we have our incoming, that will be next year's
President of the V. L. A. with us today
. Susie, will you stand please? This is
Susie Palmer from Longwood. But right now I
would like to introduce the current president. He's going
to say a few words to you, Kevin Smith
. Mhm. Good morning everybody. I'm glad you're
here for the 22nd V. L. A
Paraprofessional forum. Uh I regret to inform you
that this will be the last conference of the Paraprofessional
Forum. Only because the to counsel has approved a
name change for the Paraprofessional Forum. It is now
the Virginia Library Association Professional Associates Forum. So congratulations
. Yeah. I really never liked the name
Paraprofessional because it denoted something other than professional.
And I consider all of you professionals and we all
do professional service. Um You are the backbone of
Virginia libraries and all your institutions, your public libraries
and your academic libraries. And I always say you
are the first line of defense between the patrons and
the administration. And you do a really good job
at it to you protect uh deans and directors from
the belligerent patrons. But you have a very you
have an act and attacked for diffusing difficult situations and
making the customer the patron, the students happy.
And that's what you do and you do it very
well. And when our patrons come into the library
, they don't care who you are or what you
are. They just want service and they want their
information and they want their books and that's what you
guys do. Um If your library is like mine
, you were the most heavily traffic. You get
more citizens, more students in the library than any
other administrative building where you are. Uh that's how
it is in my library or a county. Where
the, so that means you are the face of
your institution. You're the face of your city.
You are the face of your county. And that's
what the citizens and the students remember is the service
they receive from you guys. Next month will be
20 years that I've been in the library profession and
I started as a pair of professional. So and
so I I have a pair of professionals are dear
to my heart While you're here. I want you
to learn a lot in the sessions. Um take
what you can from them learn. But the I
think the most important thing about conferences is the networking
opportunities, get to know each other, become friends
. And in my experience with networking, you get
the inside scoop on the various libraries and you also
get some really good leads on some other career opportunities
. So that's what I recommend. Um I would
like to thank Marion Eaton and Therese Walters
and Lisa Varga and the paraprofessional board for making this
happen. And uh so again thank you for all
you do you are the face of your libraries and
thanks. Yeah. Mhm. Trees trees anyone?
Okay Marion has asked me to make sure that you
take a minute and look at the ticket that you
received when you came in. That ticket will be
used for the door prices throughout the conference. See
if you can find that and if it's for the
door prizes and it'll be drawn, what does that
say? Oh right. After this? So when
she after she you know gives out the numbers of
people who are winning. Then you go out and
they'll be door prizes instead of collecting them during this
particular session. Is that it? Yes. Yes
. Yes. Yeah. The number. Oh.
Uh huh. Yeah. Place to try. Did
everybody hear her? Okay, good. Alright.
So does everybody have one of these today, pull
it out and turn it off If you can just
to everybody take that awkward moment and go ahead and
pull out your cell phones and put them on silent
or vibrate or something. Thank you. So now
I'm going to introduce our keynote speaker. Um first
of all, thank you for coming to the conference
. Our speaker is Tyler Walters and he is the
Dean of University libraries at Virginia Tech. I won't
go through the right up that you have probably already
read in the program but if you have read it
, he comes up to us today with a long
history of working in libraries and he's worked in many
of the positions that you all hope he is recognized
in state, national and international circles, through coming
to conferences like you're doing right now. So that's
probably one of the most important things you can do
is the most important way you can move your career
up to go to conferences, network and learn about
how they're doing it at other places. And so
he very much supports people being involved in those levels
. Um I didn't really know what else to say
about him today. So I thought I'd tell you
a couple of his famous quotes and see if I
can get him going here. He's one of the
main things that he's been known to saying is and
I we work at his library is libraries are not
my job there. My mission. He's absolutely made
libraries his life mission. He thinks about it often
on the clock and this is all he does and
thinks about his libraries. And one of the reasons
that he does this is another one of your famous
quotes dr Walters is that he wants to do things
like they do on science fiction, make all information
available to all people forever until the end of time
. So that is his simple goal with libraries and
that is why he is so and free, freely
available, not just available to the end of time
for everybody. But um Tyler, thank you for
coming to the conference. Thank you for sharing your
journey and libraries and please take the podium. So
real quick, since we're talking about beginnings, I
might just mention my my own. So I actually
started and archives south of the border, just south
of the border that were close to. So I
was kind of grew up in this field in Raleigh
north Carolina, which is south of the border from
where at? I was a professional associate. I
worked half time as the assistant to the photographic archivist
at the north Carolina state Archives. And I was
also saturday reference staff. So I, Uh,
even at the age of 22, I wore out
a lot of tennis shoes running up and down stairs
in the back of the state archives, looking for
records for genealogists. That was a lot of fun
. So I, that was my baptism by fire
with reference. It was very interesting. So it's
monday morning, we're here in Richmond. We're not
at work. Right? So it's actually sunny outside
if you look out there. So you're just gonna
kind of pretend you're on vacation. But unfortunately ran
across this library director is just kind of kind of
Babylon for a while, but you're going to be
charitable, right? You're gonna let me Babylon for
a little bit. So in other words, enjoy
distant, have fun. And I'm gonna walk through
a little bit of kind of where I've evolved to
in my thinking about libraries and the happy note is
, and you're gonna see in some of the slides
is I'm not the only one who's having these thoughts
. I'm gonna ask you all to think a little
bit different about Libraries and particularly library users, you
know, who, who uses our libraries, who
gets online, who walks in, who are they
today in 2014 and moving forward and what are they
, what are they doing? And that really means
all libraries, not just academic libraries. Now myself
as a university library dean, I think a lot
about academic libraries research libraries in particular. But as
Theresa knows, I just finished a PhD program last
january through Simmons College. It was a cohort system
. So which was excellent for me because I was
we had a four person cohort and I was the
only one who was really in a large university library
. The other three were excusing were uh a college
librarian, a state librarian and a public library in
in a large city. So I learned an awful
lot from them. I'm sure they learn from me
as well. I actually have some of the work
that we did in this presentation, but I really
learned how, you know, I think libraries today
in our minds were too segmented in that sense.
We think public libraries are really different from from university
libraries that are different from college libraries and different from
special libraries. And yes, there are differences,
but there's an awful lot of commonalities between them.
So, kind of, the things that I'm talking
about really does refer to all libraries. So what
I'm gonna start with today is we all know we're
going through tons and tons of change. So what
is this change now? This is a talk I
can do all day long by myself, but I
have one slide, so we're not gonna go all
day on this, on this one item, but
kind of the external factors, make sure we're all
kind of on the same page is what's impacting our
libraries. I think we already know what a lot
of those things are, what I call the ascendance
of knowledge production. Another phrase related to that would
be content creation. People are creating things and that's
where I'm going to hang most of the day.
So what are these knowledge production components that libraries can
get involved in? And then talk a little bit
about some of these evolving scenario is playing out what
our library is doing that are really getting more involved
in assisting users in producing knowledge and content. So
why are libraries transitioning? So, we know,
you know, some of the favorite things and this
is where we, you know, we want to
be careful to not, not wine, but I
will point out my second little graphic there that all
opportunities, all problems or opportunities in disguise, they
really are. That's what gets me up in the
morning, is to think I've got I've got problems
to solve. We're going to go forward. We're
gonna make this library great. We all know the
economics of the matter. We all know about governments
and lack of funding for the public sphere, and
this is really decreasing. This is a long term
trend that's not gonna go away. I don't really
want to see a whole lot more about that,
other than It's true. And we have to really
think creatively, I think that's what for me,
gets my creative juices going. I ask other people
to get creative about these things, uh money is
just not going to flow the way it was.
And even, you know, 10 and 15 years
ago when we when we thought the money wasn't flowing
, it really was. So in any case,
there's we know there's economic challenges going on. Every
one of our parent institutions are our cities or counties
or states or universities or corporations even are facing a
lot of challenges. Another factor is, is this
sense of globalization, what's going on and and part
of that relates to the next bullet is kind of
globalization and the publishing industry. Publishing industry today truly
is a global look at what's going on out there
. But in terms of really producing things, being
a publisher, you know, we have a lot
of new players. I mean those of you who
are who are paying close attention, you have things
like, you know, what is amazon doing?
They have amazon Kindle direct Publishing and a service called
create Space. So there's an awful lot of these
out there where they're creating books and acting as the
publisher themselves, not just the reseller anymore. Oh
, and information policies are changing a great deal.
This is something I pay quite a bit of attention
too. But the way copyrights getting interpreted these days
continues to change. There's there's one case after another
that changes how we look at copyright and what people
can really do with information. And that's kind of
what I want to keep talking about is what people
are doing with information. They're creating more information out
of existing information. So, to harp on the
technology piece for a little bit, we know that
technology is changing rapidly and it's changing us. It's
changing our work environments. It's changing our play environments
, you name it. Everything is really changing.
But what I'm asking you to think of today is
that phrase library user? What is the library user
? Well, in 2014, after the dawn of
the Web and all the social media tools out there
, and just basically all the tools that make it
very easy to produce anything, cameras on our phones
, all the photography, we take blogs and wikis
for writing. Things like freeware like garageband where you
can create music and video. Uh, this is
all getting easier and easier and easier. So today's
library users are actually creators and producers of content.
And that's kind of the the item I really want
you to take home with you today. Is that
these bullets, all these different things that people people
create now. Some of this is is has been
around for a long time. Public libraries have long
been host to the communities, you know, poetry
club, book club, writing clubs, photography clubs
, et cetera. Well, guess what? All
those people in the neighborhoods have been creating content all
of these years. What are people doing with that
? But in today's digital age, it's very voluminous
. Right? There's an awful lot of material.
So what are we going to, you know,
what are we gonna do with all of that?
That's the important aspect to all of this. And
all sorts of libraries, public and academic are going
to have to really think about how are we responding
to these forces. Content is getting created at at
a pace and a volume just unheard of today.
And it just continues, continues to go on in
my case on a university campus. And I get
asked by faculty researchers who who call me up or
email me and they're not belligerent, but there but
they want a lot from us. And I've got
people who walk in and say, well, I'm
doing this experiment and next week I'm creating 70 terabytes
of data. What do I do with it?
Can you help me? Tyler? So, you
know, 20 years ago, the idea of dealing
with 20 terabytes would have, you know, a
wall would have been just shrieking out the room and
and, you know, thought the world was ending
. You know, how can we possibly deal with
all that? But today we we work on that
. We deal with that. So the result of
all of this external force that's going on is we
really are looking at libraries, creating new infrastructures are
buildings and infrastructure, but so is the technology and
so as human expertise, what we know what we
bring to the table in our services. Those are
the three things that I kind of think of as
as where libraries changing our infrastructures, our services and
our skills. So it's one article and I think
about so I go back to users here, maybe
I'll begin at the beginning. Users right. Users
are producers. So let's think of them as producers
creators. There's a great article that I've enjoyed a
lot came out of Harvard Business Review now about six
years ago, Antinori and a couple of other authors
. And Nori is actually today, the Dean of
the Harvard Business School. So I tend to pay
attention to him, he knows a thing or two
, and he focuses a lot on, well in
shorthand, I'd say soft skills, people soft skills
, but he thinks a lot about this notion of
people and how they're motivated, particularly in the workplace
. So I've kind of taken some of his writings
and my thinking out of out of his context.
So it's not about employees so much in the,
in the workplace is just about human beings in community
and what drives us. And he talks about these
four drivers to acquire bond, comprehended defend. But
there's one item he doesn't talk about is create that
really. What motivates us when you think about it
, we create all day long. From the moment
we get up to the moment we go to bed
, we're standing in a better sitting in a building
. I'm standing in a building that we built that
we human beings created. People created these chairs and
tables and the cameras and the lights and everything else
that we have. So we were very much kind
of mission driven around producing and creating things. Although
these other drivers are important, maybe I'll discover them
real quick, but we want to, you know
, so you think of your library users walking in
your door. These are things that motivate them as
well. You know, they want to acquire,
they want to acquire knowledge. They want to acquire
simple things like a roof over their head, clothing
, food, those things that make them feel safe
and secure. And if you read this article,
most of these drivers are about just that we all
want to be safe and secure. And the article
actually talks about how difficult change is because of these
very basic human drivers. We don't as human beings
we don't want to change. We have a very
difficult time with that bonding is bonding with, with
people bonding with with the folks that we work with
that we live next to. Makes it very difficult
to change organizations because we more than anything. We
we start to bond with the people that were sitting
next to and working with and we don't and we
don't want to change that. We also want to
comprehend, we want to really understand our universe around
us and what's happening there. Uh when when there's
times of great change of course that that understanding our
comprehension is challenged and we have to change that to
so that that becomes another item a resistor where we
really don't want to we don't want to change,
we don't want to change what we know but we
must and to defend again the sense of safety and
security. I mean defend he Nori a writes and
talks a lot about kind of that that military aspect
of that country defends itself. But we all we
defend our neighborhoods, we defend our homes, we
defend our Children. It's again wanting that sense of
safety and security which really kind of equates to not
changing but because we create things and there's this tension
between his human drivers and this active creation and production
because as we create and produce things change and we
go through that whole cycle of change. So kind
of back to this thing of knowledge production. You
know, what is this? So David Lange's who's
a library information science professor at Syracuse. And I
thought I was the first one to start thinking about
some of these things. But David. David was
a very early thing or two about this. A
few quotes from him and he has a book out
that's very good. But he talks about how knowledge
is created through conversation that libraries are in the knowledge
business. Therefore libraries are in the conversation business.
New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation.
And I think today in the world of the web
this is an important item to remember that that we've
spent 100 200 years kind of branding ourselves as the
field that does what we bring people books and journals
and a few other tangible items. And as it's
gone electronic. Yes there are e journals and e
books but there are so many other forms of information
, you know for the first time in really in
human history and I'm sure you've heard this before.
But the carrier of the information is really separated from
the informational content itself and we can create all sorts
of carriers in digital form today. And it's very
uh there's a lot of sociology out there that talks
about being in a post literate society and what that
really means is a non textual society. Now,
I kinda thank God for wikis and blogs because it
continues text. There's an awful lot of text out
there. But there's but we know that there's an
awful lot of audio, video, moving image,
still image as well, animation, things that are
that are created not just captured from around us.
So knowledge is taking all of these forms, at
least tangible knowledge is. So he's challenging us to
really think about what what the role of libraries are
if we if we remove ourselves for a minute of
just thinking of the book and the journal because in
a way that is that that book and journal is
a is a kind of a stamp of the information
object in time over a couple 100 years. None
of us live that long. So we just kind
of assume these things have been around forever. But
those of you have kind of done your history of
publishing. One of one class will remember uh Gutenberg
bibles and the like and how the production of information
has really changed over time. So we're in the
middle of that kind of period right now in the
last 10 years were really changing how knowledge and information
is crafted and produced and preserved and shared next.
And you can notice these are a little bit old
um in that six years ago this is a school
library and joan fry Williams and and ran across this
blog and I I'm beginning to use this a lot
now in some of my thinking because I just love
some of the things that she said. So I
got a couple slides, I'm going to read to
you. So I apologize for that. But I
do that because they're they're the quotes. I just
really love So when I think about a lot about
knowledge production, the creation of content and this is
where libraries need to be going because everybody is a
producer today. Everybody's using facebook and twitter and Youtube
and flicker and all of these social media sites and
what are they doing? They're putting stuff on there
that they've that they've produced. So this is what
what drives us. But here we go six years
ago, joan Williams talks about how libraries are no
longer grocery stores where students can go and pick up
ingredients but that there need to be kitchens where they
have the resources necessary to create a finished product.
And that's very important for the rest of my talk
. This where they have the resources necessary to create
a finished product and that we need to stop being
just the grocery store candy store. She says I
love candy story so and become the kitchen. So
interesting concept. And further the these are quotes from
Williams that our business is about relationships. And that's
the other thing I I harp on a lot.
Um We are, you know, are we about
books and journals? Yeah. You bet we are
we're about information and content and and we are about
collections. And if you look at some of the
things that we're doing at the Virginia Tech Libraries,
um the collection is still one of those, one
of those strong items. We actually have a strategic
plan. We call it kind of four the four
legs of the table. These four items and that
all four need to be strong for the table to
be strong and flat and even and usable and one
of those legs is access to collections. So we
realized that access to information actually having collections is still
incredibly important. But as Williams talks about our business
is about relationships, it's about catalyzing connections, it's
not about information containers that library users think of themselves
as members, not as users or customers. And
I really kind of like that because we what do
we all do? We serve a community. I
serve a university community and beyond. I serve,
I serve the town, I serve the region as
a public library. We have all sorts of people
walk in or not just members of the university,
but they are members of of some kind of community
. And so are we and we serve that community
. So it really is this this sense, the
real work is about relationships and not transactions and I
think that's incredibly important as we go through all of
this change, and this is another item that I'm
constantly harping on with my folks as we, as
we make changes, is that when we come up
with new services, we have to generate the relationships
as we come up with a new service, we
might be dealing with people that we've not dealt with
before, and we need to initiate that relationship,
get to know each other, find out more what
it is that they want and need from us and
go from there, and sometimes they don't really realize
the things that we can we can do for them
. So there's that leadership aspect of it where it's
not just us responding to express need, but us
kind of anticipating what people might be doing, and
then kind of linking up with that and showing them
how we can help support that. And next is
this notion of trust. And when you talk about
relationships, you talk about trust and this is something
that I've actually published on a fair bit. I've
done a lot of work around digital preservation between institutions
, even between countries. And no one's going to
preserve stuff forever more if you don't trust the other
organizations that are involved in your in your network.
So trust be in that realm becomes very important.
Trust between users producers and libraries who provide services and
spaces is equally as important. So I like this
quote to from from joan where she talks about we
should emphasize hospitality comfort, convenience and create work environments
that invite exploration and creativity, both virtually and physically
the underlying is my emphasis. We want our users
members, students and teachers to trust us enough to
allow us to participate. So when you stop and
you think about knowledge creation, knowledge production and you
all might be thinking about this already. Well if
they're using facebook and twitter and Youtube, one of
my favorites flicker for photos, et cetera, what
do they need a library for? So when we
talk about all of this information use and information production
, it is possible for us to fall out of
the loop. How are we not going to fall
out of the loop by, you know, we
hope we can generate enough trust between us to allow
us to participate in their work and and add value
to what it is they're doing and how we're going
to do that as part of what I'm going to
talk about in just a couple of slides so that
trust and relationships within our community is incredibly important.
So in community trust, relationships, members, community
members producers. That's that's kind of why I'm asking
to think about those words today and that they're different
, that's different from library user. Just a slight
perspective shift. So this was a little model,
like we came up with this was in my PhD
cohort and as we created this thing, you had
to kind of be there because I actually didn't say
anything. I just watched the other three kind of
build this thing and they'd ask me. So is
it like this in university libraries? I just not
. Yeah. And they wrote this. So this
looks a lot and trees could attest to this and
some of the staff I have here could have tested
, I create models like this all the time,
but I actually didn't create this one. So it's
really kind of proud of that because I watched a
public librarian and a state librarian and a small college
librarian kind of create this model about what this is
, what they're all talking just buzzing away. This
is what libraries do today. This is we help
people create knowledge for themselves. It might always not
be new knowledge to the world, but it's new
to them and they're going about the act of how
they create knowledge. And again, I I I'm
sure I had a few words towards the end of
this exercise, but I really liked this where we
talked about, you know, what do we do
? And kind of the boxes around those circles are
the things that the libraries do. So, you
know, we to create knowledge, we provide spaces
are are learning spaces or commons, areas are becoming
incredibly important. We provide all sorts of technology and
tools. We help people learn skills to do these
things and we engage with them against that relationship thing
. People come in, we can teach them formally
, we can kind of do some just in time
learning and training on the floor of the library.
We help people create then access, what do libraries
do we create the physical and virtual infrastructure to provide
information today. And this is where the world of
digital repositories has really become front and center where we
we collect things from our, you know, our
community members and we preserve them and we help provide
access to them. Some of the larger municipal public
libraries are doing this kind of work where they operate
repositories and you know, they collect writings, poetry
, photography, all sorts of things from their community
members and put it out there of course, in
the university setting, we do this a lot with
in regards to the scholarship that our faculty and students
create course papers, articles, reports, audio,
video work datasets etcetera so you kind of use in
meeting. So this is where we help build multiple
literacy ease and skill building. You know, not
only today do we focus on you know the classic
sense of information literacy being able to find information,
understanding how to how to discern the quality of information
. But we also help people a lot with visual
literacy, multi media literacy, even data literacy things
of this nature. And I've been working on issues
of multimedia individual literacy for a while and I was
very happy to see in the A. C.
R. L. Information literacy guidelines that are kind
of under review right now that they talk about visual
multimedia and data literacy as being part of the literacy
is that we teach. And when you think about
how do we, especially today in 2014 with the
World Wide Web, how do we convey knowledge?
Well, years ago we'd say we'd write a book
or an article and it was, you know,
black text on a white piece of paper and we
still have that. And it's kind of black text
on a white screen a lot of the times.
But increasingly it's audio visual, it's still image,
it's moving image, it's it's truly multi media animation
, that's added, et cetera. So this is
how knowledge is conveyed today and people in our community
are learning more about how to do this. Students
are expected to learn more how to do this.
So we move on. So we also we market
, we evaluate, we deal with the community individual
library etcetera. So so this this whole sense that
this is what I live, this is this is
kind of our image, a visual image of what
a library is transforming communities into learning communities that thrive
. And that whole line is about value added,
you have communities and they're gonna do what they're gonna
do. But with libraries involved in this kind of
knowledge creation cycle, we add value, we turn
communities into true learning communities, we optimize them for
learning and that they're not just doing, but they're
thriving at what they do. It's also a concept
that David Lange's talks about in some of his writings
and book so quick commercial on on how some of
this actually manifests itself in a particular library. So
this is this is from my library at Virginia Tech
University Libraries and we recently did a oh, kind
of a I think of it as a pr exercise
, I suppose. And we we definitely want people
in your community to to see how we're evolving and
growing and becoming a different library that we feel is
more more of the moment, more value, add
more more immediate for our community members. So we
developed these six aspirational qualities. We started in the
library and we asked people in the library and outside
the library, and what do you think of when
you think of the library? Well, we came
up with over 100 terms and even that we had
to kind of get it down to there. So
we kind of went through one exercise after another after
another, and we finally got it down to six
. So I thought I'd talk about these six a
little bit. So this is kind of what our
library as an academic library is trying to strive for
. So the first aspirational quality is about openness that
we designed pathways to information access ideas and discovery.
So when you see openness, a lot of us
think about open access uh publishing materials and making making
information free to readers, that's a component of this
. But it doesn't say open access, it's about
openness and it's that sense of knowledge of freedom that
we want people to get to information that we're that's
what we're all here for. We're very mission driven
and it's key to learning to get to information.
And when we put a lot of costs up in
front of that, that becomes a barrier. So
that's one aspect to it. But we we value
and we aspire to reach as much openness as possible
. Next is curation and curation really is a word
that refers to kind of the life cycle of information
, everything from, from conceiving of what we're going
to create, to creating it to preserving it,
providing access, reusing it. So we talk about
how we partner with people to produce, disseminate,
preserve, use information and data and we throw data
in there a lot these days for us because these
it's not, you know, I think we all
grew up in school, we learned about primary resources
and secondary resources. Right? So we're beginning to
work an awful lot with primary resources that are in
digital form. Why? Because they're all a bunch
of ones and zeros and they're all in a computer
file and all these computer files can be managed whether
it's packages, an e book or it's it's a
for us that could be a I worked with some
crazy faculty. It could be um it could be
a huge file of dye in water, watching crabs
walk through the water. And I've actually have collected
terabytes of that kind of stuff before because researchers are
trying to figure out how crabs mechanically move through water
so we can mimic that and create better machines that
move in the water that are that are manually driven
by by us by humans. So that's data.
That's one type of data. So it's an interesting
work out there. The third one's creation, we
enable people to design, make and express their ideas
again, back to that and that's actually kind of
part of curation. And we think about that point
of creation. We help people want to create something
in my environment. When we have students walk in
the door, increasingly they say, you know,
I have an assignment for class, I have to
create a presentation. We hear that all the time
. So they're asking for reading materials, I need
a book, I need a couple articles, but
immediately they go to, well I have to give
a power point presentation. I got to create this
video with it as well. And you know,
I'm actually doing this. It's a history class and
I and I need some help with uh you know
, maps because I'm kind of doing something on Colonial
Williamsburg and I need some maps for that. So
that's, you know, that's kind of geographic information
systems material today. So we're, you know,
we're kind of designing our library more around what happens
when that student walks in the door and they need
to create something. They need the tools to do
all those things I just mentioned. And that's not
the odd case anymore. That's probably the majority of
the cases. What a librarian here is that the
reference desk at our reference desk. And we are
not extreme at all. I think university libraries in
particular hearing this. But I also know that public
libraries are hearing this very kind of thing from their
, from their community members. So the other three
are community. We bring people ideas and resources together
. And I think it's the public's who understand this
a lot better than the academics that we serve as
that community center. We are, you know,
libraries are all about being social learning itself is a
social process. That's another quote of mine. I
have said for years, I'm sure other people have
said it many times long before there was social media
. But this is this is perhaps the strongest thing
that libraries do is bringing people together. But it's
not just people, people are coming together with ideas
with concepts, things they want to create, things
they want to share. Um a very simple expression
of this can be, you know, grandparents walking
into a library saying, you know, I gosh
, I just wish I could learn more about facebook
, I just have such a hard time. I
got my grandkids who put stuff up there and I
wish I could see their photos and I wish I
could share something that what I'm doing. I just
don't, I don't know how to do that.
You know, we hear that kind of thing all
the time. So it could be as simple as
that, you know, how do we, how
do we get our community members more involved and how
we create and share today? So catalyst. We
ignite people's curiosity and sense of possibility and this might
be the one that's kind of way out there a
little, a little bit, I think for us
because it's not about service, it's about us being
a leadership organization, that we, we need to
be proud of. The fact yet humble but proud
of the fact that we, as information professionals know
more than most people around us about how to produce
, how to publish, how to share and utilize
and find information and that we can be that leadership
organization, We can show others in our community how
to do these things effectively after we listen to them
and understand what it is they're trying to do.
So we want to be that catalyst. We want
to understand their their curiosity, what it is they're
trying to do and show them new ways to do
it. And then of course knowledge, we stimulate
creative, cultural, social and intellectual endeavors uh kind
of hard to do aspirational qualities without talking about knowledge
somewhere. And we think about knowledge is being both
both tangible um which is kind of funny today because
tangible could be a print book, but tangible could
be an e book, right? Or an article
. But it's also tacit which is really about what
people know in their head, right? Goes back
to that length slide about conversations and what our job
really is is about fostering those conversations and capturing those
conversations. So what is a captured conversation writing,
right? Could be a book. So this is
what we really do today. So where is all
this leading for libraries? So, I think,
you know, I I certainly grew up in in
in the academic libraries where we talked an awful lot
over the years about, you know, there's there's
the there's the front of the shop, in the
back of the shop and that it's not one of
my favorite phrases, I don't like it, you
know, um, public versus technical is another one
to hear her a lot about not one of my
favorite phrases, I really kind of promote this notion
of, you know, this is where we're kind
of moving toward their infrastructure, were content or services
. So the infrastructure is if you look at the
gears, its its facilities and technologies and what I
said before in human expertise, part of the infrastructure
of the library today is what we know our skills
, so developing our skills, coming to conferences,
conferring literally with our Our cohorts are colleagues learning from
one another and learning new things to do with content
and information is our value add. If we stop
and do the same thing over and over and over
again, those things get commoditized, other people start
doing it and are worth starts to crumble. So
are our value is in learning how to do new
things with content. Information, content of course content
is king and that's why we exist, right?
We collect And we're still going to collect. And
if we don't collect, if we help people get
to information that we don't own, it's still about
that access. We probably have talked about that for
, you know, a good 2025 years maybe even
longer about access to the things that we don't own
. But we know that today we're continuing to hone
our services are technologies, our M O. U
s between libraries et cetera. About how do we
get people the information they need as quickly as possible
, even if we don't physically have it or own
it. So that's still critical to what we do
and services. So the services are changing too in
terms of, you know, we we've always help
people find and use information but we also focus on
the production of information a lot more today. So
you can see from looking at this, you know
, there's skills that we all need to be developing
within our libraries. Now, no one of us
can do all of these things and and you know
, I'm certainly not asking for that. So some
of our larger libraries we have, you know,
lots of departments doing lots of different things were really
very diverse in our in our services. And we
need to keep learning about how to do some of
these new things uh challenging, challenging in a time
of go back early. The economics, right.
Economics are really kind of difficult these days. So
this is where we we have to rise to the
challenge and be creative and figure out how to do
some of these things regardless of the economic situation.
Uh huh. I try not to think about economics
. A lot of it is it's kind of that
that dale Carnegie power of positive thinking thing. You
know, if you dwell on on the negative then
you're not gonna do anything, you know? Well
we don't have any money to do that. I
can't think of a bigger, harder conversation stopper than
that phrase here all the time. You know?
I tried to say, well I just ignore money
, I don't think about it. What do we
want to do and make the money issue? The
very last thing that you think about because it's real
, you have to think about it but you don't
have to think about it first. You can think
about it last. So libraries in the evolving paradigm
. So you can see I'm kind of you know
, chunking this down talk about libraries a little bit
. So what are what are librarians and what our
library staff in this in this realm? Well,
if you want to really know about staff, you're
gonna have to come to my next talk after lunch
because that's where I'm going to really focus on on
staff there, but I'll touch on a little bit
now. So who are we in this realm now
that I've kind of got you all buzzing and confused
and pulled apart? Like, gosh, what's the
library really doing today? Well, a lot of
this should be familiar, but again, it's about
it is about old familiar roles being done in very
new ways. You know, I think that that's
that that sense of, you know, the safety
and security for me when I look at it,
it's like, well, we've always been doing these
things. It is the World Wide Web that has
just completely changed our world and changed information creation and
use and and we know that. But when you
look at this really closely, you can see that
it is really reshaped what we're doing. So teachers
instructional partners, you know that that's one of one
of the roles we play. We do this in
learning spaces, we do this in physical and virtual
spaces. I I emphasize virtual because we know how
we do this in physical spaces, How we teach
people things in libraries. For instance. I mean
we we teach people how to find and use information
, but we've always taught people how to use technology
. We've taught them how to use manual typewriters and
electronic typewriters. We've taught people how to use photocopiers
and pcs scanners and the like. So we were
always teaching technology as well as teaching about how to
find quality information. Mm We're also observers or anthropologists
. Now I have a lot of kind of social
history background in my degrees and spent a lot of
time uh taking anthropology courses and in sociology courses.
Really didn't like the sociology too much. Too many
numbers for the historian in me. But it's that
sense of observational analysis really being kind of that there
there is a a book written by an anthropologist that
I read some years ago that helped me a lot
called participant observation. And that's kind of what we
do is librarians, we especially within the library and
in our online environments, we observe and watch what
people are doing. We watch how they're how they're
uh finding materials. What are they doing with the
materials once they have them um you know in our
libraries once we set up commons areas where there's more
scanners and cameras and things of this nature we wanna
we wanna you know we don't want to spy on
them. We don't have to have personal information,
but we want to observe enough to really understand what
it is there doing with these things. We bring
that back to the library and that continues to help
us shape and evolve our services. Okay. We're
also systems builders and you can tell even from these
four here as well as content producers, these four
, they're kind of a little bit different types.
Uh and I think this is where some of the
communication between us and these roles as librarians and library
staff in these four areas. And there's more um
we break down in our communication because we see things
differently. But for me, you know, and
I've had some librarian, library directors in particular talked
about, you know, gosh, we're just so
schizophrenic these days, we just, you know,
we just do so many different things. And I
just said, no, we're not schizophrenic where divers
were diverse, but but what, what's what's the
thing that hangs it altogether? Content information, no
matter what it is, We're talking about doing something
with information and that's who we are. We are
information professionals. So system builders, that's the other
thing. And I've spent a lot of time here
, probably Emma systems builder, but we talk about
this and a lot of ways. We build digital
repositories, digital libraries. We build learning spaces virtual
and physical in our buildings. People who deal with
licensing, purchasing, creating metadata, dealing with rights
. You're all kind of contribute to the building of
the system of that environment, of how information kind
of happens and gets, gets created and gets used
. Content producers. So content still very important.
And kind of the image is there for a reason
. So, again, it's not just creating information
today is not just sitting at the typewriter or the
pc. It's that increasingly it becomes a multimedia production
. So other kind of other roles in the involving
paradigm. These are a little bit loftier. But
we're organizational designers. This is kind of where I
spend my time in these two areas, Not more
than anything, but we, you know, we
have to design or organizations very intentionally for these this
new environment that that people are community members, are
information producers. What are they doing? We need
to design our organization that meets their needs and is
able to evolve as they evolve. And also the
sense of being kind of a collaborative network creator.
Because libraries today, it doesnt again, doesn't matter
your institutional setting. No single library can do all
it needs to do all by itself. I think
we all know that we have to cooperate, we
have to collaborate, we have to do things together
. Um I know that I think in the academic
libraries were finally really really getting that at a lot
of different levels. We've done things very well like
resource sharing. Um I think it's very good in
Virginia. The viva program and resource sharing has been
just great. But we're, you know, we're
learning how to do more of these things, not
just within the state, but nationally takes a lot
of time and a lot of a lot of energy
and frankly some failure to to get that done.
But it's important aspect of what we do. Okay
, so here's another little definition of of libraries and
it's a place that supports the full knowledge construction process
. So it's again it's that idea of we're dealing
with our members are coming into the library or maybe
they're online, interacting with us on with our with
our libraries and library staff. And they're talking about
, they have a concept and idea. They need
to develop skills to create something they need access to
technologies, then they create something. There is a
product, you know, what happens with that product
? Well, that products very familiar to us.
It's some sort of information that some sort of a
file, probably digital that can be printed as well
, can't exist in a couple of different mediums and
that we might want to collect and help sustain that
. So as we go forward and we think more
about what libraries are doing, it's some of these
kinds of things we want to kind of, what
do we want to do? We want to help
people translate their ideas through the skills that they have
or will be having how to utilize that technology and
produce something. So we want to talk about content
creation services. Uh I've got a few few slides
on on this. Um but a lot of it
again comes back to uh in addition to information literacy
, it's about visual communication, it's about multimedia design
. Uh There's that sense of kind of I think
of as social media literacy, you know, how
to use, how to use literacy. One of
my librarians who does a lot of work in this
area refers to adjust social information literacy, which I
kind of like. So I'm kind of borrowing that
from her more these days, but it is about
, you know, when it comes down to brass
tacks, what are we doing it? Some of
the stuff in the lower level that slide, it's
about content production. We're gonna we need to be
doing things like providing digital recording equipment, capture digitizing
, printing. Um This could be three D printers
, large platter printers, colour printers, black and
white printers, hardware, software production spaces. You
know, you really have to design your spaces around
that. Yeah, I can tell you this couple
slides, I have this one and others upcoming.
The spaces that I have photographs of these are in
libraries. So it's very interesting to see this.
And then of course when people produce things, you
know, they needed hosted somewhere. So content hosting
services is something we can do now. Yes,
people can put things up in in Youtube and the
like. Um but it's not gonna last forever.
I mean, I think one of the value adds
that all forms of libraries can offer is that,
you know, part of our job is to sustain
information, We can we can collect these things and
help keep it around longer. Then it might exist
on youtube or flicker. So we're all really dependent
on google, Right? What happens if google decides
, you know, youtube is just not that much
of a moneymaker, which, you know, I
can't believe that would actually happen. Youtube is a
huge moneymaker. Um, flicker might be, you
know, for yahoo maybe flicker won't work out so
well one day, you know, these things happen
and then boom, you know, there's a lot
of content that can be gone. It's a knowledge
production components. So I'm getting a little repetitive here
. I'm trying to make a point. So spaces
tools, literacy, these, these are kind of
the new language I think of, of libraries moving
forward that we want to design our spaces for knowledge
production, especially collaborative production. There's an awful lot
of group work that needs to be done all the
way, especially in school, all the way from
K through 12, uh through colleges and universities.
We certainly see it in our university library. Uh
The work is not as solitary as it used to
be, including the humanities, where an awful lot
of work the culture has been um pretty solitary,
but that's changing an awful lot through digital humanities projects
. So people are coming together in libraries wanting to
do stuff, We have to design our spaces for
that. We have to think about the tools and
technologies that we're providing. We have to think about
, you know, what are the skills people need
? What are these literacy ease that people needed to
develop and that I think as a field we've we've
done a very good job of defining and honing and
finding a place of value add in information literacy,
But in 2014 and beyond it's gonna be information literacy
plus it's gonna be these other things, especially visual
multimedia and data. You can't go anywhere today without
seeing the phrase big data, you know, what
is that? Well, a lot of us are
going to deal with little data and that's okay.
Um it's still data. It's still computer files.
It's it's an information resource that people want to do
something with. So it's ok to work on all
these things. But of course to do this to
teach these things and instruct these people. We are
members are community members, we have to learn some
of these skills are cells. So I have to
keep that in mind. So content creation services,
you know, this is something that I've actually focused
on a lot. My last three positions I've had
was it's all about producing stuff. So producing journals
, magazines, books, conference proceedings, video collections
, et cetera. We are libraries kind of this
library is publisher or libraries producer. You know,
we can be this organization that helps people produce stuff
and that we organize, sustain and disseminate content.
And this is what the cataloguing side, right?
That those of you are involved in technical services and
cataloguing. We organize information. Well, I can't
think of a time where organizing information has ever been
more important than now because you have all this unstructured
stuff. You've got citizens all over millions of people
creating stuff. How much more chaos could you ask
for? There's a lot of chaos and all these
catalogers are just going nuts, wanting to organize all
that. Go organize. There's lots to do,
lots to do. So the library scenario houses all
kind of playing out again. You're going to see
some repetition here. If I want to try it
, at least in writing kind of lay out,
you know, what, what is this? So
there's this, you know, the library scenario,
this is kind of the library that is assertively partnering
in the creation and production of original content. Uh
huh. I actually did this as a paper and
and my PhD program really thinking a lot and with
my cohort thinking a lot about how libraries are going
to respond, especially to copyright matters because when you're
talking about mash ups and working with original content that
someone else has created and committee member wants to take
that and add it to what they're doing and create
something else. You know, you've got copyright problems
. So libraries can be either really afraid of that
and don't allow any of that kind of thing to
go on. Um That's not necessarily a wrong decision
. It's just it's a decision with certain pros and
cons or you or you can really be more assertively
involved with your community members and teach them how to
do these things. So teaching them about rights and
copyright is part of that new literacy going forward.
People need to know what they really can and can't
do what kind of risks they should and shouldn't be
taking with with content. And it is a moving
target uh with cases that are coming out today,
it's been difficult, but most of the cases that
you've seen today are coming down in favour of the
libraries in the library position. So again, you
know, spaces, I'm not gonna read all this
, but you guys can all read this, but
it's a sense of production comments. You know,
we especially in the university libraries, we started with
we start with that sense of comments and I've been
one of my associate deans brian Matthews and I talked
about this. We're trying to come up with another
another phrase beyond just learning spaces and comments. But
there's this we we kind of talked about our space
is becoming knowledge studios and that we all do knowledge
production across the library but their their studios where you
need a lot of equipment and it's designed in a
particular way to help produce certain kinds of things through
those groups of technologies. So it really is more
of a studio like environment. Um and people produce
so services in the sense are really about removing barriers
for people in all of our communities. We want
to provide the hardware and the software is that are
required for people to do things. And then we
want to help host that content. People want.
People don't just create content to go hide it.
Especially today you can put it up in a wiki
blog, et cetera. Pretty easily. We want
to help people understand how to kind of get the
maximum benefit out of the content they created. How
to get it out there, where to put it
how and then how they're going to sustain it over
time. And part of that is social networking and
to learn more about how to use the various social
networking platforms out there for what they want to do
. Okay, so this is kind of the rights
part of it. And I don't want to talk
a lot about this, but uh, you know
, I want to point out that, you know
, this writes correct. I mean this is one
of the things we can just kind of talk about
all day and I feel like we've learned any more
about it, so we're not gonna do that.
But rights as part of the whole literacy thing and
part of the whole content production thing that we need
to learn more about. What can we do with
existing content. Um what do we do with you
know with the original content of others? And it
is a role, it is a role that a
library can play within its parent institution. That's kind
of my middle bullet here. It is an opportunity
for a leadership role. A lot of university struggle
, municipalities struggle uh counties struggle, a lot of
organizations, non profits. They all kind of struggle
with what can they do with content. Nobody wants
to get sued, nobody wants to get in trouble
. So if we can develop more prowess more expertise
ourselves, there is this possibility that we can actually
think kind of become a bit of this this copyright
or I. P. Intellectual property expert for our
parent institutions in particular. What happens to content and
publishing role? An awful lot of what I've been
talking about is production. Well, you know,
publishing and production are not that far apart anymore as
to what those those kinds of things really are.
So, you know, your library could be the
publisher of your local community pretty easily today. So
again, we want to focus on processes an idea
generation, not just the product. Historically as libraries
, we collect products, right? We collect the
books and journals, we collect manuscripts and photographs and
and all those kinds of materials as one to start
on archives. I collected all sorts of different kinds
of things. But we want to really focus on
processes today. This process of production and creation and
what are the value adds we can provide. You
know, there are literacy is we can help people
build, there's instruction, we can do, there's
technology, we can provide their spaces, we can
design and provide both physical and virtual. So these
are very important items and we can help manage that
information. So this is really my last slide.
This is the slide I'm gonna use and kind of
focus on after lunch. So I'll talk about this
very briefly here. I don't want to give up
all my secrets. Um staff roles. You know
, this is there's more than just this, but
in particular, what do professional associates do in this
role? There's there's a lot, but if you
kind of take this lens of perspective to library work
and what are we doing, there's an awful lot
of things that we can do. There are these
community embedded positions, community relations, community engagement become
very important. Training and management of public technologies and
our spaces become very, very important managing the space
itself, moving furniture around, deploying technology, asking
questions. People come to the reference desk less and
less, but they're out there on our floor is
trying to do things. So that sense of roving
and helping people is very important. A lot of
, just in time assistance needs, needs to be
given. Don't always need to be a really deep
expert to be able to do this. A lot
of people just struggle with with something in Photoshop.
Uh, they might just need a little bit of
help. They might need a little bit of help
getting that three d printer started something of that nature
. So there's a lot of basic things we can
do as well as more of the high end stuff
, so more on that later. But there's,
you know, to me, the good news is
there's lots to do. There is a it's a
really vibrant time for libraries that are willing to kind
of, I think, and we re imagine their
role and grow and go forward. So that's what
I have for you this morning. See if you
have any questions, anything you'd like to talk about
, and I just kind of leave you with this
parting thought in my contact, once, I'm always
happy to follow up today or after today. If
you want to reach me by phone or email,
happy to talk with you. So, thank you
for your time. Okay, questions comments. Yeah
, all makes perfect sense. Right, so thank
you so much for your sharing your perspective and your
model of uh what libraries are, acknowledges that result
, but my head was like, mhm, okay
, well, thank you. Exactly mean, my
head is buzzing too. I mean, in a
good way. Yeah, I mean I think about
this all the time and you know it for me
it feels like You know that this is kind of
this ages last 10 years or so. It's like
it's that same period when the printing press was was
created, when the typewriter was created. Even when
you know when Papyrus was used and ink was set
on to it. It's it's like that. I
mean and what we do today, what we choose
to do is libraries today is going to Set the
tone and the model for what we do in the
next 10 years and then 10 years after that.
So you know I can't emphasize enough that this is
such an important time that we you know some of
us could wither some of us are but there are
many libraries that are really succeeding in becoming more used
and more vibrant today. And so that's the good
message. He'll make your PowerPoint transformation available. Mhm
. Yeah, we'll find a way to do that
. Yeah. What's your name? Mhm. Yeah
. Oh there is a recording of the talk as
well um if you want to get to that but
we can put the slides up somewhere there there's a
conference website, right page. So maybe we can
put it up. They're recording is going to end
up in the Virginia Tech Libraries repository. V Tech
works. So you can you can go there.
Okay, just we'll put a link to the video
on the website as well. So anything else?
Yeah, I'm just concerned about combating the image that
libraries are dying many people out there joking about people
libraries and it's great to come to a conference like
this and people were already supporters of libraries. Sorry
. Mhm. I don't really have a question.
I just have a concern about this whole new way
as part of this new way. Years back,
libraries are even in corn and libraries being used and
we all know that exactly the other, you know
, So. Right. Mhm. I mean,
so one of the roles I talk about is kind
of this community relations. Um I mean that goes
that that's out in the community as well as kind
of our resource allocators above us and the work chart
. They're part of that community. We need to
You're right. I mean, we need to keep
putting the word out. I mean, I can
tell you in my libraries at Virginia Tech, Our
head count through the doorways has gone up 85 in
the last five years. Our just our journal article
downloads are going up at about 10% a year.
Were over 2.6 million downloads. We even get more
. We create a digital repository, uh an institutional
repository that didn't exist two years ago. And it
already has 2.5 million downloads in this last year.
So, you know, the good news is we've
always known you put something up on the internet and
people find it it gets used. And I think
this is, you know, we can I think
libraries we look at we've always evolved with the times
. We just kind of, You know, don't
think about that all the time. And so we
go from, you know, again typewriters to photocopiers
, two PCS, etc. We we always have
done this. So we're just in the middle of
this great time of evolution this next 10 and 20
years is really important. And I think if we
conceive of information broadly as content, there's a ton
we can do. Yeah, it's really a good
a good time. I get that. When I'm
out on the street, someone says, oh,
you know it, So what do you do?
So I run a library. They're like, well
, what's that like today? Everything's online, right
? You know, I don't want to ask,
you know, the person sitting left to me,
I can tell you is like, don't do that
because I will bend your ear for the rest of
the day. It's like, oh, let me
tell you what we're doing. You know, just
kind of go on and on and on about.
But it is amazing the misperceptions out there. People
think that, that, you know, everything's free
online. Well, it's, you know, it's
not we, you know, your libraries purchase things
and license things and, and share between libraries that
that still goes on. So there's a lot of
concepts that people still don't get about the web itself
and that's kind of why I emphasize it. Um
and that's part of the community literacy that we need
to be building. I mean kind of what I'm
talking about here, there's a bit of a production
literacy, you know, how to produce stuff,
but we also just need to understand the web itself
. And I run across this probably every week where
I just listen to somebody. I realized they really
just don't get it yet. And I think,
you know, we can be irritated by that or
we can help people learn. And I think,
you know, libraries are this great place where we
can we help people learn about tools and things so
that we can do this town. Yes, I
don't get the concept library. So what sort of
laboratory where you can do and create that? Uh
huh. I guess my question for is how are
you allowing your customer education? Are they allowed to
take these resources outside the library? Have audiovisual which
they can use beyond like GoPro camera maybe check out
. Yeah. Do their own work with, how
did that relay back in house? That's got to
be saved by the library with their own creation now
, it's a good question. So I mean I
can tell you kind of what we're doing in our
library and I feel like for universities it's a little
bit easier because generally these are either these are faculty
staff or students who borrow things and a lot of
times its students. So you know, we have
that relationship with the registrar's office. I mean I
know what you're thinking, what most of us are
thinking about. God, she had this expensive camera
. What happens if it doesn't come back? Well
in our case the student does not ever get a
diploma. If they, if they don't return it
, nor do they get grades that semester. I
mean, you know, there's some power in the
registrar's office. So you know, in a public
library setting, it's a little bit, it's a
little bit different. I mean, and you see
public libraries who will like team up with their department
of motor vehicles, which I think is an ingenious
, like if you're gonna walk off from a public
library with a camera, not bring it back,
then you know, you're going to get your license
revoked or you're certainly not going to get it renewed
. Uh, something along those lines. So you
know, we don't mean to be mean about these
things, but yeah, you know, if we
can loan equipment, it is expensive. So we
have to be careful. We loan laptops, which
has been a godsend for some students when the laptop
breaks, believe it or not, students today are
still kind of poor. They don't have lots and
lots of money. They're required to come to school
with a laptop. And we've seen students who want
a laptop breaks, you know, they call mom
or dad and they're in tears. You know,
they don't know what to do. They borrow,
borrow one from us to get through the semester something
along those lines. So we do loan things out
all sorts of cameras, tablets as well, ipads
. We were trying to loan out more and more
high end equipment as well as low end equipment.
And sometimes, especially for classes, people do create
things and and bring it back to us. And
that's where the lot of this will end up in
our repository. And that kind of work faculty as
well. So that's, yeah, that's part of
it. And I guess you've heard me say a
couple times already, but I just go back to
, you know, the days of the typewriter and
early on with photocopiers, we've provided that stuff.
We taught people how to use it. You know
, why not? You know, how is this
any different in that regard? This is just the
latest technology. We need to buy it, loan
it, get it out there for some of us
there. You know, there are, especially in
public libraries. You know, we've seen the Gates
Foundation do an awful lot with Pcs and libraries.
There are foundations out there that will help us all
kind of get started with the equipment that's necessary.
So it's not an inexpensive investment, but it's one
of those, uh, you know, another thing
I say a lot of times is just get started
. Don't worry about where you and don't worry about
scaling this thing. I hear that too. How
does that on a scale? I don't know.
You know, and I say that a lot too
. It's like, but let's just get started and
see where this takes us. Yeah. Something that
three D printers, how they, how they use
them. This is what we have one. Oh
, it's small. It's students kind of use it
. It's it's up on a small area in our
fourth floor that we're looking to actually move it so
it's more visible. So we actually don't have a
lot of experience with that right now. So it's
in an area called Port. It's kind of a
small research comments and there's a lot of high end
software in that room. Things like Autocad for engineers
and architects en vivo for textual analysis and the likes
of the three D printer is sitting there right now
. It's getting used but not tons. Um students
a lot of times just they just need to create
kind of models of things that they're working on.
They can take drawings, especially the engineers and architects
. So we see some of the usage really there
at this point We've only bought one small one but
they're, you know, they're getting cheaper and cheaper
. I think the one we bought last year was
about$2,000. So they're getting less expensive. It's
like a, you know, they're like cars,
almost anything you can spend almost whatever you want on
them. They're getting less and less expensive. If
nothing else. It's a conversation piece. It gets
people, you know, in in the building and
wanting to use something and the comment about the laboratory
, I think it's kind of what we're after.
It's that, that sense of if a student is
, you know, in, in an environment that
they're in an engineering building and architecture building or the
history department and they're doing oral history or something.
We want, we want them to come into the
library and not necessary experience. A lot of change
. We want to kind of think they want them
to think of. The library is kind of that
, that studio, that production place just away from
their kind of their departmental home, but we want
some similarity going on there. So anything else?
I'm just curious how Newman like I know at the
bar, but right. It's been coming a lot
of study space issues even after renovations. So like
an exam times, there's just, there's no room
for anything have all been having a similar effect.
Oh no room. Oh yeah, we're really tight
. Yeah. In some ways, spaces are,
yeah, just the lack of room is our largest
challenge. Um you know, we've got some pretty
creative thinkers and and things are changing up, but
that's what stymies them a lot of times is trying
to find the space to do things. So we
just, you know, that's what we focus on
next and we're doing what an awful lot of libraries
are doing. I mean we're starting to move some
of our collections offsite, we create that space.
You know, that's not been difficult for us to
do. You know, if you talk to some
of our, you know, our faculty, there's
there's consternation about that. But you know, there
what we've been doing in our case mostly is we've
been moving print journals, not books Off site.
And we've been buying trying to save up money and
buy more electronic journal packages back file packages and kind
of retire the print. But we've we've got a
whole slew of print books that are 4050 years old
and have circulated haven't circulated since like 1980 That that
we you know we we've sliced and diced the data
. This is where you really need collections managers,
you can really analyze your collection today. And I
think we have a spreadsheet now of anything print anything
published before 1970 That's been checked out once or less
since since 1990 and and at least 500 libraries in
the US. habit in no clc something and there's
there's tens of thousands of books like that that we
have. So you know, we can easily move
those things to offsite storage And we've improved that service
. Well we'll bring things to campus in 24 hours
. We used to just bring it to the cirque
desk. Now we'll bring it to any any academic
department office location. We asked them to register with
us, we want one location and and we'll go
and drop off that book. Um You know,
next we kind of figured out that people want to
bring it back there, they don't want to bring
it back to the library and we kind of thought
, oh gee we didn't think about that picking up
the book. So now we're now we're kind of
working on that, you know, to go go
pick it up. So again, there are things
you can do in the print world that can really
help to like that, just make it very,
very easy for people to use the print. And
that was part of the change to, we had
some librarians at first has said, well, wait
a minute, they need to learn Library of Congress
classification schemes. They've got to learn how to find
things. Well, you know that for us at
least that's that's beginning to be less and less of
the case. And they kind of realize that well
in our case, about 99 a half percent of
our journals are online. We have 2.5 rows of
print journals in the library now. And we're beginning
to buy more and more E books were probably up
to seven or 800,000 e books. A lot of
print books still. But both it's very early days
for for the e book. So the idea of
part of that literacy of learning Library of Congress classification
schemes becomes it's still needed, but it's less of
an issue. And it become, and you know
, why do we have that classification scheme to organize
material so people can find things easily on the shelves
? So that's the point. So why not,
why not ship it to them? Why not drive
it out to their office or drive it to the
service desk if that's what they want and then pick
it up from them. So we're doing things like
that, just trying to make it very, very
easy to use our print collections. And it's helping
, um, you mentioned multimedia projects part of the
presentation and I'm sure all the late, uh,
often times it's difficult for us to convince back with
you to incorporate new types of assignments in their regular
curriculum. I was wondering if you could maybe share
with this a couple of examples, incorporate projects.
You're absolutely right. It's very difficult. So this
is for me this is where it is literally brick
by brick, one by one. It's about identifying
, finding ways to identify faculty who will do some
of that. So we, we've done that through
like many grant programs. We've been, we've done
some, many grant programs in conjunction with our Learning
Technology division on campus. It's under, under the
VP for Information Technology. And you know, that's
one way to kind of tease them out. It's
not a lot of money. I think we each
put in like seven or$8000 and the faculty member
might get five or 600 bucks to do something.
Maybe it's about buying, um, you know,
some equipment, but we've, we've had one professor
in particular in the history department has actually worked with
our Associate Dean for Learning on kind of re using
Wordpress in the classroom using different plug ins, different
, different kind of tables and charts and colors and
and uh plugging in multimedia that's been developed other places
kind of using digital humanities projects that have been developed
at other universities and pulling them into in toward press
and into the classroom. So I think that's that's
one quick example. But there are, you know
, it's kind of hard to find sometimes. But
there are faculty out there who want to change the
way they teach and they realize that that's a better
pedagogical approach than just than just lecturing or reading things
to people. But but you're right, not everybody
thinks that way, but this is where, I
mean about libraries today, we're a leadership organization.
We can help lead people to doing things in a
more engaging, more visual way. There's a,
there's a lot of educational research that shows that we
all learn better through things like problem based learning,
collaborative learning. Um, we a quick aside,
but you know, in, in Newman Library at
VT, we've built with the College of Science,
we built a scale up classroom, We donated the
space. They paid for 80 of the construction and
it seats 72 students. Now there's a table rounds
, there's eight tables where nine students can sit in
the College of Science teaches there, they teach,
they get half 50 of the use of the room
, we get the other 50%. So we do
library instruction in there as well. And then it's
open evenings, weekends for students. But the College
of Science when they teach, it's all these problem
based project uh, Projects that they were working on
with students. So the professor is able to walk
up and down. Each table has a very large
screen, about a 50, 60 in screen.
So they can they can share between their laptops.
Watch the screen work together on building some solution to
a problem and the professor walks around and assist them
. So, you know, we look at that
as an example of that, that's how, you
know, learning. It's more engaging and much more
collaborative and people take away a lot more that way
today. So we're that's we're looking for ways to
get involved in just that much more collaborative, engaging
ways of learning and doing research when you're trying to
replace your friend of magazines such and you go back
and you find that there are metal electronic services,
electronic versions of the or maybe the publication has gone
friend, How are you? How do you go
from there? Well, in a case like that
, I mean, we keep the materials, there's
there's, you know, there's no doubt, especially
if they're of use on our campus there. And
there are cases where there are things that are out
of print that they may not be digitized yet may
not be available. Um, some of those kinds
of materials we're digitizing, uh, especially stuff that's
in the public domain. I mean, things that
are copyrighted still, you know, we can digitize
what we can't make available. So we're actually doing
a lot of work right now with Virginia's Cooperative Extension
Service. A lot of older reports that they have
that we're, you know, we're scanning, we
have thousands and thousands of those and we're, you
know, we're the land grant, one of one
of the major land grant campuses in Virginia. So
we have a lot of that material. It's mostly
either us or the State Library and Archives has it
. So it's an example of material that's not easy
to find sometimes, but it's in the public domain
. So it makes a lot of sense to scan
it and put it out there. But it is
when I say multimedia, I mean that's the other
expression of multimedia. Libraries are going to have print
collections. We're going to have film collections, we're
going to have special collections. We're going to have
a lot of digital information too. But you know
, it's not gonna all become digital one day.
Um I think we're always going to have some of
that. I can remember years ago, you know
when I when I was in school learning how to
you know, work in libraries and archives and and
there's literature in the 1940s about microfilm. Everything's gonna
get microfilmed. We won't need this paper anymore.
Well, you know, that didn't happen. Thank
God. So it's the same thing with you know
, there's an awful lot in digital form but still
not everything. And some inspector copyright. This is
why learning about copyright is really important because you can
scan things but there's an awful lot that we as
libraries cannot make available to our publics because it's copyrighted
still. Yeah, I'm doing a research library.
You don't have any form of like a d opposition
policies in place because you are starting to do a
being project on his own. And I was curious
if it was almost as if you have one just
kind we do. I can tell you this actually
we have a collection management policy and there probably is
some language in there. I mean we don't necessarily
have a separate de accession in policy. It's just
there is language within our collection management policy about that
so that we know that we review. It's pretty
simple but it just basically says that we reserve the
right to review based upon usage based upon shifting discipline
, disciplinary interests of the university things of that nature
. So that's never an easy thing. But as
I said, when it comes to the accession of
what we've done mostly in our cases, you know
, we we've been spending money on the journal back
files and we've been, we have been we don't
call it trashing, we call it recycling the recycling
office at Virginia. Tech loves us because we're helping
them meet their quotas every year. As we are
. We are recycling a lot of print journals and
we have tried and tried and tried to get libraries
to see if they want to take those and nobody
, nobody does. We do have a small projects
, Some things go to some african nations, but
even there there's limitations on what, on what they
want. So we do recycle, but we don't
do that. We're not really, and for us
, we, we kind of adopted this approach is
we're not losing content. Were trading the content from
the print to the electronic and we're able to rationalize
it to as a university with large global aspirations.
There are Virginia tech community members all over the world
. Um, you know, we have, we
have campus centers in Switzerland, the Dominican republic,
Egypt building a new one in India. Um,
so I'm, you know, I'm pretty fond of
mentioning, you know, those are, those are
Hokies too, and they need access to the library
. And if we, you know, for us
, if it's in print, it makes it really
difficult for them to, you know, those fields
, uh, to use those materials. If it's
online, then, you know, they just got
to put in their, their idea in their password
and boom, they've got it. So I mean
, that's part of it too, is, you
know, and I worked with my dean's for instance
, and I've tried to explain to them that and
I know this sounds heretical, but keeping, keeping
print material on a shelf in the center of campus
that isn't used for decades is the most expensive thing
a library can do in terms of information provision.
And, you know, when we're dealing with my
administrators above me and we're asking for, we're making
the arguments for bigger and better budgets every year.
But we do that, that's a real problem.
That's half the reason why we asked for warehouse space
off of campus is to just be more effective and
efficient with, with our costs on these things.
So we were careful to try to make sure that
, we're saying we're still providing that information, we're
not getting rid of it. We're just moving to
a different model of information provision. But for us
, you know, having some of that in the
center of campus that isn't really isn't used. Um
it might be stuff we need to keep, there
might be only 100 libraries in L. C.
L. C. Makes us a little nervous,
okay we need to keep that but we don't have
to keep it in the center of campus. Anything
else. Mm We're not, Yeah. Yeah.
Yes I could mention really quick that one of our
strategies on on books in particular. We we joined
when I started three years ago at Virginia Tech pretty
quickly. We we became members of the Hottie Trust
Digital Library at the University of Michigan. They for
those of you who don't know what they hold,
all of the books that google scanned, That that
makes the Google makes available. Um the corpus of
that material that's in the public domain. So this
is material that's roughly older than 1925 or so.
It's all open on on the Hottie trusted your library
. Now, if you're if you're a paying member
of the Hottie trust, you can actually download the
google books, scans that are in the public domain
. You can't download them. If you're not a
member, you can kind of see them in line
, on, on on the site. So we
thought really one of the best things we could do
for our humanists and social scientists on campus and historians
of science and engineering was to make that stuff available
because there's there's about three million volumes in the Hottie
Trust, that's public domain. Well, my library
is about 2.6 million volumes, so, and there
is some overlap. So we also use that as
a preservation scheme. About 40 of Armani graphic material
is already scanned and held by the Hottie Trust Digital
Library. So they have the google books scans,
but they also continue to scan and they take scans
from member libraries as well. So we look at
that as at least in part that's one of our
digital preservation strategies regarding monographs. So that's helped us
a lot I think. And and again, here's
it's another instructional item. We've had to teach professors
and students, you know how to kind of how
to log on, how to how to download,
understanding their rights, which you can and can't do
with that digital library. So all those new kinds
of things they provide rich instructional work for us to
be doing. And we show them there's millions and
millions of material. They're probably up to about 11
or 12 million volumes, all told in the Hottie
Trust. Now, with about three million of that
being in the public domain, it's pretty impressive.
You via is also a member of that. So
the two of us within Virginia are members. So
anything else you can listen to me this afternoon after
lunch if you really want to again, I can
drone on some more. All right. Thank you 1756 --> A:middle L:90% .