Megan Heady is the Director of Knowledge and Resource Management and the Associate University Librarian at West Virginia University. She kindly agreed to talk about how her library is taking the initiative to meet modern research and teaching needs.
LB: Could you tell us a little more about West Virginia University?
MH: West Virginia University began life as West Virginia Agricultural College in 1867. It is a public land grant university, which means that it wasdesignated by the state to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, confirmed by the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act of 1994. There are more than 100 similar institutions in the USA and they were granted their land and status on condition that they focused on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science, and engineering—although “without excluding other scientific and classical studies”. West Virginia has almost 25,000 FTE students and teaches all subjects, though there is still a strong focus on agricultural disciplines and the health sciences. It has a teaching hospital and is the only university in the state with a law school. It has a strong research tradition and became an R1 university about ten years ago.
LB: Librarians across the world are experiencing budget squeezes at the moment, but libraries in the USA, despite their historically large budgets, are for political reasons probably suffering more uncertainty than elsewhere in the world. Could you tell us what your main budgetary challenges are and how you address them?
MH: The University has suffered. In the last fiscal year we had to manage a $45m structural deficit and a wide variety of measures were taken. This including reducing the number of faculty staff, cutting some programs, merging some of the schools and reducing library expenses. This meant laying off some library staff and cancelling some subscriptions. We restructured the Library to accommodate the lower staffing levels and identified the core services and functions we should prioritise. It was not as drastic as it sounds! We also changed some of our activities to reflect open access policies – the restructuring increased our commitment to OA. We took on board the NIH recommendations and the Nelson Memo, which says that any publicly-funded researchers must publish both their research results and the accompanying data via a public access site, with no embargo. It changed how the Library addressed research. Making data management plans certainly increased our workload, but we were keen to comply.
LB: Universities and their libraries in the USA engage much more in fund-raising than in other parts of the world. Are you able to describe some recent fund-raising activities?
MH: We seek donors to participate in our projects. For example, the Library runs the West Virginia and Regional Historical Centre Archives and Special Collections. We received $1.4m from a late university professor to provide public access to the materials held in the West Virginia and Appalachian collections. The University encourages donor participation and has an annual day of giving. On this day, the West Virginia Feminist Activist and Women’s History fund raised $10,000. Fund raising happens throughout the year, too – usually for specific initiatives, but the Library recently received a large sum to use at the Dean’s discretion and it has been dedicated to professional development for librarians and other library staff.
LB: What are the challenges that you face besides financial ones, particularly in your relationships with publishers?
MH: Sometimes specific publishers’ business models challenge us. This is especially true if a book is wanted for the whole class and the publisher will only offer it as a single-access ebook. We also run into issues with requests – we can’t buy every book we’re asked for, so we tend to base purchases on faculty requests. There can be difficulties with streaming media, but we can usually resolve these by buying the DVD outright. It’s hard explaining to researchers that we can’t purchase everything they want, especially if they’re working in niche areas. It’s interesting to see what’s happening with AI – some publishers’ databases have an AI add-on for improved searching – but there is often an additional cost attached to this, so we haven’t added any that charge. It’s interesting to see how users interact with AI and also how it affects publishers’ licence updates.
LB: What are your future plans for developing the library and its services?
MH: We will continue to build on our more streamlined approach. Outside the specific collections, we will consolidate collection development. We used to have subject librarians who made collection decisions, but there is now a single senior position – an Assistant Director role – which was created during the library restructuring. This person oversees general collections, special collections and the medical history museum. Also instead of subject librarians, we now have two new units, one based on research services – data planning, data visualisation and IP – and the other on scholarly communications. We’re in the process of building a new digital repository for digital collections, working with a consortium on HAIKU, an open system. All these new initiatives are about meeting needs in a different way.
LB: Would you like to tell readers a little about yourself? How long have you been a librarian?
MH: I haven’t always worked at West Virginia University. I’ve been a librarian for nineteen years and I started my career in public libraries. Public libraries in the USA are much more challenged now than they were then, because they have lost much of their federal support. I didn’t need a new qualification in order to transfer to university librarianship – the only specialist qualifications needed in this country are for school librarians and some subject specific roles – for example, if you want to become a law librarian. I started in access services at West Virginia, then moved to the law library and finally to the main library. In my current position I am responsible for all knowledge access and resource management, metadata, collection development and government papers. I’m still learning and still growing with the job, which is constantly changing – for example, OA is changing how collection development works. I’m not sure what I would like to do next, as I’m happy where I am, but I think it would be interesting to work in one of the federal libraries.
LB: What do you think will happen to academic libraries – and, by extension, higher education – in the next three to five years?
MH: I’m not good at predicting the future, especially in this time of great change! I don’t know what will happen to HE, aside from the changes that have already been made on the federal level. Owing in part to student disillusionment with higher education – and the debts it incurs – and partly to the falling birthrate, we’re already dealing with decreased enrolment. Some small schools and colleges are merging or closing altogether. I think university librarians will still be here in the future, still maximising on what they can achieve. Academic librarians have a strong history of collaboration and working through consortia is a big part of this. I hope that some of the friction felt in certain quarters between publishers and librarians can be improved upon – we rely on each other and I think that cordial partnerships are important to both.
LB: Megan, thank you very much for your brilliant thoughts and insights.
This blog post was written by Linda Bennett and first published on the De Gruyter Brill “Conversations” blog.
Gold Leaf 