“I think we’re going to go from a model from which a local collection of paper materials was a leading indicator of a great library, to where the libraries that collaborate and leverage the best will be seen as the best libraries,” Leonard said. “Now, we have to think of those buildings as nodes in a network. Information flows from one node to another.”
Shared collections in both digital and bound form increase library interdependence and effectiveness, said Joyce L. Ogburn, the president of the Association for College and Research Libraries.
In addition to its efforts in the HathiTrust and the Digital Public Library of America initiative to share digital holdings, Harvard also joined a program last year to facilitate sharing of its physical resources. Harvard was a latecomer to Borrow Direct, a partnership formed among the other Ivy League institutions nearly a decade before to share books across the universities.
Within the library itself, Ogburn said that a more modern library would reserve more space for computers and student collaboration. Books, she said, could be retrieved by a robot.
VISION TEST
Harvard University Library administrators have generally stated goals in line with what outside experts consider important for a competitive university library. But critics charge that library leaders cannot fully articulate their own idea of what the library of the future should look like.
“They just don’t have a clear vision,” Asani said.
Asani and several of his colleagues have said that they fear that the library, long renowned as one of Harvard’s strongest features, will be weakened by this lack of vision. And library workers share the same concern.
“There’s some confusion among our members about where exactly this is headed [and] what the goals actually are,” Jaeger said. He added that workers still hope that the library reforms will in fact lead to an improved and more efficient Harvard library system.
Garber acknowledged that the University’s efforts to create a 21st-century library combine both “catch-up” measures and cutting-edge innovations.
“We’re trying to do both things at once, basically,” said Garber. “We’re trying to, where possible, leapfrog into [the] state of the art.”
But the difficulties communicating may be due in large part to the precarious state of library transformations across the country. With the rapid pace of change, experts say that it has become difficult to chart a definite course and stick with it.
“I think the age of having a 30-year, 15-year plan, that age is over. Even five is pushing it,” said Frick. “When you think about the constant development process, you’re constantly retooling and developing.”
—Staff writer Samuel Y. Weinstock can be reached at sweinstock@college.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Justin C. Worland can be reached at jworland@college.harvard.edu.