Towards a New Paradigm in Map and Spatial Information Librarianship

Introduction

In this editorial, we continue our conversation with readers about the value of map and geography libraries with a focus on the past and likely future trends that have and will continue to define our profession. In doing so, we identified three paradigm shifts that have occurred in map and spatial information librarianship over the last 25 years. Each shift was precipitated by a desire to stay relevant in the areas of collecting, providing access to, and using spatial information in a changing world. The third paradigm shift described below is ongoing as academic libraries in general and map and geography libraries specifically continue to evolve. As is typical of transitions of many kinds, variation in how the third paradigm shift is being perceived and applied at different institutions is substantial; meaning that there is an opportunity for us to share with one another what we are doing, what is working, and, perhaps more importantly, what is not working. The formal and informal conversations that ensue will help to shape the future of our profession.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines paradigm as: “A conceptual or methodological model underlying the theories and practices of a science or discipline at a particular time; (hence) a generally accepted world view.”¹ If we look back, we can see that during the past 25 years we can mark three major paradigm shifts in map librarianship. The first shift coincided with the arrival of decennial United States census data on CD-ROM, and a digital revolution in map libraries followed. The distribution of census data in a machine-readable format meant that libraries needed to have the machines to read the information. Libraries responded by installing public access computers in their spaces, a signal that how we accessed and used geographic information had changed forever. The next shift came with the introduction of another new format—digitized images of print items, mainly maps and aerial photographs from library collections. After becoming more comfortable with digital objects in libraries, it was natural for librarians to begin to think about taking advantage of new technologies to increase access to print collections. This was especially appealing for map librarians as cartographic collections were often housed in basements or out of the way areas of libraries. And so, digital collections were born.

Now, we believe, we are in the middle of a third paradigm shift marked by the development and proliferation of geospatial services. There is not yet consensus on what core geospatial services should be offered by libraries, but they commonly focus on the organization and use of library print and digital collections, in addition to non-library resources, and the use of a variety of mapping tools. Gone are the days when any single institution, no matter how wealthy, can possibly acquire and incorporate into their collections even a small fraction of the available geospatial data and information; a point that the creators of Harvard’s WorldMap (http://worldmap.harvard.edu/) often reference as justification for allowing non-Harvard entities to upload data to their “institutional” platform. Advances in technology have allowed the development of a variety of means for adding value to our digital collections through, for example, enhanced metadata and web mapping tools, as well as software to georeference and extract features from images. While the tools may vary widely in their ease of use, affordability, and implementation, they all have one thing in common: increasing access to and the usefulness of the information embedded in collections—both text and map based, print and digital. Some of these tools and projects are being developed outside of traditional map library spaces—as parts of a suite of “new” digital services in libraries called research commons, scholar’s commons, and digital humanities and scholarship labs. There are also an increasing number of examples of this work being taken up by academic units that are outside of libraries entirely, within research centers and institutes across campus. In general, digital cartographic collections² have stimulated new avenues of research, allowing researchers to discover and identify new research questions and to find new answers to old questions.

First Paradigm Shift—Introducing Geographic Information Systems and Digital Data

In 1992, the Association for Research Libraries (ARL) in partnership with the largest producer of GIS software in the world (ESRI) initiated the Geographic Information Systems Literacy project. The goal of the project was to “introduce, educate and equip librarians with skills needed to provide access to spatially referenced data” (Cline and Adler 1995). The focus of the project was not just on academic research libraries; it also involved public libraries, state libraries, and some private institutions. Participants were often government documents librarians because they were already familiar with digital data that could be used in GIS software. The ARL project did not dictate how GIS services³ should be implemented at any given institution and each library was able to develop GIS services as they felt best fit their needs. The implications of this flexibility continues to explain differences that we see in geospatial services² offered by libraries today. At some institutions libraries became the central point of contact on campus for all things related to GIS government documents librarians software licensing, training, and data services. This was a common outcome at universities that did not have a geography department, such as many elite private schools. On campuses that already had GIS services located in disciplinary departments, colleges, or research institutes, the library often became a partner or were seen as a place for access to software and data rather than expert guidance in the use of the software. The ARL Geographic Information Systems Literacy project was successful in setting up libraries to take advantage of changing technologies and to position themselves as a neutral partner on campus for the development of geospatial services that continues to this day.

Second Paradigm Shift—Transforming Print Collections to Digital

Search through the MAPS-L (the email listserv many map librarians around the world belong to) archives and you will find evidence of discussions about map digitization beginning as early as 1995. The discussions were robust and encompassed a wide variety of topics from scanners, to standards, to file size and storage, to prioritizing collections for digitization. Some even centered on whether or not we should be digitizing print resources amid concerns of damage to the materials due to light exposure from equipment. Early adopters of digitization had many issues to work through. In July of 1995, Alice Hudson from the New York Public Library asked about priorities for scanning. In response, David Allen, then of Stonybrook University, offered a succinct summary of the issues at hand. He finished his response with some thoughts about the future and offers some caution to librarians, advocating against beginning many new digitization projects because he thought that in a few years, the landscape might look very different and he feared that people would have to digitize their materials a second time. The uncertainty about the future of digitization was clear, but what was also clear was that libraries were continuing to move in this direction by actively digitizing their collections.

In the early 2000s, the appearance of the word “digitization” became more frequent in posts to MAPS-L and we noted another change—the appearance of advertisements for jobs in libraries that were specifically created to digitize print collections. The creation of dedicated full-time professional positions was indicative of acceptance and the newfound importance of collection digitization in libraries.

As map libraries started to digitize their print cartographic collections, they also began to see the need for a new set of skills from those who worked with map collections. Some of the necessary skills to work with digitized print resources overlapped with the new skills required of the first paradigm shift related to working with digital spatial data and centered on the advanced use of GIS software and tools. Although we have presented them in this editorial as two independent paradigm shifts, paradigms one and two were in some ways advancing in parallel and contributed to the development of a new kind of library professional—the GIS/Geospatial Information Librarian. The required and preferred skills identified in these new positions started to include things that were formerly unfamiliar to librarians, like expert knowledge of the use of GIS and/or statistical software, advanced training in non-library fields, and experience working in an academic research environment (Xia and Wang 2014). The development of these new positions and the people who filled them set the stage for the third paradigm shift in map libraries that is ongoing to this day.

Third Paradigm Shift—The Future of the Profession

The third paradigm shift marked a transition from looking at print cartographic collections as objects to digitize and make available to the world, to looking at collections (regardless of format or ownership) as critical information resources that contribute to a multi- and inter-disciplinary research environment—sometimes even as the key to pulling together understanding from different disciplines in the sense of geographic space as an integrator of disciplinary knowledge.⁴ The transition to a digital world was a blow to the former prominence of map collections in academic research libraries throughout the first two paradigm shifts, but now in many cases geospatial services are being touted as a major contributor to the modernization of library services. For map and GIS librarians whose tenures have spanned these transitions, it has been a roller-coaster ride indeed.

Being in the midst of a third paradigm shift leaves us uncertain, not unlike the uncertainty felt during previous transitions. Within academia, libraries are often seen as a neutral party on campus and thus can provide leadership in the future of digital scholarship. However, what does that leadership entail? Are libraries organizers, collaborators, teachers, service providers, data producers, knowledge producers, or facilitators? Or do they play all of these roles? There is evidence that map and geospatial librarians are attempting to fill all of these roles at different institutions and sometimes simultaneously at the same institution. The “Collections as Data” movement (Padilla et al. 2017) is clear evidence librarians increasingly see themselves as data producers. The development of library-based digital humanities web mapping projects is evidence that librarians increasingly see themselves as organizers, collaborators, and facilitators. The changing landscape of information literacy instruction within distinctive collections (see the forthcoming special issue on instruction from JMGL), combined with the increasingly common practice of map and geospatial librarians to teach credit courses and/or serve as mentors for student research and special interest clubs (e.g., GIS and data science clubs), provides evidence that librarians increasingly see themselves as teachers. And the fact that many geospatial librarians now hold terminal degrees in non-library fields and serve as principal investigators on academic research projects, are advisors and supervisors of student research, deliver keynote addresses at research-oriented professional conferences, and are invited to hold formal affiliations with university research centers and institutes is indicative of geospatial librarians also playing a role in the production of knowledge.

Amongst all of this promise of the potential roles that geospatial librarians could play at universities, it is worth noting that all but one (data producers/collections as data) involve a divorce from the preceding two paradigms and working with library cartographic collections. Our last editorial detailed four ways that print cartographic collections remain relevant today, but if there is no one assigned to work with these collections, then these will be opportunities lost, at least for the time-being. If having no one to work with library print cartographic resources leads to deaccessioning these items from collections, then this will likely represent the wholesale loss of innumerable volumes of spatial information. The Federal Depository Library Program is there to ensure that this does not happen with U.S. Government produced map products. How do we insure that this does not happen with other cartographic resources?

Our attempt to summarize the current state of affairs is that geospatial librarians most often play three roles: 1) digital scholarship service-provider; 2) discipline-agnostic advanced spatial methods expert; and 3) some modern version of a map librarian that is a person with an MLS and a GIS certificate or an advanced degree in a subject related to geography/cartography. Libraries as organizations sometimes hope or expect that a single person can fill all of these roles well. The trouble with this expectation is that it is often unrealistic and can sometimes lead to individuals not filling any roles well and/or burnout, job dissatisfaction, and in extreme cases, faculty and staff attrition. Indicative of the tension that exists between the different roles that geospatial librarians could play as we go through a third paradigm shift, is that institutions have administratively organized their map and geospatial departments very differently and hired staff with different sets of skills and expectations, or sometimes without well-defined expectations. Organizational tension can also be released over time so that in other cases the administrative organization and expectations of map and geospatial services at the same institution can change, sometimes rapidly. Some amount of change is good, presents opportunities, and can be strategically planned for (LaLonde and Piekielek 2018); whereas too much change can be a serious impediment to the successful implementation and maintenance of geospatial services.

In our limited view, the individuals hired into geospatial librarian positions seem, largely, to define the positions themselves rather than hiring for a specific skill set and/or set of interests. We wonder what this all says about the role of map libraries and geospatial services if they are largely dependent on who is hired into the position and ask whether there will be convergence of skills and roles at some future date? Is the current state of affairs indicative of transition, or is it the future? Or thought of another way, is this an analog to what happens in academic departments when they hire a “human geographer” and during the course of that person’s ∼20 year career the department offers upper division courses in that person’s area of expertise at the expense of other potential human geography topics? If nothing else, the flexibility and dynamism of geospatial librarian positions is markedly different from many other positions in academic libraries where there is a specific skill set and task that needs to be performed in order for the rest of the library to function. This last point may contribute to map libraries and geospatial services continuing to be an area of unfamiliarity for most other staff in libraries, sometimes including administrators. Unfamiliarity can result in a lack of “vision” and “big thinking” for services in these areas and a scattered, inconsistent approach to geospatial services across institutions and through time. Is all of this inconsistency indicative of transition, or was it determined by our past that was rooted in the ARL GIS Literacy project of the 1990s that did not want to dictate to participants how to build their services? For the time being, geospatial services seem to be an important part of 21st century librarianship, but if it is not seen by library colleagues as central to library work in general, this preferred status will likely not last.

In his 2014 article reflecting on ten years of the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries, James Boxall stated: “…by the end of the decade people will see this as a spatial century wherein the geographic technologies, information, and approaches are recognized as core to our learning, work, and community-based action to adapt to the many challenges we now face generations in the future.” He says this in relation specifically to geospatial data services, but it is relevant to the corpus of digital tools within which we now find ourselves immersed. Boxall’s quote sums up the third paradigm shift. Technological advances have brought us to a place where our digital collections are now being used in ways we could never have imagined; mapping tools are being used by scholars in disciplines where mapping has not been a traditional research tool (Fish and Piekielek 2016); open access is changing how libraries and data producers work together to provide access to geospatial data resources; collaborations with new partners are developing and we are seeing suites of services rolled out in libraries around the world. We can now see the work of the first two paradigm shifts coming to fruition. A challenge may be in maintaining enough focus on print cartographic collections, amongst the distractions of other promising developments, just long enough to allow this promise to be fully realized.

However, there are also challenges we see for the community of map and geospatial librarians. Libraries are struggling with how to manage legacy digital collections that are approaching their third decade and digitized cartographic resources are often among the largest collections by storage volume. Metadata for geospatial data collections continues to be elusive for libraries without the expertise for both library and geospatial metadata development. Declining budgets at some universities are creating a library digital divide whereby some libraries who are able to afford to experiment with new services are leading the development of the field and universities who cannot are either constantly playing “catch up” or simply being left behind through non-participation. In our view, the map and geospatial librarian community needs a diversity of people, opinions, expertise, collections, and institutions in order to be successful in the current paradigm that places so many high expectations of map and geospatial librarians. How do we ensure that some are not left behind when budgets are cut, staff are lost, and/or collections and services are reorganized? Community and professional associations may be more important now than ever and yet attendance of map and geospatial librarians is diffuse at best. This was our motivation for starting a column in this journal of conference write-ups—so that people can share what conferences they attend and how they feel they benefit or do not benefit (see Quill’s write-up of the FOSS4G conference in this issue).

We look forward to continuing the conversation of the most (and least) promising areas of map and geospatial librarianship under the current paradigm and even entertaining ideas about what might be future paradigms. We hope that this journal can play a central role in having this conversation and promoting successes.

Marcy Bidney and Nathan Piekielek
Co-editors, Journal of Map & Geography Libraries

Notes

1 Thomas Khun’s 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is widely credited with developing the idea of “paradigms” and their influence on academic fields of study.

2 Here we are referring to both digitized print collections and geospatial data resources.

3 We make a subtle distinction between “GIS services” mentioned here that refers to historical services that were mostly limited to access to GIS software and a limited set of digital geospatial data primarily produced and distributed by the U.S. Government. Versus “geospatial services” referenced as part of the third paradigm shift below that refers to a broader and often more advanced suite of services that go beyond simple data and software access. Both of these are generalizations and there was/is substantial variation in the implementation of each.

4 For example, if researchers wanted to integrate understanding of social phenomenon that organized around neighborhoods with ecological phenomenon that organized around watersheds, they might do this through the use of spatial relationships as represented in a GIS. If they did this for a historical time-period they would likely start with information contained on print maps that had been digitized, georeferenced, and traced in some way.