 Okay, I'm Ann Kenney, the Carl Kroc University Librarian, and I'm very pleased to welcome you all to Cornell. Little later in the morning, you'll hear from our Dean of Arts and Science, Gretchen Ritter, who will give a view from the university. So I thought I would just start off with a kind of a view from this one university librarian's perspective, and, you know, Larry can feel free to agree or violently disagree, and that nice Canadian style of violently disagree, but he isn't American yet, maybe hasn't been there long enough. So just start off with some key things that all libraries are facing in this first half of the 21st century. This is no brainer, you all know about them, but these are the ones that sort of keep me motivated in thinking about the role of information professionals. And let's just look at economic and digital realities, man, that's sort of a major one for all of us here, particularly at Cornell. These twin pressures are really dramatically changing the way we think about what the library does. Particularly in the United States, the academy is under deep scrutiny for the unrelenting costs associated with higher education. We also have the costs of not only increasing tuition, the federal funding that is available in the United States is going down, while the federal regulations around that funding and other things is going up. And there are greater and greater demands for bigger and better translational science and things like that that increase the costs associated with doing research. The cost of education in the United States has increased faster than the military budget. So no wonder parents are really upset about it. And those impacts of financial scrutiny and cost-cutting measures certainly permeate down to libraries in particular. The inevitability of digital knowledge ecosystem, we all know how that has changed dramatically, not only the kinds of materials we make available, the percentage of our budgets that go toward electronic resources, flipping intellectual property issues and ownership issues and preservation issues upside down. But it also brings to the fore that much of our human capital is devoted to physical constructs and physical way of doing things, yet the digital is so compelling and we need to start thinking about how to address that. And all of those things really affect the way nature, the changing nature of research, teaching, and learning. Things that were not possible even a decade ago are just sort of commonplace. And we look at new forms of not only asking questions about research or the way we educate, but also new ways of conducting research and doing things that would have taken lifetimes to manage to do. So, and even if you're dealing with humanists, particularly those who love to dig into paper and text and photographs, the reality is they will end up becoming digital workers and that they need to address those things. So being able to work with them in that is critical. You all, no doubt, have seen this. This was very key in the Humanities Trust case brought by the Authors Guild, which included Cornell, the only private in that list of universities who were sued. We were thrilled by that. We actually wanted Columbia to be the poster child. But this was so telling to the judge, which is looking at the mining of the Hathi Trust corpus to look at something very simple, when the nature of the United States moved from the United States R to the United States is. And that led the judge to rethink the issue of what is transformative in terms of digitization and access and really sort of broke down the author guild's claim that this was violating copyright issues. Global engagement. Man, higher education has become so global. All three of our institutions are deeply engaged in global programs around the world, whether, you know, NYU leads the way in terms of international campuses. But programs are just popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Concomitment to that is the rising evidence of internationalization as an undergraduate experience. We know that America is still the sort of mecca for higher education. The number of international students coming to the United States since 2000 has increased by 72%. The number of Americans, and I believe Canadians who have moved for international experiences has doubled during that time period. So that whole issue of how do you support the international experience and the increasing research on a global scale just becomes critical in terms of what the library can do to support not only folks who are here but folks who are there in terms of providing access to the services that they expect. This is just a snapshot of the digital commons for ILR here at Cornell over a couple of hours showing its reach in terms of an e-print on women in the economy. The collaborative imperative. You know, too cool. We know about these sorts of things, but I think these three issues, economic, digital, and global realities, really challenge us in the next decade and beyond to radically rethink how we network, how we do our work beyond borders, our responsibilities, extend to what others do in other institutions. And it's critical to our future survivability and thriveability. You know, I don't think we're a global village anymore. I think we're more of a global street corner. And these things are so integrated that no matter how wonderful your library is, it is but a node in an information network that spans the world. And what happens around the world is absolutely critical to our ability to serve our faculty and students. So it's necessary but insufficient to have a robust program within your own institution. You need to move beyond. And that leads to interdependence and operating at scale. Much of the emphasis has been placed on large scale efforts, but I think the scale needs to be appropriate to the nature of what's being done. Sometimes too many folks end up with process rather than really moving forward in new directions. I think the basic challenge, as I said in the Ithaca brief, is in an age where some members question the value and expense and maintain antiquated notions of what a library does, that we need to have them expect more and to deliver that expertise and resources and services that will be verifiable differentiators in their academic lives. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, famously said if it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist. And we even have the federal government looking at legislation in the United States that would dismantle government information systems. And the bill is dubbed just Google it. We are facing the not unrealistic possibility that undergraduates will search on their phones and only find resources from Cornell and Columbia and Toronto if they're geo-tagged and show up as nearby, rather than coming to the library or the library's website. I think it's no exaggeration that libraries are challenged to reconceive themselves and their place on campus and within a larger construct. I think it was summed up pretty well. The dilemma we face, a colleague at a conference a year or two ago said everyone on my campus thinks they know what the library is and does, and they've all got it wrong. Love this photo. What's a library? More specifically, what's a librarian given these sort of things that are in play and particularly what information professionals and liaisons do given these realities. I believe our future really is more virtual, that the digital onset is here to stay and will continue to become more robust. But at the same time, it's more personal. That what we do in terms of that deep engagement one to one, one to many will be incredibly important moving forward. We've seen the rise of the liaison model in response to these realities and the shift in focus from single responsibilities to a full spectrum of engagement. It's a step in the right direction, but I think it's just the tip of the iceberg and I honestly think we've kind of plateaued around what the liaison model should be that we're sort of starting to solidify much too early in the process of its development. Most of the programs that are out there are pretty informal and fluid. I think that they principally lack issues around how do I know what success is? How do I measure it? What are my benchmarks? It's a moving target. How do I continue to evolve and respond to changes that are going on? As the portfolios for liaisons continue to expand, it's really clear no one liaison can do it all. And so what we have is a domain specialist increasingly playing an important role working with functional experts to provide that much needed expertise in addressing key challenges. But that raises real turf issues. Good subject expertise, Trump, functional skill sets and that deepening engagement with faculty and students. I really think that interdependence is here, but it has yet to lead to an appreciation that the liaison work we do is important, but the individual labels are much less important. A meeting at ARL last year which sort of led to the genesis of this institute, a great idea, came out of some of those discussions, which is maybe liaison responsibility should be assigned to teams rather than individuals, and it might provide a better way to recognize realities and to move forward. An engaged liaison seeks to enhance, quote, scholarly productivity and empower learners and participate in the entire life cycle of research, teaching and learning. And that requires us to engage patrons, faculty and students and other in their space, not just in ours, and to be driven and motivated by their needs. That's easy to say, but we tend to be looking from the inside out and we've got to start focusing on the outside in. And this is Carla Streep's taken from a presentation at the Fall Forum in 2013, which was their first take on how to start providing resources in terms of the full life cycle to their constituents. And look at the stakeholder map. I mean, you know, all of that context is so critical. The last mile. The last mile is a phrase used to describe the weakest link in a communication chain between a supplier and a customer. How many of you remember how difficult it was with dial-up access at home? You know, it doesn't matter how robust it is getting to your house. It's what happens when it gets into your house. We did a faculty survey last fall. We had a huge response rate. Forty-three percent of all of those who were surveyed responded. Fifty percent of all tenure-track faculty responded. So that was the good news. But what we found out was that they did agree that all too often students come in ill-prepared in terms of information literacy skills to meet their expectations, that of those who engaged the library in information fluency programs, there was a corresponding rise in the ability of students to assess and utilize those resources. But only a third of the faculty took advantage of those. When we looked at the other two-thirds of the faculty around why they didn't use it, fully a third of them were not aware that the library offered such service. We've got a huge marketing issue. You know, I think that communication misalignment is something that we're really going to have to step up to the plate in thinking about. Sometimes our information seems totally transparent and available to us, but it's kind of hidden through several layers on our library websites. And increasingly, I think the medium is not the message. Faculty are inert to the emails, the alerts, the blog postings. And increasingly, it's more and more difficult to get their attention. We have a faculty digital scholarship program here. And I once asked, I think maybe Oya was with me, with this was how they actually found out about the program. One person said, I found out about it because the poster for it was on the door of a colleague who had taken the advantage of the program. So, you know, the rise of paper, ow, no. So in the Ithaca brief, I talked about a range of strategies for moving forward. And these are they. I won't go over them. But then I ended with suggestions for aligning action with academic goals and success measures. I know others can be developed. And these can be further improved. I just wanted to say a couple of things since the publication of that piece. First is institutional repositories. And here we have sort of, you know, a goal is to make this stuff accessible, you know, publicize the IR, support faculty deposit, blah, blah, blah, all these things. When we looked at the faculty survey response in terms of institutional repository use by faculty in terms of deposit, the law school and the business school were under 50% of use of those programs within the Cornell environment. Drilling down a little more, it became apparent that many of them are using SSRN and that so much of their reputation is wrapped up in terms of the sort of visibility within the social science research network, you know, the number of hits, the sort of all of that kind of thing. And that they were seeing the institutional repository responses as drawing away from that. So those kinds of things really need to be addressed more deeply to understand culture and traditional patterns of thinking about things. It doesn't have to be an either or, it could be an and and, but how do you get that information across? Open access publishing has also continued to be an issue that we're trying to gain traction on. We have just recently the Elsevier announcement that accepted manuscripts will be embargoed for a period of one to four years, is like a major negative game changer on campus. You may recall that at the time Elsevier started to raise prices, the mathematicians around the world led by Tim Gowers developed a boycott for doing reviews, serving on boards or publishing in Elsevier journals. And the cost of knowledge website developed and rapidly was populated by faculty and other researchers across the world in terms of their pledges. I went to look at the cost of knowledge, which plateaued at around 14,000 folks and had remained steady over a number of years. I went to the way back machine and checked, you know, what the numbers were until May, when it started to jump, and May and June this year, it went up by 585 individuals. Is that a coincidence that that correlated with the April 30th announcement of Elsevier's boycott? I don't know, but I think it's worth drilling in to see whether it is or not. I then went, I had a lot of time on my hands, I then went to look at what was happening in terms of signatures from your institutions and our institutions. Cornell had 25, Columbia had 28, Toronto 57, and then I looked at where they were from. So for Toronto, the greatest number came from math and physics. That makes good sense. That was where that a lot of genesis came from. But for Columbia and for Cornell, the number of folks from the medical community was higher than math or physics. What is this saying to us? And is there an opportunity to engage in that environment in ways that we haven't before? There are other examples, but I see my time is running out. But I think we just need to keep sensitive to those issues as we move along. So moving along, and this is the importance of this institute, and I'm so grateful for ARL's leadership in providing this, much of the liaison work that is currently done is at the institutional level. But I think that insularity is antithetical to the models for further maturation. Opportunities do exist for creating networks of shared core beliefs, best practices, common suites of tools, including user surveys that result in actionable information, shareable measures, collaborative matrix, et cetera, et cetera, to lead to a community of practice centered on engagement across a broad range of institutions. So thank you very much.