Tell me what you’re doing in your new position as associate university librarian for services.
This is a newly created position that’s responsible for both internal and external services. My job is really to work with all the librarians in our 42 departmental units that provide the library services. It’s one of those jobs where, when you read the job description, you wonder why anyone would apply for it. But it’s fun. It’s challenging. And I’m just delighted to be part of this. Delivering services is what we’re all about.
What are the challenges you’re facing in your new position?
I think the challenges that are facing me are the ones that all libraries are grappling with: recruiting, space problems, collections. There seems to be an increasing shortage of people wanting to go into academic librarianship and we have to be more aggressive about recruiting. Over the past 18 months, we’ve had lots of retirements, too. I think we have about 20 searches going on out of an 80-person faculty.
We also have space problems. Our stacks are 92 percent full, and that may belie the fact that they’re more filled than they’re supposed to be. With regard to our collections, we’re having big problems with inflation of the costs of materials and all these new electronic resources that are coming on board that we try to provide along with print copies.
How have libraries been affected by the proliferation of information and technology?
People want information now; they don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get it. They want to be self-reliant. People’s expectations are higher. We can’t acquire all the information, so we’re trying to figure out how we can provide access to it when it’s not here. Our whole relationship with our users is changing.
Just finding information now can be a job because there’s so much out there. Do you see more training on the horizon for users to help us find what we’re looking for?
We’ve developed various kinds of teaching aids. We go into classes and give presentations on bibliographies of specific subjects. There are Web tutorials. We’re redesigning our Web page because we’ve realized that it’s not optimal. But people aren’t taking as much advantage of those things as we would like, perhaps because they think they know it already.
What types of new programs are in the works?
We’re renovating space for offsite storage that we’re calling our Oak Street facility. It is based upon a model that’s been used at Harvard, Duke, Yale and other major universities. We’ll have a public service area there so people can pick things up within 24 hours. I think it will be open in the winter of 2002. Faculty library committees are deciding what books to put there to minimize inconvenience and so people can still get things from the stacks fairly rapidly.
We’re also developing a new program for putting electronic reserves on the Web. It was tested with a select number of courses this semester and will be expanded in the future.
What do you enjoy most about librarianship?
I like working with the people in the individual libraries when they come across problems and trying to help them find the best ways to do things.
What types of things do you do when you’re not working?
I’m a yoga practitioner. My wife and I have a 13-foot sailboat that we’ve taken to Clinton Lake, Homer Lake and Carlisle. We like to travel to North Carolina and West Virginia. I also try to keep up with my three daughters, who are scattered around the world. My oldest daughter is a speech pathologist, and she’s married and living in New Zealand. My middle daughter graduated from college last year, and she’s coming back from Australia. The baby’s a freshman at Kenyon College in Ohio.