The interviews provided a wealth of material on cultural change. Interviewees were able to draw on their experience of particular projects as well as their knowledge of the wider policy and strategic matters. The following represents a summary of the major issues arising from the discussions.
Interviewees were asked for their understanding or definitions of cultural change in the eLib context. The majority view was that cultural change needs to occur throughout HE and not just in the HEIs running eLib projects. Everyone needs to be affected, not just librarians, but also senior management in universities, students and faculty, publishers and subscription agents. The library community should be instrumental in bringing about cultural change and should act as change agents. The most noticeable effects should therefore be visible at the library level. One interviewee viewed librarians as "the catalyst for the transition between paper-based systems and the delivery of electronic information…the most important people are the front line staff in libraries, who get people to use the systems and give them training and help".
A general consensus emerged that cultural change is happening in spite of eLib and that inevitably there are difficulties in measuring the specific mobilising effects of the programme. This was considered to be impossible without some kind of benchmarking or a longitudinal research approach. All interviewees agreed that although there is no doubt that eLib is accelerating the pace of change; it is not itself dramatically effecting cultural change across the board. One interviewee suggested that it is impossible to direct the course of cultural change anyway:
"I think it's more like trying to get your hands round a jelly: you try to squeeze it into a certain shape and it comes out between your fingers, and it goes where it will... You think you are going to squeeze it into that shape, but it goes into its own shape. And it would be wrong, once it's happened, to say 'that's the wrong shape, we must chop these bits off'. We must accept that, as far as possible, that is the right shape for that time."
There was also general agreement that the institutional and organisational context needed to be taken into account in mobilising cultural change in HE as a result of eLib developments. The point was repeatedly made that HEIs are complex and diverse organisations with very different cultures and histories. Organisational commitment was considered to be important, not least for ensuring that the right technological infrastructure is in place to allow the optimum take-up of electronic products and services.
Interviewees highlighted where they thought the most noticeable cultural change effects had taken place. The role of the publishers was generally regarded as particularly significant. The sea change in publishers' attitudes towards the increased use of electronic information was attributed directly to eLib. As one interviewee described it "Publishers' attitudes had gone from outright hostility, through to scepticism, lukewarm enthusiasm to a degree of acceptance and even the beginnings of enthusiasm." These shifts in attitudes have been dramatic and, although they would have occurred eventually anyway, had been accelerated enormously by eLib. An example cited by several interviewees was the pilot site licence initiative, seen as a pivotal stimulus for significant change.
Other significant changes involved the library community. A number of comments attested to the fact that eLib had made a considerable impact in providing the library community with a whole new set of research, development and project management skills. The programme had also brought a lot of different people together, people from across different boundaries who would not normally have worked with each other. This was seen as an important coalition building process, allowing new relationships to be forged and in the long term paving the way for more fundamental cultural change. eLib has also been seen to influence the job market for librarians, by increasing the need for IT literate staff.
One constant theme in our interviews was the lack of involvement in eLib of the major library schools (Library and Information Science departments in HEIs, providing undergraduate, postgraduate and professional librarianship training). We understand that there has been some liaison between eLib and BAILER (the British Association for Information and Library Education and Research), although only a handful of eLib projects include library schools as partners. However, in general there is a noticeable gap not only between eLib development and library school research projects (largely, we have been informed, because the types of proposal submitted to eLib by library schools were too research-oriented for the programme objectives), but also between the eLib T&A activities and the library schools' taught curriculum. Two of our interviewees described this as a missed opportunity, and doubted whether academics in library schools were keeping themselves up to date with the Internet and other technological developments, let alone with eLib or other major initiatives. Another, speaking from within a library school, argued that the schools could not be expected to contribute actively to a programme like eLib without the provision of earmarked funding. A third suggested that someone from a library school should have been included in FIGIT (the Follett Implementation Group for IT), but that there was a general perception of library schools as being too theoretically-oriented. The final section of this report (see below) will discuss the implications of this in more detail.
Effects of eLib on academic behaviour were considered to be fairly insignificant, and a number of interviewees commented that real cultural change would only happen when fundamental change occurs at faculty level. A major sticking point concerned the reluctance of academics to accept electronic journals as a serious means of publication. Although there is a general perception that scholarly communication is changing (and that eLib may have nudged it along) radical shifts in an emphasis to electronic information had not yet occurred, and in this respect eLib was not having a very profound effect.
Interviewees also commented that academic information seeking behaviour was not changing dramatically. There was still a preference for trusted traditional sources, and informal communication channels were highly valued. One interviewee remarked that librarians would need to take the lead in trying to change scholarly working practices by choosing either the carrot or the stick approach: either by enticing use of electronic information services which are new and better than traditional tools, or by reducing the book budgets so that academics have no other option but to use electronic resources. Another interviewee more pessimistically commented that "Academic departments are not run as organisational hierarchies. You don't get to change things, you get to persuade, cajole, seduce..."
An important tenet of cultural change in the HE context was regarded by several interviewees as the shift from the teaching to the learning paradigm. One interviewee linked discussion of this issue with the need to view change from the perspective of individual institutional cultures. The new universities were taking a more innovative approach to teaching styles but did not have the necessary resources to move towards more remote-based learning. Ironically, the older universities enjoyed better IT resources but were clinging to more conservative teaching approaches. If eLib is to make a difference in changing the teaching culture it will need to take more account of these institutional issues. Certainly, students cannot be said to be having their study practices radically altered by eLib just yet.
The comments on the Training & Awareness projects suggested that training initiatives need to be focussed more on the basic underlying issues such as copyright and charging mechanisms rather than a narrow concentration on Internet skills. A wider range of organisational and managerial competencies were required; one example given was the importance of negotiating skills, essential for dealing with the publishers for example. Indeed, one comment attested to the fact that some projects had been less successful specifically because of a negotiating weakness in dealing with publishers.
The size of individual projects, one of the potential causal factors identified by the Tavistock Institute and listed earlier in this report, was not seen by the interviewees as being particularly important in effecting cultural change. Examples were given of very small projects which had quite profound cultural change effects and large projects which (although successful in terms of product delivery and development) seemed to be having relatively little impact in altering peoples' working routines, perceptions, attitudes and behaviour.
The need for a project 'champion' was considered to be important. Personalities were frequently a major factor in the overall success of a project. The point was made that an individual could have a profound effect on changing user attitudes by generating a positive approach and enthusiasm for the project (and conversely a negative approach would have the opposite effect). This did not necessarily have to occur at a senior level to make an impact; centres of expertise could spring up in unlikely places, sometimes at a quite junior staff level, but still have a major impact in influencing user behaviour and attitudes.
Previous section: Applying the model
Next section: Analysis of Training and Awareness projects
The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) was funded
by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
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