 I'm Joan Lippincott from the Coalition for Networked Information, one of the organizers of the conference. And Tom, I think we're going to just get right into it, okay? Okay. In my view, and I do have views about designing libraries, maybe too many, the truly important projects are where academic libraries have been redesigned or renovated, have derived great strength from the vision that underlies the design. What are the ways that the Taylor Family Digital Library reflects your fundamental vision of libraries? The first thing I'd say is that I see myself as a pragmatic visionary. I love great ideas, but I also think that we have to be committed to strategies that can realize those ideas. So importantly, it is to know your vision, but also to realize it. The Taylor Family Digital Library was designed to support continuing change. I had seen the rapid evolution of library services and our role, and knew that whatever we decided in 2007 was only going to be valid for 2007. So I've described this by saying you design for the library that you know now, you design for the library that you can imagine, and you design for the library that you cannot yet imagine. So what that means is that you actually have to build a fundamental infrastructure that will allow that building to evolve over time. And in the Taylor Family Digital Library, we did that by having raised flooring throughout the building, even in the museum. That was an 18-inch space that allowed us to put all of the electrical and networking under the floor. And so that allows us to have electrical outlets at every user seat in the building. And we also have over 50% demountable walls. Now, that doesn't mean they're easily moved. They're not on wheels. But they're not load bearing, so that in fact they really can be moved. And so you really could create a very different structure in this building. And I would expect that to be the case in 20 years, in 2038, that in fact that the building would be quite different and supporting services and users in a very different way. The other thing that we focused on from day one was on users, on students and scholars. And Scott Bennett, former university librarian at Yale, had just published a terrifically important study published by the Council for Libraries and Information Resources, clear in 2003, in which he studied the 10 years of library growth immediately before that time. And what he found that in spite of the ideas that were thrown out, that in fact most of that growth had been focused on responding to collection growth. So I had the good fortune of having a new provost right at that point in time. Alan Harrison arrived on campus almost simultaneously with me in 2006. So we came here to build this building. And he had just read Scott Bennett and was totally convinced. And so we were committed to making sure that collection growth never drove users out of the building. And in order to ensure that, we only installed space for 600,000 volumes in the building on day one with the understanding that we would never increase that. And that what was roughly two-thirds of the general collection that was in the main library at that point in time would move to our high-density storage facility which we were able to build at the very same time. I will say today there are fewer than 600,000 volumes in the building. Another focus was I had a strong belief in the convergence of knowledge and culture. So I believe that libraries, archives, museums play an integrated role in supporting knowledge and understanding of artistic and scientific achievements, but importantly of the human experience. And those three areas fill that role in different ways, but they actually work or such a rich combination together and that we should support that to the degree we could. At that point in time the University Art Museum reported to the position I held and but it hadn't really not at all been integrated in the library. So we actually designed the TFDL with a full functioning museum in the space and to offer students and scholars access to that broader cultural experience to make the museum part of the instructional and research program of the library and of the university, not just an exhibition space, but yet at the same time because it was a public exhibition space. It allowed us a new connection with the larger Calgary community. And the other really important thing from day one was the focus on knowledge creation. Information access is ubiquitous. It was then and it's even more so today. But it's what do we do to support the use of that information to create new knowledge. So we focused on technologies. We focused on collaborative spaces. We focused on expertise. And we also decided to invest in a 34.5 million pixel visualization studio which was a very unusual decision at that point in time. But in fact that visualization studio is actually provided the first blueprint for the evolution of our functional support for the way research is done today. And I refer to this as a new synthesis. And this is where digital content and the analytical tools that support the analysis, creation and dissemination of new knowledge are integrally related and that we have to consider that digital content and the analytical tools in combination. Excuse me. And I think that many people here are so interested in bringing faculty back into the library and that visualization studio at the outset was one of the most significant things for bringing faculty literally back into the library. It was terribly important in and of itself because one, there was actually not a 34.5 million pixel wall anywhere else on the campus. But it was particularly important for us because it brought people into the library from medicine. It brought people into the library from medieval studies. It brought people in from architecture. And it very quickly built links with our spatial and numeric data services where they were beginning to teach GIS to faculty and graduate students. And so that combination was just a, it was a fervent initial mix for us but it has evolved in such a, in a way that's absolutely essential today. Thank you. Tom, one of the lessons learned that we, the organizers along with Greg of the Designing Libraries Conference hope to impart to all of you is that design is never complete. And we've heard that mentioned in a number of the presentations. So even newly opened libraries, meaning entirely new libraries may need major or minor adjustments. What are some of the significant changes that have been made in the Taylor Family Digital Library since it opened? Well, there are many and probably some of them were corrections of thoughts that we had right off the bat. But the major changes have been substantial. And they're particularly meaningful. And the fact that we've been able to make them is terribly important. One of the important ones is the graduate research commons. So the building is a wonderful space for students but graduate students felt like we had not focused on them. So we have focused on them now and we have a space where they can actually book for a whole term, both a space and a locker where they can keep their materials and so forth and only graduate students can enter the room. We developed this in association with the Graduate Student Association and with the graduate studies faculty on campus. I heard the reference earlier to microforms. We have moved all of our microforms and the equipment with which it was once used out of the building to the High Density Library and turned that area into more student spaces and more technology spaces. We have created a, as you just heard, a virtual reality and a one-button studio space. A particularly important move was that we moved the Research Data Center which was in an adjacent building into the library. And the Research Data Center is an outpost for a federal program from Statistics Canada that has confidential information about the general public of Canada. And one has to go through a very serious vetting process to be able to use that material. But our open spatial numeric data services had compatible information and it's publicly available. And what we realized was that the people who were using the Statistics Canada information, there was this very closely interrelated data that they were not using. And in the workshops that it was introduced to them, they weren't hearing about all the kinds of data and they weren't getting the kind of GIS and other analytical approaches. And so we actually created a space in the library to move them into the building immediately adjacent to spatial numeric data services. In fact, to build a much closer relationship between those important areas of research support. We've created an auto-visual reformatting laboratory and as those who went out to the new high density library saw the other day, we're creating a audio visual reformatting laboratory there but we in fact first created one in the TFDL and started our work on the audio visual content of the Capital EMI Music Archive which had negotiated the gift from Universal Music officially announced in 2016 but which we had started in 2014. And we've had a good deal of support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the reason for that is one because of the nature of the collection that we hold of the audio materials, 13,000 files are actual master files and production masters not replicated anywhere else. Similar relationship in the video materials and our libraries, our archives and our museums are full of audio visual material. Well, just our collection has 40 different formats in it and rapidly those formats are becoming unusable and so the Mellon Foundation sees this as actually an international crisis is that our repositories are full of material that is increasingly unusable by the day so we are developing an industrial model that we hope can be broadly replicated for converting material, oh gosh, we buy conversion equipments on eBay all the time or wherever else we can find it to move from one format to another to create a body of material that can be preserved over time and not just preserved but actually be made broadly accessible because this material is really important. It's actually the record of the last half of the 20th century. In addition to that, you just heard a presentation about Labnext. Labnext was a very explicit outcome of the research project in identifying what today's researchers need and so whether it is a perfect instance and perhaps it isn't today and hopefully we'll change it tomorrow but it does respond to a vital need for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinarity today and those kinds of approaches to the grand challenges that society expects to see addressed in our universities. Thank you. Well, I think many people here are worried about putting in high-tech facilities that may be out of date in a few years. So what strategies have you used to get the funding? Are you reallocating some of the library budget? Are you getting funding from your VP for research or your provost or other places because a lot of your work say with the Mellon Foundation I don't believe supports the actual reconfiguration of facilities and may be incorrect there. You're actually absolutely correct. So we're very fortunate and there has been a program on campus supported by the Office of the Provost which is we call FARCAR which is Facilities and Classroom Improvement Fund and so we have been able to consistently apply to them for money to enhance particular areas for particularly vital purposes and so not as much as we would have wanted but about 50% of the lab next funding did come from those funds and a number of the other areas in the building have similarly benefited and then there's a while it hasn't dealt explicitly with research capabilities but we're very fortunate that the students union here at the University of Calgary is actually a very wealthy organization in part because they support conferences like this and so they have what they call quality money and so we have been able to go to them for particular enhancements particular technology enhancements that gave more support for high-end animation and desktop creation so we've been able to go there as well so I think we've been fortunate and we have been oh so canny and oh so desperate all at the same time but also so visibly successful with your programs and I think that's important too both for people who come into the library for people who participate and for the communications and outreach that you do well I think Christy Hurl's presentation gives you a good sense of how aggressive we are in trying to spread the work and with the changing nature of research it's a complex environment and before we started focusing on the multidisciplinary research needs of today I had a sense that faculty didn't come into the library from many disciplines and in the process of our investigations we found that yes indeed they did come into the library but they mostly went to spatial and numeric data services they went there they drew on the expertise they drew on the data and that in fact that we were essential in their work but they did not any longer take advantage of the traditional ways in which we have supported research and so they all knew Peter Peller who's the director of that program but the traditional liaison network was really not a point in the new research environment that they were establishing those connections So this meant a lot to you in terms of the evolving role of the research library I think it's major I referred to a new synthesis and as I explained I think that's the intersection of digital content and the analytical tools and that one is not useful without the other and as Christie referenced and showed you the diagram of the services that these scholars found most important going forward and they were areas in which we had strengths but some of them were being envisioned to be applied in different ways and I had a discussion with Brian Mormon who's an associate vice president research in the Faculty of Arts and I was talking to him about the traditional ways that we in the library had supported research and he turned to me and it was without criticism and without sarcasm and he just said it, he said but we don't do research like that anymore so that's my new mantra and I think it should be the mantra of everyone in the room I think some of you are very aware of it So what I would say about that is that as Christie described we're seeking to create a research platform and research platforms are not a new concept, they're certainly in the STEM areas there are those areas where you have a set of services that can be applied in multiple disciplinary focuses and so particularly in the neurosciences and looking at everything from pre-birth problems to issues through schizophrenia and so forth, depression and then those that go right out into end of life problems and what they have created is an analytical layer that can support the research at each end of that spectrum but by using the same functional capacity so that's what we are trying to do for a range of areas we're particularly focusing in areas where such research platforms don't exist I mean the great thing about libraries is that we're the neutral place and we'll support all of you and some people come to us to a greater degree because they don't have labs and that we can be their lab but we need economies of scale, we cannot respond to these researcher needs in one-offs we need really to create this band of services so how do I think that matters for research libraries right now? I mean this is not tomorrow, this is right now is they so need these capacities that in fact we may be the most logical place for them to receive this support but if we don't support it, they will go elsewhere to develop it because they cannot do without it so the Association of Research Libraries, pardon me, has certainly the membership many have recognized this and recently we created and I was fortunate to have been actively involved in the creation of new criteria for research libraries in the 21st century and these are to identify the elements necessary to success and in these new criteria which were adopted unanimously by the membership I mean unanimity and ARL, I mean where did that come from? but what they know is how important this is and that in fact that libraries need a new role in the research ecosystem and so several of the criteria specifically address the development of that new role so what will happen if we don't? our importance in that we will be great learning spaces but in fact the very same thing that those researchers need our undergraduates are needing also people are learning GIS at 19 years old and they're learning VR at 9 so we're just behind the line and so if we do not develop in this way our role in academic research will decline and our importance to our universities will be significantly diminished so I am curious what's your prediction? a percentage, a yes or no where do you think things are heading broadly? I think it's great that ARL defined this set of characteristics because it doesn't matter if you're in the organization or wanting to be or just not at all part of ARL you can still use those same criteria as guideposts for where you want your library to be headed but realistically speaking do you want to venture a guess for where things are heading? well first I want to agree with you that this is not about ARL libraries this is about all libraries particularly in Akading where research is a vital function I think we're significantly behind this change has been going on for some time it's not that we haven't recognized it but what's happened in research is with the turn to societal grand challenges this kind of multidisciplinary research Suzanne Goopy who spoke yesterday afternoon okay she's a cultural anthropologist she's in the faculty of nursing she's in the community health program which is over in medicine and she's producing results that are about changing the protocols and the bus transportation routes of the city of Calgary so this is where we are today this is what we all should be embracing and this is just this is what's happening and it's happening rapidly and so an English professor and a computer scientist are involved in a common analysis of 150 years of science fiction literature that's an everyday project today so if I look at proportionally how fast are we progressing it's not tremendous but on the other hand we are getting it but when I talk about our getting it and your question about money really speaks to this and I had a conversation with our colleague Greg Grashke from North Carolina State about the way we look at our collections budget as a budget to purchase and license content irrespective of the analytical tools that will be essential to use that content irrespective of the fact that over 50% of the material that people use is not what we purchase is not what we license and we have not embraced that world in thinking about how we manage our libraries and if we don't do that in spite of how damn smart we are we won't be able to achieve at a fast enough rate and the nature of research will have changed again in five years so we'll be a generation behind Tom for my final questions most of you will probably not be aware that many years ago Tom and I were colleagues at Cornell University Libraries and your role at that time which was a long time ago was in special collections and archives I find it fascinating that the span of what you've accomplished in your career is so much wider than that specialty and I think our audience would be very interested in your role in documenting underrepresented groups and in making special collections and archives a signature program of the 21st century library can you tell us a little bit about that please I'd love to I do think that as a great deal of the information that we have managed in the past becomes ubiquitous and that the collective collection and shared print and so forth how to hide each trust and so forth provides us access to a wealth of general collection materials at the same time rare and unique holdings are taking on a larger and larger importance and in a very different way than some of those reading rooms that we heard described earlier this morning and that they're just terrifically compelling in instruction and research I mentioned yesterday to some of the people touring the library about our Numismatics collection which is a very strong collection that's actually in our art museum but it could be in our special collections and it's such a powerful teaching tool so if you can put in the hand of a student a coin with the head of Cleopatra on it that was actually stamped by the Roman army when Mark Anthony was in North Africa what a view of society how does that move a student from what happened on Facebook yesterday to all the Facebook's of history it just introduces a tremendous impact on the mind that goes forward so that's what teaching and research with special collections can do but it also has a tremendous societal role so in the late 1980s at Cornell University I was responsible for leading the initiation of the human sexuality collection and the human sexuality collection was the first focused effort by any academic institution in the US certainly by any of the larger universities to focus on documenting the social and political life of gay and lesbian individuals and what I had seen over the years was how both our collecting and the way we describe and promoted the material had marginalized women had marginalized African Americans had marginalized indigenous peoples and we were going right on with that and that in fact we had to change course and that this was an opportunity to in fact broaden the evidence and the record of a substantial component of society and so when we did this no one else had done it it drew a lot of attention it it got a lot of attention it's the only time in my life that I received personal threats for my professional practice coming through the mail fortunately it was real mail not e-mail gosh would have hated that but this was also right at the time that the AIDS epidemic hit and it proved to be so important and I'm going to tell one story if I can get through it of a man from North Carolina who had grown up in a rural area of North Carolina had gone to New York City as a financial officer a stockbroker and also became very active in the arts community in New York City his finance his firm fired him when they became aware that he was a gay man and he contracted AIDS and he had to return to his home in North Carolina and after hearing about our collection he had a tremendous collection of art and records of his own experience as being how he was treated with AIDS which was horrifying in and of itself in the medical environment and so he contacted me and I had newly hired a curator for the collection and we flew down to probably to Raleigh we rented a car and we drove out into the countryside and we went to went to their home and he and his his sister was taking care of him and he had been living in a separate building on the property and so we went out to there where his collection was and his sister and I carried him over our shoulders there and we picked up the material and we boxed it up and we hauled it to the plane and we flew it back to Ithaca New York and we contacted his sister on Monday of the next week and and she told us that he had died and that he had stayed alive long enough for us to get his collection so that's what the archival role can mean to individuals but it is so powerful in the larger society and obviously has changed so much research and contributed to the elements of society today at the same time after coming here I have became a founding member on behalf of the University of Calgary of the Board of the Military Museums which is located near downtown Long Crow Child Trail it's one of the two military history museums in Canada and the University of Calgary has a library and an archives there and I was fortunate to be able to raise private money to actually establish an exhibition gallery there as well and so that collection is one of the great research collections from military history but for political history and social history but what we chose to approach in terms of documentation was a holistic approach so the impact of warfare on society and not just the formal military experience but in fact how has that impacted society how has that impacted civilian populations looking at the effect of terrorism looking at the effect of internal civil wars and and created such a rich experience for the public and for researchers and for students to be able to understand the role of the military history of our society and this is not political this is professional this is how we should be filling our professional role is by creating the records of important elements of society that might not be well documented or well understood or incorporated into the educational and research environment and at the same time that we think about particular parts of society we need to look at those parts of society that are also obvious but because they're also obvious we may not be we may not be pursuing them and that's the way I see the gift by Universal Music Canada of the Capital EMI Collection to the University of Calgary so this is a collection that is a miracle that it exists from 1949 to 2012 EMI became the major music industry giant worldwide and this collection was managed to survive through those years, through all the transitions in the music industry, through all the artists through all the AR people, through all the concerts through the business operations which were largely hidden and so a collection of 5,500 boxes, over 2 million items as I've mentioned over 40,000 audio and visual and video tapes the record Canadian artists like Anne Murray and Tom Cochran but also the original DAT tapes from the BBC sessions of The Beatles the original disc from which the rubber soul vinyl albums were pressed an album by David Boyd which was actually created in Quebec at a studio there that was never broadly distributed so really remarkable material but it's part of the culture, it's part of the social it's part of the political, it's part of the industrial, it's part of gender roles, it's part of fashion I would say that most of the people in the room have had some experience of the last half of the 20th century, what was more important across this spectrum of time than popular music so what does it tell us about our society and about the impact of popular music worldwide so we also need to seize those opportunities to document and provide understanding and accessibility for materials that are the ubiquitous aspects of society and once again in developing the new criteria for ARL this societal role is formally recognized for the first time yet in fact historically libraries, archives and museums have played this role over century after century after century in preserving whenever possible the record of diverse societies and I'll tell you from a personal point of view to have been able to enrich my career by involvement in playing this important societal role has just been wonderful I love it. Well at the beginning of the interview I talked about the importance of a vision for today's library you've just heard such a vision and the breadth of Tom's vision, his commitment to the 21st century libraries are truly remarkable thank you Tom.