 Luncheon program at the 159th ARL membership meeting, remarks by Michael Tanner, convened by Mary Case. There's a lot of good conversation going on in Florida and Iraq. But we are delighted this afternoon to have Michael Tanner here as our speaker for lunch. Our Michael Tanner is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Chief Academic Officer of the Association of Public and Land-Grad Universities. Minor joint APLU, I should say, in January of 2011. Prior to that, he was Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois in Chicago for almost nine years, where he was my very first Provost. And then prior to UIC, Michael had a 30-year career at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He holds bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. At UIC, he was in charge of 14 academic colleges including the library and had principal responsibility for the budget. He spearheaded major initiatives in interdisciplinary areas including a successful NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award. At UCSC, he was chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences and Acting Dean of Natural Sciences before becoming Academic Vice Chancellor. He was the Academic and Executive Vice Chancellor for nine years, serving as the campus' chief operating officer. In 2000, Michael was named interim director for the University of California Silicon Valley Center, where he was responsible for planning a satellite campus for 2,000 students at the NASA Research Park at the NASA Ames Research Center. His principal research interests have been in the field of coding and information theory, and he is recognized as the founder of the field of codes on graphs, a theoretical framework for designing coding systems that correct errors introduced in the transmission of digital messages. He holds four patents and is a fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Michael's other interests include computer simulation models, educational uses of information technology, intellectual property, and issues of sustainability and energy consumption. A noted advocate for the academic needs and faculty rights in scholarly communication, Michael was a principal author of the 1999 report of the University-wide Task Force on Copyright at the University of California, a feature speaker at the 2004 CIC Summit on Scholarly Communication, and has been invited to a number of campuses around the country to speak on scholarly communication issues. He helped spearhead the CIC authors' copyright contract agenda, and was one of the CIC provosts on the Negotiating and Global Organization post-settlement contract. He's been an organizer, moderator, and panelist for the Saltwick APLU National Meeting Sessions, and he's a member of the advisory board for the NIH Pugnance Central. Please join me in welcoming Michael Tanner. Thank you very much, Mary. It's a great pleasure to be here with this very distinguished audience. I was, as Mary said, the provost of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and it's been quite a transition to be at the APLU. Thank you for listening to my old friend, Paula Caron. I haven't been sued in the last year. It's part of being a provost. I did come out of Silicon Valley. I grew up in the area of Silicon Valley, what it was still called, Santa Clara County, and picked part of the pair, which is now Semiconductor Lane. Maybe what I could do was talk a little bit about libraries from the perspective of someone who spent a life in technology. I know this is a very sophisticated audience, and I said, I don't know what might interest them there, but I'll give you a few musings on information technology and what it is doing for libraries. So the title is, Where in the Digital World is the Library? Which is sort of a variant of the typical question, exactly where is the library at this point. There are three themes in what I'm going to say here. One is around the internet. Back in the 1990s, I had the pleasure of being with some of the people who were part of this great internet and stuff, and everybody would have a conversation at the end and say, the internet changes everything, meaning if you were having trouble with this logic it seemed like it was taking you to some new space. It was because the internet changes everything. And at this point I think it's fair to say the internet has changed everything and it hasn't finished, so we're still in this time of very rapid change. It's both marvelous and terrible, depending on where you are, and what rights you want to try to protect. It's absolutely marvelous. It's very, very disruptive. Second theme is, in times of rapid change, design your future. You use another California metaphor, surfing. It's better to catch the wave than have it break on your head. So this is a time of flux and a time where there's opportunity. And the third theme is collaborative action is really necessary. And that's because we're in an increasingly interconnected world. You can't go alone, so you better get together. Now back to basics. What do I want in a library? The ideal library is a place where I can go whenever I want. I can get rapid access to any of the recorded texts of human intellectual activity on any topic of interest to me. I can read the pertinent material. I can have health and guidance and find that pertinent material. I will know that the records are authentic, and I know that they'll be there next time I come back and anybody else wants to get to those records. That's what I want from a library. There are five interconnected dimensions around this theme where the internet has had some impact. And I'm going to put them in sort of a cluster here and see if I can talk about each one. I had 50 minutes. No, no, no. Not today. I have to be somewhat agreed. The first is access availability and retrieval time. The second is the comprehensiveness and the quality of the collection. The third is density, durability, and security of storage. The fourth is the ability to find pertinent information. And the fifth is on the legibility of records. So I'm going to talk about some of these and the challenges that are there. There are lots of challenges out there for librarians. Now let me first tell you that many people said to me if you want to get something done, give it to a librarian. You have a very high brand name out there in the world of probos. Librarians and people are going to make sure that things actually work. Good thing. But you are challenged at this point. First, you're etymologically challenged. A library has to do with the bark of a tree and the writings that came out of the bark of a tree. And it's not too much about barks on trees anymore. It's not even going to be about paper very much anymore. It's not going to be about the physical records so much anymore. So other than the fact you've got the wrong name for the future. I'm going to sort of say there's a dividing line that's occurring in major form. There's no sharp division. But somewhere around 1960 we moved into an age where more and more was being recorded in some electronic form. And there was a break that occurred. Up to that point, it was really the physical medium that dictated a lot about how a library performed, what a library would be had to do with that physical medium. Now I think it's the Assyrian tablets that hold the record for longevity. I'm not mistaken. And that, as a movable medium, allowed you to have a library of tablets. And of course it created certain constraints on the size of the collection. It created enough constraints on the actual generation of the collection that you probably didn't have to worry about having the same problem. You had to carry it around, I guess. But it certainly kept down the number of manuscripts at that time because it was such a specialized form. So I'll go way back there. Because in the physical medium, our dependence on the physical medium and the effort of creating new works and duplicating new works actually proved a filter. Our record that would remain would be only those things that had high enough value that they could make it through a whole chain of filtering that was really generated by the physical medium. And that's where the internet is now causing us some problem because you can replicate and you can distribute almost anything at almost no cost. And while that is marble, it's also the problem. You've got to figure out how we deal with that. You have a massive record, of course, in printed form. And that record has to be preserved. The future is going to be more and more about things that are born digital, they're native to digital. And so I'm just going to concentrate on where that goes. They don't ever have one physical existence that you might say is the form. Think about that. I had the privilege of being at the Library of Congress and I got to see the original manuscripts of the composer doing these are a few of my favorite things and I can see where he crossed out and he found a better line and so forth. What are you going to do in the digital age to get back to that closest to the author? What? You can have the keystrokes recorded so you can figure out how to backspace. We don't have that. It never really quite existed in the same physical sense. That changes things. The physical records are going to be, of course, very important. There's always going to be a question that somebody would like to ask that will be tied back to the existing physical records. For example, are the tiers on this composition actually Mozart's? And you could probably find out something about that now but you can't find it out unless you actually have the physical artifact. So I think it's really important that we have that record but more and more the past is going to be converted into digital form. We're massively digitizing. Are there limits to where you can digitize? Well, sure, but it's hard sometimes to say what are the limits to where people will want to digitize and find that meaningful. The one that gave me a bit of a chuckle was being in Florence a few years ago and I went to see the famous statue of David by Michelangelo and right there in the room in the corner is the three-dimensional virtual and you can go and either look at the real thing or you can go and just look around. I'm sure you'll be comforted to know most of the people were looking at the real thing but I thought it was fascinating that they would have digitized it through all of this and give you this other form so the people could work with it. Access, availability, and retrieval. We've just made a quantum leap in the ability to do that if you enter the digital world and you should never underestimate the power of convenience the seductive power of convenience and flexibility. I confess I go to something that I can find easily. There's probably something better if I worked at it but in my busy life I say I don't have time to work at it what can I get to quickly that's good enough, right? And that's going to be a very strong force when you have the digital natives coming up. I don't, you know, digital the youth, the youth of our country I have a, my grandchildren I really was stunned to know that my four-year-old granddaughter knew exactly how to navigate to the URL to get to one of her favorite videos at age four. That was funny. Yeah, okay. Sit down and just start navigating on the web. The next generation is taking digital access as it's given certainly in the developer world and in many other places around the world where it's a leapfrog technology. I've been surprised. I've had to run a few tests with people that I thought were bibliophiles would stay with the beauty of holding onto a high-quality manuscript and they've come to me and they've said I just love reading on the kingdom. Really? Oh, the convenience of moving onto Kindle and I say, this is a person I never would have thought would have been a Kindle convert. So we're undergoing a certain kind of conversion. What time do I get, Mark Mary? We haven't chilled 120 for the whole session. For this whole session? Okay, I'll just speak quickly. We're undergoing a digital conversion all sorts of things are being digitized and it's the flexibility and convenience that's going to dominate that great deal of what we have in the past which has to be preserved carefully. It will be digitized so that people can get access. Now that leads to the next one which is the comprehensiveness and the quality of the collection. The great solution of this powerful information technology didn't solve the problem. It compounded it. If I could just give you people high-speed computers big disks and so forth and so on and you organize the world and everybody else had to live in a paper world would have a really nice library. But out there we're in sort of an information tools race. It's not an arms race, but it's an information tools race. You come up with some way of trying to keep track of stuff and somebody else comes up with a new way of generating more. And so that volume of production if we're just keeping track of what I personally composed the data density is going up where I don't have to worry about it. I can put everything that I personally composed right inside my pocket but it's that we've got machines that are now generating all sorts of things and large data sets. You can have sensors that are the size of dust mites and they're only just a little more expensive and they don't know how to self-reproduce yet but they're going to put out these massive data sets. How are you going to do the triage? If you have to have a scribe right down the data, I can tell you you'd be doing a triage, but you're going to have to enlist professional societies to help do that triage because you can't possibly keep up with the flow of data. If anybody thinks you can, I can give you the counter example probably and you can ask me the question. I feel confident I can come up because it's just the ability to generate data. The information technology just causes form. So we're out here trying to figure out how do we deal with terabytes and exabytes and all that's going to be generated and how do we go through the process of winning them down to decide what's worth cataloging. To have reliable storage with rapid access is going to require coordinated action. There's just too much out there and you're going to have to use information technology to help tame the volume of what's there. You have to use the approaches of information technology to actually solve the problems created by information technology if you think masses of information and data and manuscripts are there. There's so much. You can count pretty much on connectivity. I'll say that as a footnote if we come back. Modern devices assume that you have connectivity. I'm an old-timer. I don't always trust it. I sometimes like to cash something. Something I can hold on to just in case I should lose connectivity. But how many tablets are in the room who are violating the rule and blogging? They don't have anything for reading one of those clunky old CDs or DVD-ROMs, right? They say we're going to be connected. I won't wax nostalgic about shrink-wrapped software. But this is the assumption of the modern world that you're going to be having all these data flows, and you have to build that into the way that you think about cataloging. And that means that you are part of a collective interconnected library in some sense. Every single library is not, you know, no library is an island. Everybody is part of this highly interconnected world. You can't hope to be comprehensive. The density, and durability, and security of storage. Well, let me take an example from the domain, the keeping of repositories for scholarly works. How should we organize the repositories? The first reaction is every institution should keep track of the works of its authors. Or maybe you count on the publishers to keep track. But do the publishers actually have an obligation to mark up? I think really, and I'm not sure you could tell me, but I think really the publishers don't necessarily always do a good job of archiving. They've been counting on you. Okay. And when it's all flowing and you're just licensing stuff, which I hope won't be the case right now. But you have to say now who's really keeping track of all this data? If you just allow this to go up, you can end up with some problems. I will argue against hazard as being good enough. I have a problem in my own personal space. It's so easy to replicate something that when I have something I'm working on, I'm prone to make a copy just in case I should lose this copy. Then of course it's being backed up someplace else. Then of course I'm revising it and I can't remember which of the copies were actually revision. And pretty soon I've got copies all over. So in a fit of peak, I purge. I've been known to purge every copy. I've been saved by it back up someplace. I nailed it somebody. So do as I say, not as I do. Somehow there has to be somebody has to think about the collective strategy that you're going to use to keep the volume down and to know nonetheless that you'll have the reliable access. There are some well designed protocols and you can't afford to get so buried in copies you don't realize which ones are actually important ones. Central repositories tend to solve that problem. So we have the Library of Congress as a good example here where if you have one integrated library that tries to be very comprehensive and say, okay we know it's in the Library of Congress that's where the real copy is. And that works pretty well because it says that integrated. But if you have a single point you also have the corresponding vulnerabilities. The Library of Congress, it was one single spot and if it weren't for the distribution of some copies that allowed retrieval that would have been a real disaster. I mean it wasn't real disaster as it was. But that's a problem with a single point. Is it a single point that's absolutely invulnerable to certain kinds of loss in the Library of Congress? We are dealing with attack. It's something we don't often have to think of in libraries that in so much of the world we're now in form of cyber warfare in a sense. But that's really what's going on. You have agents and counter agents. And nobody's said we're going to try to see if we can wipe out all copies of such and such in all libraries. But when thinking about the security and engineer speaking, you do have to say now what are our strategies and what are the vulnerabilities of the overall system? So my specialty is air correcting coding and reliable communication. In Wildness is the preservation of the world, said Thoreau and I say in design redundancy is the preservation of the world. You've got to design redundancy if you're okay. The advantage of this fluid information that only every once in a while becomes manifest in physical form. Again, it's got wonders for the disabled community. The fact that you don't have to have one thing that you can have the font blown up that you can change things that you've manipulated. That is such a boon. And when you're doing some of the conversions that require human intervention you don't need to do them multiple times. I don't know about all the projects but I hope that you've got projects for thinking about those conversions so that you're all finding some way of sharing those so that you don't have to do them repeatedly. The changing of formats does have that old downside and the question about are we going to be able to compete with the Assyrian tablets? How many people lost something when 8 inch floppy's went out? How many people lost something when the hard shell little floppy went out? That includes me. And I have discovered that I thought I had something in a format that was still readable. Now I know it's readable with forensic computer science and the right tools that we can get to but practically it's lost. So again, I don't know there may be ways that you're thinking through but you have to think about the constant evolution of the media and how do you have a reader that can read it and have you actually migrate every single one to migrate and if you don't have a systematic strategy at a certain point say we're out of we're out of luck. Then we have that find the pertinent information. Wow can we find information these days? I must say my colleagues I was up when Google was first coming up and I said yeah, an algorithm that searches. How are you going to make any money off of that? So I'm learning I'm thoroughly chastised. So they're out there and they have these wonderful algorithms that do their link weighting and preference and so forth and they're Google is really able to bring up an amazing number of things that's the problem at this point Google is trying to figure out how they weed out all the chaff I hope you don't have to store all the chaff Google has a hard time figuring out how to get rid of the chaff and while Google is trying to figure out how to do that there are other forces at play that are working against it one is everybody wants attention and so there are people out there optimizing if ever Google says what their algorithm is there will be someone saying how do we get higher up in the ranking so we appear closer to the top there is one way of doing it it's called money Google won't they'll tell you they're advertising to you all along the search path as you go down through your clicks they've already expressed yourself by what you clicked on they can give you targeted advertising so they make the money there they also tell you these are the ones that have got money I don't know inside maybe Cliff does or somebody how much in fact the algorithm understands which are the clients that they're going after and which not Google always says no I think they don't bias those search results but all sorts of other people are competing with those search results the end of which is when I want to find and that's why I think you're actually going to need librarians at some point to deal with the quality of information that you're getting in what is again become a flood of sometimes irrelevant information so we have the revolution going on it's changing practically everything and sometimes it's forcing us to surface the models for how we made the decisions how the publishing industry was deciding how how will it be decided in the future everybody can publish you're the star in your own youtube video which of the youtube videos should we hold on to any of them who's going to decide that we've got a lot of new challenges because of this digital revolution but I think it's a very exciting time I think what I'll do is just leave you with one question which is in the digital world what would be the criteria for membership in the ARL I'm not sure I understood it thank you for listening music was provided by josh woodward for more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org