Boundaries as Opportunities
Adapted from recent reflections delivered at Harvard Library on how research libraries advance discovery and access and what opportunities lie ahead for our community.
Harvard Library’s Advancing Open Knowledge paper from 2020 depicts the concept of a global knowledge commons with content and information at the center of a globe. People, machines, and physical spaces accessing that content are depicted on the surface. Our work — the work of libraries — is described as “a layer of distributed, open interoperable infrastructure and services — the continents of the globe — and a layer of policies that open up access and protect rights as appropriate.” This idea of our infrastructure and services as continents on a globe is particularly striking.
In nature, we see spectacular changes at these points of intersection where continents meet — shifting tectonic plates give us volcanoes and deep sea trenches with evolving forms of life that subsist in new and amazing ways. So it’s at those edges, those boundaries, that we see the opportunities for change.
If our layer of infrastructure, policy, and services are the continents of the globe, what are the edges of those continents, the boundaries? Is each library or department its own continent? Each of our professional communities, our policy making entities a continent made up of member institutions? What about our workflows, designed around content format or location, are those each separate and distinct, or do they form land masses, shifting and changing together?
For each of these edges, these definitions, we are talking about boundaries. Over the past several years I’ve heard the concept of boundaries discussed in the context of data boundaries, community boundaries, personal boundaries.
Consider the following definition of a boundary: as a real or imagined line that marks the limit or edge of something — a place of meeting, learning, differentiation, and exchange — a means by which to include or exclude — and fundamentally, a place of connection. When we imagine those continental boundaries that we use in research libraries to frame our infrastructure, policies, and services, we can consider three categories.
The first is boundaries related to our collections — this is about more than print versus digital. We are collecting more diversely than ever before, and therefore those boundaries between format or jurisdiction, for example, are also evolving.
The next category is access boundaries. In many instances we think of our work as breaking down barriers, but it can be easy to make assumptions about what openness means and how we can increase accessibility, rather than navigating the more nuanced conversation about user needs, behaviors, and who benefits from our efforts.
Lastly, consider operational boundaries. With each new tool or technological breakthrough, we have the opportunity to redraw the lines around operational categories — how we do our work, and what success looks like. This includes evaluating our own personal boundaries when it comes to workplace expectations and culture — which are often also influenced by technological change.
For each of these categories, the following reflections articulate the potential boundaries at play, share some recent work, and identify future opportunities.
Collection Boundaries
Having alluded to the distinction between print versus digital as a collection boundary, let’s further interrogate how an “e-first vision” does not always align clearly with our processes or priorities.
Over the past 20 years, Harvard Library and many of its peers have invested a significant amount in e-resource licensing and e-book purchasing. In many cases, however, that is not a replacement for acquisition of physical items. In fact we are collecting more and more print every year, despite our increasing expenditures on e-resources. Restrictive license agreements or digital rights management clauses often diminish our ability to uphold our stewardship, preservation, and resource sharing goals.
Even if we can successfully convert some orders or licenses to reliable electronic versions or subscriptions, there are a number of jurisdictions in the world and areas of study where publication of print materials remains the only reliable way for libraries to acquire content that represents those voices or perspectives. So in order to uphold our commitment to creating a truly anti-racist, global collection, we must maintain our commitment to supporting print materials.
Additionally, at Harvard’s scale, collecting practices reflect patterns and arrangements of our organizational history, boundaries that have allowed us to collect deeply and meaningfully in particular areas, but have also served as limitations and demarcations that may not serve our future needs. We have begun to recognize the opportunities of what could be if we treat those boundaries as an invitation to be curious.
Curiosity about boundaries is what led us to consider how it might be to bring together all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America — over 700,000 pages of scanned material. I was privileged to participate in that project, known originally as Colonial North America, but what is more appropriately now Worlds of Change.
This initiative called for representing these remarkable materials in ways that both crossed boundaries and reinforced them. We sought novel ways to articulate both collection-level metadata, including subject headings and archival description, with item-level metadata, including dates, names, and places, that would allow users to search across collections and identify new intersections. We drew a large circle around these materials, and by doing so were able to highlight otherwise underrepresented themes such as Female Laborers at Harvard, Food, Medicine, and Material Culture.
We also used data boundaries to make sure that the underlying collection could be successfully migrated through adapting technologies — and that is in fact what ended up happening when we were able to successfully migrate Worlds of Change into the CURIOSity platform — articulating new definitions around what migration looks like in the overall digital collections lifecycle at Harvard.
These successful thematic boundaries and approaches to migration have given us a framework for a new way of looking at large-scale digitization projects. This year we were able to use boundaries as an invitation, putting out an open call for digitizing collections related to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Anti-Racism (EDIBA) as well as Climate Change and Colonialism. These kinds of open calls are another boundary — one of community. When drawing community boundaries we are articulating who can join, who can make decisions, and what are the modes of participation. With the HL Digitization program we are making it clear that anyone at Harvard Library can suggest material relating to these themes for digitization, collection managers are brought in to help make decisions, and the project team participates in setting priorities.
We also have the opportunity, through our partnership with the HBCU Library Trust to share our experiences and empower our peers — supporting efforts across the participating HBCUs to create a digital collection that represents both their collective strengths and unique contributions.
Additionally, these new boundaries reflect the changes we are seeing in collection development, where we are moving the focus away from collecting based on jurisdiction and toward collecting based on alignment to subject areas. This will require a realignment of our connection points between collections and technical services — a conversation around vendor management, approval plans, and shared expectations for metadata that reminds us all of our responsibility in maintaining a global collection.
Finally, it requires understanding the materials we have and the formats that are required for the type of scholarly work occurring today — such as our recent experimentations with a/v digitization and delivery and our pilot program for creating usable tabular datasets from handwritten archival materials. All of these efforts will require a shifting of those real or imagined lines that mark the limit of what we can and should be doing with our collections.
Access Boundaries
When we think about what we can do with our collections, that naturally begs the question of access. And here we have some natural intersecting boundaries — open access, resource sharing, accessibility (print and digital), and restricted access — just to name a few. This is a particular area of our work where it’s important to consider both the negative and positive connotations of creating a boundary.
For example, as we seek to make library materials accessible to users with print disabilities, understanding their user needs and behaviors is not a one-time check box. We must incorporate their experience into every change we make. This represents a broader respect for our users and consent-based relationship to access boundaries, where we must actively seek out engagement with our user communities. At the same time, when we seek to make items from our collections openly available, we also need to ask who benefits and is anyone harmed by providing access to these items — we may be perpetuating systemic and structural racism by providing open access to materials that in fact should be repatriated to their communities of origin. One frame of accessibility is about respectful open inclusion, while the other may be about respectful restriction or limitation.
Current explorations of applying Standardized Rights Statements to digitized content, for example, is an explicit invitation for re-use of public domain materials. We can clearly articulate the rights a user has in relationship to these items and make that boundary easy and usable. The same framework for applying those kinds of rights statements may also be used to apply traditional knowledge labels in partnership with communities of origin — allowing them to set the terms for discovery of and access to materials currently held in our collections. Or we may rethink the the necessity of custody of those materials at all and instead pursue a non-custodial digitization approach, such as our groundbreaking agreement with President Sirleaf and the digitization of her papers. Navigating all of these choices is not easy, but it is work that we all must do, collectively across the library community. All of us have the ability to take on that responsibility and develop the requisite expertise to be mindful of access boundaries.
When Harvard’s Digital Accessibility policy first launched in 2019, we knew there was significant work ahead to remediate library content and functionality in publicly available systems. While we had a tremendous advantage in all the work and expertise that had been developed in the User Research Center, there was no way that such a small group could be responsible for assessing all of our systems and that our Library Technologists would be able to address everything that required remediation all that once. So what we did was to expand the boundary line of who could participate in those processes — who had the requisite expertise. Through lightweight training and a team-based approach — one that I have developed through leading several other cross-functional teams — a group of 12 motivated contributors from across Harvard Library self-organized to review 14 library systems for compliance with the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard and document and prioritize over 500 accessibility issues. We shared findings with product owners, developers, vendors, and other stakeholders. The work took place from July-November 2019. 5 months.
Fast forward to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the push to develop a working system for digital access to course reserves. The pandemic provided the catalyst for rethinking the way we approach reserves in the library. Again, rather than relying on isolated staff expertise, we needed to not just hand off from one team to another, but create an environment where teams work together. We needed to create an ecosystem, and people from different departments were organically pulled in.
Looking retrospectively at the experience, one staff member described that “being uprooted from our offices and work areas certainly presented challenges, but it also lessened the sense of division between units. It mattered less what department you were from — what mattered was what you could contribute in the effort to stand up this new service … The entire lifecycle of each reserves request can now be followed by individual staff members, regardless of their ‘home’ department or role. The walls between departments have begun to dissolve; regardless of their individual responsibilities, in this new workflow [using JIRA project management software] everyone can see how the service works as a whole.”
This is arguably the most salient success story of the Discovery & Access portfolio at Harvard Library — all four departments working together to make course reserves available during a time when we did not know what the future of library services would look like. But it didn’t end with the pandemic. This service continued to grow and evolve, taking on new digital accessibility goals, with remediation of scanned materials to make more accessible documents available upon request. Bringing us back to that relationship with users to understand needs, behaviors, and engagement.
Additional opportunities have been afforded by our publication of the HL Bibliographic Metadata Dataset and the Public Domain Digital Corpus, expansion of our full-text search capabilities, and the application of tags and labels — again both as an inclusion effort and to make clear the limits of our custodial relationship with our collections. To do this, we need to take advantage of technological advances and continue to evolve our library operations.
Operational Boundaries
With each new tool or technological breakthrough, we have the opportunity to redraw the lines around operational categories — how we do our work, and what success looks like. This includes evaluating our own personal boundaries when it comes to workplace expectations and culture — which are often also influenced by technological change. It’s easy to think about very contemporary applications here — post-pandemic realities of hybrid work or the impact of artificial intelligence, and while each institution has its own internal boundaries to contend with, it’s also an extremely common experience across our community.
As the most recent past Chair of the ALA-Core Interest Group for Technical Services Directors for Large Research Libraries, I hosted our annual open meeting. A few weeks prior to the open meeting we held a business meeting to identify areas of interest where members felt they could facilitate a discussion during the session. Without an active thumb on the scale from me, these were the areas the group identified: (1) Advocating for library space — collections, users, and staff, (2) Creating service alignment between technical services teams, public services, and collection building, (3) Artificial Intelligence — adoption, reaction, engagement opportunities, and. (4) Navigating systems transition/migration.
In my current role, directing a co-location of multiple distinct teams, advocating for space has been top of mind for more than a year now, and so much of that work is about boundaries — defining not only where, but, who we are, what we do, and how we work, together. I have also been overseeing the research into both staff and student use of artificial intelligence — and I would like to recognize Amy Deschenes and Meg McMahon for their recent publication of their Survey on Student Use of Generative AI Chatbots for Academic Research in the journal of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. A timely and meaningful contribution to our community.
Strikingly, however, ILS migration and implementation remains a critical concern to our library community not only because it involves the adoption of new and evolving technologies, but because it sets a framework for change management that underpins so many other elements of our library operations. Our transition from ALEPH to Alma was about more than a 1:1 replacement. It was about rethinking how we accomplish tasks, and making space for the multiple pathways that can exist in a browser-based system rather than a set of keystrokes in a client-based system. It was an opportunity to be both critical and creative, and we continue to feel the impact of that mindset shift as we undertake new challenges.
Part of what makes systems migration so difficult is that we can have a number of simultaneous changes that touch so many different aspects of library work — back end infrastructure requires security, maintenance, and interoperability; staff interfaces require timely vendor support or in-house expertise within open source communities; user-facing systems demand near-perfect performance under an ever diversifying set of user expectations. Accessible from almost anywhere, by humans and machines, and humans using a variety of machines.
These intense levels of expectation for our systems and support of our systems also lead to intensely high expectations of ourselves. Remote work has been shown to be successful in many instances, but in-person work also shows significant benefits, so now we must do both — not surprisingly, this can lead to frustration and burnout. So we turn again to our concept of boundaries. We can only link and connect information and global knowledge effectively if we understand its boundaries — and our own. Establishing personal boundaries requires understanding our purpose, our values. how we allocate our time and attention on the things that matter most.
Thankfully, we have done much of this work in community already. We lead with curiosity — constantly pushing boundaries to understand what we do not yet know. We seek collaboration — using boundaries to draw even bigger circles, bringing people and ideas together to generate new and more interesting ideas. We embrace diverse perspectives — using boundaries in our collections and in respect of our community to construct a more inclusive and just world. We champion access — enhancing access to information and advancing inclusive boundaries. We aim for the extraordinary — driving progress and delivering the unexpected, reflecting on where we’ve been and constructing new boundaries that define our collective future.
I want to give credit to Jessica Meyerson from Educopia who inspired me with her framing of boundaries during a 2021 keynote at the LD4 conference and Veronica Arellano Douglas from the University of Houston whose presentation at the 2023 Conference on Academic Library Management applied the framing boundaries in the context of Relational-Cultural Theory. Her talk featured the work of Judith Jordan, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard who uses these definitions of boundaries in her research and practice.
