The annual CNI Spring 2020 membership meeting cancelled, originally scheduled for San Diego, was cancelled due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In its place, CNI convened four sessions in April 2020 to bring together CNI participants to discuss the topic “What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?”
Much of the discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on libraries and universities has, rightfully, focused on how it affects pedagogy and students. These discussions brought together key campus players from Offices of Research, Libraries, and IT/Research Computing to focus on how the global pandemic will transform the research enterprise of higher education.
In the sciences, much of the impact, from the start, was on lack of access to laboratories and research equipment, however, as was noted by participants,
It is important to understand, and we will have more to say about this later in the report, that libraries (along with museums and archives) can reasonably be considered to be the laboratories of many humanists and a substantial number of social scientists (p.3).
In the first weeks after the start of the COVID-19 crisis, institutions reacted in a variety of ways. In those first weeks of confusion, different parts of the same institution often had varying responses and it was noted that:
The extent of library autonomy with regard to broader institutional policies or regulations from various governmental jurisdictions has been an important factor in determining the extent to which a facility may be open and/or able to provide services or access to resources (p. 4).
With the closure of most libraries as the crisis deepened, a variety of responses evolved to provide researchers with access to the information now locked in hundreds of millions of volumes in quarentied library stacks. These responses ranged from more liberal access from publishers to certain content to the controversial National Emergency Digital Library from the Internet Archive. For those at top tier institutions,
Many participants discussed the importance of the HathiTrust Digital Library Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) for access to at least a portion of their collections that otherwise would have only been available in print form (for more information on this program see here). Some of the collection's limitations were also noted: the relative lack of newer material, the availability of only a portion of an institution's physical collections (most commonly estimated as less that 50%, though we really need better data on this), and the concern about discontinuing access once normal operations resume (and questions surrounding the definition of “normal operations”) (p. 4).
In the same vein, there seemed to be an openness around a dramatic rethinking of many assumptions about library collections: “There is certainly some recalibration about copyright, fair use, and new ideas like controlled digital lending that are taking place in light of the current emergency and public priorities” (p. 12).
With most library staff moved to a telework environment, many institutions attempted to pivot staff unable to perform regular, place-based tasks to work that would facilitate improvements and access to existing digital collections:
At least a few campuses are seriously recalibrating the extent of investment in digitizing special collections; additionally, some campuses with library staff working from home but unable to do their usual jobs are re-assigning them to enhance access to digitized special collections through transcription work, for example (p. 6)
Importantly, participants noted that there would unlikely be a return to the “old normal” any time soon, if ever. In the research environment, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate changes that have been underway in the research environment for the past three decades and see these changes more evenly distributed across disciplines outside of the sciences. The role of research support enterprises (libraries, IT/Computing, and offices of research) will be key to these changes and these areas need to actively engage with these changes:
We need to collectively envision what a maximally resilient, highly distributed, low-density, and network-based research enterprise might look like. Until we develop that vision we cannot exploit it as a way to enhance resilience in our current enterprise, and we cannot begin to explore questions about what parts of this vision are desirable, and which are problematic and counterproductive (p. 14)
June 14, 2020 | Find Online
See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.
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