Foreword

Larry Hardesty

April 26, 2012

I am both delighted and honored that Jacob Hill asked me to write the foreword to this book. I also am very pleased by the attention this book focuses on the winners of the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Excellence in Academic Libraries award. I believe there is much to be learned by the academic library profession in general from the practices and experiences of these libraries.

I initiated the Excellence in Academic Libraries Award when I served as ACRL's president in 1999-2000. From my previous work and experiences I had concluded that the contributions of academic libraries and their staff often went unacknowledged in higher education (Hardesty, 1991). I had found that very few writers on higher education, outside of the late Ernest Boyer in his 1987 book College: the Undergraduate Experience in America (still one of my favorites a quarter century after its publication; the chapter "Resources: Printed Page and Printout" is recommended - while some of terminology related to technology may be dated, the message, relating to libraries and the mission of the undergraduate college, is not) wrote much about the role of the library in the academy.

When, about a decade ago, I queried numerous higher education authors about their lack of writing about the role of the library, they responded typically along the lines, "I don't think much about the library because . well, er . because I don't think much about the library." One well-known author, who had served as president of a prestigious university, responded to my query to the effect that he had not written much about the academic libraries in higher education in his books because libraries had not contributed all that much to higher education. Well, excuse me for showing my bias, but I beg to differ. I also sensed that many academic librarians and others on the staff of academic libraries felt underappreciated in their roles of supporting the missions of their institutions.

For these reasons, as ACRL president I put together a task force to help identify academic libraries that are outstanding in furthering the educational missions of their institutions. This foreword provides me an opportunity to publically acknowledge the members of the task force for their good works. They are (including positions at the time of service, and in addition to myself, who served as the Library Director at Austin College at the time):?

 Gloriana St. Clair (chair), Director of Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University

 Susan Anderson, Director of Libraries, St. Petersburg Junior College

 Willis Bridegam, Librarian, Amherst College

 Susan Campbell, Library Director, York College of Pennsylvania

 William Crowe, Vice Chancellor Information Services, University of Kansas

 Ray English, Director of Libraries, Oberlin College

As the reader will note, they represent a wide range of types of academic libraries, and the task force decided early on to have one award each year for each type of academic library: university, college, and community college. Each member made significant contributions to the final plans. For example, I distinctly remember during the course of our deliberations, Bill Crowe stating rather matter of factly, "Of course, the award should be made on the campuses of the winners." We all paused for a moment to contemplate the ramifications of doing this and then responded enthusiastically, "Of course!" This decision would allow the involvement in the award ceremony of the full library staffs, along with presidents, provosts, and other members of the institutions. Over the years almost all of the winners have made the most of this opportunity.

The best laid schemes of task forces often go awry if there is no financial support for their ideas. Fortunately, Althea Jenkins, then executive director of ACRL, recommended I contact Don Satisky, Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing for Blackwell Book Services. In Don, I found a ready champion to provide substantial financial support for the award. In fact, I think Don and other representatives of Blackwell Book Services with whom I worked at the on-campus award ceremonies enjoyed giving the award as much as the library staff and their institutions enjoyed receiving it. As they say, the rest is history with YBP, which has taken over Blackwell Book Services, continuing the strong support for the award.

In this book, Jacob Hill and Susan Swords Steffen have a gathered a series of essays representing nine of the winners in the "college" division. While I hope others will follow their lead and will compile similar essays representing winners in the "university" and "community college" divisions, I have to admit to another of my biases, as a long-time college librarian, towards the valuable services often offered by college libraries to their parent institutions.

These are challenging times for academic libraries and particularly so for small college libraries, with some questioning their very existence, as described in the Hollins College library contribution. Recently I was asked to give a talk at a small college on the future of the small college library. In preparing for the talk, I was reminded of a quote attributed to Yogi Berra, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." This is not only true about small college libraries, but also about academic libraries in general. Recently, Charles Lowry, Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries, and Sue Baughman, Associate Deputy Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries, concluded from the efforts of scenario planning among the research libraries, "Nobody seems to have a clear crystal ball, and the record of 'future casting' is spotty at best. Maybe all we know about the future is that there will be one" (Lowry and Baughman, 2011). Therefore, we need to learn all we can from each other.

I have written elsewhere about the typical characteristics of the winning libraries in all the divisions (Hardesty, 2007). Briefly, they are:

 a multiplicity of efforts often sustained over an extended period of time;

 ready adoption and creative use of technology;

 development of the library as "the place" for communication and collaboration among users; and

 clear sense of service and dedication in both anticipating and responding to individual user needs through personal attention.

The libraries contributing to this book all reflect these characteristics to varying degrees. Some may well serve as models that others would do well to examine and to emulate. The commitment of the library staff as a whole team at Carleton is such as model. Others, such as Grinnell and Mount Holyoke, are examples of how the staff of libraries have attempted successfully to serve the distinct needs of their colleges in their particular circumstances, and the positive results may be less portable, at least not in total, to colleges of different circumstances. Still, there is much be learned from these more distinct experiences too.

All the contributions are well worth the reader's time - and for different reasons. The Augustana College (Illinois) contribution particularly struck me for its refreshingly candid account of how the leading edge can become the "bleeding" edge. Too often the "how-we-done-it-good" accounts, a frequent genre in library literature, gloss over the significant challenges and, as a result, offer little useful guidance to others.

The reader also will learn how the Earlham College library, which has enjoyed several generations of strong leadership, responded to the question the library staff asked itself, "Are we still excellent?" Excellence is not something that once achieved is always maintained. It can be a quite elusive concept. It may well be defined not only differently among the various groups the library serves but also within various groups over time. A lesson from the Earlham contribution is that the effort to maintain excellence must be constant.

While the winners of the relatively more affluent institutions made good use of their resources (or else they would not have received the award), I am particularly pleased that college winners also represent some of the relatively less affluent colleges. This suggests that creativity, imagination, team work, and sometimes just old-fashioned hard work can result in a college library providing excellent service to its institution.

I also agree, as Susan Swords Steffen argues in her contribution, that in many ways the staff of college libraries may better serve their institutions than can those of the larger institutions. While the college library may lack the financial resources and the technical expertise more characteristic of large research libraries, the staff of college libraries usually have the opportunity to better know their institution and they often have the agility to readily adapt and adopt innovations to better serve their institutions. Elmhurst's culture of "yes" epitomizes what can...