Globalisation and changing practices for academic librarians in Australia: a literature review.

In the age of the internet, the knowledge society is linked with globalisation and provides the framework for the modern university. Yet there has been little research on how globalisation affects librarians' roles in institutional intemationalisation efforts. Are librarians' activities important only in library terms, or do they have impact on other parts of the university? Clark has said that academic groups have to see themselves in common situations, with common problems and enemies, and in need of common actions in order to build a common culture. (1) Where do librarians fit into that institutional model?

While some have written of the need for librarians to be proactive in institutional policy forums, there is little follow up on how this occurs in the universities. (2) This study of the literature is an attempt to understand the place of librarians within the wider institutional context.

International education for librarians has to be placed in a broad context. Librarians have always worked in an atmosphere saturated with internationalism. While Australia is part of the Anglo-Saxon West, and much of its history and ethos is Eurocentric, ideas and the books they come in have always been international. In a small nation, the amount of scholarly publishing is not copious; and overall, Australia has necessarily been an importer of knowledge. (3) In no way could Australian publications meet the full educational needs of higher education. Therefore, for years the majority of academic library collections consisted of materials published outside the country. That has continued with the recent proliferation of international electronic databases to which Australian university libraries need to subscribe to remain competitive. They have had to develop new collaborative methods for funding expensive subscriptions. (4) With the advent of government mandated international education, new technologies, massification, and the influx of international students, many from Asia and the Pacific, librarians have had to rethink everything from collection development to models of service responsive to diverse populations. (5)

Added to the mix were two other factors: that immigration patterns in the late twentieth century were changing the face of Australia, while it was becoming increasingly clear that indigenous groups such as Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders would also need to be included in higher education. (6) During this period of high growth in the multicultural needs of diverse incoming groups, (7) the government cut spending for higher education even while it amalgamated the university system. (8) In light of the diminishing support, how would librarians cope in this increasingly diverse environment? What were the strategies devised by librarians to increase their knowledge of cultures and their ability to work successfully with divergent learning styles? In short, how would librarians become globally competent citizens in the modern academic library? Whatever steps they took to internationalise their own perspectives and activities would now have to be carried out while trying to adapt to new colleagues, new settings and new institutions brought on by unifying all tertiary institutions into one university system.

Academic Libraries and Librarians

Libraries are large, sprawling organisations that have complicated interrelated parts; they should be understood in the same structural terms applied to all modern organisations in higher education. (9) While each university library is divided into public and technical services answering to an administrative hierarchy, this has to be set in the Australian context of amalgamated campuses where main libraries and multiple branch libraries are geographically widespread. For example, some branch libraries are comprehensive and exist to serve the broadest possible educational needs; other branches have special collections that are meant to serve a discrete population. Staff members, particularly during the hectic time of the mergers, were often divided by having differently understood histories, cultures and missions; organisational change in such an atmosphere had to be carefully planned. (10)

Libraries are, by their very nature, complex organisations where work done in one department may be little understood by librarians in other departments. For example, set the complexity of the university library into the wider institutional context and one begins to see that change for librarians is varied and bound by both institutional and individual preferences. The roles that librarians play in internationalising their own practices, experiences and beliefs may be institutionally or personally driven. Leadership for change may come from a variety of internal and external forces such as the government, the vice chancellors, professional organisations or the library administration, which itself is under pressure to change. (11) For some individual librarians, being globally competent citizens is understood as an important thing, enabling them better to carry out their professional service, particularly in regard to changing populations of students. (12) However varied the forces driving change, the traditional roles of librarians are shifting from the parochial to the global.

Librarians and Changing Roles

For librarians, the definitions of international education encompass all of the meanings understood by academics and include additional outcomes that revolve around solutions that support library service. Up until the 1980s, the work of most librarians not employed in library administration was localised in one department, and so internationalisation was seen in terms that were work related. For many librarians, international education was defined in terms of providing the right information to a predominantly white, Australian population, and the methods of work varied little from previous ages until the population of users began to change. (13)

Library administrators were always the primary interface of the library outside the library portals. They ensured that the library served the public properly and kept to budget. (14) The need to broaden administrative practices to meet new, external responsibilities was not fully understood until higher education itself underwent dramatic change. (15) For all librarians, the methods and services offered before 1985 were based on a tried-and-true model that had changed little as long as the population remained the same.

Under the pressures of globalisation and internationalisation, the activities of librarians have expanded considerably and thus definitions of library work and international education have enlarged from old understandings. In the 1992 Boyer Lecture, Geoffrey Bolton stated that four million people from 100 countries had migrated to Australia since World War II. (16) Considering that Australia's population is now over 20 million, this growth is a substantial addition to the formerly white, European makeup of the country. Since the 1960s the populations served by higher education have grown increasingly diverse. The push toward massification (17) meant that multicultural populations of students from non-English language immigrant families were entering tertiary education in large numbers. (18) Although their numbers were smaller, the needs of Indigenous students entering higher education presented other unique challenges to the system. (19) At the same time the population of international students was growing rapidly. The needs of these students were vastly different from the elite students who had formerly constituted library patrons needing to be served.

New demands from these diverse populations have affected library work in numerous ways. The responses are partially based upon and induced by the wider institutional changes driven by globalisation. In other cases, library responses are a result of a growing awareness that new populations, brought to campus by the push for international education, must be given new forms of library instruction. When the major increases in foreign students began…