Out of the ‘Frye’ Pan, Into the Fire

1. Out of the ‘Frye’ Pan, Into the Fire Lessons in Transformational Leadership NERCOMP Annual Conference March 19, 2001 Worcester, Massachusetts

2. Out of the ‘Frye’ Pan, Into the Fire Presenters: • Lois Brooks, Director, Academic Computing, Stanford University • Pattie Orr, Director, User Services, Wellesley College • Robert Renaud, Associate Dean of Information Services, Connecticut College • Joanne A. Schneider, Assistant College Librarian for Budget & Collections, Middlebury College

3. Out of the ‘Frye’ Pan, Into the Fire Outline: • Context of Frye Institute • Individual Perspectives • Outcomes and Lessons • Questions

4. Frye Institute: Goal “The Frye Institute is designed for individuals in higher education who aspire to significant leadership roles in information management.. … The participants themselves -- representing a rich diversity of individuals from a variety of institutions, professional backgrounds, academic discipline, gender, and ethnic background -- will enrich the institute experience and forge a powerful network for future growth and mentoring.”

5. Frye Institute: Sponsors

6. Frye Institute: Sample Topics • Innovation • Scholarly Communication • Intellectual Property • Government Information Policy • Public Policy and Higher Education • University Economics, Budgeting, and Organization • Leadership

7. Frye Institute: Organization • 2 Deans • 33 Faculty • 42 Fellows • Home Institution Support: Professional Leave, Tuition • Pre-Institute Assignment on Home Campus • Extensive Reading List • Two week institute in Atlanta, Georgia • Demanding schedule: 8.30 AM – 9 PM • Practicum

8. Individual Perspectives: Lois Brooks Practicum Problem: Technology allows for the aggregation of data and artifacts into digital library collections. These are typically held by libraries who provide the infrastructure and the expertise to build the collection. How might we enable faculty to build their own collections? In what context would they do this? What kind of infrastructure support would be needed? What issues would this raise, and what benefits would be gained?

9. Individual Perspectives: Lois Brooks Practicum First Solution (pre-Frye): • Build a digital library repository for common media types, with scripted metadata generation, simple searching. Simultaneously, look for ways to link this to BlackBoard and WebCT, perhaps through APIs or additional scripting.

10. Individual Perspectives: Lois Brooks Practicum Solution (post-Frye): • The Open Knowledge Initiative, an open source, modular infrastructure for courseware. • Partner with MIT and other schools • Funded by Mellon • Will include media support, portfolio support • Deeply integrated with our digital library efforts at Stanford

11. Individual Perspectives: Lois Brooks Impacts of Frye: • Broaden perspective on how to solve the problem – upward, outward • Broaden community of partners in the project – upward, outward • Narrow scope of project to a central problem, aggregating materials for online courses • Understand how to navigate multidirectional vectors

12. Individual Perspectives: Pattie Orr Practicum Problem: • The rate of change in software and the need for information literacy is changing at a staggering rate. Traditional face-to-face in user training classes across the country are experiencing lower enrollment. • How can training be technology transformed on a college campus? • Can the power of the Web, networking, and distance learning provide effective just-in-time training for staff, faculty and students? • What can be done to redesign and transform their training programs.

13. Individual Perspectives: Pattie Orr Practicum First Solution (pre-Frye): • Offer more demonstration classes, less hands-on to maximize staff efforts. Try to get departments to train as a group. Simultaneously look for paper or online tutorials to encourage users to do self-initiated training.

14. Individual Perspectives: Pattie Orr Practicum Solution (post-Frye): • Use Partnerships, Packages, and Policies to Offer User-Driven 24x7 Access to Training and Information Resources • Partner with Boston Consortium and NERCOMP to Develop Partnership with Vendor Element K • Gain Mellon Grant Funding for Pilot • Form Partnerships with Human Resources, Departmental Managers, Administrative Council, and the Deans to Promote Resource • Make Transformational Change to deliver custom and personalized approaches to training with upper level support

15. Individual Perspectives: Pattie Orr Impacts of Frye: • Broaden perspective on how to solve the problem – upward and outward • Broaden community of partners in the project including Human Resources • Devote the time needed to bring leadership to the consortial partnerships • Experiment, Dabble, Pilot, Think out of the Box • Policies Developed with HR to Put Responsibility for Training on both Manager and Employee • Make transformational change not incremental change

16. Individual Perspectives: Pattie Orr What Does Training Look Like Now? • Vendor Partnership with Element K--2 way street • Less Empty Seats by Offering Mid and Upper Tier Courses and New Topic Courses • Deskside Coaching • Peer-to-Peer Support for Students Online, Chat, and Tutoring • Training Plans Being Developed during Review Process • Marketing/Marketing/Marketing!

17. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider Original practicum problem: • The commercial availability of digital scholarly monographs by a growing number of vendors provides opportunities as well as challenges for libraries to enhance student and faculty access to information.

18. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider Pragmatic motivating factor: • Years-long planning for library renovation/expansion tenuous as estimated costs rise precipitously and some key players believe technology will soon solve Library’s space problems.

19. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider The Library needed to: • Aggressively pursue reasonable technological solutions • Gain credibility in the eyes of College VIPs • More accurately assess how rapidly digital innovations will address need for physical growth space.

20. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider Practicum solution-Pre-Frye: • For Middlebury to collaborate with a small group of academic libraries—in this case, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth--in a consortial “experiment” to develop a shared collection of electronic books from netLibrary and major purveyor of current digital scholarly monographs.

21. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider Issues originally addressed in practicum: • How soon and to what extent will ebooks impact space needs in libraries? • Implications for collection development-- who are users, how and what it is they access? • Budget implications? • Optimal size and composition of consortium for developing digital collections?

22. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider Developments along the way: • Middlebury College decides to build a completely new library that will incorporate all campus information units into a single facility known as the Library & Technology Center or LATC. • Additional ebook initiatives become available, e.g. ITKnowledge, etc. • New consortial opportunities develop that require testing and analysis.

23. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider Peering through the lens of Frye leadership lessons... • Planning must be derived from core institutional mission and values • Redefine and engage major stakeholders, identifying appropriate relationships between each one and the Library. • Build or strengthen strategic relationships through collaboration • Examine best balance of campus investment in information content and infrastructure. • Understand that new kinds of leadership involve initiative, innovation, and taking advantage of opportunities. • Clarify what the technological future is about

24. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider ...Provides future direction: • Involve IT and other information units on campus on content selection and content resource allocation • Users, undergraduate students, currently do most preliminary selection of titles • CCDM consortium experiment extended • Consortium members expanded • Partner with netLibrary on product development based on user statistics and satisfaction

25. Individual Perspectives: Joanne Schneider ...Has evolved the individual leading the project: • Recognize need for strategic planning regarding information • Realize the ability to “lead from the middle” • Clarify power of partnerships and collaboration to employ solutions that scale • Importance of being bold and taking risks

26. Outcomes and Lessons • Need for leadership in higher education • Value of mentoring and the challenge of finding it • Understanding of the sacrifices and joys of leadership • Need to overcome isolation within institutions • Value of professional networks • Need to see beyond day to day crises and ‘keep our chins up’ • Value of concentrated investments in professional development • Problem of ‘re-entry’

27. Questions and Discussion