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tion and that its collections enhance scholarship in all of our programs. I am convinced that we can collaborate with faculty to teach students the essential lifelong skills associated with discovering, obtaining, and evaluating data in a technologyand information-rich world. But I also worry that administrators, faculty, and students don't understand how many needs the library serves—and I fear that the library will cease to be a living partner in teaching and learning. JORG G R E U E L/G ETTY I MAG ES A s a libra librarian, I was excited to turn to a recent article in BizEd and find ti l i a picture of a student standing in a beautiful library and loaded down with books. I was sure an article titled "Students Who Love Research" would feature the academic library as an essential part of business education. But this was an article about real-world experiences, and the word "library" did not occur even once. The experience led me to wonder how the library is currently viewed in business education. What is its role? What kinds of research expectations do deans and faculty have of their students? Is the library still a fundamental feature of business education, or has it become just another metaphor? As the Director of Libraries at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, I strive to make certain that the library is central to the academic mission of the institu- The Library's Role Like other industries, academic libraries are experiencing many tensions. We must cultivate a deep understanding of the larger ecosystem in which we operate, manage growing technological complexity, and respond to a high level of competition. We also must serve a segmented market, providing sophisticated support to the faculty who are engaged in scholarship and knowledge creation, while offering basic instruction to students learning to retrieve and use information. At the same time, we must cope with the pressures at work in higher education—the need to affirm the value of a degree, the need for assessment measures that confirm we are achieving our goals, and the need to rethink our own roles in light of new realities. Our responsibility to the business school is clear. As Christopher Puto, dean of UST's Opus College of Business, says, "We expect our students to be effective problem solvers after graduation. They should be able to identify their information need, then find, analyze, assemble, and use information to make decisions." Students need to understand not just how to conduct research, but how to put it together in a meaningful way, notes Jeff Oxman, an assistant professor in the finance department. In many papers, he says, students "have cited this and this and this—they have a bibliography, but they don't have a story." Of course, research isn't everything, as Lisa Abendroth points out when she asks her students to imagine doing research on the tango. "Then I ask, 'Now, could you come up and dance for us?' and of course, they couldn't," says Abendroth, an associate professor in the marketing department. But unless students know how to conduct primary research, she believes they will be inclined to make decisions based on gut reactions, which she tells them won't be acceptable in the workplace. Instead, they need to know how to draw conclusions based on credible information that provides context for contemporary business problems. They need the library. Search Energy Optimization Even I will admit that users can find it challenging to navigate the large and rich collections of electronic content that academic libraries have amassed today. For instance, a little more than a decade ago, the UST libraries had a collection of 2,000 print journals; now we provide access to more than 50,000 electronic journals. As we continue to expand, it becomes even more important that we find ways to remove barriers between users and content. We must help students develop the skills they need to discover information in a high-tech environment—but we BizEd January/February 2014 47