14 minute read
at an Academic Library
Biz of Digital — Library Equipment Lifecycle Planning & The Triple Bottom Line: initial steps Towards More sustainable iT Management at an Academic Library
By Carolyn Sheffield (Associate Director of Library Technology and Digital Strategies, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-2964) <csheffield@umbc.edu>
Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Acquisitions and Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-6754; Fax: 410-455-1598) <flinchba@umbc.edu>
Abstract
Environmental sustainability, while not new to the library profession, continues to warrant more focused planning, particularly as climate change accelerates and has increasing impacts in both local and global contexts. These impacts include several extreme weather events already this year that have damaged homes, businesses, and communities, and can contribute to food insecurity, making climate change as much a social issue as an environmental one. Indeed, as part of the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) adoption of sustainability as a core value of librarianship,1 ALA committed to the “triple bottom line” framework which calls for measuring impacts of business decisions not only on the financial bottom line (i.e., profit) but also on social equity (i.e., people), and on the environment (i.e., planet). (https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2019/05/ ala-adding-sustainability-core-value-librarianship)
This article presents recent efforts to incorporate the triple bottom line philosophy into equipment lifecycle planning at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The author shares resources identified and incorporated into workflow planning for equipment lifecycle management, focusing on low-to-no-cost and low effort opportunities for other libraries to pursue similar initiatives, and challenges identified for further enhancing incorporation of environmental and social sustainability considerations into IT & Digital Strategies planning.
Background
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university serving a student body of approximately 13,600 and employs over 800 faculty members. UMBC is committed to environmental sustainability and was one of five recipients of the 2021 Maryland Green Registry Sustainability Leadership Award https://mde.maryland.gov/ marylandgreen/pages/leadershipwinners.aspx. The Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, where I serve as the Associate Director of Library Technology & Digital Strategies, serves all UMBC faculty, staff, and students, as well as scholars from other University System of Maryland campuses and the surrounding community. In my role, I am exploring and implementing strategies to incorporate environmental sustainability into our IT planning. I want to share what I have discovered here because I believe it is important that the library profession collectively think about and address sustainability.
This article will outline how I perceive the triple bottom line in relation to libraries, introduce some easy-to-adopt strategies I have begun to implement in my own planning, which I see as low-barrier opportunities for others to consider adopting; and it will also highlight some of the remaining challenges I have encountered in my planning.
Triple Bottom Line & Libraries
The triple bottom line is a framework that calls for the social and environmental impacts of decisions to be given the same weight and consideration as financial returns. Attributed to sustainable business author John Elkington,2 the framework is often distilled as the three Ps: People, Planet, and Profit. Below, I outline the core concepts of each along with my perspective of how these apply in the context of academic libraries.
People: The employees, customers, partners, and community members that will be potentially impacted, positively or negatively, by decisions being made. In an academic library, this would include library employees, library users (physical and remote), employees of the parent institution, internal and external partners, and the surrounding local community. More broadly, it can also include people in different parts of the world impacted by supply chain decisions and methods of businesses with which libraries work.
Planet: This refers to any environmental impact that decisions may have. For libraries, the most obvious ones might be the local impact in terms of waste management or electricity use. Less obvious ones might again include the impacts of decisions made by vendors within the library’s supply chain for collections, technology, office supplies, or other materials. Our day-to-day operations contribute to overall greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to impacts on the planet overall.
Profit: In a library or other non-profit driven organization, profit can be reframed to think about services and goals. Even if our end goal is not to make a profit, the decisions we make should still be guided to ensure we continue to successfully provide the services that enable us to achieve our mission. With the limited budgets available to most libraries, seeking economical options, assessing cost-benefit ratios, and focusing on return on investment are already familiar to many librarians with purchasing and other decision-making responsibilities.
In identifying opportunities to more prominently center the people and planet bottom lines, it is important to recognize that most libraries operate under the auspices of larger entities. Some parent organizations, such as universities for academic libraries or county governments for public libraries, may provide both high-level guidance on or direct support of sustainability (e.g., energy efficient practices) and access to specific resources (e.g., recycling services or other enterprise-level solutions). Using the technology purchasing phase of equipment lifecycle planning at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery as a case study, I will share examples of some of the resources and guidance available to
Equipment lifecycle planning encompasses four main stages: planning, purchasing, use (including operation and maintenance), and disposal. For a practical introduction to IT planning, Silveira’s (2018) “Library Technology Planning for Today and Tomorrow”3 offers an excellent starting point with step-by-step guidance and helpful templates that also touches on many of these areas. For this article, I will focus primarily on purchasing, including a brief overview of the context at my institution, a sample of current and in-progress efforts towards incorporating the triple bottom line, and next steps. I will also highlight some considerations at the purchasing stage that support sustainability at the later stages of use and eventual disposal.
Technology purchases for both the public and employees are at the discretion of the library and are my responsibility to select. I work closely with the Library IT Operations Manager to research and select from various options. At UMBC, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) serves as the central IT unit for the campus and, among many other services and support, provides recommended computer (Dell and Mac) configurations for faculty and students, including for institutional and personal purchases. Recommendations from DoIT and vendors that have a proven track record with the University are not always final deciding factors but are taken into consideration when choosing between options. The economic or “profit” component of the triple bottom line is already well-established and familiar to most librarians and library IT staff having responsibility in this area, and is generally the most straightforward to navigate. Most functional features and costs are either readily available online or quickly attainable by requesting quotes from vendors. Vendors are increasingly also providing data about their sustainability efforts and commitments, although these are often inconsistent and difficult to compare across vendors or sometimes even across products for a given vendor.
For incorporating environmental and social considerations into the technology purchasing process, I started by reviewing the EPA’s guidance on identifying greener electronics (https:// www.epa.gov/greenerproducts/identifying-greener-electronics). This provided pointers to a number of helpful resources, most notably the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT). EPEAT applies tiered rankings of Bronze, Silver, and Gold for a wide range of commonly used electronic products and models from well-known vendors. The rankings are assigned by the General Electronics Council in accordance with ISO 14024:2018 Environmental labels and declarations — Type I environmental declarations — Principles and procedures.
The EPEAT website provides a searchable, sortable database of computers and displays (e.g., laptops, desktops, monitors), imaging equipment (e.g., printers, and scanners), servers, network equipment, and more. Users can search for specific models, which can be beneficial in choosing between a few models under consideration or a specific model that has already been recommended. Search results are sortable to allow for easy comparisons across various models. Results are also exportable and, with the advanced option, it is possible to view all criteria that were used in reaching the assigned ranking. Within the exported results, the criteria are presented as numbered columns; to see the criteria corresponding to those numbers follow the link to the Advanced Filter Options on the search page for a given product type. In addition to several criteria related to the environmental sustainability of production practices for a given model, section 4.4 of the EPEAT criteria covers Product Longevity / Lifecycle Extension which can be helpful for planning for the use phase of equipment lifecycle management (e.g., maintenance and repairs). Examples of longevity sub-criteria for the computers/ monitors category include (4.4.2.2) Publicly available service information, (4.4.2.5) Product upgradeability and repairability, and (4.4.1.2) Long life rechargeable battery.
Some common library technologies (e.g., self checkout machines) may not have a third party assessment with comparative data such as that provided by EPEAT, thus making assessments more challenging and time-consuming. To help address this, my next steps will be to create a tracking sheet using EPEAT criteria and populate it with information on vendor websites and, when unavailable, to request information from vendors on if/how their product(s) meet those criteria. I will admit I am concerned about the time requirement, but the hope is that if more requests for this information continue to reach vendors, it will motivate them to share it more proactively and transparently on their websites or perhaps even to investigate opportunities to make their products more sustainable.
Although EPEAT focuses primarily on environmental sustainability, it is important to acknowledge that there are some criteria specifically related to social issues. Within the Computer & Displays category, for example, criteria include (4.10.1.1) Socially responsible manufacturing: Labor; (4.10.1.2) Socially responsible manufacturing: (Occupational Health and Safety); and (4.10.2.2) Participation in an in-region program that advances responsible sourcing of conflict minerals. The ability to filter results by these criteria could be particularly helpful for any libraries, or their parent organizations, which have set targets for improving in any of these areas.
The social bottom line of technology purchases is also guided by the eventual use of the equipment. Libraries making computers and other devices available to their target audiences is in itself a contribution to the social bottom line and much should already be available in the literature on the positive social impacts of these efforts. In terms of specific considerations that can inform purchasing, I would emphasize the importance of considering accessibility of a given technology. For a little over two years, I have served on the University’s IT Accessibility Working Group comprising representatives from departments including DoIT, the Office of Accessibility and Disability Services, Procurement, the Office of Advancement, and of course the Library. The Working Group’s charge is to develop a three-year IT Accessibility Plan including setting targets for improving accessibility across our IT infrastructure. For the Library, our targets related to my areas of oversight include adding and maintaining specific assistive technologies in collaboration with UMBC’s Office of Accessibility and Disability Services; improving the accessibility of scanners available to the public and as part of our Interlibrary Loan and E-reserves workflows; and leveraging a campus-wide license for software that assesses the accessibility of websites. In our case, the Library had primary responsibility for selection of hardware and software for accessible scanning. The publicly available scanners already had OCR software implemented and some of the scanners used in the ILL and E-Reserves workflows did as well, but there was not consistency in the type or availability of software for those. Our goal was to establish a baseline level of consistency to facilitate workflows and support, a reasonable price, and high quality OCR. As part of our review process, we reviewed the Voluntary Product
Accessibility Template (VPAT) of the option with the best price and felt it met our needs well. Although VPATs are voluntary and are generally self-assessments from vendors, they can be a useful tool for getting a sense of a product’s accessibility.
Challenges and next steps
Among the remaining areas for which I would like to investigate potential improvements are the Library’s use of cloud solutions and the sustainability of emerging (or recently emerged) technologies. Each of these present challenges for selecting sustainable solutions. Although my plans for these areas are in a more formative stage, I hope sharing them will help provide ideas for others to build on or inspiration to share solutions already in place at other institutions.
Cloud-based services and platforms are becoming increasingly instrumental to the way that many organizations, including libraries, manage both day-to-day operational documents and for elements of digital preservation strategies. In Archivists Against the Climate Crisis (Season 2, Episode 2 of CLIR’s Material Memory podcast),4 https://material-memory.clir.org/wp-content/ uploads/sites/28/2020/11/S2-E2-transcript-1.pdf
Nicole Kang Ferraiolo reported, “Even digital collections have a carbon footprint. If you add up the energy consumption of the world’s data centers it amounts to 2% of global emissions, about on par with the UK. And data centers are on track to account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint by 2040, about equivalent to that of the U.S.”
Although the size of a digital collection stored in a given cloud repository may seem the most obvious contributor to its carbon footprint, the easiest way to control for that would be through collection development policies which are out of scope for this paper. Another key factor, and more relevant here, are the carbon emissions of the particular cloud solution chosen. At UMBC, the majority of the cloud solutions used by the Library are managed as part of enterprise-level licenses through DoIT. Of these, the Library makes extensive use of the Google suite and Box for day-to-day document management and AWS S3 Glacier as part of the offsite storage component of our digital preservation strategy; the Library also maintains digital materials hosted by ContentDM and Omeka.
Each of the three major cloud solutions used at UMBC provides information on their environmental sustainability efforts on their websites. Google and AWS also post easy to find reports on progress towards their sustainability efforts. Although I was unable to locate a report for Box, they do include quantitative information on their progress prominently on their website. • Google: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ google_2019-environmental-report.pdf • Box: https://www.box.com/about-us/esg/protecting-ourplanet • AWS: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/ pdfBuilderDownload?name=amazon-sustainability2020-report
As grateful as I am for this information, and for the increasing availability of comparative analyses between solutions in popular technology magazines such as that in a recent Wired article5 https://www.wired.com/story/amazongoogle-microsoft-green-clouds-and-hyperscale-data-centers/, calculating a library’s carbon footprint remains complex and requires a level of expertise that is not commonly held by most librarians. In Khalid et al’s 2021 Sustainable development challenges in libraries: A Systematic Literature Review (2000-2020)6 10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102347, one of the primary challenges facing our profession was that LIS programs do not currently provide adequate or perhaps any sustainable development education and environmental literacy in their curricula (p. 7). Among their recommendations were to both increase coverage of these topics in the curriculum and for libraries to establish positions for Sustainable Librarians to help inform effective planning and development of programming for library users to empower them to make better informed decisions. While many libraries currently face significant fiscal challenges that will likely hinder the creation of new positions, shorter term solutions may entail seeking guidance from and forming partnerships with those within our parent organizations. I am currently in the process of reaching out to the UMBC Office of Sustainability to work with us on a library-wide Green Office assessment and, longer term, hope to pursue ongoing conversations with them and others around some of these more complex considerations.
Conclusion
Incorporating the triple bottom line into library technology purchasing can help improve the sustainability of future stages of equipment lifecycle planning including use and eventual disposal. Likewise, there are excellent resources and notable challenges for each of those stages as well. For those interested in exploring further, I would recommend the States Electronic Challenge https://www.stateelectronicschallenge.net/about.html which is a program providing detailed guidance on actions that can help improve environmental sustainability and showcases state agencies across the nation that excel in one or more phases.
Although in many ways these efforts remain preliminary and incremental improvements are still being made, I wanted to share these strategies because I believe it is so important that we each continue to move forward in responsible, sustainable ways. I hope that this provides one or two ideas that can help move efforts at other institutions forward, sparks inspiration for other things to try and other groups to collaborate with, or motivates others to share examples of sustainability strategies that they have adopted.
Endnotes
1. Macey Morales, “ALA adding sustainability as a core value of librarianship,” ALAnews (press release) May 14, 2019. https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2019/05/ala-addingsustainability-core-value-librarianship 2. John Elkington, Cannibals with Forks: the triple bottom line of 21st century business (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1998). 3. Diana Silveira, Library Technology Planning for Today and Tomorrow: A LITA Guide (Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018). 4. Nicole Kang Ferraiolo, “Archivists Against the Climate Crisis,” CLIR’s Material Memory, Season 2, Episode 2 (podcast),
November 9, 2020. https://material-memory.clir.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/28/2020/11/S2-E2-transcript-1.pdf 5. Daniel Oberhaus, “Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here’s Who has the Greenest Cloud: A WIRED report card on the top three cloud providers shows how their enviornmental claims stack up,” WIRED, December 10, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/ amazon-google-microsoft-green-clouds-and-hyperscale-datacenters/. 6. Ayesha Khalid, Ghulam Farid, and Khalid Mahmood. “Sustainable development challenges in libraries: A Systematic Literature Review (2000-2020)” The Journal of Academic
Librarianship, 47, May 2021. 10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102347
