terra Jacobson: Yeah, sure. I’ll jump in and start with that and share the journey of how we came up with the concept of the book and where we hope to go and what we hope to do, and we were really seeing a lot of changes and issues in community college libraries. So many of our peers that we talked to in groups we belong to, Spencer and I both belonged to a group called NILRC (Network of Illinois Learning Resources in Community Colleges) in the state of Illinois that really focuses on community colleges and their learning resource centers, and we were hearing the same types of things. Many of them were losing funding, space, resources, and most importantly, their librarians and library staff were being cut.
So what’s going on? Why is this happening? We started looking at some of the studies that were out there and not finding a lot of research on community college libraries overall. We really wanted to make sure we started demonstrating the relevance and the value of our community college libraries to our campuses. It’s something that just wasn’t being done. We had a lot of people that just were looking for some answers, so this book really hopes to help answer those questions a little bit, at least give us a starting point.
There’s a gigantic hole in the literature, if you look at the literature review we have also focusing on community colleges generally, community college libraries specifically. It’s very, very bare. We had some publications in the past that did focus on community and junior college libraries that are now defunct. There really isn’t a lot of information out there that we could count on, and I think that it’s a natural progression for us in our community college libraries to have that hole in our literature because we are so overworked. I think at some points people are about trying to do all these different things and so we don’t have the time for that type of scholarship and there’s no research motivation as part of that tenure process if you are faculty in a community college setting, which is fine. We are teaching focused, but it makes that slide easier for us to have less available in the literature.
Spencer Brayton: And I’ll just point out too, something Davis had shared at the end of her chapter along this theme is that community college librarians deserve more support for their important work with under-served populations on college campuses as well as more opportunities to share their stories. She also states that community college libraries need more exposure to the college library world to gain a greater appreciation and respect for these colleagues. So I think that also ties back to what Minnis stated in terms of what our value is in terms of looking at the history of community college libraries. And she cites a couple articles that talk about how we are still finding out what our value is separate from university libraries and four year libraries.
Terra Jacobson: Yeah. And I think just to jump in one more time. With ACRL and what they’ve been working on, I think they’ve been doing a really good job trying to address this gap in the literature. They founded some scholarly research groups focused for CJCLS, and Spencer and I have been part of those groups and those discussions. So I think that we’re trying to find some ways to resolve that issue at a broader scale, but we thought us doing this on our own was one way to really motivate some new authors into getting excited about writing, maybe people that hadn’t written before and really get them interested in maybe taking that chance to write a chapter with some assistance and work through that process with people that can help them and guide them versus sending your chapter off to an editor and not really hearing much back, which can happen frequently when you’re doing publishing. So I think this was a concentrated effort to really get some new voices out there.
Troy Swanson: Excellent. And just for the record, CJCLS is the Community and Junior College [Libraries] Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, which I’m sure our regular listeners probably are aware, but just in case folks are public librarians who aren’t part of the academic side of librarianship, the jargon. I think the point of we in community colleges serve under-served populations so much that also when we’re absent from the literature, that also means some of those voices in the work that we do is absent from the literature, I think that’s such an important piece that you bring with this book, so thank you for that.
You had touched on some of the work that of ACRL that’s such a ongoing conversation within academic libraries, how do we demonstrate value? And it definitely comes through in several chapters in the book. So that idea of value and demonstrating value to students, faculty, and to administrators is such a key theme. Could you talk about some of the key points that were brought up in the book?
Spencer Brayton: A couple themes that the authors identified at a high level were things like access to space, that library as third space concept, the library as a microcosm of the institution. I think a large theme in the book throughout several chapters, especially I think Linda Miles talked about this in her chapter about organizational cultures. The ecosystem piece is about building partnerships and different collaborations across the institution with the library, and the library as a linchpin for student success and be more of a proactive space. And so I think to me, that also shows that the library is sort of a microcosm of the institution when we talk about value because the institution is trying to work across itself to break down silos.
We hear common themes about that among different departments as well as working within the community, and I think we also see that in terms of the role that community college library plays, especially as Terra alluded to in her introduction about a community space and an academic space, in terms of community impact in the value that we bring. There’s some great examples of joint college and public libraries, as well as just I think day-to-day work that we do to support our communities.
Other value, especially since the pandemic, has been student technology loans or support for that work, dedicated roles and sometimes if we’re lucky enough to support students in their technology needs. Other chapter addressed spaces for parent students. So that’s important as well. Accreditation comes up a lot, HLC or Higher Learning Commission for us in the Midwest I think is one. And then student engagement, both academic and non-academic, I think we play that role and I know we’ll talk about this further on, but that library as a hub for the campus and what that means.
I also think in terms of value, wanted to point out that something that we don’t maybe always think about right away that Nathasha Alvarez was pretty intentional about was courses in community colleges, maybe career courses, and how we can use some of those as pathways for students entering our profession, which is largely white, in terms of getting underrepresented groups involved in this work.
Terra Jacobson: And as you can see, this idea of value can be demonstrated in so many different ways. So this book really tries to give the opportunity for people to show off, maybe some case studies, and experiences that they’ve had in trying to demonstrate that value, but also questioning some of the things that we kind of hold as truths in libraries and maybe saying maybe this isn’t the case anymore.
I think Spencer started to allude to this, but how do we demonstrate our value when we keep thinking that we are the heart of the campus? Like, we have this assumption that people love libraries, we are here for them, and they’re always gonna love us, and we’re just like a known factor. It’s easy to support a library, but it’s also easy then to cut a library, because you just don’t realize what actually goes into running this resource for our students.
And I think us wanting to demonstrate through these chapters, and the authors do such an excellent job of doing this, is talking about how we’re part of that student engagement piece on our campuses and that retention picture. Community colleges, if you’re not in the community college world and I’m sure most universities, are really focused on student retention and success rates. I think if the library can speak to that, and I think some of these chapters really help us do that, talk about how we retain our students and the effort that goes into that but helps us justify that work we have to our administrators in a way that speaks their language.
This book is starting to get at that. We wanna talk in the language of our administrators to tell them what’s happening. And that’s why we had some administrators actually join us outside of the library world, or partially in the library world, in some of their editorials to talk about how they see the value of that library on our community college campuses. I think it’s shifting. It’s changing, I think, but I think we have a lot of work to do. We can’t stop and just say, “We’re the heart of the institution!” We need to actually do that work.
I think some of that comes into that accreditation picture that Spencer mentioned too, looking at what those standards look like? What do we need to push for maybe more nationally in representing libraries and academic accreditation processes and standards that are set out for us?
Troy Swanson: Well, Terra, that is actually a good segue into our next question. In chapter 19. Dr. Jenkins, who is the president or former president of a community college and also a former librarian has written a chapter, which I think is a great addition. She talks about the ideas of protecting funding, prioritizing libraries in the institutional context. Could you talk a little bit about what leaders, especially like non librarian campus leaders, too often misunderstand about the role that we play on campus?
Terra Jacobson: Sure, and I was really excited that Dr. Jenkins was willing to write this chapter for us and share her opinions. I’ve been lucky enough to work with her for some time at Moraine Valley, so very special connection there for us with the book. Dr. Jenkins was really an incredible advocate for libraries throughout her career, continued into her role as president at Moraine Valley. She tells us that we have a responsibility to make the library the heart of the institution. So I started talking about this I think a little bit in the last question.
So I’ll kind of bring it back around, right? We need to really work on making sure our leadership at our colleges understands that we need to have ALA accredited librarians in our libraries. And I think Dr. Jenkins starts to say this, talking about our staffing and our staffing needs and how we need to put those people in those spaces.
I think they misunderstand even what a librarian may do or require. They just don’t know. And it’s not their fault. Like, I don’t know what is required for many other careers. They shouldn’t be expected to know. But it’s our job to tell them, and it’s our job to request that and to not minimize maybe our needs or resources, so that’s something I think that gets misunderstood by our leaders is that we need to have ALA accredited librarians. And I think there’s distinct value in having faculty librarians in our community colleges. And that’s something that was always supported in Dr. Jenkins is planning and what she does share in some of her chapter.
So I think getting those faculty librarians involved in our campuses also helps demonstrate that support and work and additional service value that librarians offer across community college campuses that maybe goes unseen. I think that it happens a lot that we do a lot of work that people cannot see and visualize so making sure that we have librarians that are represented on campus committees throughout different areas and all different forms is really, really helpful. And I think that that really is something that has been advocated for, and I think that Dr. Jenkins will continue to advocate for, and she shares that with other leaders.
And I think that it has been impactful in our campus in making that a very successful relationship with other faculty and having them see that value ’cause I think once faculty can demonstrate that they find value in the library, the administration has an easier time seeing that value too if they hear that from other voices than just the librarians.
I also think what she talks about is really the human physical and financial responsibilities that the executives need to have an understanding of the library. There’s a human role, a physical role, and a financial responsibility that the institution has. I think that we have always struggled in demonstrating how we are financially valuable to a campus, and I don’t think that’ll change unless we start offering credit courses, which I think some librarians have talked about doing and offering in those ways and has been successful for some.
We’re seen as a cost center for our college. So when we’re seen as a cost center and a charge to the college, we really have to work twice as hard as other faculty to demonstrate our outcomes for our students. Unfortunately it’s really hard to demonstrate the ROI for libraries. If you don’t have credit bearing classes, how do you talk about that in a way that maybe other administrators that came through a different portion of the system, especially academic affairs administrators, where maybe they’re deans of areas that are only credit bearing, they have one way of understanding how that works and that’s their understanding. But it’s our job to then say these are different ways that we can talk about how we bring value back to demonstrate that retention, student success, outcomes, all those keywords that our administrators love to hear about the work we do.
And understanding that and being okay with it not working this way is something that we need to teach our administrators, that they’re not gonna get that data in that same traditional way that they’re expecting it. That’s a responsibility we have too. So I think as librarians we have a much more elevated responsibility to talk about how we are creating value for our institutions, and I think we tend to sometimes, for lack of a better word, I think become a little lazy about that because we see our value. It’s not an intentional laziness, but we see what we do. We see our students’ excitement every day. We see the faculty we impact, we see the courses that come in and how much they enjoy what they learn and what the students do in those classes, and then come back and see us again, and so if we don’t talk about those things or share those stories out, it’s not gonna get to those administrators.
So I think that’s what Dr. Jenkins is really getting at the heart of. She does it much more succinctly than I do in that chapter, but I think that we have to continue to have that outreach work as part of our job. And if we don’t have outreach librarians or outreach happening at our highest levels of administration, we’re not gonna see that return on investment for the library.
Spencer Brayton: There’s two things I just wanted to jump in and add there quick. I think we talk about value in data collection. I’m not sure that always that the statistics and data that we’re collecting necessarily match our actual work or what students are learning or how they’re engaging in our spaces. I think about things like gate count or circulation stats. I think sometimes there’s more qualitative work to be done there. I think the default is the higher the number, the better. Sure, to a certain extent, but what is the story? What is that actually telling us? I think sometimes it just doesn’t match the value of the work that we’re doing in our spaces.
I did also want to mention that, going back to Minnis’s chapter she talks about the future of libraries and it kind of touches on some of these themes based on the research that she had done, research about the future of libraries saying that there’s always gonna be uncertainty, themes of fiscal stress, pressure of the changing narratives about libraries and academia. I think we’ve always had those, and so maybe, to Terra’s point, those will just always be in our repertoire. That just needs to be something that needs to be part of our daily work rather just writing about it.
Troy Swanson: It is a challenge where we are loosely tied to the outcomes of our institutions, so if you increased our book budget or increased our databases, or increased our staffing, how many more students get A’s or how many more students graduate? I don’t know how that connection is, but definitely we see it, right? With more librarians, you have more impact. We see learning happen, and so how do you relate that story? So yeah, I think, Spencer, you’re right, that’s just an ongoing reality that we’re gonna have to live with, and I think that’s true across all of higher ed probably also true across public libraries as well but it is the challenge for us.
Speaking of learning, there are several chapters, and I just wanna especially note, I really appreciated the chapter by Tish Hayes, chapters about information literacy and directly about the role that our libraries play in the curriculum and in learning. Could you talk a little bit about that role and how the authors writing about it cast libraries as instructors and as teachers?
Spencer Brayton: One thing I want to mention here is that Kate Nadolski’s chapter on archives, she also mentions the value, in terms of the future again, of community college libraries and archives is the future need for primary source instruction. I don’t think we often think about that, so I just wanted to make sure I put that out in this space that I think that’s an important piece to note.
In terms of the question, I think typically for us it’s information literacy sessions. Maybe I know college success courses, so College 101 courses, a lot of us can be involved in First Year Experience programs. One piece that I think we kind of always roll up against in higher ed is how folks see the librarians as educators. Sometimes I don’t think they see us that way, so I think that’s another point of advocacy and value, but also just to know that we are educators. We are in that classroom space. Especially now, I think with how we’re grappling in and trying to move forward with AI as a part of information literacy in the work that we’re doing in libraries, trying to incorporate more textbook affordability initiatives and open educational resources in the curriculum.
And I think too, especially from Tisha’s chapter, building students’ curiosity. I think her chapter does a really good job, part of a broader theme that I see in the book in terms of centering the student in this work and being proactive is what is a student bringing to the research process and centering their background, talks a lot about, which I think we see, but maybe hasn’t been named, but research that’s not linear. The research process is not linear. You can set out a script about how this is supposed to work and how the different research parts of your paper are supposed to work, but it really doesn’t necessarily always jive that way.
I think one of the important pieces, I think from that chapter too, is that if we want to have students be able to build their own curiosity, some of that can be overshadowed by the institution’s business model and the focus on job outcomes and degree or transfer numbers versus that actual instruction, that curiosity, again, centering the student in that work and having the time to do that, which a lot of time I think, I hate to continue with that theme in the profession, but sort of time in the classroom with students that we don’t always get.
The other piece that’s also a theme in the book that she touches on is, again, that partnership theme, being able to work with faculty and create assignments and not just talk about interdisciplinary work and partnership, but actually doing that work. That’s another piece that I appreciated about that.
Terra Jacobson: Yeah, and I think Spencer touched on this a little bit, but I think we have a big opportunity right now to align ourselves directly to students with AI work, and looking at how information is created and how students understand and interpret that information. So I think there’s a good opportunity for us in the community college library to address that in our curriculum and really speak to our students.
We can also do that with faculty. I think that’s being addressed on many campuses already, but I think that we have a role in that student learning experience to offer that education that I don’t think many other faculty are positioned well to do. We are the information specialists. We should just take that and own it.
And I wanna remember that our students, we’re an open enrollment institution, so our students are coming to us at so many different levels. In our instruction, and Michele Handy really talks about this in her chapter of the Open Doors, Open Minds section, in this open enrollment type of mission is how do we serve these students in different ways? We have to serve ESL students, ELL students, transfer students that are maybe having an unsuccessful semester and need that extra assistance, and the librarians can be those touch points for those students too on our campuses. They meet them in the classroom and they become that space that is safe to come back to and ask questions, and if we can make that very clear to our students, I think we can also add that one-on-one instruction value to our overall institutional value.
We’re a teaching institution. Community colleges are different than other academic libraries. I think that’s something we always see in the literature that we struggle with. We’re all doing instruction at some level in all different types of academic libraries, but our main goal is teaching. Our main goal is not research, and I think that’s where we get left out on many of those value propositions about our instructional role in the larger literature.
We have a really unique opportunity in our community college library spaces to be experimental. We’re not committing to an entire semester with a course all the time. So we can help other faculty be experimental too by maybe creating new and innovative learning spaces. We can help change classroom design and work with them to make it more flexible, active learning, and also just offer them an opportunity to take a chance to do something innovative. I think if we’re flexible in our prep with them and instruction that we do, they’ll come back to us again and think of us as a place for the instruction innovation. I think that’s a really good opportunity that’s out there for us in this information literacy role for community college librarians.
Troy Swanson: It’s interesting that the kind of gaps that we fill and how that matters with the innovation because like you said, we can test things, but also if we find things that work, then we can also spread those ideas. In so many ways, we’re like champions for the ideas and spread from class to class. Sometimes I’ll talk to faculty members who are in the same department and they don’t even know what their colleagues are teaching because they don’t see each other. They see each other in department meetings, but they don’t, I’ll be like, “You know, so and so down the hall is doing this almost exact project” and they’re shocked to learn that. So that’s even just spreading the word about how other innovations are working. So 100%.
To touch a little bit on that space idea, in chapter 20, Dr. Knetl talks about the value of libraries as third spaces, and I know that’s an old idea that’s been around, but I still think it’s so relevant and especially for community colleges, could you talk about why that third space is so valuable for community college libraries?
Spencer Brayton: Yeah, I think it’s the third space and also I’ve noticed looking at the book again, how we’re talking about heart and hub. Sometimes they seem to be interchangeable. Sometimes the hub is a term that’s used in the chapter in a more proactive sense rather than a nostalgic sense. So while one might be one that we maybe don’t wanna rely on as much anymore, I still think there’s some advantage to that. But I’m also observing that one, they’re used interchangeably, but one, the hub seems to be the more proactive approach to the work, and I think maybe that’s why we still see this idea of the third space around because I think libraries, kinda like you said, Troy, we try to fill gaps. I think this is one way that we try to do that at our institutions, at community college libraries, because we’re always thinking about engagement, academic and non-academic engagement and programming.
We’ve talked about, we serve a diverse community of users, whether it’s the local community in our districts in Illinois, or is it parents, commuters, we have lifelong learning institute on our campus too, so we serve students who are taking classes on campus, but they’re also needing to connect to take their online course in the library at the same time. We talked about this previously, but serving students with technology needs, and having students, again, Terra talked previously about students being able to see themselves and have a welcoming space, so how are they seeing themselves on our campuses and our collections and our spaces?
Again, we’re trying to be all of that, and I think that’s sort of this sort of third space. We’re trying to fill that need, and I think it goes back to what I said earlier, that to me seems like a microcosm of what the institution is trying to be. We talk about, again, this goes back to the theme of that I’m observing in these chapters of partnership and collaboration. A number of the chapters touched on interconnection with student affairs and student life. And so again, we go back to that non-academic and academic piece we’re trying to bring both together in our spaces to make students feel supported. That may be why that third space continues to be an important theme for our work.
Terra Jacobson: I think we have a very particular way, maybe those of us that came up in a certain library generation, had heard Third Space a lot, and we thought of it in one specific format. I think now we’re becoming an answer to maybe post pandemic student needs addressing concepts of loneliness. Students are looking for ways to connect with each other again. I feel like I can see that in our campus. It is packed in our library and it’s wonderful. It’s loud. There’s a lot of joy and energy. Sometimes it gets a little frustrating when you’re trying to help a student, but it’s so nice to see. They’re craving these spaces and there aren’t that many spaces for them anymore, honestly.
Where are they going to go that you can go for free, where you don’t have to make a purchase to spend time together with your friends? It’s economically difficult for our students right now to just attend school. So they’re not wanting to spend probably more money to go to a coffee shop and spend time together either. There’s just not a lot available.
But I think on our campuses specifically, we really meet a very unique co-curricular need too. If we position ourselves correctly, and I think I’m gonna call, Troy out on this briefly, but I think we do on our campus an excellent job with our academic co-curricular programming. We offer academic based events that meet our students’ needs, get them into our space but also get our faculty to bring them into these spaces. We’re becoming a third space because these students come with their faculty members, which I always said, faculty really drive our student engagement on our campus. And they come in, they see us one time, they have a great experience in an event, they feel like they are civically engaged perhaps in some kind of event that we’re hosting, and they can feel involved in a community. The community gets built in for them. So we continue to then be that space over and over again for them.
And I think that that’s really just giving ’em, again, that touchpoint of a place to find people that they know, whether that’s other students, maybe seeing a faculty member have a coffee, meet with them for office hours here, or the librarian that helped them with a one-off question that seemed really unique and weird, and the librarian’s like, “This is no big deal. I got this.” They need some experts. They need some help, and we’re here to help them through those processes. So I think their students are seeking those types of spaces.
We just generally are lacking in our culture right now, and we share this in our first intro chapter, that we need places where people can just find joy and inspiration and feel motivated and libraries provide access to content. They provide you people, they give you space, they give you technology, they offer instruction, they just have everything that you could need in that moment when you’re trying to investigate something new and make connections with folks. It’s really like an equalizing space.
And if your campus can foster that growth, which I think is a struggle for many campuses in many libraries right now. I think I’m seeing some changes in what I’m seeing when I talk to other people and what directions their learning commons are going, or their libraries are planning to move in, that we’ll see maybe a reinvigoration of whatever the new third space is or whatever that’s called on those campuses. I think this is the turning point and I hope it continues to go that way.
Troy Swanson: Yeah, absolutely. It is a unique thing that I don’t know that you could go back and reinvent, like if we didn’t already exist. But that by pulling the history forward and kind of always competing to be relevant, you’re always looking to what’s the new thing that we can offer and how can we have impact?
We’ve touched on some of this and I think this leads us to a good point. I think, across higher ed, there’s many challenges and I think there’s challenges facing all of us in community college libraries. Given your perspective with all the chapters, all your thinking about community colleges and the work that you’ve done, how would you define the major challenges that we’re facing right now as a subsection of the profession?
Terra Jacobson: Like we’ve just mentioned, we’ve becoming like this catchall for our campus. Many of us have taken on roles that we don’t expect to have, and we’re serving our students while doing those roles. So we are definitely, I don’t love this term, but I’m gonna use it anyways, doing more with less constantly. And we’ve really, I think, hit a point where we can’t do much more and so we need to demand more to do more. I would love to abolish that phrase from library literature, ” doing more with less.” We should stop doing that. We need to demonstrate that this is important work and we can’t be asked to do more with less.
But I think a huge challenge to that and making that possible is something that’s going on in just in higher education overall. There’s a huge funding and enrollment cliff that we’re experiencing in many institutions. We’ve seen so many of our peers even close to us their campuses are closing. Not community colleges, generally, but other liberal arts institutions, and that’s a big struggle and we’re gonna see some of those students join our institutions. Maybe they’re gonna move to community colleges and that might change things for us. We have a slight increase at our institution and enrollment overall, but I think that enrollment cliff is gonna hit us hard financially if that does happen. And being a cost center for campuses, we don’t show that way that we provide the dollars and dollars out metric that they might be looking for. That’s gonna continue to be difficult.
There is a scary trend in academia and education in the whole that colleges are looking more like business models, and that’s putting libraries at risk too. We’re following a business model in the work that we are doing versus a service model, and I think education’s a service. We may not make money on programs and we need to offer them. That might be an unpopular opinion right now, but I think that the library needs to be centering themselves in that conversation, where do we not make money, but become important? ‘Cause we’re in a place of survive or thrive. We need to stop just surviving in the work we do. We need to instead do things that help us thrive on our campuses and show that we can really make a huge difference to our students, faculty, and honestly the whole community. That’s who we serve too, and I think that’s a overlooked spot for many of our libraries too.
Spencer Brayton: I think we talked about advocacy and outreach and the importance of doing those things, but I think if we’re constantly viewed as cost centers, and I think sometimes that can be exhausting having to over and over always have that additional justification. We’re always gonna be dealing with change in higher ed and in libraries.
But I think that this idea of innovation and you had mentioned during the last question, what’s the next new thing we can offer? We’re always trying to think about that to try to maintain our status on campus. I think too, sometimes within that conversation, what if we really focused on doing the basics really well, like just adhering to our foundation really well, back to that as value. So I often think about some of those things too in terms of, all just talk about innovation and change versus what have we always done that people have trusted us to do, and how can we continue just to do that really, really good.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. Excellent. That is like the juggling act, to be good at what you do and then still be able to find a way to grow and and to recognize that. And I think the point is, I think it’s well taken, the point that there’s a cost to also demonstrating value. In the institutional scheme, every time the state passes a law that says, “Hey, you’ve gotta show that you’re not wasting money or something,” then we hire five accountants. Like, there’s a cost to show that you’re not wasting, and that drain, even if there isn’t a huge cost, the emotional drain of always having to report and to show that we’re good. I think that’s such a key point about where we are within our profession.
So the flip side of the last question, what are the challenges? How do you see us growing and changing? How are we evolving maybe more of the positive side, like what’s next and how do we get there?
Spencer Brayton: I think we have owned that, maybe not explicitly, but just as our work has evolved, we have owned being that connection hub, moving on to be a more proactive space, which I think is important and more student-centered space. I think we have owned that, and I think that’ll continue to be important. I think obviously, and I know we’ve talked about this and it’s been talked about a lot ,but AI education, AI literacy, I think it’ll be important for us to evolve in that direction.
I think just allowing people to explore information, going back to that idea about curiosity especially I think will be important. I was sort of reflecting on this in preparation for today, but I keep going back to Kate’s chapter about archives. How can archives continue to have an impact on our future and demonstrating our value moving forward? And then I think about Linda Miles’s article about relying on different departments for help, being that linchpin, making connections, building partnerships, working side by side with faculty, and how we maybe come together in that third space, that learning common space via those partnerships, I think will continue to be important as as we evolve.
Terra Jacobson: Yeah, I think I agree with a lot of what Spencer’s shared there. Again, back to I think the opportunity for fostering innovation on campuses, not just for the faculty and instruction, which we’ve already talked about, but also being a space where students can experiment and maybe find new career paths, try out new types of work, working with new tools and just offering that to our students I think is a really great way for us to expand our role on campus. Once we get the basics down, which I think are extremely important first, is to look at that as an opportunity.
We’re definitely gonna be dealing with addressing mis- and disinformation more and more with AI generated content. I think librarians are already aware of that role, but I don’t know if our campuses are aware that we have that role, so I think that that’s something that we’re gonna spend a lot of time doing and hopefully doing it really well, that it becomes a basic for us. I hope this is what’s being taught in library schools, that information isn’t what it used to look like and you can’t count on sources in the way we used to count on them and we’re teaching that change. I know our librarians are learning it at Moraine Valley. Tish Hayes is working with our teams to share how this changes how we teach.
But I think that that’s gonna be expanding at community colleges for sure. And those students really need the most resources. They’re gonna need the most help understanding what is a good source at this point in time. Sometimes I get tricked. It happens to all of us. You’re like, “What is going on here?” And then you need to take some time to step back and think. And so I think that’s gonna be something we’re going to do.
I think there’s also a really good role for us in the future to just be a way to connect our students to resources and give them that opportunity to create, to experience new ideas, to question those ideas together with maybe other students or maybe at an event or in some way to participate and then create new ideas. I think we’re trying to help them learn, do all those pieces of that information process. I think it’s a mission that I know our institution has for our students. And I think that that’s gonna grow too.
I’m seeing a huge shift, especially in the state of Illinois, where, and I alluded to this a little bit earlier, but I’m seeing some recentering around our libraries. They’re looking different. They’re definitely changing how they work on our campuses. They’re definitely incorporating some more student support services, maybe more learning common style, learning resource center style again, but I am seeing that many campuses are reinvesting into recreating those spaces and they’re seeing that those students need a place and a hub to make those connections. And that’s exciting. Like, that feels good to start seeing that some presidents and executive teams are looking at that as an opportunity on their campus. So I’m excited for those peers and I’m excited to see that expand throughout the country, I hope.
Spencer Brayton: Yeah. We’ve got part of our new strategic plan is to be the community’s college here, which I like thinking about us being that, working with local public libraries or being that joint use space and serving district folks that support us. How can we think about being there for them and what does that look like?
Troy Swanson: Excellent. I really appreciate the work that you’ve done on this book. Clearly all community college libraries are gonna wanna buy your book, but also I hope universities add this to their collection for their departments of education, just for people interested in higher ed, public libraries too, so how can our listeners find a copy of Valuing the Community College Library?
Terra Jacobson: It’s published through the Association of College and Research Library, so if you are an ALA member, it’s easy for you to find. It’s at the ALA store on their website. Also it’s on Amazon if you are using them as a vendor, and many book vendors are carrying this text as well. You can also order it through your local bookstore if you really want to. I think that’d be a great way to get our book. We’d love that.
Troy Swanson: Excellent. Terra and Spencer, thank you so much for your time and for your work editing this volume.
Terra Jacobson: Thank you, Troy.
Circulating Ideas 