 Well, I think the top of the hour is in play, so I'm going to kick things off. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a great guest covering an important topic, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I'm just delighted to welcome Tony Zanders. You see, ever since the beginning of the forum, ever since our first month, we've been focused on, among other things, the role of libraries and what they mean for higher education and what they mean for society as a whole. We've hosted guest after guest who has been giving us different views of the library world. Now, Tony comes to us with a view from the software entrepreneur side, library technology side. He is just a dynamic, wonderful person, and I'm absolutely delighted to bring him up. So without any further ado, I'll beat him up on stage. Welcome, Tony. Hello. I've never seen myself this big on a Zoom. Well, here, let me make it even bigger still. How's this? Nice. Nice to be here. Thanks, Brian. Oh, what my pleasure. Where are you today, Tony? I'm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I'm in our office. I just shut my door to try to get some quiet. And yeah, it's about 72 degrees here outside, about 60 degrees here inside. And how's the humidity? It's perfect for now. We're still dealing with the beginning of allergy season. We got about three more weeks before the humidity comes. I remember this. I used to teach in Shreveport. So I remember summer as I would just beat. Well, listen, Tony, the tradition we have in the forums, we ask people to introduce themselves, not by talking about their past, but by talking about their future. What are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big topics? What are the big projects that are just really top of mind for you? That's a good question. I've never heard that framing before. The next 12 months, I think, are going to be in two areas for me personally. I think every day we're talking with libraries, library managers, on how are they grappling with coming out of the pandemic to run their organizations in this new normal. And so that's one area that I spend at least an hour a day talking with folks on. At Skilltype, we use data to help them make better decisions. And so that's one area. I think the second area is exploring how to help libraries become sustainable from a financial perspective. And so libraries are cost centers on campus. And that historically may have worked out if you knew for sure that you were going to get a certain budget. But that's no longer the case. That certainty started to go out the window. And so I also think pretty deeply about how to generate revenue for libraries. And I think we're going to make some progress on that conversation this year as well. I'd love to hear any solutions you have on that topic. And I'm sure quite a few people in the audience would love to hear that as well. Now how and Skilltype, tell us about Skilltype. How's it coming? And what does it do? Yeah, it's coming along quite great. We're in a much different situation today than 12 months ago. And so about four years ago, I decided to leave Epscope, which is a global database company. And really spend my days working with libraries to understand what were their biggest challenges that weren't being solved at all. And the recurring theme was managing our organizations, people. And that led to us building a community of about 12 libraries, some professional associations like the Black Caucus of ALA, NACIG, others. To start rethinking the way we manage our talent. And that community winded up producing a software platform that has a focus on using data to help us make better decisions as professionals. But also helping our organizations make better decisions using what we understand about our skills and our skill gaps as an organization. So we're trying to have a more data-informed conversation around our career goals and our organizational goals. So at a high level, that's what Skilltype's hoping to accomplish. Wow, that's quite a lot. When you mention skills, do you mean skills in terms of library science and organization, or do you mean management skills? All of the above. And so as we understand, libraries are very complex organizations. When you look across all of the core competency frameworks that are created by, say, the American Library Association or the Special Libraries Association, you can start to understand that there's actually hundreds of discrete competencies that are required to run a modern research library. And so that includes some things that are very specific to libraries, like electronic resource management or digital asset management. But it also includes business skills like HR, public speaking, license negotiation, IT, data. And so libraries sit at this interesting juncture on campus where they have to meet the needs of students and their space students can come to. But they also are in the academic realm as well, partnering with faculty on the research side. So there's a lot of competencies that are required today to run a modern research library. Oh, that's extremely important to hear. Do you... Well, I have more questions, but let me just turn this around. So first of all, it sounds like everyone's going to be digging into skill type and learning about what you all do. But let me just emphasize the Future Transform is a conversation venue for all of you. So this is the place for you to put your questions to Tony. If you'd like to ask him about libraries after COVID and how they change, or if you'd like to ask about libraries in terms of financial sustainability, or in terms of the issues that he was just talking about, in terms of what skill type addresses, in terms of management of a complex organization, a dynamic environment, this is your time. This is your place to do so. And again, you can hit that raised hand button for a join us on stage. And I promise to make you big or just typing your question in the Q&A box. And, you know, I don't even get a chance to finish saying that before someone asks a question. This is great. So we have a question from John Hollenbeck. Hello, John. And John asks, we put this up on the stage for everyone to see, aren't libraries based on scarcity? How do they pivot to electronic text on the Internet? A big foundational question. Yeah, I'm not sure that everyone would agree with that. I think there's a general expectation at especially larger research libraries to try to provide access to the world of information resources on behalf of patrons and on behalf of researchers and to be the gateway to helping interpret that world. And so you have a variety of types of collaborations. Entire consortia are created for the purpose of creating the largest possible shared collection as possible. And so I think I'm following the line of questioning around scarcity, but I think the other side of that coin is that it's the library's role to secure rights and privileges and access to the broadest set of scholarly research on behalf of their customers and to help ensure that that research can be accessed at the right time. And so you have library consortia, but you also have collaborations like the Hathi Trust and others that are trying to, Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America. There's a litany of groups that are trying to remove the barriers to access to remove that scarcity. Well, that's a great way of putting this. Thank you. In fact, John wants to join us on stage. So let's put him on so he can talk with us and develop this further. Hello, John. Hello, hello. I didn't word that very well, I guess. Thank you. What I meant by scarcity is like the library of Alexandria was the only place all those scrolls existed. And I always feel like school was instituted on the notion of knowledge scarcity, that you had to go to see Brian Alexander to learn something. And so libraries kind of, you know, what I mean by that is that libraries to me are conceptualized as buildings that have the book. But now with electronic media and the internet, the book is more ubiquitous. Even research libraries. And I'm wondering, you know, so that to me would be a foundational shift from, I'll just say gatekeeper. I guess I'm not, today is my non-expressive day. But you know what I mean. Yeah. So yeah, I think I have a better understanding now. So that shift began to take place in the 80s before I was born. And so I was born in 1986. Oh, God, don't say that. I had to do it. But a couple years before that, you had this transition from the card catalog to the first integrated library system. And that was out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And so the library's been at the core of helping reconceptualize itself to meet these new expectations that researchers and students have since forever. And so even looking past the 80s, when we went to the ILS, the next decade or so where that started to transition again was getting into electronic resources. So not just managing the print resources in a networked environment, but now starting to publish research in an electronic format, which brought on its own need for better tools for management and description and access. And then you fast forward another 10 years to the 2000s, where we're starting to get into digital asset management and starting to scan and digitize born print materials for discovery and for access, right? And so I think the reconceptualization of libraries has been taking place for decades. And it's been run and governed by the librarian community itself. They know best what are the more efficient ways to provide that service. And so today, fast forward, we have to sort of reframe our understanding of a library much broader than the brick and mortar building itself. The way students are trying to access these resources and faculty are trying to organize these resources, oftentimes is outside of that brick and mortar building, right? And as universities start to invest more in distance education and remote learning, the pandemic really just put an exclamation point on a number of trends that had been sort of bubbling up for years. But we really have to reconceptualize the library to serve a sort of locationless community. And so the most important ingredient in this equation are the people. It requires experts who understand the needs of the patrons, but also understand the needs of the institution, which involve their economic constraints, the legal constraints, the copyright and the privileges constraints, along with making sure interpreting that complex web to provide that seamless access to students and researchers and doing it in a way that serves a community that may never walk through your gates or your doors. Well, that's, first of all, I just got to thank you. That was the best history of the library in the past 30 years that I've heard in under two minutes. That's amazing. That's a whole lot to cover. John, does that help? Does that help address? It helps. It's interesting because there's so many different aspects to this. And I look at libraries, librarians is helping tame the fire hose and helping with things like we call information literacy now, but I also reflect on going back as far as Vannevar Bush with the idea of linking texts and the great Brown Intermedia project that got swamped by hypercard for some reason. But, you know, just all these attempts to come up with ways of linking and organizing knowledge that I think really is the problem of our day that, you know, even Dewey wrote about in democracy and education is we just have too much stuff. And how do we make that workable and realizable? Well, we turn to librarians for invaluable help. John, this is great. Thank you for coming up. Take care. Thanks for having me. Friends, if you're new to the forum, this is how to ask a video question. You can see it's very easy and that we're very kind. And even to people who don't have beards, no, I'm kidding. But let me welcome a few other questions that have just come up. And here is one from Rebecca Jones. So let me flash this on the screen. Tony, delighted to see you presenting here. What is the development you've seen in the past 12 months that raises your concern the most for post-secondary, higher education libraries? And she's asking about Canada and the U.S.? I think... I'll put that back up on the screen again because that was... Yeah. Thanks for that. And so I think the biggest concern is sort of lack of empathy towards the situation the library workforce is in. I think there's been... Just to tie this back to John's line of questioning, there's been this sort of impression that the libraries are these sort of buildings in spaces and these sort of boundless collections that manage themselves. And we all can agree that that's not the case. But that's the sort of impression that we approach the institution of librarianship with. And the cost of that has been that we are currently in a talent crisis where we not only are experiencing collective burnout and a shortage of the expertise that we need. As we're shifting from a primary print in-person experience to a fully digital, fully remote experience, the skills that are needed to provide the same services are quite different. And so we're in this digital shift that's taking place, which only exacerbates the talent crisis that we're in because the curricula that's been developed by information science programs, those curricula were designed during a time where we were mostly in-person and we were mostly dealing with monographs. And so there's this lag of the training and the curriculum and it simply hasn't caught up to the pace and rate of change of the demands that are being placed onto the libraries. So yeah. I was going to say even now in 2022, after all, you know, a generation of the web, I mean, we're still lagging. I would certainly say so. And I think that that's a consensus agreement, but certainly open for disagreement. The way curricula is developed at an information science program, the way decisions are made and what goes into that curricula is over a century old. And so it takes on average about 10 or 12 different votes from various committees at a university to add a course or a new topic to a curriculum. And so if we acknowledge the rate of change with technology and with society and with user behavior, it's moving quite at a pace that that voting model and the decision-making model for the curricula development simply hasn't caught up with. That's a huge issue. And that's a great answer to Rebecca's excellent question. In the chat, a couple of people have added a couple of notes that I wanted to hoist back up for people to see. Kimberly mentions the pay scales from librarians versus IT professionals is really harming the profession because you can get paid more in IT. So I actually have a strong conviction on this. And so the pay scales and pay grades that she's describing, I think, need to be at the top of the conversation. Those are quite outdated as well. Again, based on job families and the institutional structures of the library before this digital shift took place that I just described. And so HR departments haven't stayed abreast of the evolution we just walked through starting in the 80s that today the typical library job and experience looks a lot similar to an IT job and experience. And so an information professional is no longer stacking books on the shelf as the primary work they do. They're helping students and researchers troubleshoot broken URLs or they're having to contact vendors to understand why a certain article no longer belongs in a package or why is my device not connecting to the Wi-Fi or I'm on campus but the proxy server isn't acknowledging my credentials. These are very technical and very specifically IT types of tasks that reference librarians have to address. Systems librarians, technical services. And I haven't even gotten into the entire web services side of things where a lot of the interactions take place through online chat and through authentication and other issues. And so it's my view that the pay scales have to start to right size to acknowledge the IT nature of the library work. That's a great cause. Thank you for saying that. And there's one more to add to this to all these different information technology skills. Valerie Hawkins reminds us of the sequence information literacy, digital literacy, data literacy, digital dexterity, which librarians often end up having to teach and advocate for. Well this is okay so first of all first of all Rebecca great question to start to to get us rolling with this. And friends you can see how the Tony has a huge wealth of knowledge and a lot of passion and the incredibly rare ability to say this with great concision. So please come up with your question. I can only get to say finish saying that sentence ever because you guys have so many questions. We have one from Tom Haymes coming to us from the Houston Texas area. Tom says do you think most outsiders like non-library faculty students administrators they understand librarians as curators of information rather than curators of artifacts physical holdings? I don't I'm not sure that outsiders know what to think of the the modern information professional. I don't I don't believe that most outsiders acknowledge their existence at all. Again I think that people I hear I have conversations all the time with people that don't realize that people actually work at libraries. The conception is that there's this building I can walk into. I can get access to wi-fi. I can perhaps get a coffee. I may see some books. I may not. I can sit down and I don't have to really interact with anyone. And that coupled with the dawn of e-commerce and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and you know the proliferation of Starbucks and all of these trends I think really hide the work of the modern information professional. And so I I think even your description is a bit generous because it does assume that people acknowledge the the work and presence of librarians and I don't I don't think that society does. Wow that's a and you and that's a dark view and that's one that we should change as much as we can. Friends we have we have time for your questions that I want to encourage you to to bring them in. We have a lively activity in the chat Tony where Kimberly Fillmire says that educating up is a constant for academic libraries and librarians. Not a question just an observation which I think absolutely true. And she says in terms of what libraries do with technology information and everything else. While people are are are thinking hard about about their topics let me ask one if I could press on that point of information literacy. I mean enormous credit to the library profession for coming up with information literacy in the 1980s before the web began or I should say Tony when you were a kid the great decade. Yes apparently so and and and the idea that libraries can help librarians and libraries can help us all sift through the wild west of the digital content frontier. I'm curious right now ever since 2016 we've been more as a society we've been more and more anxious about fake news about misinformation about disinformation and right now with the war in Ukraine there's even more demand for this. In fact yesterday I saw the first deep fake video of Ukraine's president. What what can academic librarians do to help us and us meeting people in academia first of all to help us sift through and develop these skills to handle this wild information world. I think firstly just continuing to occupy this unique space on campus that is both one that is non-academic so libraries have to interface with the facilities and security department on campus. They have to interface with student success and and and other groups that on campus that aren't related to the classroom and the academy but they also very much so are embedded in the academic work of a research institution and so I think the first thing is for the for us all to acknowledge that unique hybrid role of both being able to have a value add conversation with a faculty member in 30 minutes later have a mental health related conversation with the student who feels pressure. That is a very unique role on campus and so I think firstly just to acknowledge the unique role of the library. I think secondly I've seen many institutions incorporate the library into freshman orientation and really embedding info lit as a key part of the introduction to the academy and so those are two sort of things that I believe first we just need to acknowledge that there is no other group or expertise on campus that can do both as well as the library but also find ways to seek out their services because libraries also sit across all majors and disciplines across all academic departments and so each department on campus has a different vantage point when it comes to things like fake news and information literacy so the library is the one to tie it all together and so it's very much so a service center and I always have to just emphasize that it's the people so if you find a live guide or a web page that is providing insight on how to navigate fake news there's a person who authored that live guide right and so it all comes back to the people and the expertise and just looking at them as a service provider that will reinvent itself to meet the needs of the time and we've been seeing that well before the 80s but my introduction to this as a library technologist is when that card catalog converted to the ILS so but they've libraries have always adapted and evolved to meet the the needs that were presented to them that's true that's true well this is thank you for that very very excellent and actionable answer to my very parameter question we have more questions coming in and this is from JD Mosley match it who asks so how should our higher ed libraries pivot if they are still a collection of physical books that are molding on shelves where can our traditional librarians turn to get tips for how to change well one answer is skill type and so we've aggregated thousands of library trainings from the world's best library conferences professional associations it's become the single best place to find out what are the best practices for any given challenge that I'm facing so you can find many examples nowadays of libraries who have responded to this particular issue by doing analyses of the usage of their collections and understanding how long has it been since a particular book has been checked out and if the book hasn't been checked out in a really long time there's an argument that that book shouldn't take up precious real estate in our campus and so as a result an entire economy worth of companies have sort of been created to serve this need by not only providing that that collection usage analysis but then providing actionable steps for libraries to then move the books out of that physical space into things like off-site cold storage or centralized collections where instead of each of our institutions all holding a copy of a book that may or may not ever get checked out again we can collaborate as a consortium or a group and hold a single copy and through things like interlibrary loan and other tools we can make sure that the off chance someone wants it someone can get that book in a in a in a decent amount of time and so I would just encourage your library to sort of attend the conferences sign up for skill type go to various presentations on this topic but there's a lot of things happening around things like off-site cold storage automated storage and retrieval systems so as ar as rs's and things like this university of utah is an example of a wonderful warehouse they've installed one of these beautiful systems oh great so yeah there's a lot there jd that's a great question and a very practical question and I think Tony again just gave us a wonderful set of marching orders on how to do this thank you and more questions have come up one from our dear friend George station out on the west coast Cal State Monterey Bay George asks how can we encourage more publishers to support fuller ebook access e.g. on the users as routine and not quote hard this this is a great question so that takes us I don't know if you've all experienced this but this is often an issue of publishers which will make available a limited number of digital copies kind of representing the analog space so that there's only a few copies that can be checked out in time rather than the infinite supply of pdfs and so on what do you think what do you think Tony so as an sort of entrepreneur at heart I started my career in Silicon Valley and and develop my professional worldview surrounded by companies like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn in its early days and the host of other companies and as a result my worldview always is that if there is a problem that needs to change or be disrupted there is a way to use technology to change that we have to support the innovation we have to support entrepreneurship we have to support experimentation we can't have a a combative view towards these things because the solutions to these sticky problems are oftentimes going to come from the edges of of our of our work and so I believe that universities should hold more hackathons I believe that libraries should be a part of those types of 72 hour events where you bring together computer science students and and librarians and IT staff and you kind of start to create this culture of not only experimentation but but but innovation and trying to to generate as many potential solutions to this problem in a short amount of time as possible and creating a culture and habit of it and so any industry that we've seen that has sort of a predatory relationship with its its customers has been disrupted from the outside and so I think I'm looking at students and researchers on your campus that are the ones who are the biggest victims of this problem you're describing and I think the university should be investing in them and supporting them to use their expertise whether that software development whether that's design thinking to to to put together solutions to try to tackle these problems and if as higher education as a community becomes more experiment friendly and more startup and innovation friendly I think it's only a matter of time before publishers and vendors see the writing on the wall that that the next wave of ebooks and and licensing will not be predatory there's people interpreting web 3.0 and blockchain as a potential solution for this particular problem you described I wonder how that would work in terms of possibly having blockchain backed checkout records or just individual copies that are that are backed using that to try and prevent piracy is that the idea and so I'm not the expert here I think that the decentralized approach of the way information is stored and on the blockchain provides some really interesting tools for universities and university presses and and the publishing side and the research production side of universities to circumvent publishers that have been deemed predatory and so there there are people right now that are thinking about the sort of supply chain of of how research is produced and trying to understand how can universities become more independent using that that technology infrastructure because right now the power has been consolidated with a few and we have to rethink the entire supply chain if we're going to sort of get ourselves out of this the situation but to rethink the entire supply chain George thank you for the really good question in the chat Tony people have mentioned two other options one being open access and scholarly publication and also some large-scale negotiation for increased access I think this is already Hawkins mentions large-scale negotiation for scholarly materials but before before I say more about that we have Carolyn Coward who has one of the best library jobs just in the world I want to make sure that you guys know that she's the head librarian at Jet Propulsion Laboratory so I'm just in Envia for every day and she won a cup on stage hello Carolyn sound can you guys hear me yes hi Carolyn no hang on hang on I'm driving I'm driving hang on oh please be safe um yeah I might need to come back and reconnect hang on hang on okay no problem wow that's commitment that's cool well Carolyn is wonderful and we're getting a great 3d view of the inside of your car Carolyn and while she's doing that while she's doing that let me bring up one more question that has just come up that builds on what you were just talking about Tony and your answer to to George this is from Naomi Thomas and materials and textbooks sure if you could be more specific is there something that you're curious about I think from the skill type perspective our goal is to ensure that each library professional has access to the right training material and support they need at the right time and so we look at sort of the training that's required to become an expert in the area of say course materials course reserves that's sort of our role in this community in this ecosystem is to try to make sure of this vast world of resources that are being produced each day to learn about a topic like say course reserves right our goal is to make sure that people have access to the right one at the right time because the librarians and the library workers that support the university they're too busy to sort of comb through this this vast world of conferences and webinars and workshops and so that's sort of our goal but I'm curious what you were getting at with course reserves course materials Naomi please if you want to join us on video just click your raised hand that I can bring you up or otherwise just type in a new question to say a bit more because it's a great great topic and we have let me bring up Caroline now now that she's I think in a safer location hopefully yeah in a parking lot hi Caroline still driving still driving I've got a meeting on lab at noon so I'm trying to get there but I'm bringing up these really critical issues and ideas I want to challenge okay just a little bit about me yes I'm the head librarian at NASA propulsion laboratory but I spent 20 plus years in higher education as an information literacy librarian high impact practices when we used to call it bibliographic instruction working for the California State University system for first-generation um inter really behind the eight balls so really testing in a library engineers not so much they're like in a my garage you know manual what manual areas and librarians yeah I'm telling you you mentioned this occurring the message my challenge is to work out that information mess that's in all the involved in data governance at JPL the organization focus on that embedded in that that will pull the more traditional services along especially from faculty and staff thank you that's a fantastic yeah um I'm in I'm in full I'm in full agreement with Caroline I think that uh what we're observing today skill type has a lot of insight into what skills are needed at libraries what skills library workers are interested in learning and I think things are 100 moving in the direction you state to be more sort of digital in the work and more data driven in the work I think part of the challenge gets back to a sort of remark I made earlier that in order to sort of reconceive what our work looks like and I'm not a librarian but I just work with them every every day to sort of have these conversations we need to create a workplace environment that is more supportive of the goals of these professionals I think right now we're noticing collective morale issues we're noticing burnout we're noticing the effects of never having right size the pay grades to look more like IT we're noticing lack of management experience people being promoted to higher levels of responsibility because they did really well in say e-resources or in research data but that doesn't translate into management and leadership and so I think the pandemic sort of brought an exclamation point on these organizational issues that many of our colleagues that went through library and information science programs they never really learned the things that were being taught over in the MBA program and so I think we're observing that a bit and in order for us to make this leap to where Caroline's describing I think we first need to address the the organizational culture and a lot of the issues that are being surfaced that right now are stifling people to reinvent themselves and so I think once we take care of the needs of our people we we work on the pay issue we work on the morale and the the the support and management issue I think we now will have a healthier environment where we can do the the the more exciting work of um rethinking what does librarianship look like in say 2030 well first of all can I just say thank you to the two of you for having a conversation in extraordinary physical circumstances uh that's uh carolin is amazing uh and I appreciate that to ask you your question and Tony I love I love your answer I mean you're you're positioning librarians not only as IT professionals but also as entrepreneurs as uh in that space uh 10 years ago I heard the faculty librarian from a major chinese university describe his team as information entrepreneurs I was always struck by that um we uh to circle back one Naomi Tofness um she both had an answer to your question and she wanted to join us on stage so let me just quickly beam her up on stage see if we can make her uh mic and camera work um Naomi Naomi we can neither see nor hear you um in that case Naomi a good thing to do would be to relaunch this browser window and then your browser should ask for access to your microphone and camera so just give that a try while you do that I'll read your answer that you typed in as a text question um her question it looks like this or response my specific university position seems unique and then I spend most of my time with course materials and it has become a revenue generator from my university which is very interesting she's a post university uh and we can see her now let me just let me bring her up while you while you think about that hello Naomi hey I'm gonna switch you over here so I can stare at you and not at my other monitor yeah so uh I wish that my position like existed elsewhere right so that's why I wanted to bring it up so um essentially in like a nutshell I would say that my position is like a typical reference librarian for faculty where I'm like helping faculty while they're developing courses and selecting course materials that are like appropriate for their courses but also I have to like think a lot about um you know accessibility and stuff because we're mostly online school in a way that faculty as subject matter experts don't always necessarily think about that first um so and uh I get to work remote halftime so uh you can see that I'm in my home office right now um so I I wish that this existed elsewhere you know and everybody has had to figure out what online learning means in the last two years so there's like no excuse for that anymore um I feel and so like everybody's trying to figure this out but also um there's no new positions in libraries that I see you know like people are desperate to hold on to the the few positions that their institutions are allowing them to have um and they're not they're not able to like expand out um in a way that would allow for a position like mine um I'm going to turn my camera off now for uh everyone's privacy but I just wanted to communicate that oh it's great to see you it's great to see you thank you for uh thank you for your your persistence Naomi and thank you for telling us about about your story what do you think um tell me yeah I think Naomi raises a good point that I think jumps back to the leadership conversation that we had I think uh what we're seeing is this generational shift that's been being discussed for I don't know from according to some decades of that there's this uh there was this retirement um there's this delayed retirement bubble that started to grow in 2009 when the economic downturn happened and the people who were expected to retire decided to hold on a bit and that bubble started to grow which started to reduce the supply of open positions uh and for the last decade since the downturn through now through the pandemic the bubble has been growing and um that bubble started to burst due to the pandemic which created I remember at one point in 2020 there were of the 126 association of research library members there were about 30 open university librarian positions at once wow like simultaneously and I think I had a tweet thread about this two years ago or whenever and so there is this generational shift that's taking place and this next generation of leaders aren't bringing a lot of those ideas into their role they have more of a blank canvas on how jobs should look how the organization should look and so I think that's sort of a array of sunshine or silver lining rather to the pandemic is that new leaders of libraries have a different disposition they're more people oriented and they aren't bringing a lot of the preconceived notions around what jobs should look like they they are open to rethinking what our role should look like uh and so that's one response I think we're going to see more progress on Naomi's challenge this decade than than last thank you that's a that's a that's a great vision uh and Tony and the Naomi again thank you for for your thoughtful outlying of the question twice we had in the chat is an interesting perhaps response to this Tony Alene Frank says when it comes to OER I'm a librarian at two places they're totally committed UMCC and you the people both universities are using OER for their courses the community college where I work is getting their feet very wet librarians are helpers in that so that seems to be like a new kind of librarian for that for that world friends work we're almost out of time and you've been terrific at asking all kinds of questions and I wanted to take the moderators privilege and just quickly ask one question on my own Tony and this is a big one and then and this points about two hours south of you um I'm wondering about the role of higher education and the climate crisis doing a lot of work on that and in particular I'm wondering what is the role of the academic library in the climate crisis I mean I you can see some some immediate role such as continuing to provide research materials for research universities on the topic are there any other ways that you can foresee academic libraries playing a role as campuses join the rest of the world in this big struggle yeah I think academic and also public libraries have a very particular interest in being at the table during this conversation I'm born and raised in New Orleans Hurricane Katrina was sort of a turning moment for my entire family and I remember Tulane University was gravely impacted by the flooding that took place and it actually interrupted some of the undergraduate thesis work I was doing at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane and that's not uncommon for libraries that are say in Florida or or being impacted by by sort of erosion and things and so since the libraries does have a disproportionate amount of physical assets that need to be protected they have a very strong interest in this conversation I think they also have experience with how to handle the handling of these rare books rare assets that can be learned from and serve as as as a guide for the rest of the institution and so part of the heaviest burden of responding to things like like rising water part the heaviest burden of that is placed onto the the library system it's one thing to get the students out it's one another thing to get other resources out but research universities have a large physical footprint and in the libraries are managing that and so I don't think it's just about providing research to the experts to make progress on solving climate change I also think it's about emergency preparedness and and how do you sort of galvanize and and and prepare to protect the destruction and damage of physical assets that's a terrific answer thank you Tony I really appreciate it I also appreciate the fact that we have just shot past the end of the of our scheduled hour you've been terrific Tony answering a wide range of questions hitting all kinds of aspects of the work you do what's what's the best way we can keep up with you and skill time should we follow you on Twitter or do you have a newsletter what's the best way mostly active on Twitter and LinkedIn I wasn't able to keep up with the the maintenance of a newsletter I tried but yeah just I'm publicly available at at at Zander's my last name very very good well thank you so much I really appreciate it we're going to check back up on you and keep up with the skill type thanks so much thank you and don't go away friends I need to point out what we're doing next and what else is coming up so looking ahead if you want to keep talking about this and clearly from the chat you do uh please just use the hashtag FTE on Twitter or go to my blog Brian Alexander so that we can hear more about what you're thinking we can keep the conversation going now if you'd like to go back into our past discussions about libraries and other related topics just go to tinyurl.com slash FDF archive and if you'd like to look ahead to some of our other topics again we're looking at everything from the climate crisis that we're just talking about to public higher ed web three how to pay for college you just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more thank you all for terrific questions thank you for volunteering so much about your individual work your careers thank you all please keep supporting libraries keep doing great work above all take care and be safe we'll see you next time online bye bye