The Library’s Central Role in the Future of the University
Joseph Branin, Director of Libraries
After-dinner Speech, October 26, 2000
Ohio State University, President’s Residence
Thank you Brit, and thank you and Patty for hosting this wonderful dinner tonight.
With your indulgence, I would briefly like to talk to you from three different perspectives.
First, let me make an observation as a newcomer to Ohio State University and central Ohio. My wife, Anita, and I arrived in Columbus in late December of last year. The weather was cold and gray, but our welcome could not have been warmer or brighter. Just a few weeks ago, right here, Patty and Brit welcomed new faculty to the University. I remember Brit at one point saying to all of us newcomers, “I can absolutely guarantee you that you will not find another community that supports its University with such good spirit.” That has certainly been our experience over the last ten months, and our distinguished friends who are here this evening give compelling evidence of that support, enthusiasm, and concern for having a great public university in their community.
Second, Anita and I are parents of a student at Ohio State. Our daughter, Sara, is a first year graduate student and teaching assistant in the Statistics Department. Sara (a bit to our surprise) did pretty well as an undergraduate at a state university in New York. She applied to three graduate schools – Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio State – and was accepted by all with essentially the same offers of financial support as a graduate teaching assistant. Why did she choose Ohio State (in spite of having to be near her parents)? Because she found the recruitment process, the summer orientation program, and the personal and friendly attention she received from faculty and fellow graduate students far superior to the other two schools. For a university as big as Ohio State, we offer our students a caring, personal, and exciting educational experience. Maybe that is why our alumni and community give us back such spirited support.
And now finally my comments you have all been waiting for – from the perspective of University Librarian.
Ohio State has embarked on a very challenging and exciting journey. With our new Academic Plan, we aim to transform ourselves from a very good public university into a truly great one academically. As I have studied and participated in this Academic Plan, it has become clear to me that the creation and management of information are at its core. The Academic Plan has a constant refrain about how important it is for Ohio State University to be a leader in, and an engine for, our new information-based economy.
Most attention is paid, and rightly so, to the creation of new information and knowledge. The quality and productivity of our faculty in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences in generating and teaching new knowledge will be the keystones for achieving the academic excellence we seek. However, someone has to manage all this new information and knowledge, and that task must be taken up by librarians, archivists, and museum curators. We are responsible for collecting, organizing, and preserving the artistic, scholarly, and scientific record. In the liberal arts, where basic and enduring concepts of culture and science are dealt with, it is particularly important that our libraries, archives, and museums collectively have a complete and accurate record of knowledge.
The challenge for all of us today, of course, is managing the sheer volume of information in our every day lives. I have heard it said that John Milton, the great English poet, was the last person who could claim to have read everything (at least everything written in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian). Milton died in 1674, and he actually went blind in middle-age, many think from the eye strain of reading so much. (He wrote one of the enduring sonnets of our language about his blindness entitled “When I Consider How My Light is Spent.”)
We have been suffering from information overload since at least the 17th Century, and it is not getting any easier today. Just last week I received a number of differing reports about measuring the size of the information universe.
- According to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is located right here in Dublin, Ohio, the Internet now has 7.1 million unique web sites, a 50% growth over the previous year.
- An Internet company called “BrightPlanet” claims that Web sites just measure the surface of the World Wide Web, and that the deep Web now contains more than 550 billion individual documents.
- And finally researchers at the School of Information Science at the University of California, Berkeley, just released a study on the size of the information universe. They do no even try to talk in terms of number of sites, documents, or titles, but instead tell us there were “between one and two exabytes of unique information produced last year worldwide, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth.” An exabyte, by the way, is a billion gigabytes. Don’t ask me what that really means – but it’s a lot of bytes!
What is a librarian to do? (Besides, run for cover before this avalanche of new information.) I think our course of action is actually quite clear and essential to the success of our Academic Plan. We must embrace new information technology and use it to manage our key responsibilities to collect, organize, and preserve the record of knowledge. We must use digital tools for the management of a digital information system. OhioLINK, the best statewide academic library service in the world, is a good example of this new approach. In partnership with OhioLINK, our library at Ohio State offers our students and faculty the most complete array of digital information and document delivery services anywhere.
With OhioLINK and several other State and Federal agencies, we are making LANDSAT 7 satellite images of Ohio available over the World Wide Web for the first time. New satellite images, which are taken every 16 days, are indexed, organized, and posted on the Web. And what is most interesting to me is that a research scientist at Ohio State University (Carolyn Merry) has created a teacher’s kit called “A Global View of the Earth,” which is also posted on the Web site, for making these satellite images useful in K-12 education.
While we embrace the new digital information system, we cannot neglect the past and present print information system with which most of us are most familiar and comfortable. Ink on paper --in its many manifestations --has proven to be a resilient medium, and we must take care to continue to collect, organize, and preserve these traditional information resources. We do a pretty good job at Ohio State with these traditional responsibilities. We have outstanding collections (numbering more than five million print volumes and an excellent library staff (with 100 librarians and 300 support staff). Let me just highlight two of our special collections.
- We are home for the John Glenn Archives, our newest and largest archive devoted to a single individual. Senator Glenn has been a real “collector” all his life. He or his family and friends have saved everything, and as a result we have a comprehensive record of his life and achievement in exploration and public service. Imagine the richness and value of this archive for generations of researchers to come.
- We are also home to the Cartoon Research Library, the most complete archive to this popular medium in the world. Right now the Cartoon Research Library, which is located in the Wexner Center, is offering a wonderful exhibit on the Peanuts cartoon. Is Charles Schulz’s work important and influential? Can you imagine an America of the last fifty years without Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Snoopy?
Our one weak link in our otherwise very strong library system at Ohio State is the poor physical condition of our Main Library. That pile of limestone at the Head of the Oval looks impressive from a distance, but once you are inside it is disappointing. Over the last hundred years our Main Library has lost its grandeur and its appeal as the real and symbolic intellectual center of campus. But we are going to change this situation. Serious work is now underway to restore and renovate the Main Library to make it a place that can effectively service both the traditional and the new information systems. We want to make the Main Library a vital research center for the liberal arts and a real destination on campus for all our students, faculty, and friends. I promise you we will remake our Main Library and turn it into a beautiful and functional research library that truly reflects our academic excellence and our outstanding community spirit.
Thank you. And one last thing: as your university librarian I must remind you: please return your borrowed books on time! Thanks.