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MICHAEL FONTAINE: I'm Mike Fontaine. I'm Associate Dean of the faculty. I'm also Associate Professor of Classics here at Cornell. And it's really exciting to see so many people turn out for this event on the Forum on the Faculty.
And I thought I'd just start briefly by reading out bits of that blurb that many of you got on e-mail three times over the last few weeks. So the question is, what will Cornell's library look like in 10 years? Will the live cafe slowly grow to occupy the entire first floor?
Will it be an enhanced web space with all computers? Or is it going to make more or less the same as it does now? Are we actually going to need miles and miles of books here on campus that most of us are guiltily reading all the articles on our computers on the beach?
Can we move all those books somewhere else, and make nice office spaces out of that, or a new dormitory? Should we raise the budgets or should we slash them? I bet I know your answer anyway. But should we raise the budgets or slash them in response to digital access?
And importantly for this forum, do we faculty across all the disciplines share a common vision of what to do with the library? And how can we get involved in planning its future? So without any further ado, I want to turn things over right now to my colleague Nerissa Russell.
So Norris is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department here at Cornell. She's also a member of the Archeology program. But what's more important for today is that she's also the Chair of our University Faculty Library Committee.
She's been on it since 2006. And this year and next, she's the Chair of the Committee. So this committee has got 16 members. It includes undergraduates and graduate student representatives. So the members are chosen from all across the university to get a better idea of who's using the materials and how, and why, and what we should do with them.
And the last things to remind you before I hand the floor over are no food and drinking in this room, please. That was made quite emphatic. However, as soon as this is done, there's a lot of nice refreshments outside. So if you have time, I hope you can stick around to continue the conversation. Thank you.
NERISSA RUSSELL: Well, thanks very much. And thanks to everyone for coming. And thanks in advance to our speakers.
So I want to leave time for the speakers, and especially for a Q&A discussion afterward. So I'm going to be extremely brief. But I am very glad that we're having this faculty forum, because although libraries are always important, and we're always worried about their future, and happily anticipating their future, this is, I think, a time of particular importance to think about the future of the research library.
It's a time of myriad challenges and possibilities that face them in the years to come. We all know about digitisation as being a major factor. But there are perhaps some consequences of digitisation that we may not all have thought about if we aren't librarians.
This brings new challenges for intellectual property issues in relation to dissemination of intellectual materials. Libraries are taking on new forms of archiving and distributing data beyond just text. And that's not only digital materials, but also other kinds of collections of print and non-print material. So the libraries are increasingly intersecting with the museum.
There are many challenges related to scientific and academic publishing, and rising costs associated with them. I hope that many of you are familiar with those. It's one of the main things we have to wrestle with.
And libraries are also playing a role in facilitating new forms of publication. So all of this means that libraries are increasingly involved in new kinds of collaborations and consortia of many different kinds. And I expect that we'll hear a lot more of this from the speakers. And I hope we'll also return to many of these issues in the questions, so that we can actually have some idea what I'm talking about in detail.
So just what we're going to do here-- we have two speakers who've come from elsewhere who are going to speak for about 25 minutes each, with no questions in between. And then we will have a panel. And we'll be joined by our university librarian.
And they will respond to questions and answers. And we'll have microphones to pass to you. And then we get to go out and have some refreshments after that.
So without further ado, I want to introduce Clifford Lynch, who is the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington, DC since 1997. I'm going to be very brief to allow him time to speak. So I will just say that he has a PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley.
And he is the winner of numerous awards, and has many publications. His career has been focused on the role of information technology in preserving and disseminating knowledge in all sorts of ways. And I want to let him tell you about some of that.
CLIFFORD LYNCH: Thank you. It's always nice to be back at Cornell. And unfortunately, this trip, I need to open this talk with a short apology. Because of the way some scheduling has worked out, I have to sort of vanish in a puff of smoke at 5:30, which means that I will be sneaking out on some of the Q&A. But of course, I'll refer all the hard questions to my colleagues in advance.
Let me set the stage for this conversation about the future of the research library. I get asked this question a lot about what's the future of the library. And sometimes it's the public library. Sometimes it's the research library.
But especially for research libraries, I think that it's an impossible question to grapple with by itself. Research libraries do not have this sort of intrinsic destiny that's independent of the things that go on around them. And I think to understand or to try and map the future of the research library, we have to start with asking questions about the future of the university broadly.
We need to ask questions about how are the practices of scholars changing? And how are the ways in which scholars work independently and together, and how they communicate the knowledge that they gain-- how are those changing? Because after all, the library is there to facilitate the transmission, and preservation, and organization of that knowledge. And as the knowledge itself changes, the library must change along with that.
We also recognize that scholarship doesn't happen in a vacuum. Actually, scholarship, as we're occasionally reminded-- and I think valuably so-- especially in the sciences, and especially to the extent that it is underwritten by public funds, be they direct research funding or tax exemption-- all of this bears a complex relationship to society, and the expectations that the society has about scholarship and scholarly communication, and related issues. So I don't want to just spend my time taking a very quick look at some of the sort of key developments that I believe are taking place that are going to fundamentally reshape the role and portfolio of activities of research libraries over the next, let's say, 10 years.
Some of this will happen a little sooner. Some of it is already, indeed, well underway. And I will also conclude the preamble here with a little bit of a caution, which is that just because all these new things are happening doesn't mean that the collections that exist-- especially the wonderful, vital, special collections that represent the distinctive and special character of individual research libraries-- those don't go away.
Responsibility for that doesn't go away. Some of our tactics for managing them and making them available get enhanced. But this is a question of balancing and transitioning from the old to the new, a question of the new totally know overcoming and washing away all of the things that research libraries have done historically.
So let me start this quick survey with a recognition that in many, many fields now, scholarship is becoming data intensive. There has been a lot of talk, of course, about how scholarly work since the '70s or '80s in many fields has taken on an increasing reliance on computational capabilities. But indeed, I think these are now being overtaken and supplemented by the growth of data-intensive scholarly work. For some of you who are in the sciences, particularly some of the observational sciences, this is not news at all.
If you just look at what's happening in astronomy, in genomics, in the kind of remote sensing that underpins a lot of earth science, if you look at the floods of data coming out of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN-- or at least that were coming out before they shut it down to do some upgrades recently-- this is all the world of data-intensive scholarship. It's very important to recognize that this is creeping into the humanities in numerous wonderful, and creative, and sometimes absolutely unexpected ways-- everything from being able to build up corpora of everything we know about the literature of a given language over time and ask questions about it, being able to look at a span of 100 years of most of the publications-- most of the book publications, at least-- in some of the major Western languages, and ask questions about when did these expressions become commonplace and who was using them, the ability to reconstruct architectural sites or archaeological sites in various speculative ways, and then actually test the reconstruction by running simulations that are repurposed from places like the design of modern buildings and stadiums, about how crowds flow, to see whether crowds could, in fact, populate and flow these kind of re-imagination of historic structures.
There's a huge amount of activity happening here. And if we are going to be able to pass on and conduct this kind of scholarship, we need to recognize that the underpinning data is an integral part of our ability to do this. There are two things that are happening that are sort of accelerating the change here.
One is that funders have really gotten on board here. And in particular, we see in the United States the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the digital part of the National Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanity, we see private foundations like Mellon, all starting to, in more or less formal ways, ask those that come to them seeking grant funding, what data is going to come out of this work? And what is your strategy for preserving it and sharing it?
And it proceeds from the assumption that if valuable data is being created, lacking reasons not to, it should be shared. There are sometimes reasons not to. Often, for example, personally identifiable data and human subjects issues come into play here. But the working assumption is, data is there to be shared under appropriate circumstances. And the funders expect data to be treated as a sort of a first-class part of what is produced with their funding, and to be handled thoughtfully.
The other thing that is bubbling around-- again I would say particularly in the sciences-- is the notion of the importance of being able to replicate, and reproduce, and build upon research results in a very detailed way. And particularly as we find research results that are very tied up with data and computation, simply putting out the paper summarizing things isn't good enough anymore. There's an expectation that other scholars ought to be able to reproduce those results, be very clear about the assumptions and parameters that went into those kinds of results.
So you're seeing not just a quest for the better management of research data as a way of advancing scholarship and making scholarship more effective, but also as a way of being responsive to the growing demands for this kind of transparency and reproducibility in scholarly work. There's a lot more we could say about data-intensive science and data-intensive scholarship, including the interplay between the public-- citizen humanists and citizen scientists-- and the Academy. But we don't have time here. I merely put the stake out here, and claim that the management of data is a critical issue.
This requires a very interesting complex of expertises-- in digital preservation, in disciplinary practice. It requires partnerships. Over the long term, it clearly requires institutional commitments, either acting on behalf of a multi-disciplinary institution like a university or as a discipline-specific archive. These are practices and activities where I believe research libraries have an integral and essential role. And we see many research libraries now stepping up to partnerships with other institutional entities and with faculty to help to address these requirements.
A second big development is around openness, sometimes called open access to the literature. But I would just characterize it as openness more broadly. There's a great deal of detail here. There is a great deal of theology here about multi-colored open journals, and green ones, and gold ones, and the path to Nirvana.
We could talk about all of that in great detail. But the fact of the matter is, I think, most scholars are interested in seeing their scholarship being read and read widely. They are increasingly realizing they are in a global world, and they want their scholarship to be able to move around that world.
We are increasingly seeing, I think, a recognition that it is desirable not just to keep this within the Academy, but to make it open to the public, to begin to heal some of these rifts that have come between the Academy and the broader public about the contributions that the humanities, the sciences, the social sciences, the professional schools make to the economy, to the business, [? citizens ?] of states and nations to the intellectual and cultural lives of their host nations and states and cities. I think that we will see an ever-increasing demand for transparency and for openness. I think that you're also seeing a certain amount of connection between the public funding of scholarly work and an insistence on openness.
And there's no place that that's more obvious or more advanced, I would say, here and in other nations that in the fields of biomedicine. Consider the billions of dollars that American taxpayers plow into biomedical research every year. Now, I think you will probably most of you, at least, agree-- as did large numbers of people when they watch televised hearings to this effect in Congress-- that when you discover you've got a child or a parent that is grappling with some disease that you have been paying taxes to underwrite billions of dollars of investment in research about, it would be reasonable for you to be able to have access to the reports of the results of that research.
That's something that viscerally connects with many, many people, and it's really hard to fault. I think you can extend this case into a tremendous amount of other government-funded research. But that's the place where the initial case was made, and made compellingly.
One of the wonderful things that Cornell has done in the last decade or so is to support the archive system. This originally started at Los Alamos, and was brought to Cornell by Paul Ginsparg when he came here. What this does is actually twofold-- it opens up the literature of high energy physics and increasingly a number of other fields but not just at the end of the research and publication cycle.
This actually opens a window into the frontier of publication, into the invisible colleges and the preprints that used to be passed around among a very elite few 40 years ago. And it has had a astounding effect worldwide on the progress of the sciences that it supports. This is another example of this great sort of trend towards openness in all its ramifications.
I see my time is going very fast. I'm going to simply mention one more issue. And I'm going to just do it through a couple of very brief examples.
Scholarly work relies not just on observations that are taken today. It actually has a very complex, ongoing relationship with this society's cultural record. A very, very good example that crosses many, many disciplines would be news.
Think about how many kinds of scholarship make use of historic newspapers in order to gain insight into something, whether it's the availability of housing in the economy of a city 40 years ago, or how various groups were portrayed in advertising, or how the campaign of 1968 played out. The applications of this are endless. It used to be that research libraries acquired newspapers first in physical form, and then more recently in micro form.
But newspapers themselves have changed, as have so many other parts of our cultural record and our scholarly record. They exist as digital databases right now. And if you think about how research libraries are going to ensure that we have those databases for future generations of scholarship, of scholars, it really calls for a whole different construction that engages on one side the kind of collective of research libraries and cultural memory organizations, and on the other side the organizations that manage these databases on an ongoing basis, and a very complex conversation in the middle about how this is preserved and the ways in which it's used.
You can see this play out again and again in the preservation of journals, of websites. We have vast new categories of ephemera that have very different characteristics than the political handbills of the 18th century. Political websites now disappear almost instantly when the elections are over, unless someone takes positive action to capture a copy of that.
So when we see the challenges of collecting and preserving all of the evidence for future scholarly work, we see, I think, a world of very new and very difficult challenges for research libraries, but also one in which collaborative effort completely reshapes the rules of the game, where research libraries become increasingly interdependent and increasingly working together to meet these kinds of challenges. These are three big trends that I can see happening. I think all of them are going to reshape investment services, strategies, and priorities for research libraries, both individually and collectively.
And I invite you to think about other kinds of macro trends that will exert similar forces, as you think about how your scholarly work is conveyed, what it relies upon, what its practices are, are shifting as we move farther into the 21st century. Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
NERISSA RUSSELL: Thanks very much. And again, I ask you to hold your questions for the moment. First we're going to hear our second speaker, who is Wendy Lougee. And I'm going to be equally brief and unfair to her considerable accomplishments in the introduction here.
She's currently the University Librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. And she's previously worked in libraries at Wheaton, and Brown, and University of Michigan, where she was responsible for developing digital services. And she's also the winner of many awards, grants, and very widely published, and is going to give us her perspective on the future of the research library.
WENDY LOUGEE: It's always a pleasure to share the podium with Cliff Lynch. I think he's always at that wonderful intersection between technology and libraries, and always has, I think, a wonderful way of looking deeply at the dimensions of an issue. So some of what I'm going to say is probably a little like-- do you remember Garrett Morris on Saturday Night Live where he just said the news louder? I'm going to do a little bit of that.
But I also want to bring the news, if you will, from the research library front, from those of us who have to lead large research library organizations and are faced constantly with the challenge of meeting the contemporary needs of you-all, as well as thinking about how to position the considerable resources that are libraries for the future. And that involves forecasting. And because we have to serve the whole campus, it means that sometimes we delight and sometimes we displease. And that is the challenge that we face-- pleasing everyone is usually not possible.
Now some years ago, I was speaking with a colleague dean. And I think I was explaining some bit of expertise I thought the library could help his college with. He finally stopped and said, I just have to say something. I have no idea what a library is anymore.
Now, I don't think he was discontented. I think the problem was that he was beginning to see some dissonance between his mental model of what a library was, and what it was virtually being transformed into, I would say before his eyes, but that's not true, because many of the transformations are not all that visible. So I'm not here today to try to ask that existential question, what is a library, but rather I do want to pose some questions about what your mental models are, or what the classic roles are for libraries, and do a little bit of a broad-brush approach to some of the issues that are changing those classic roles along the way.
So I'm going to do a bit of talking about the forces of change. Cliff has touched on some of those. And then I want to walk us through some of what it is that's changing our world.
Now, for some time I've used the phrase "diffuse libraries." And it's a phrase I like, because I think it captures a couple things-- the fact that with ubiquitous technologies and so much power on the network, and with all of the changes in the way we build, and create, and share knowledge, that it fundamentally changes what a library is-- that we're no longer bound, if you will-- pun intended-- by the sort of volumes in our libraries and the kind of services built around them, but rather we have the potential to be deeply engaged in every aspect of the knowledge process from the discovery to creation to sharing to preserving. So it really changes us into no longer thinking just of that stewardship role of the kind of recipients of knowledge products.
So let me start with a really quick inventory about some forces of change. And I suspect some of you, if you follow technology trends, see the Annual Horizon Report that's put out by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE. And it's trying to identify those enabling technologies that will fundamentally change higher education in the kind of near term, and maybe five-year horizon.
So this year's trends in ranked order were the following-- openness-- concepts like open content, open data, all of the things that Cliff referenced-- it's really the thrust to have easily accessible and sharable information. Second trend was MOOCs. I'm not going to belabor this media darling. I'm sure you've heard plenty of it-- probably more than you want to.
Third, experiential learning, The fourth, interest in using new sources of data in learning, but also in research. And as Cliff pointed out, digital data is infusing all of the disciplines. In fact, I have one colleague who has said data is the new oil. I liked that phrase.
The fifth was the changing role of educators in the context of students who are constantly network natives, if you will, where it's increasingly hard for them to discern the authoritativeness of information, or who is an expert. And what does that mean for the role of educator? And then finally, the sixth big trend-- the educational paradigms that are now a mix of online, hybrid, and collaborative learning models.
Now, I could go through each of those, but just keep in mind that each and every one of them can have profound changes of what the library is, and what it should be doing. And we'll get to that in a moment. But now I want to bring you in closer to the library and some of the trends that are affecting us.
And here, I'm going to use a list that maybe is not so rosy. In 2011, there was a group called the Advisory Board Company, which was a commercial consulting firm to higher ed. They interviewed dozens of provosts, and administrators, and faculty, and librarians.
And they came up with four drivers-- I think I'd call them threats-- that portend a very uncertain future for the library. And they called them the Four Horsemen of the Library Apocalypse-- not a great leap. Each of them is really a big stressor for libraries, and involves some really hard choices that I think we could talk about.
First one is unsustainable costs-- and here they were getting at not just the kind of journal inflation things that I'm sure you've heard of, or the new ways of pricing content by bundling it, or even the kinds of born-again content, where analog materials are converted and then sort of packaged-- whether it's 18th century literature, or streaming media, or whatever. That's a primary motivator, obviously, behind the sort of whole openness push to think about costs.
But libraries are also pricey and maybe unsustainable because they grow. We have an insatiable appetite for space. And hence, the ongoing need for a very pricey commodity, which is real estate. More about that later.
Second horseman is called viable alternatives. And this is getting at things like Google, which is not only a major source for search, but also increasingly content. Google Books now is somewhere around 22 million volumes, which certainly dwarfs most of our research libraries.
But of course, Google and other services-- iTunes, YouTube, you name it-- have really become destinations for our students and for faculty. And we've founded our own research at Minnesota, that about 75% of the traffic coming into our library catalog or other similar discovery services comes from Google or other large databases on the network. So if the library ever had centrality in the discovery business of finding information, it's long gone.
The third horseman-- usage and declining usage-- by some measures, most research libraries have dropped somewhere between 30% and 40% in the last five years, in circulation of print volumes and in reference traffic. Those are pretty sobering statistics. I'm sure some of it is due, of course, to the rise in digital content-- that if you look at those data, it's in the millions that we're seeing every year. But those are not always the visible changes, are they? What we see is what's happening physically in front of us.
And the last horseman is new demands. And again, Cliff has pointed some of them, but that list from the Horizon Report-- e-learning, experiential learning, digital data, publishing-- all of those changes in research methodologies and contexts for learning are profoundly affecting what people want from the library, what kinds of services they want, what kinds of content they want. And what the report suggests is that we have to begin unbundling all of our traditional commitments in the library and transitioning resources towards a much more mature digital environment. Now, the transition time-- the horizon-- is unclear. But I think by many measures, we're really at the epicenter right now of that transition.
So now, last, I want to shift to talking about what all this means for the classic roles of libraries-- those kind of mental models that are referred to at the beginning of my colleague dean, when he wanted to know what a library was. And I bet if we asked each of you, you'd all say, well, a classic role is the collections. It's the books.
Maybe secondly, you would mention access-- you help me find stuff. And then thirdly, some mixture of information services that maybe help you mediate between a question you have and some resource that will solve it. So I want to take these kind of mental models and give you just a teaser in each of them where some of the strategies for change are unfolding, where investments are beginning to move in different directions-- some of which you may not like, some of which we may talk about. We'll see.
So I'm going to start with access. I know you probably thought I'd start with collections, but I actually think it's in the access arena where we see, first of all, that first interaction when you're looking for content and pursuing something. But it's probably where there is also the most interesting and most profound foundational changes that can happen in terms of how we approach collections and services.
There's a guy named Larkin Dempsey who is a Vice President for Research at a large network service for libraries called OCLC. And he's got an interesting way of describing this shift in access. He says he noticed that library catalogs emerged at a time when information resources were scarce-- they were held in distinct libraries-- but attention was abundant. And guess what? Now we reversed that.
We have information resources everywhere on the network that we can get to them. And attention is scarce. So we have a real challenge, in that we know that there's a huge hole to the network.
And starting there, how do we think about changing the way you work and what access means? In the past, your individual workflow might've been centered around the library. And now it's more likely to be centered around the network, and that brings you to the library. So that centrality of local holdings, local catalogs, is not there anymore. And our challenge is to think about how to share what we have distinctly with the world-- and what we have in general with the world-- so to push out information about our resources, and then bring in what's available elsewhere.
It also underscores another trend, which is a real push for libraries to take responsibility for helping create discoverability of other campus resources. And I know Cornell has done quite a bit of that in the past. These kinds of access services are pricey-- in the past, labor intensive. So there's opportunity, certainly, to use much more vendor and publisher data, but also to coordinate. And so Columbia and Cornell's 2CUL partnership is a great way of looking at where there might be some economies in that very labor-intensive work of providing access.
Let me move to content and collections. Now, we all know that libraries haven't been able to collect comprehensively for some time. And again, the Cornell-Columbia partnership, I think, is great in looking at where it can coordinate acquisitions in some very distinctive areas.
And obviously, a large portion of what's happening in our acquisitions and collection building is moving to licensing digital content. I'm not going to talk about that obvious shift. But I want to point out three strategies that are emerging that have some great potential, but also have some interesting possibilities of how they change what a library is. So think about the impacts here.
The first one is the move towards buying content on demand versus the library sort of acquiring things, having it here, anticipating that you're going to use it. So there are systems that we can use now where a group of publishers works with a vendor, brings thousands and thousands of titles into the library catalog and if you interact with it, the library automatically buys the e-book that's behind that catalog record. You know nothing has happened except that you've got the thing you wanted.
Now what's interesting about that, of course, is that it's moving from a just in a case building of collections to a just in time. But what are the downstream implications of that? What does it mean in terms of what we don't buy, or what somebody needs 30 years from now? I'm just going to leave those questions for us to talk about.
The second trend relates to the openness that was mentioned by Cliff and the Horizon Report. And I think there's a real, again, push to see increasing efforts for libraries to take responsibility for putting open content out there. And certainly ArXiv is a great example of that.
So there are significant bodies of important content that are now being contributed by institutions, often through libraries, into the network environment. So you see a shift here of investments toward not just acquiring things, but supporting things, and sharing them with the rest of the Academy. Again, there's implications for that. They both cost money. One could raise questions about the free rider effect of making things freely available.
Third trend is something called the collective collection that's emerging. So how do we coordinate collection investments across multiple institutions when it comes to the significant costs, especially of storing and preserving content in the future? This is the real estate question.
So here we're seeing the emergence of large-scale collaborations to distribute the responsibility for holding onto the analog materials, the print materials. Over 100 institutions in the Western states are coordinating print journals, for example. And there are similar models for monographs.
What it means that libraries can choose to then withdraw print volumes, rely on the shared print and perhaps the digital surrogates that exist. And it does help us reduce that physical footprint and the costs that go with that, although it raises new costs of shared investment in the infrastructure for things like the HathiTrust Digital Archive for the digital surrogates. So right now we see that model mostly with legacy collections. But I think we'll increasingly see it prospectively going forward.
Last role-- services-- and classically, I suspect you think of things like reference and instruction services. But as users increasingly are relying on e-content remotely, access is ubiquitous. Digital content is being infused in research and learning.
The support needs of students and faculty are changing dramatically. So the service roles are no longer built around the collections, but rather, again, this support of the full lifecycle of whatever work you're trying to do-- whether it's a student paper or whether faculty research. And our library staff are having to increasingly have far greater out-of-building experiences-- to be out there working with the colleges on research and learning and teaching.
So I'm going to underscore here, again, what Cliff mentioned about as digital data becomes more important-- both in scientific research, but also in the humanities and canonical texts for the humanities-- libraries are increasingly called upon to play roles around finding relevant resources, managing them, preserving them, and also, the legal uses of content. With e-learning on the ascendancy, we're seeing much more attention to requests to buy things that are explicitly for a learning context, whether it's digital video or simulation data sets-- those sorts of things. And it means that a lot of our services are moving towards education and consulting services, where the expertise is brought to the question.
On my own campus, we've been working in the e-learning context to try to knit together all of the components that support content for a course, so that a faculty member could just submit what their interests are. And quite naturally, it would flow through whether the thing is licensed, and have it linked into the course, whether you need copyright permission, whether you need consultation for an open resource, coordinate with the bookstore, all of those things, and seamlessly bring it together. So you might say, why is the library doing that? Well, who else has the content expertise, the copyright expertise, the pricing expertise, and so on?
Similarly with federal funding agencies requiring data management plans, libraries are being called upon to be consultants in development of those plans, and in some cases, actually supporting the data. I call your attention to Purdue University, where they have a partnership between the libraries and the VP for Research, where you work with the library on your data plan. You are then assigned your storage capacity for your data. And the preservation aspects are taken care of in a very seamless environment.
Not everybody is going to want to go for that centralized approach. But I think it's emblematic of the kinds of demands being put on libraries. So these two examples, I think, of data intensive contexts for learning and research also highlight the kinds of expertise we're going to need to nurture and sustain in the libraries.
So my final comments here-- just a couple takeaways. First, I hope I've underscored that as an academic enterprise, the research library has to be very tightly aligned with what's going on on campus and the broader trends that we've talked about. The status quo is just simply not an option.
The classic roles that we have with content and access and service-- they have been reshaped. And they're going to continue to be reshaped. And that's going to, frankly, have to happen with reallocation of dollars to support those new demands.
But as Cliff points out, this is not an either/or. It's a transition where we have to manage the two. And the big change going forward will be that we have to reallocate towards digital infrastructure, content, and services to have that more mature environment that was cited in that report from the consulting firm. So in the future, the answer to the question, what is a library will simply be quite different. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
NERISSA RUSSELL: Thanks very much, Wendy. So we're now going to move to having a panel of speakers, or at least for as long as Cliff can stay. And then it will be kind of one speaker.
But we're also going to add in, at this point-- because I imagine that everybody here, as they're hearing these things raised, are wondering what does it mean for our library here at Cornell? So we are also asking Anne Kenney, the Cornell University Librarian, to join the panel so that she can address that in a more concrete way. I hope that most of you know who Anne is.
She has been working during her tenure to keep Cornell at the forefront of research libraries. And she also has many awards and publications to her name. We asked the speakers to keep it brief, so that we'd have a lot of time for discussion. Of course, what that means is they've put a lot of issues on the table, and they haven't had a chance to really go into detail on any of those. So now's your chance to ask what these things really mean for our library and libraries in general.
AUDIENCE: One of the things that happened in recent times is that we lost two libraries that I used to browse-- the Engineering Library and the Physics Library. And one of my colleagues says, well, what we really need are virtual shelves so that we can browse on the web in a way that we used to be able to in the shelves. Now, on the shelves, you have collections of interesting things, and you go down that, and occasionally you get into the neighboring area. And that gets you into something more interesting, et cetera.
But as it is now, if you have to go specifically for a particular book, you're not necessarily going to have that advantage. This affects primarily the undergraduate students, and maybe the early graduate students. The research people know where they're going.
They want something. They've got a good background, et cetera. But that experience which at least our good students always had in the library, browsing and looking at things-- that we're losing, and that's very important. So I wonder, do you think it's possible to arrange it so that we can do the same thing on the web that we used to do [INAUDIBLE] on the shelves?
ANNE KENNEY: Cliff, are you taking that one, or would you like me to respond?
CLIFFORD LYNCH: I'm happy to say a word or two about it. I think that we can build things in the network environment that allow browsing across a richer range of materials than was ever possible in the physical environment. And indeed, not just that, but bringing together things like manuscripts, books, works of art, other kinds of materials in very novel ways. I think that the way to get there, though, is not to sort of slavishly attempt to precisely recreate the phenomenon of browsing by putting up a virtual bookshelf.
I think that there are many other experiments that have been done in this area, which continues, by the way, to be an active research area. And one of the most compelling things that has surfaced, particularly in recent years, is the notion of being able to link up social and collective behaviors as suggestions for interesting places to browse as well. So I believe we can get back there. I just think that we get back there in a very different way than simply trying to copy what we used to have in the physical world.
ANNE KENNEY: Howard, thanks for your question. Our largest library now on campus is two miles off campus in the apple orchard. It has more books in it than Olin does. And it will continue to have more books.
You mention the Physics Library. The laws of physics are that we have two miles of shelving that, as we bring in new physical items every year, we have to accommodate. And we cannot accommodate then in the physical spaces that we have on campus. And so as you do your physical browsing, you're browsing less and less of the related material that might be important to your discipline.
If you're a social scientist, that material is spread across eight schools and colleges, and the same number of libraries on campus. Online, we actually have that possibility of pulling together a shelf of relevant material that may actually be dispersed in all sorts of places-- and not just the material that's in the apple orchard, or in those eight libraries, but in Wendy's library and other libraries around the world. I think there is some active research being done in this area. We have now, on both the engineering and the physical sciences website, this Harvard tool to create the virtual shelf based on the kinds of data that we have about the content, based on the classifications.
The thickness of the book would be drawn from the catalog record about it. And the amount of use that is made of that book also will be reflected in the presentation of that information. And now with Google allowing searching by color, that big, blue book you were looking for on that upper left-hand shelf-- you might be able to find it as well.
NERISSA RUSSELL: Thanks, another question-- raise your hand for a microphone. Anyone over there?
AUDIENCE: What you said about "just in case" versus "just in time" I found very intriguing. Things become canonical not when they're written, but many years later. That's one thing.
Another thing is-- as much as I love the evanescence of The New York Times front page, there has to be a paper of record that says what happened that day. There has to be something solid. And I'm just wondering, do those things exist online for, say, The New York Times or other papers of record? Is there some sort of solid, unchanging version of here's a New York Times of that day. And we're going to store that 30 years down the road just in case. It will be there for you.
WENDY LOUGEE: Interestingly, when you say The New York Times, which New York Times? The one you get here or the one I get in Minneapolis? Just saying that the--
ANNE KENNEY: Or what time of the day.
WENDY LOUGEE: What time of the day, I mean, I think what we increasingly will see with something like that is that that experience of what it looked like on the page may disappear. It's really much more of a database of content. And after two weeks pass, your inquiry is much more likely to be a search, as opposed to what it looked like.
I think publishers have come to realize that the early days of digitisation, things like ads were left out, and things that they thought was extraneous. But increasingly, they're recognizing that those have real artifactual value, too. So I think it depends a little on the genre, how much is kept. But there is increasing recognition of all piece parts in it.
The question of the "just in case" versus "just in time--" where I thought you were going is that if you didn't anticipate that arise in the study of the occult 20 years from now, and the current users weren't making those selections, what happens? And I am hoping that in the digital context, the sort of e-book canon, if you will, that's being created now, that those will be preserved as well. We're just going to have to have new mechanisms for mining those data years hence.
But my point was more about it makes for a differential investment currently. Because e-books' pricing mechanisms are often at least at price for the print. And if you want to have more than one viewer, the price goes up. So having users make those decisions de facto means some other things won't. You get the timeliness, but you don't build the collection.
CLIFFORD LYNCH: Just a fast footnote on that before the both of us smoke-- this whole question of what we're collectively capturing is history is getting shakier and shakier by the minute. We're seeing a huge rise in personalization on websites, for example. So it's not just what instant did you look at it, but from where, and who you are.
This is happening not just in news media, but on government websites, for example. You will see a very different version of whitehouse.gov depending on who you are, when you come to that page. So we really face a series of substantial intellectual and cultural conversations about what it means to have this kind of collective history documented.
This really goes way deeper than just the tactics of specific newspapers. And it's one that I think scholars in many areas need to be talking about, and talking with the broader public about. And with that, please excuse me, folks.
WENDY LOUGEE: Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
NERISSA RUSSELL: Do we have another question? I'm also going to make a suggestion, because I believe we have two microphones. So if you want to raise your hand for the spare microphone while we're still discussing the previous one, that'll cut down on waiting time. So I see there's a hand up there if you can get there. Louder than that, though.
AUDIENCE: Question, a question of open--
NERISSA RUSSELL: And we're recording it, also.
AUDIENCE: It was too bad that Cliff, whatever his name is--
NERISSA RUSSELL: Lynch.
AUDIENCE: Left, but I was surprised at the idea of openness. Somehow, everything's going to be more open. My experience as a scholar in the last 10 years is quite the opposite.
Copyrights, for example, have thwarted things that I want to do. I have been to research meetings of research supported by the government, and one of the researchers come with a lawyer, because they were worried about giving up secrets that could turn into patents. And the other thing is, if everything is online, it requires the use-- in the old idea of the library-- this is the challenge of the library to keep openness.
All you needed was to be able to walk into the library. And you could browse, and find things, and use your eyes. Now you need $1,000 piece of equipment.
And that's the thing that you have. That's not counting the data storage systems that require licensing, and require energy and buildings to run. And I did go to Columbia University to use their archive, and that was quite great.
But try to go to Harvard. You have to pay a fee to walk in the door. So the idea that somehow things are more open-- it seems to me things are probably going the other way.
You have to have expensive equipment. And you have to have some sort of passport or some way to get into these chambers, now-- whether it's in your home or whatever-- to find information that in the past, you could walk into any library or university library, and find it on the shelf. So maybe you could address that issue.
ANNE KENNEY: Well, even if it is available electronically-- and let's not think about the cost of the equipment to access it-- half of our collection budget goes for licensing content. Actually, it's 60% of it now. And half of that goes to four publishers-- Elsevere, Wiley, Springer, and Blackwell. I forget, but I think the last one is Blackwell.
And that's not that dissimilar from what Wendy gets at the University of Minnesota, or Jim Neal gets at Columbia. We're replicating that same increasingly homogenized scholarship in that area. And so as we think about the things being locked up and, our rights to share that material that is now in digital form, I cannot do the same kind of lending of digital content to a researcher at Minnesota as I could with the physical objects in my collection itself. So there's some double and triple whammies that are going on there.
WENDY LOUGEE: Can I maybe purse your question slightly differently? Because at least how I was hearing it was two separate things. One was around the issue of open access, which is really more of a model for sharing rights.
It's a model wherein things are made freely available online, where you retain the copyright, but you're giving others the right to use it freely. And the underlying economic models are typically either that there is some institutional support for that, or that an author pays model. So open in that context is much more about the rights model.
Your question though, about how do we look at costs for the digital versus the print-- and let me give you three numbers. They're are roughly right. I am guessing on the pennies here.
To store a book in an open library-- and these data came from University of Michigan-- open shelves in an open library is about somewhere on the order of $4.90 a year for the infrastructure that goes into a physical library. To put it into your apple orchard-- remote storage, non-accessible to browse, but closed storage-- is somewhere in the neighborhood of about $0.98, something like that.
And then to do it digitally is less than $0.20 a year. And that includes all the infrastructure costs. You really do have quite a bit of differential with respect to the costs of sustaining.
Now, there's certainly a human cost too, to taking it in. Your own computer and those sorts of things are not necessarily part of that equation. But the infrastructure that an institution has to think about are quite different.
ANNE KENNEY: Also think about the endangered nature of scholarship. We talk about the ephemeral nature of things digital and websites that come and go. But I also worry about the supporting mechanisms for scholarship in vibrant, but fairly economically challenging areas.
And I think I see Peter Hohendahl here, and looking at German monographs, and how to continue to support their publishing, when most of the university presses around are saying, we can't sell those things to be able to make a profit, to continue to do other things. So what happens to those German scholars around the world in terms of publishing material? And this is an area where libraries can work in partnership with the faculty and with the presses, to look at models to provide sustainable access to the monographic, the extended argument literature.
WENDY LOUGEE: That's clearly a role I didn't mention, but I think is an important one. The number of instances where libraries are taking on both a publishing function or a content creation function, which is a little bit different-- whether they're sort of formal kind of publishing-- books, journals, those sorts of things. Or we, for example, just produced multimedia Ojibwe dictionary working with the faculty members.
So it has elders speaking each word. It has the images for each word, and then, of course, the kind of normal functionality of a fully searchable dictionary. I don't know whether that's publishing or not, but there are certainly a lot of that activity going on in libraries-- would not be viable for a traditional publisher to take on.
NERISSA RUSSELL: We had a question up there.
AUDIENCE: My question has to do a little bit more with you're talking about usage and the expertise of the librarians, that the library is a landmark, not only as a place to go to get your book off the shelf, but also a collaborative venue. And with the move more and more towards kind of collaborative cross-departmental work that's going on, can you speak a little bit more towards the librarian as a facilitator of that kind of dynamic?
ANNE KENNEY: I think I've seen it more in the sciences-- the talk about the data management issues. How do you handle all this stuff? But there are other great examples of it coming out of the humanities, particularly what's called digital humanities, where the projects-- Eric is sitting here-- where you think about different ways of managing and creating content, and providing it to particular fields.
And I just don't know how to do it. What are the sort of technologies or skill sets that need to be brought to bear on it? I think that those opportunities in bringing new forms of scholarship in, say, new media art to the table-- those things are a ripe area where expertise that the library can bring to scholarly inquiry is a chief new field for us to work in.
WENDY LOUGEE: I'm trying to think whether to add this or not. It's a slightly different take on your question. Again, I seem to have a habit of doing that. I think there's also a bit of uptake with libraries beginning to see a role in not just helping make content discoverable, but expertise and faculty research interests discoverable.
So on a number of campuses, systems to kind of profile faculty and their interests, and to use those data to help you find kindred spirits-- collaborators-- on your own campus or globally, but also to take that profile and think how it can help you learn about other things. So if we know this is your interest profile, we can funnel funding information to you about potential grants. We can help you find out about events that are of interest to you. So it's taking the kind of classic cataloging function and cataloging faculty. And that's, I think, another way of stimulating collaboration that may not fall into the norm of what you think of with libraries.
ANNE KENNEY: Certainly the work we've done here with VIVO is bringing kindred spirits who might not necessarily have found each other together to work on things.
WENDY LOUGEE: Sounds like an academic dating service. Sorry.
ANNE KENNEY: That's right.
AUDIENCE: As was pointed out, funding agencies are increasingly requiring researchers to make their primary data available to the community at large. And whether this is going to be in the library, or whether it's going to be stored in some form by the individual researchers, it's pretty clear that this is going to dominate the volume of content that universities will have to store-- at least, there is a good suggestion that will be the case. I'd like to hear the opinion of both of you as to whether you feel this should be the responsibility of the library system, or of the researchers within the university.
WENDY LOUGEE: Or perhaps some other players, too. I was reading recently a data audit that was conducted by Columbia University for a center that's on my campus. And what became clear in looking at the data needs of this fairly significant research group was the lack of-- I'm going to give a label to it-- they had a hard time describing it.
But really, the kind of data mediator, sort of a data curator, to help with all those issues, to help think about the structures of the data when you're capturing it, the kind of ways that variables, for example, are labeled, the ways that you capture information about instrumentation, if that's appropriate, and how to think about it in an ongoing way so that you don't end up with your office with some tapes on one shelf with a label that you can no longer interpret, or even files on your hard drive or in university storage where you really are not sure what you have there. So that kind of curatorial role, I think, is one where libraries clearly do have a role to play.
And I think we certainly-- many of us-- are now doing the consultation services to develop those data plans. Where I think it's not clear is how institutions will choose to structure the infrastructure. And it relates to the kind of budget model you know whether you leave it to the colleges to fund storage, and to think about those costs in an ongoing way where it becomes all too easy a decade hence to say, oh, those data-- we don't really need them anymore-- those kinds of questions.
So you have the Purdue model that I mentioned, where the institution is taking a very active stance about curating data over time, that it's going to try to-- I won't say in perpetuity, because I think over time there will be an opportunity for appraising whether or not the data are replicable, for example. So it's more likely to be some convergence of expertise. But I think clearly, the library has that curatorial expertise on preservation management, the metadata for describing the data. Whether that relates to the digital infrastructure for ongoing preservation is a little less clear to me. And we can talk about there's a whole lot of other things, too, for discovering data once-- not your own data, but other people's data.
ANNE KENNEY: I do think that it will take a village to do this kind of work. The worst thing that could happen would be for the library to take on an unfounded mandate to do this data management, and that it won't be one size that fits all. If you're dealing in the big, big, big science, there are areas where data can go.
One of the things that we focused on here at Cornell was sort of the temporary holding of data during the period of a research project. And then what's the ultimate end game for that data? I think also the National Science Foundation is giving more thought to the long-term management and the cost implications for institutions in defining these requirements for managing that content over time.
Bob Berman, who is the Senior Vice Provost for Research here and I do co-chair of the Committee on Research Data Management Services. And they do range from the kinds of expertise that the library brings to the table-- metadata creation, the preservation awareness, the sort of looking at appraisal issues, and re-usability over time-- with the sort of Center for Advanced Computing. How do you really store the stuff, effectively, efficiently somewhere else?
How do you replicate it? And with IT at Cornell looking at the sort of infrastructure for supporting all of that. But it needs to be much more integrated and linked between not just libraries around the country, but IT communities around the country, researchers, bodies of researchers around the country as well.
WENDY LOUGEE: I think there's also a related issue about sustainability. So I'm part of an NSF project, one of the DataNet Awards, where we're dealing with 100 years worth of census data from 70 countries, and 100 years worth of land use data from not quite as many countries, but quite a few. And part of the proposal or the project requires coming up with a sustainability plan.
And the PI's keep saying, well, we ought to fund it like a library. Either it's a subscription where people pay-- and these are canonical data. You're not going to replicate them.
Is it going to be on a pay per use? Is it going to be kind of like social science data archives where institutional subscriptions? So I think we're going to begin to see the same problems of sustainability for data that we've seen with libraries. And hopefully, we'll keep it in the nonprofit sector and come up with models, rather than turning it over to the commercial side.
ANNE KENNEY: I think that sustainability issue's a big one. And Cliff mentioned the ArXiv. And the cost of maintaining an open-access repository for the world of scientists who rely on it is over a half a million dollars a year.
And it was something that came with a couple of years of funding for the library when Paul Ginsparg came. But then after a couple of years, that went away. And how do I fold that into my library budget, which is increasingly being pressured by the other costs of things?
So this model of a public good that is worthy of support by the heaviest users has really played out pretty well for ArXiv. So we now, with funding from Simons Foundation-- a challenge grant-- and the support of about 130 institutions worldwide-- and Oya, I'm seeing you up there. She's done a wonderful job of developing this business model and governance model.
We feel pretty secure that we have been able to, by reducing the amount of financial support that the library provides-- we will commit to about $75,000 a year here on out-- have secured the ArXiv for the next decade. And God knows what's going to happen with high-energy physics 10 years from now. That kind of model of supporting things that are being done at other institutions, rather than what I physically own or physically license for my community, will become increasingly important. So we'll need more transparency across those financial transactions to support things that are for the good of all of us.
AUDIENCE: As a historian, I want to ask a historical question, and a historical question about books. Yes, so years ago, in the pre-digital age, I was actually on a committee that was set up. I was sitting here trying to remember what the organization was that set up a committee, but it was when everyone was worried about brittle books, and about books--
ANNE KENNEY: Mission on Preservation and Access.
AUDIENCE: You're absolutely right. That's what it was. Anyway, and I was brought, with a bunch of other historians, to a meeting in Washington, DC, where we were told, we cannot save more than about 10% of these books. What 10% should we save?
And we were told that people in other disciplines had been able to say, oh, you've got to save things by this, or save things by this person, or whatever. And you can forget the rest. And the historians all said, we cannot predict what historians in the future are going to want.
And the example that I used in that discussion was what all the works by what Nathaniel Hawthorne called "that damned mob of scribbling women," that is, all the romantic novels of the early 19th century that Hawthorne and all the other "great writers" thought were horrible, but which have become the source of all kinds of cultural and literary history for historians subsequently. And I said, if historians in 1870s had been asked this question, they would have said, get rid of all that stuff. And yet in fact, it's become so important for scholarship.
So that's the preface to my question, which is, what has happened to the brittle books problem? And is it being solved completely by digitisation? I'm not convinced that it is.
I think those books are still out there moldering away on the shelves. And they have not been adequately saved. And back in the day when we were posed with this problem, the problem was you cannot microfilm these books fast enough to save all of them.
That's why we had to do it. And can, in fact, digitisation work fast enough to save everything, or at least a good, randomized sample? There you are.
ANNE KENNEY: I think the sort of magic number NEH came up with was something like three million volumes were going to be saved through microfilming. And while books are still brittle out there, our fine Fine Arts Library, our 19th century collection, is now in the annex. Because it was stored in an un-air-conditioned facility under the beautiful Sibley Dome.
They're burning at a much slower rate than all the other content that is being produced digitally now. And this horrible statistic that something about 92% of the world's data was created in the last two years. I mean, what the heck are we going to do with all that data?
But in fact, a lot of those brittle books are still alive, and well, and living on shelves. And the rate of deterioration will continue to exist. But I think there was such rhetoric and such hype around that to sell this to Congress as the scary thing of the 1980s and 1990s. And we certainly got millions of dollars from NEH to microfilm materials here. And
Wendy, I know, at Michigan was also big into microfilming. And then we went into digitisation of that material. But a good chunk of things were preserved, I guess, on microfilm. Other good chunk of it-- there's now 20 million books that have been digitized by Google. 10 million of them are in the digital repository that is co-managed by 70 institutions, including Cornell, called HathiTrust that Wendy had mentioned earlier.
WENDY LOUGEE: I think if that early estimate from NEH for brittle books was three million, we've far exceeded that in terms of digitisation. I think what's going to be an interesting question-- and there's some work going on at your University of Michigan School of Information right now-- assessing the quality of all that early digitisation, and asking some really interesting questions-- that it's not really a black-and-white question of either it's good or it's bad. Is there a fingerprint on the volume, or is there a text that is kind of blurred? But rather what the PI on that project is raising is the question of fitness for purpose.
So it may be just fine to take a 1920 government document about the sanitary conditions in Virginia School systems-- which happened to be one of our best sellers in Google, by the way-- after it was digitized from our collection and only available in Google for one week, it had 390 uses. So the Google digitisation may be just fine for that document. But then there are going to be some fine art volumes where the artifactual value is important, where Google digitisation won't work.
So I think we have to have a far more nuanced strategy for dealing with deteriorating print. And we have to be willing to accept that sometimes, it's going to be good enough for reading and for still having the intellectual content. But it may not preserve all that you had with the book. But at least it will be around.
ANNE KENNEY: I also think the duplication of the great collections around the country is much less than we would have intuited. There's something like, I don't know, a third overlap between what Cornell and Columbia's holdings are. So by being able to bring those two together, we actually get a 167% of the holdings that they have.
But talking about the Fine Arts Library, I just want to-- library-- one size fits all, where they all came walking in and they looked at the books. Man, I really miss those days. Because what is the library really depends upon who you are and what your needs are.
But I love this quote. We put together a proposal that is going to a donor, we hope, to build the Fine Arts Library out. And this is from a PhD student in the History of Architecture. "My appreciation for the Fine Arts Library spans two building facility management carts, and weighs approximately 200 pounds per semester." And she's talking about the books she uses for her research.
NERISSA RUSSELL: Thanks. I think we've got time for one more question over here. And then stick around for just one minute more after that.
AUDIENCE: I want to talk about the role of the library for the undergraduates, in that we always looked at the library as a place that helped undergraduates with critical thinking, screening of material, getting a better understanding of judging scholarly material and other kinds of material, and putting things in their right context. And it feels like our students are no longer going to the library to do library work. And some of that is showing up in the quality of the materials they're handing in. And how, moving forward-- as we put all this emphasis on the research library and the materials collections and the access-- still maintain that role?
ANNE KENNEY: Well, I would suggest that undergraduates are still coming to the library. They're coming in droves-- about four million users of our libraries, physical libraries every year. Which, given the size of Ithaca and our population here, would be an amazing figure if you multiplied that and went to New York City with that kind of use.
But one of the things that, as we do this undergraduate information competency-- how do you infuse those skills into the curriculum-- some of the early findings on that was, you can beat undergraduates over the head about that stuff. But unless their faculty require them to have that kind of expertise, and infuse that into their curriculum, it isn't going to stick. And so a lot of the work that we've done on the information competency kinds of activities has been working with faculty to add that kind of stuff into the curriculum that they're teaching.
WENDY LOUGEE: I'll just add one little kind of-- I totally agree with you that it really depends on that partnership with faculty. But sometimes there's other tools you can think of to enhance that. So 10 years ago, we developed a little tool called the Assignment Calculator, which I thought sounded really silly. I'm trying to think of the right word.
What it does is, a student fills I have a paper due x date. Here's what it's about. And it begins to step them through a research process.
So it leads them to the core resources that relate to their topic. It links them to the library, and if they need help. And it helps them with citation when they get to the writing, all that.
And based on when it's due, it emails them. So you're a week into the project. You better get going on the next stage.
You've got two more days to go. It has this kind of motherly nudging of how far behind they are. But they use it. They use it a lot. So there are ways to also help with the process that may be a little onerous for the undergraduate, and then to use it in concert with the faculty as well.
NERISSA RUSSELL: All right, well, thanks very much. Just stick around very briefly. First, I want to thank our panelists-- Cliff Lynch in absentia-- I hope he's on his plane-- and Wendy Lougee, and our own Anne Kenney.
And then before I let you get at the refreshments, I just want to take a minute to talk about a few ways that we can carry on this conversation, because we clearly could go on for much longer. One thing I want to draw to your attention-- I hope you've heard about it already-- but related to some of these issues here on the future of scholarly publishing, the library is sponsoring a Reading and Discussion Project centered around these two books. And there we go, give you a little [INAUDIBLE].
So we have two books. You can get these for free from the library. This one's actually also available online open access. The one that's called Open Access is not. But it is available through the library.
So that gives you a little taste of planned obsolescence there. This shows you both of them. I got these slides from Kizer Walker, and that's how you get the books from.
And there are these little flyers which have information including the dates of the discussions, which are in March and April, around these two, and how to get the books. There are some on the table up here. And I put some on the floor, because there didn't seem to be anywhere else near both the entrances up there.
They're both pretty easy books to read. This is actually really short. It's sort of been plumped up there. It's easy to read.
It's full of lots of good information. If you have questions about open access, how does it work, how is it sustainable, what are all these different kinds? It's a great basic resource for that.
OK then I also want to remind you that there is a blog. There's a discussion board that has been in operation for a few weeks now. It's had a few postings beforehand. The link is in all those notices about this forum that you got.
And if you Google something like "Cornell Library future," you should be able to get to it. You ignore the part about the login with Cornell ID. You just put in the password, which is capital LIB for library, and you can continue that discussion there. And I know that many of the library staff are following that book. So it's one way to get a message to them.
And finally-- well, not quite finally-- but the third of four ways to carry on discussion-- please, if you have ideas, concerns relating to the library, you can speak to me as Chair of the Library Board or any of the faculty library board members, some of whom are here. Maybe the library board members could just stand up for a moment. You might see somebody you know.
And I can see at least a couple. OK, not too many are here. We have more than that, but not too many who could make it.
They are scattered throughout. If there's not somebody in your department, there's probably somebody in allied department. And you can find, of course, the members online. So we serve as a conduit to the library. Of course, you can talk to Anne yourself.
And then finally, after we thank our remaining panelists here, we can continue this right now informally with some refreshments. We sort of go up and down there. And I invite you all to that. But first, I want to say thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
What will Cornell's library look like in ten years -- a glorified Starbucks, an enhanced web space, or essentially the same? Will we actually need miles of books on shelves or should we move the books offsite and re-purpose the space? Should we raise or slash collection budgets in response to digital access? Do faculty across the disciplines share a common vision? And how can faculty engage in planning the future of Cornell Library?
Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information and Wendy Lougee, university librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor at the University of Minnesota, speak at a faculty forum on the future of research libraries.
