 All right, so speaking of faculty perspectives and Dean's perspectives, the question that came up this morning, we were very fortunate to have Dean Gretchen Ritter, who is the Dean of the biggest college at Cornell that of arts and sciences. Join us today to talk to us for a little while about how the faculty and the Deans might be perceiving the library and what they might be thinking the role of the library is. And again, as you know, every single presenter this morning has been saying, from my point of view, from my point of view, so it's time to hear what the faculty point of view might be. Thank you very much. So good morning, everyone. I can see on all the various notes around the room that you've had an active and productive morning. That's great. I just have a few kind of thoughts and comments to offer and thinking about libraries in the context of universities, having to do with faculty, having to do with students, having to do with some of the changes going on in higher education. And what I would really love to do after throwing out a couple of preliminary ideas is just to have a conversation with you all about how this looks from your perspective. In many ways, I think that libraries are at the forefront of helping us to think about where things are headed in higher education for various reasons, both good and challenging at times. I think libraries have had to reinvent themselves over the last decade. And so in a lot of ways, in fact, I think you have things to teach the rest of us. So I sort of start with a question of what is a library really in the age of Google and smartphones and what role will libraries play in the transitions that are impacting higher education in the 21st century? And here, not in any particular order are some ideas I would throw out and would love to get your thoughts and responses to. I certainly think of libraries as being the place that leads in the acquisition and the curation of knowledge. What it means to do that, of course, has changed enormously now. It is not just books, it is also databases. It, I think necessarily at this point, involves a greater emphasis on the needs of particular users and a greater emphasis on the comparative strengths of particular libraries. Libraries don't have to be physical location libraries, don't have to be all things now to the people around them. So thinking about, just as I think in many ways we are in universities and our research programs, thinking more about comparative strengths and how we highlight those and how we collaborate around those is one of the things that strikes me as important in the age that we're coming into. The second thing I would emphasize is the important role that libraries play in information literacy. And it's, of course, a very different role than it was when I was a student at Cornell and Eon and a half ago. Now, I think one of the great challenges for libraries is helping students in particular, but students and faculty as well, think about how to navigate the incredible overflow of information. It is not the case that the challenge is, as it once was, finding information. The challenge now is sorting information. It is understanding how to differentiate between kinds of information, how to order it, how to customize it in more precise forms. And I think we make the mistake, or many of our faculty make the mistake of assuming a level of information literacy on the part of our students because they have grown up in an age where every question is answered by pulling the phone out of their pocket, then in fact they really don't have. And when you spend time, certainly with freshmen and sophomores, you really quickly reveal the degree to which they don't know the difference between a.org, a.com, a.edu, right? So I think one of the places where librarians can be at the forefront in helping us to shape what it means to be institutions of higher education in the digital age is by leading in some of the efforts to cultivate information literacy in both our students and our faculty. I also see libraries as contributing to and responding to the way that we re-imagine the physical space of the campus. And I want to talk about this in a couple of different ways. It is unequivocally the case that our needs in terms of learning spaces is changing enormously, whereas of course we used to be so focused on building the large lecture halls and the sort of fixed seats scenarios. We're undoing a lot of that and we are much more focused now on learning spaces that are collaborative, that are active, that are responsive. And I think that need for collaboration exists in the context of our formal classes. I think it exists well beyond that as well. And I think libraries can really contribute to helping us as their role in function and their need for space is changing to helping to think about how spaces within a campus can be sources of collaboration in learning in new and different ways. And one of the reasons that I personally find that exciting as a role for libraries going forward is because it brings students in. And in a lot of ways our students don't necessarily feel like they have to go to the library anymore, but I know I and all of you would really love to get them in a place that inspires them, that gets them excited, that gets them to browse and look around in ways that they might not otherwise. So locating those collaborative and learning spaces within libraries themselves, I think has other benefits to us as well. And the other way I would think about space building on that last piece is the importance of libraries as physical settings that are sources of inspiration and sources of inspiration that really remind us all within these campuses of the tradition of producing and consuming knowledge that is part of what it is to be at a university. In a lot of ways, I think of many of our libraries as being kind of the cathedrals of the campus. They are the place that makes you feel inspired and awed to be a reader, to be surrounded by all of this knowledge, to see yourself as part of a continuum of generations of students and faculty who have come to that place to discover, to think anew about things, not just because of the books that they found, but just the setting itself and to think ultimately about the wonders of being someone who contributes ultimately to that production of knowledge. The excitement of not just having a book, but a book that's on that shelf, I think is an important role that libraries continue to play that we often underappreciate. And then the last idea that I would mention in terms of where libraries fit now is I think libraries are really key in some of the conversations that are going on about new forms of academic production. I think about the role, for instance, that libraries are playing on many of our campuses in working with university presses and thinking about as we move away from a strictly print age, a mass print reading age, how do we begin to imagine for faculty what it means to be published? How do we begin to imagine what it is to have one's work critically reviewed and validated? How can we collaborate in areas that show our particular strengths on particular campuses, whether it's involving various kinds of subvention programs in relation to a press around a particular area, like we do with the Signale Program at Cornell, or whether it is in imagining the right balance between print and media open and closed sources of academic knowledge. So I think as conveners and as partners in the broader conversations about this shift in the production of academic knowledge, libraries have a key role to play as well. And then finally coming back to the point that I started with, I think that libraries have had to for budget reasons, for technology reasons, for reasons of change in the business models and in the global reach of higher education and digital technology. They have had to be flexible, they have had to reinvent themselves in a deeper way than a lot of other parts of our campuses have. I would call on you to actively bring your experiences and perspectives from having done that into conversation with other parts of campus. I think we are at a moment in higher education where change is happening at a rapid rate and not everybody is ready to recognize and participate in that in positive ways. I see it in my faculty, I see it in various colleagues and administrators and I think helping people to understand that one can stay attached to the mission and the values of what we do here, but be open to change is an enormous contribution to make. And I hope you will help to bring that perspective to these broader university conversations. Thank you. Thank you Dean Richter and I think we have some time for questions from the audience. Yeah. Thanks for the question that you raised in my mind. We talked a lot about it and Oya's here somewhere, the digital humanities, the digital scholarship programs and how successful they have been, but they reach one person at a time. Your challenge was how do you go from those one-offs to something that is more systematic, sustainable and those options are well-repected in how faculty across your school think about the way that you spend them. So that stuck in my mind. Yeah. There's a tipping point issue there. Right. And I think partly it's important that we broaden our conversations. I mean, I think we're doing wonderful and creative things in the context of various digital humanities efforts and I think here at Cornell, the libraries have been leaders in that regard. I think we need to be talking to other disciplines as well. I think we need to be talking to folks in information science and computer science about ways that we can imagine the production and the curation of knowledge in new terms. Just as we've talked about the fact that accessing information is completely different now than it was before, the problem isn't accessing it, it's what you do once you get it. I think another reality of where we're at is that producing knowledge has been democratized. But that doesn't mean that it has the same sort of structures of validation around it. It's making full use of the opportunities for feedback and dialogue that it might. So I think expanding the conversation about not just the digital as an object, but the digital as a vehicle that changes the way that we interact with each other is part of what we all would be doing. Yes. Could I just, so we can get the questions on as well as the answer. And if you can introduce yourselves. Hi, thank you. Barbara Rackenbach from Columbia. So one of the themes that has come up several times this morning has been the need for all of us to understand the broader context on campus. And so I'm wondering if we could put libraries aside for a moment and just have you talk for a moment about what you see are the major priorities that you have and maybe the stuff that keeps you up at night that we. How much time do we have? Exactly. But ways for us to begin to think about how libraries and in particular liaisons can begin to be the solutions to the problems you care about. So there's a long list here. I'm trying to sort out what would be the right things to talk about. You know, we're at a moment where academic research, and I'm sure every age thinks this, but nonetheless I do think it, is becoming deeply interdisciplinary. So going back to this theme about information technology for a moment. You know, I think there's been a conversation that tends to say STEM or humanities, that makes no sense, makes zero sense. If you talk to any of our students and to our young faculty, there's not a boundary between these things. So, or if you talk to, for instance, our new Dean of Computer and Information Science, he says, well, what's the next frontier in computer science? It's social sciences, right? I mean, the field has grown up in such a way that it's becoming so much more integrated, and the boundaries between fields in many other ways, leaving aside computer science and information science, the explosion of data is affecting us in enormous ways across everything we do. So I think in addition to more general information literacy, one of the things that is becoming an absolutely pressing need across everything is numerical and quantitative literacy. So how we handle that in terms of our teaching needs, in terms of our research needs, I think is going to be a big challenge going forward. The role of faculty is changing enormously. Their educational role is changing enormously. I'm sure you're all aware of this. There's a big move afoot to pull faculty away from thinking of themselves in the more traditional role as kind of the givers of knowledge that you receive and absorb, to being the folks who help to be a kind of guide on the path for students in acquiring knowledge. I think in many ways that is a daunting change, particularly for many of our older faculty, helping them to make that transition in ways that aren't threatening to them is going to be important. One of the things that I think is happening along the way with this is that our, how we structure our instructional teams is also going to undergo a lot of changes. Instead of the one lead professor for a large class, you're going to see much more of a team approach to learning and instruction that may involve more than one faculty member, that may involve a course coordinator across several sections of a class that may involve not only the TAs, but undergraduate learning assistants as we reinvent what we're doing in the classroom, helping us to think about how to navigate some of those shifts, I think is enormously important as well. Does there a few? Yes. I think he wants to come over with it. So I'm Ashley, I'm in the Food and Agriculture Library and here at Calis and I'm also an alumni. So I went through this school as an undergrad and after graduating I saw so many ways that the librarian would have helped me, but that just wasn't evident to me and I don't think it was evident to a lot of professors here as well. So the challenge now that I'm on the other side is grappling with how do we make that pitch? How do we do that in a non-threatening way where the faculty member truly does want to collaborate with us? Good, it's a great question. I think the approach into it is to do it in the context of various kinds of curriculum efforts where it's structured in. So here, a place to do that and I think a lot of our schools place to do that is if there's some kind of a freshman seminar program, use that as an occasion to say that information literacy is a necessary part of some of the skills that we teach in the introduction to college life. And if we can use that as an occasion to ensure that both the students and the faculty member get into the library and work with a librarian, that I think will have an enormous impact in opening some of those doors. I would go around and pitch yourself to deans. I would go around and pitch yourself to department chairs, offer to be a resource particularly for the DUS as a lot of our departments and programs are undertaking various kinds of curriculum and pedagogical reform efforts that you can sort of help them in one aspect of managing them. Other questions?