The Phillips Library: New Strategies for a Changing Environment
By John R. Grimes
Deputy Director for Research, New Media, and Information
Peabody Essex Museum

In an effort to create a better alignment with its strategic goals, the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum has undergone some recent changes with respect to staffing, hours, and research access. For the benefit of NMRLS Newsletter readers, I would like to briefly outline some of theses changes and their context.

In the past, although the Phillips Library was primarily a research facility, it devoted considerable resources to providing support to walk-in visitors, modeled on traditional public library operations. Today, fundamental shifts are occurring in the ways in which people access information and conduct research - changes that are the result of computers, the internet, and changing lifestyles.

Across the world, libraries are making significant investments to create online access to their collections. At the Phillips Library, as elsewhere, these new technologies provide exciting opportunities to serve larger audiences through such digital access. To accomplish this, changes have been implemented in the structure and operations of the library, including more emphasis on behind-the-scenes technology, and a reduction in the library's walk-in hours.

The Peabody Essex Museum is strongly committed to all of its collections, including those housed in the Phillips Library. During the past twelve years, the museum has been transformed in ways that significantly enhance its ability to serve the public. Prior to this transformation - which includes a magnificent new gallery complex, new exhibitions, and new program capabilities - the vast cultural heritage that the institution embodies has been known and accessible to a relatively small number of people. Those that were aware of it were seldom aware of the true breadth and diversity of its collections, or of the true range of human stories they embody - stories about creativity, lifeways, and cross-cultural contacts. The work of the last twelve years has dramatically inaugurated - and only begun - the process of making the collections accessible and bringing them to life - in ways unimaginable in the past. Moreover, this radical transformation is inspiring a growing body of patrons who are essential to the museum's future.

For both the museum as a whole, and for the Phillips Library collections, the past twelve years have brought about far greater advances than any comparable period in the institution's history. In both areas, preservation has been dramatically advanced by new climate controlled storage and conservation of many items. Accessibility has been significantly improved, through new user facilities, better cataloguing, the integration of the holdings of the two separate libraries, expanded indexing, and the introduction of automation. Important collections and individual items have been added. We have hosted and conducted important research, symposia, and exhibitions.

While much has changed in the last decade - at the museum and in the world - our fundamental mission of using the collections to bring new meaning to people's lives has been constant, and we are succeeding in that mission to a far greater degree today than ever before. The library, as well as the museum, have been, and continue to be, on a trajectory of improvement and advancement.

Through its transformation, the Peabody Essex Museum is rapidly enhancing its reputation as a nationally recognized and accredited institution with dedicated, knowledgeable, and professional staff, as well as a deeply committed board. Our curators and librarians are professionals. We care for, research, exhibit, and interpret vast and priceless collections from throughout the world, and we regularly host the many international curators and scholars that come to study them. Our attention to proper scholarship, conservation, and security is of the highest order.

The Phillips Library must be an integral part of the Peabody Essex Museum, now and in the future. The library houses vast and unique collections that enhance understanding of other collections - regional, national, and international - and are important in the own right. The Phillips is vital to the museum's standing as a center for scholarship, which is essential to the museum's national and international standing and reputation.

Preparing for the future requires that we understand the changing nature of libraries, and recognize that the Phillips Library is subject to many of the same challenges faced by libraries everywhere. Among other factors, research patterns are changing as more resources become available online. This trend has been evident at the Phillips Library, where use has declined by nearly 50% since the mid 1990s, to 880 users in 2003. This is consistent with national trends, as reported by The Association of Research Libraries, which has monitored use of research libraries for several decades:

...certain service areas are increasing whereas others are decreasing their activity levels in relation to 1991. Overall, library staffing has remained roughly constant. Starting in 1996 circulation service transactions began to decline, in 1998 reference transactions began to fall, and in 2000 both categories dropped below 1991 levels for the first time.

Previously unpublished data regarding inhouse use also show declines. Even the Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured a story on campus libraries being deserted as more students seem to prefer to work online and are more likely to use electronic resources. As a result, libraries are re-examining the role of the physical facilities by creating more appealing and comfortable environments emulating the Starbucks or Borders models. Libraries are also purchasing and making available increasingly larger amounts of electronic resources.

Many libraries are making a concerted effort to examine the changing user needs that impact reference services in general. Heavy users of library materials and services may make less use of in-person reference services than did such users in the era before the availability of online catalogs, remote access to indexing and abstracting databases, and electronic full-text resources. (see http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/01pub/intro.html)

Roy Tennant, of the California Digital Library, at UC Oakland, has pointed out that the entire social and intellectual landscape is changing for libraries:

The game has changed. We're in trouble in a number of areas. Our clientele that formerly started their information seeking with us are now starting elsewhere….The long-cherished role of libraries, museums and archives as the guardians of our cultural heritage is being bought out from under us. Others (not librarians) have tackled the problem of finding information on the Internet...And although the Internet has presented us with unprecedented opportunities for collection development and service delivery (the disappearance of the barriers of space and time), we have yet to take advantage of them.

... we must...put ourselves back into the game. We must watch for and spot important trends. As a profession, ten years ago we should have seen that the Internet would become an essential enabling technology for libraries. We didn't.

Our organizations must be nimble and able to create and guide rapid change. When we evaluate our peers, we must reward risk-taking and innovation and punish loitering. Our print resources cannot be left behind, which means integrating access to print and digital materials

We must break out of the mold of thinking about desks and open hours and begin serving our users needs when, where, and how they wish to be served. (Digital Library Futures: New Roles for Libraries, by Roy Tennant, 1999; see http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/autobiography/rtennant).

New Strategies for the Phillips Library

Over time, the operation the Phillips Library had become increasingly misaligned with its actual use. Last year, for example, each visitor (880 visitors representing 2000 visits) cost the institution nearly $400.00. It therefore became imperative that we find ways to more efficiently serve on-site researchers, while making the collections vastly more accessible - within the museum and beyond.

The changes that have implemented at the Phillips Library are designed to strategically enhance the accessibility, visibility, and standing of the library. The changes were carefully considered in the context of institutional goals, as well as the strategic goals that have been set forth by national library organizations. Among the most important considerations was the maintenance of our capability to serve our audiences, both professional and non-professional, even as we sought a different and more efficient staff mix, a mix that puts new emphasis on bringing new technological capabilities to the service of the library collections and users.

Given the widespread availability of new digital technologies, the museum has a profound responsibility to devote time and resources to selectively make library collections available online. The prudent approach for the Phillips Library is not "either/or" but "both/and" - creating digital and online content, while also continuing to accommodate on-site research. We will do this by prioritizing and deploying our resources in more efficient ways, by soliciting project-based support, AND by careful scheduling of work and services. The extent of potential access created by the internet is staggering. Any document digitized and placed online has the potential to be accessed by literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Many of the people interested - or potentially interested - in historical documents are not professional researchers, but students and lay people with regular jobs, for whom the new digitization technology and the internet provide access to documents they would otherwise never see. The internet is allowing this unprecedented opportunity to millions of people - far more than could ever be served in traditional research libraries. And digitization - like earlier microfilming - is a boon for archival preservation, since excessive handling of fragile documents causes their deterioration.

Changes in library staffing actually implement a new mix of skills rather than result in a net reduction of staff. The recent reduction in primarily reading room staff amounted to 4 half-time and 1 full time employee. In terms of labor, this equals 3 FTEs (full time equivalents). With the restructuring, the library has become part of the division of Research, New Media, and Information. This brings together a number of new employees with those of the Phillips Library, resulting in new capabilities, such as web development, DVD production, digitization, etc. Thus, the loss of 3 FTEs is offset by the gain of 3 1/2 FTEs (this time distributed among several staff members, whose jobs now encompass library responsibilities and projects. In total, the restructured staff give the library greatly increased technological capability, in keeping with new goals that include wider dissemination of collections via the internet.

On-site accessibility to the library has not reduced in any significant way. Prior to the recent changes, the library was open to walk-in researchers 28 hrs. per week. Today, the library is accessible to researchers, by appointment, Monday through Wednesday (10-5), and Thursday (10-8), and to walk in users on Wednesday (1- 5) and Thursday (1-8). From Monday at 10, to Thursday at 8, the library is accessible 31 hrs each week, including 11 hrs to walk-in researchers. Although the changes have been in effect for a short time, they extrapolate out to a level that should not be dramatically different from last year. One of the advantages of the hours-by-appointment is that it clusters researchers with well-defined needs and objectives, allowing staff to devote more concentrated and personalized time with them.

The Phillips Library is not - and has never been - a public library, but a privately funded research library that accommodates use by the public. Like all privately funded institutions, we must provide services according to short and long-range goals, and according to the schedules, and the staff, that we judge to be most effective and responsible. We expect that certain services and hours may expand in the future, where there is specific need, and when the expansion can be supported by grant funding, special endowment, or user-fee offsets. (As early as this summer, we hope to be able to implement a special expansion of on-site services for genealogical researchers.) This approach, regularly revised according to performance against strategic goals, will ensure that the Phillips Library continues to be a vital part of the Peabody Essex Museum, and of growing value to the audiences PEM collectively serves.

I welcome the reader's comments and questions, and hope for your continued support as we set out on an exciting future for these important collections.

By John R. Grimes
Deputy Director for Research, New Media, and Information
Peabody Essex Museum