A week ago the Provost of the university I serve sent me a link to Dan Cohen's article in The Atlantic, The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper. I know Dan and like and respect him as a colleague, and what he wrote is accurate---he may have extrapolated a little too readily from his context at Northeastern to practically every other college library.
When the Provost of your university sends you a link like that, the implicit message is clear: books are already irrelevant, and libraries (the bearers of the "book brand") with them. His point did not have to be made explicit: libraries are toast. Libraries are the past; the future is STEM education.
Like many universities, my university is rushing headlong into STEM programs. The popular, pundit-led perception goes that those subjects are the wave of the future, with little use for legacy resources: the future is everything (here come the flying cars!). The reality might be different, but who cares? The sizzle of growth is all: more sizzle, more growth, more STEM.
This rush is a rational response to perceived market pressures in higher education, pressures all measured and conceived narrowly as data. Fear of failure is so palpable one can taste it: the demographics in the Northeast are grim. Adapt (and that means STEM) or die. Adaptation means success, in this view.
In higher education, success is measured by ever-narrower criteria and data for students, their parents, and higher education administrators.
Students want to earn an immediately marketable degree. Marketability and immediate application --that first job-- is emphasized through the college application and enrollment process. Success is narrow path: don't fall off.
Parents demand, ostensibly on behalf of their students, a university that provides a the path to earn such an immediately marketable STEM degree; otherwise the graduates might be left behind in a morass of doubt and student debt: the penalties for falling behind could be severe. Fear of the childrens' failure is palpable.
For university administrators, success boils down to survival. A university that fails to cater to the clientele risks falling behind and disappearing, according to similar narrow criteria. Demographics assure that enrollment will decline in the Northeast, and expensive private universities that lack substantial endowments will be especially threatened. Enrollments must be kept up: and especially male enrollment, in some places already critically low.
Among all qualified high school seniors, the supply of qualified male high school graduates will continue to decline, and that in particular threatens any university, like my own, that historically has been characterized by educations in nursing, education, health professions, and social services. The retention of all students, but especially males, is critical to the university's continuing financial success. Received wisdom has it that the balance of males and females cannot tip more than 60% in the female direction without risk of losing those males.
Hence the undeclared but transparent emphasis upon majors that are regarded as appealing to young males: business (sports marketing, accounting), and STEM subjects, such as computer science gaming, cybersecurity, and financial computing, and a few outliers such as athletic training and exercise sciences. Hence the emphasis upon varsity sports and NCAA division I status. Doubling down: these young men and their parents tend to define success by very narrow criteria: income ("bank") and corporate prestige: major firms or bro-grammer-led startups. Both their success and the university's is very narrowly conceived and measured.
Given these narrow criteria both for students, their parents, and university administrators, STEM seems to be the ticket to guaranteed success for all. Northeastern is the template of such a successful, expensive private university in the New England. Such "template" quality makes Dan Cohen's article doubly powerful: if library books are becoming wallpaper at Northeastern, then it must be true everywhere. Cohen cites Yale and University of Virginia --others in the elite class. If a university is not like Yale, UVa, or Northeastern, that college of university will face decline and extinction because it did not become like them. It's a charmed, circular logic that assures senior leadership, trustees, parents, and students that the university is providing an excellent education because budgets are maintained, money is saved, enrollment goals are met, and the number of graduates increases, especially graduates in STEM subjects. The numbers of the key performance indicators add up to doing a great job.
What's this have to do with libraries?
Libraries are identified with books, etymologically and historically. Where else by definition do you find a librum? (Yes: French for bookstore is libraire.) If the books are becoming wallpaper, then the library is becoming a museum, a lovely exhibit of what used to be, rather like Thomas Jefferson's library exhibited at the Library of Congress. Cohen, from Northeastern (that template of the future), proves it by word and example: case closed.
Or is it?
At the university level: Northeastern developed into the STEM fields earlier than many universities. Recently the number of STEM programs everywhere is increasingly so rapidly that sooner or later simple "reversion to mean" suggests that some of them will not be as successful as hoped --measured of course by those key performance indicators. When every college or university wants to do the same thing, competition will reward some and demote more. STEM education actually poses some risks. The reality that many STEM subjects are actually difficult and demanding usually goes unremarked: even the best programs and services in support of student success will not lead everyone to succeed. Academic risks (can any given student really master the subjects?), and financial risks (can any given university really afford the expensive equipment and faculty that STEM subjects demand?) suggest that failures, when they come, will be expensive and hard to overcome by other means.
Academia by definition is a vast sorting engine. The vast sorting of academic achievement will mean that not every computer science graduate (for example), or computer science program, will be equally worthwhile. When every student is urged to pursue STEM, and every university caters to STEM instruction, real market differentiation is very difficult for a university to achieve in the face of increasing competition.
At the University library level: Cohen's piece is hard to reconcile with several other influential studies and surveys. A well-sourced article in PLoS One, May 2018 surveyed over 10,000 tertiary-level students world-wide and found that national origins or school systems had little sway in choice of format (print or digital): "the broad majority of students worldwide prefer to read academic course materials in print." The rush to digital looks like, from this viewpoint, a considerable convenience to administrators, but not what students for the most part desire. Print is changing, not dead.
On the other hand, Jean Twenge et al. clearly charted trends in adolescents' media use 1976-2016, and came away with the conclusion that "the rapid adoption of digital media since the 200s has displaced the consumption of legacy media." Since 1976?--well, duh, since consumer digital media did not exist yet. Twenge's definition of "legacy media" is very broad: "print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers; TV; and movies." That age-related cohorts of users have moved away from printed media since 1976 is obvious if only because now they have many choices. By contrast, have adolescents really moved away TV? If by TV one means broadcast signal by the three major networks in the style of 1976 (plus maybe PBS), then yes --but how many adolescents now interact with digital "TV" media on phones, including full-length movies, numerous cable series, and Youtube videos? The crux comes with Twenge's verb "has displaced" meaning "taken the place of," or "removed." Her (or their) assumption is that because adolescents (as everyone else) have only some much time and attention, and the amount of time has not increased, therefore a zero-sum displacement must have occurred. On the contrary: many adolescents now interact with digital media in spaces and activities that never would have allowed similar use of printed or analog-visual media, such as transportation, exercise, and meal times. More accurate reading of the "time spent" might result in a verb such as "has supplemented," "has extended," or "has substituted." Measuring cohorts since 1976 effectively stacks the research deck: adolescents now do many things that were far less common activities in 1976: women's sports, interactive but not digital games (Dungeons and Dragons, for example), and community and social service. What activities had to be "displaced" for those to happen?
The question here is: are "library books" merely "wallpaper" (Cohen), and broad patterns of behavior only partially warrant that view. Work by the highly-regarded Pew Research Center in surveys regarding the internet, technology, and libraries give depth and nuance to the question of the public library users, engagement, and expectations.
Through a long-running series of surveys and reports, the Pew projects have identified typologies of engagement of public library users and non-users. Public library users are not a niche group: "30% of Americans ages 16 and older are highly engaged with public libraries, and an additional 39% fall into medium engagement categories" (Citation, page 4) This is seen in 2012 studies of library engagement among younger users: "Younger Americans—those ages 16-29—exhibit a fascinating mix of habits and preferences when it comes to reading, libraries, and technology." (Citation)
This scheme of user typology measures engagement, not age, although one of the groups, "Young and Restless," describes a group younger than US median age, new to neighborhoods and cities, not other civilly or socially engaged, and predominant in the South. They have lower levels of engagement and library use and do not usually know where a public library is located. On the other hand, library engagement frequently correlates with all kinds of information usage and interaction, income, and education: the groups of highly-engaged library users tend to be slightly younger but considerably more educated than the US median. Some engagement is also associated with life changes:
Deeper connections with public libraries are often associated with key life moments such as having a child, seeking a job, being a student, and going through a situation in which research and data can help inform a decision. Similarly, quieter times of life, such as retirement, or less momentous periods, such as when people’s jobs are stable, might prompt less frequent information searches and library visits.
(citation: page 4-5)
In 2017 further analyses of library engagement revealed that about half of US Millennials have visited a public library or bookmobile in the past year --53%, compared with 45% Gen Xers, 43% of Baby Boomers, and 36% of "Silent Generation." The survey question was specifically focused on the use of public libraries, not on-campus academic libraries. Pew reports "relatively high library use by Millennials might be related to changes that many public libraries have undergone in the past 20 years." When Pew asked "who doesn't read books in America?" (at rates ranging from 19% in 2011 to 27% in 2015, and 24% in reported in March 2018), the demographic traits that characterize "non-book readers" (who also seem to read little else) were mostly likely to be Hispanics, older adults, those living in households earning less the $30,000 per year, those whose education stopped with the high school diploma or did not graduate from high school. Again, this analysis was focused on public libraries.
So what about academic libraries? Cohen's report from Northeastern, buttressed by statistics from Yale and UVa, and consonant with experience elsewhere, is that college students are reading (and checking out) fewer books, but using far more e-books and other digital text (journal articles, and statistical, numerical, or geographical databases). This does not immediately translate to lower library engagement, because gate-count and head-count numbers suggest steadily rising library space usage by students who have relatively few quiet places to study (as well as one of the few places on campus with intentionally-designed small group work spaces). Cohen suggests that libraries are really seeing "a Great Sorting within the library, a matching of different kinds of scholarly uses with the right media, formats, and locations." Some books continue in high demand: bulky health sciences texts and reference works; art books and bound music, and a few other categories. "Multiple copies of common books" can still present a problem because of digital rights management restrictions imposed by vendors. Lower-use books are much more appropriately digital, and really good news at SHU is that we have far more books available to our users in digital format than we were ever able to provide in the years before e-book aggregations, rentals, and purchases.
Cohen's piece in The Atlantic centers on printed books, and the conundrum remains: why is academic book circulation lower while Pew also reports fairly high use of libraries and collections (including print) by Millennials? Millennials, like everyone else, are elective public library users: they choose to use a public library (contrasted with assigned-use in academia, for example "you need to find three peer-reviewed articles"). These different patterns and perceptions are hard to square with each other. I believe that many millennials have fairly high engagement with libraries, and believe that libraries are important to them and their communities, all while using printed books more rarely in academic settings.
Cohen acknowledges that the decline of printed book circulations "runs contrary to the experience of public libraries and bookstores, where print continues to thrive." (Note: many of those libraries and bookstores are in communities with many college-educated people.) Cohen continues, "Unlike most public libraries, [academic] libraries have always been filled with an incredibly wide variety of [resources] --different books for different purposes." Research monographs are rarely read through cover-to-cover. A 2016 study at Seton Hall University suggests that in-house use of printed books may in fact be higher than traditionally tracked by parallel circulations: is it time to bring back the in-house use count?
(How much familiarity does Cohen really have with public libraries? Many public libraries I know, even smaller ones, have a wide variety of resources, though often at less historic depth than academic, and certainly less access to specialized STEM resources, which are the staple at Northeastern. Still, many public libraries are hardly to be dismissed casually.)
The ground-level realities of public and academic libraries usage patterns, levels, and engagement by Millennials and late-Millennials (so-called "Gen-Z") are quite different than those perceived by their elders, who tend to substitute their own experience for the actual and observable behavior of those who are young now. The message that printed books are irrelevant, and libraries, distinguished as the "book brand," are irrelevant, too may disclose a lot of wishful thinking among academic administrators regarding STEM education, higher education finance, and the behavior of the young. Cohen did not intend to show in his Atlantic article that "libraries are now irrelevant," but that is how his article can be taken by those simply looking for confirmation of their established point of view. To which I can only reply, watching millennials use libraries: engagement is as engagement does.