Building the Innovation Economy
Academic Libraries as Information Infrastructure to Support Knowledge-Based Economy
It is no secret. New York must develop a modern economy to compete successfully in the global marketplace. Intelligent and well-meaning people have talked about this for years and offered myriad solutions, yet the need remains. The missing piece has been - and remains - the absence of an information infrastructure to undergird an information age economy. New York’s academic libraries are the solution.
Prior to the Spitzer administration, Governor Pataki invested heavily in SUNY Centers of Excellence, established the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research, and undertook other targeted actions to bring New York’s non-finance-based economic sectors into the twenty-first century. Yet Governor Pataki fell short.
Today, Governor Spitzer talks about an “innovation economy,” and charged his Commission on Higher Education with, among other things, enhancing the relationship between the higher education sector and state economic development efforts. Upstate economic development czar Daniel Gunderson has received a commissioned report from A.T. Kearney calling for a “unified statewide economic growth engine fueled by the development of a high-technology infrastructure” that includes academic and research communities.
It seems likely that Governor Spitzer too will see his best intentions unrealized if he fails to recognize and support the requisite infrastructure for the new economy. The solution lies in our academic libraries.
The libraries of the public and private academic and research institutions of New York State possess a vast store of information. Together they expend huge amounts of money and time to maintain access to the latest, most comprehensive and most respected research from around the world. It is a rich vein but one that free, public tools, like Google or Yahoo!, do not mine.
Unfortunately, the availability of this information is restricted by rapidly rising costs and proprietary limitations that prevent our universities from openly sharing.
New York can change this. The state can make information more affordable by providing the leadership to secure economies of scale among the public and private institutions, and by serving as the contracting agency, the state can create access to peer-reviewed science, technological and medical information resources for the state’s small business community and entrepreneurs.
Other states have done exactly this. Most recently, New Jersey was able to partner with its academic institutions to use $6 million in state appropriations to leverage $74.5 million worth of information resources. The result is declining research costs, and increasing development of innovations and patents, which leads to new licenses, new jobs and occasionally entire new industries.
The untapped potential for a collaboration of this sort in New York dwarfs anything possible in New Jersey. Already, an alliance of public and private academic and research libraries has proposed partnering with the state to harness the combined power of SUNY, CUNY, public research libraries, and members of New York’s private sector - including world leading institutions such as Columbia, Cornell, NYU and Syracuse University - to create an unrivaled information infrastructure.
This alliance of academic libraries, known as NYSHEI (NYS Higher Education Initiative), proposes a $15 million state investment, which would supplement $45 million in resources provided by these libraries. This amount, while far less than that spent annually on “pork projects,” holds promise for all regions of the state. This small investment is the missing component that has prevented the creation of an innovation economy in New York.
All recognize that a bright future for our state economy hinges on information and innovation, yet New York has failed to unlock the gateway to that future. By building an Erie Canal of information, New York can once again unleash its vast resources and natural advantages. By leveraging the enormous potential of its academic libraries, New York can again open new vistas of progress and expansion.