The Library: Center of the Restructured University

s Franklin Wallin, the president of Earlham College, observed in a recent article in Change, ''Universities have not moved much beyond amazement at the cost and power of the technological engines that drive this shift [from an industrial society to an information-based society], the computers and telecommunications that can come up with answers in nanoseconds and transmit them to everyone around the world in minutes. We struggle merely to keep up with this technology in our universities. We have scarcely taken time to understand the educational implications of the change or conceive what a university might be like in the context of an information age.'' For at least a decade, librarians have been very much aware of the revolutionary impact of developments in information technology. But the expansion of computer capabilities occurred at a time when research libraries were experiencing, for unrelated reasons, serious obstacles in serving scholarly needs. The traditional bonds between scholars and librarians have been substantially eroded, and librarians' efforts to reinvent the library in the electronic environment have often been actively opposed, widely misunderstood, or more generally, completely ignored by scholars and administrators. In addition, there appears to be widespread misunderstanding of the function of the research library in the process of scholarly communication and a pervasive misperception of the ''library'' as no more than a storehouse for books. As often happens in academic institutions, symbols become enshrined in mythology and mortgaged to territorial jurisdictions, with the consequence that the basic function is obscured and overlooked. Traditionally we have defined the library as a storehouse where librarians "mark and park," rather than as a place which has a scholarly information function within the university. The introduction of computer and communications technologies into the society were initially viewed as separate and distinct activities unrelated to the historic functions of the library. The traditional organization of the university into largely autonomous units further inhibited the recognition of the essential relationship between the new technologies and the information function of the library. In keeping with conventional organizational structures, university administrators departmentalized the function, establishing an organizational barrier between libraries and computer centers. For almost a decade, there was little recognition that advances in communication technologies were radically affecting the ways in which scholars communicate. One of the most powerful deterrents to change in conservative institutions-and I think the educational institution is one of our society's most conservative institutions-is the existence of strong autonomous vested interests and the fear of losing one's empire. Universities are no to-