 Great, thank you very much for that kind of introduction. I hope this lavalier mic is on So it may sound like I know what I'm talking about But I actually I'm at a moment in my life when for the first time I'm actually directing a library like many of you if an actual physical library. There it is it's a snow library on Northeastern's campus and as part of becoming a librarian And thinking about what it means to run a university library I'm thinking about what I think all of you are thinking about which is Where are we in the long history of libraries? I'm actually very jealous of Jessica running a library that's been there for a long time rather than 1990 as this library is But as a historian, I think we're we're really at a very interesting point in the history of libraries because of many of the things that have have impacted us Since the advent of the web a quarter century ago and even before that some of the trends that were going on in the way libraries were working and working together and I emphatically put that word into the title because I want to talk a lot today about what it means to work together and in fact Digital public library America was really as I'd like to say it was an exercise in togetherness of how libraries work together, which is actually not that easy so I think as we look at the Hundred-year history of libraries the thousand-year history of libraries So many of the themes of this conference over the past few days have touched on Really the big changes of our age that we're in the midst of tackling and that are really a multi-decade effort to address The first one is that that my library like your library is not alone. It's it's part of a network our libraries exist in a network and As I think about this, I'm also thinking about it from The user's perspective from the students perspective from the professors perspective I still have on campus every year our library receives about 2 million visitors get 10 to 12,000 Gate checks a day. It's a lot of people coming in and out of the physical library But of course we have an order of magnitude more than that visiting library.northeastern.edu every day We have multiple campuses and also The way people see the library, it's also as a virtual library. They are experiencing it online They're thinking about resources that they can get through interlibrary loan And so what I'm struggling with right now is really thinking about how we express that To our patrons how we express it to the researchers What are we telling them about our library and at the end of my talk? I want to come to this idea of the library as a kind of user interface How do we present ourselves and how do people in a sense read the library? How is the library legible to them as an institution? Incorporating truly and very deeply this idea of a library sitting in a networked environment I think is one of our really key challenges and this really came about a Lot of my thinking about this in working at the Digital Public Library of America, which now has over 20 million items Brought together from about 2,500 different libraries archives museums historical sites And so this was a virtual Synthesis of these many collections it surfaced in a lot of ways new collections Collections that were distributed and I want to talk at length about that You know and and everywhere I would go to talk about DPLA oddly The day Donald Trump was elected I was in Riga Latvia, and I was giving a talk there, which was very strange to be there a couple of November's ago but I just did a search on on Riga and we had 800 items in the Digital Public Library of America from this city and of course when you when you dig down What you find is that this collection is Scattered across the United States, so there were images at the New York Public Library 100-year-old photos There were These weird fire department insignias that sit in a science museum in Missouri We had books that were scanned at from the University of Michigan published in Riga or about Riga there were very old photographs and daguerreotypes at the University of Washington In Seattle, and there were architectural plans in Columbia, so Maybe an obvious point But I always like to sort of go under the hood and look at the contributing institution page at DPLA And what you would see is that for any topic the actual collection about a subject was scattered extremely widely and It's only really of course through the network that we're able to kind of re-aggregate this collection Near the end of my tenure at DPLA there were a number of institutions that Had the distributed collections of the poet Emily Dickinson Harvard and Amherst among them that for the first time reunited all of her original drafts and letters and all her writing into one location and then we're able to deposit it in DPLA and of course that was the the power of this idea of reuniting collections so networked resources People and institutions are of course a key challenge and I was at the workshop yesterday afternoon Lork and Dempsey gave a great Sort of introduction for me of sort of how some of this networking has happened in the UK Which is in some ways similar in some ways different. It's maybe a little bit more centralized in some cases but These challenges around the the networked library. I think are still we're still struggling with them I mean if we can be frank about it because it is actually hard to get outside of your specific institution and think about How to interact with other institutions what strengths you have and I'll come back to that in a minute So synthetic collections, right almost everything From the perspective of the user is now not just local but in fact synthetic from other places that to Now putting on my historian cap to me as a researcher But I care a lot less that it's in my local institution as long as I can access it through my local institution And in fact if you talk to researchers or teachers who are incredibly busy, they're running the class They're in the lab. They're doing these works They don't necessarily make the distinctions that we make in our mind About what the library is the legibility of a library to them Has changed and they may not even be aware of it So how do we express that to them and how do we leverage the fact that we now have these great synthetic collections? I think the second big challenge and it's of course related is just this question of scale It is really astonishing as a historian to think about the scale of resources we have access to And I've been privileged to be at at places with very large libraries. I did my my PhD work at Yale I literally could not have done my dissertation there without the fact that they had so many books that I was able to look up Very rare books in the history of math that were actually physically on campus and I was able to come here and do some work here But it was it was physical access to those books now I can you know at 3 a.m. In my pajamas access all the same books online and many more that I didn't realize existed And not only that but just again keeping my historians hat on for a minute I have access to new collections that are almost unimaginably large and that confuse me So it when we're Rosensweig and I wrote a book on digital history, which is now almost 15 years old Even then 15 years ago We were looking at the case of the poor presidential historian who's working on Presidential history, but is no longer working on let's say Lyndon Johnson like Robert Carrow did in his masterful work on LBJ who read Literally over a decade or more Tens of thousands of memos from the White House now you have in a modern White House literally a billion emails In a four-year period in the first White House that had access to email the Bill Clinton White House eight years They had about 40 million emails, so you can no longer Read it all right, and that's what I was taught to do as a researcher is you find your topic You locate the material about it you read everything and then you sit down and write a book right that's that that was method so that's no longer possible and and Libraries have always been good and now need to kind of reassert ourselves as an institution that help researchers sort through unimaginably large collections through metadata and through new means I think of Finding what we want to look for so that scale the fact that we went from the 1960s the 1990s Just in one institution the White House of Several orders of magnitude five orders of magnitude larger of a collection to deal with is is tough Library of Congress access accession the Twitter archive Billions and billions of tweets Everyone I think snickered at it when at the Library of Congress when they set up set this up And and yet it is an important collection that people will have to sort through historians will sort through that It happens that we now have a president who used this medium almost exclusively for pronouncements so that will become an important resource, but You can't read every tweet Even in several lifetimes, so what do we do about this question of scale as well? seems really really critical to me and You know worked for many years with my friends at your Piana. There's over 50 million items there I mentioned D PLA 20 million items. These are Justin These really special unique collections Of course, we're now dealing with large shared print collections So it's a great article recently in the Columbia student newspaper about recap Combined collections in that sit new at warehouse in New Jersey From several major institutions Princeton and Columbia and NYPL among them 20 million volumes that now Sit in New Jersey Obviously as you can see here or not exactly accessible to researchers directly And so the process of discovery within that has changed for the researcher I want to come back to the movement of books as well and physical items, but the legibility of the library Now with something like recap is different for me as a researcher if I go to the library and I know most of my Books that I need are somewhere else. They're sort of out there. I don't I didn't even know where this was in fact It's evidently unmarked on Google Maps, so I can't even go there So what is that? What does that mean the fact that we have this kind of? outside world to our library I didn't even mention of course scientific collections, which As a historian of science, you know the old old saying about this is that 90% of the scientists who ever lived are alive today And that's a shocking and also maybe true stat. Maybe it's 85% at this point, but Certainly 20 years ago that was true and and that also means that our science production is just enormous The scale not only of articles, but increasingly we're all dealing with data sets that are again extremely large Climate science for instance produces petabyte scale climate models. What do we do with those? So scale is a huge problem So coming back to to my humble library. What what am I to sort of think about the approach of our library? So we have a decent size collection, but we are we're not a Cambridge. We're not a Yale We have a lot of research going on on our campus. It has actually surged at Northeastern campus where research one University we have people working across the science and technology fields We also have arts and science arts and humanities social sciences So what does this? Building what does the institution of the library? mean So I come to this word togetherness which which I use very intentionally because And I felt this really at DPLA as well and then in other projects that I've worked on like when we started working Over a decade ago on Zotero the citation open source citation tool that we created at George Mason It's thinking about collaboration and how we kind of work together and collaboration is really really hard You know human beings are social animals, but actually we don't collaborate well naturally We like to kind of be together, but we also like to be separate and actually that's part of I think the concept behind Togetherness is how we can kind of be adjacent and having interactions without unifying And and here again, I've heard really interesting examples From the UK about how you're doing it and there are different models for it But my point about togetherness and it's really exemplified in something like DPLA is there's ways to be virtually Unified and yet remain separate There are political and social ways to do just that to have a kind of light Affiliation where we're still doing our own things and maybe doing some things better than other folks but yet leveraging what's out there in the network and Addressing together the question of scale because I think Individually we can't address scale we have to address it together because it's so big and we can leverage our combinations to do that so just a small example from DPLA that I really liked when There was a thaw in our relationship with Cuba. Maybe now it's refreezing but the National Library in Cuba Added a little button for DPLA. We had an application programming interface. We had open data they were able to add links to WorldCat of course OCLC and DPLA so that when they digitize their card catalog they could actually have a button and link to a digitized book from Harvard Very lightweight way of leveraging the association and the relationship together So These lightweight connections and often they do happen technically but I also want to talk about some social methods are Really key. How can we increase this kind of interconnectivity? so the the kinds of words that I throw around with my staff now are are these things is sort of How do we think about collaborative spirit shared spirit? How do we leverage our diversity? Which I think is really quite critical. There's some things I know, but there's lots and lots of things I don't know and having a diverse staff with different viewpoints and coming from different backgrounds is really critical and then also I think Part of this discussion is about interdisciplinarity. So I'm a historian, but I've worked a lot in technology I think everybody is going to have to be working a little bit outside of their Very distinct disciplines to tackle this and the modes of approaches. So sort of how we do it are through these kind of flexible Multifunctional capacious service space. These are the kinds of words that I really emphasize We need to work on And I'm not sure actually that libraries have been so good in these areas having very flexible services is actually really hard It's hard on staff who might have to be doing many different things Tools it's often hard to build a tool that's multifunctional if you if you code something you're often sort of rigorously coding it for specific use cases and You know a great example of that from actually just going back to Zotero You know we did it for people like us researchers who needed a great way to pull citations right off the web right within the web browser then it ended up being used by By people to store recipes because they realized that they could extract ingredients off the web We never thought about that But they ended up using that tool lawyers ended up using the tool for case law and we never Hard-coded in any of that it just happened to be that the tool was very multifunctional from its spec and others went and and used it capaciousness the ability to Store lots of data and operate on that data is really key and of course we're again in a multi-decade movement from From nouns to verbs from things that we have Physically in our library to services that we provide that access those things Including those that we ourselves have but then also operate on find other material outside of our specific world So thinking more about services and the verbs that we incur incur So I was very interested to look at the strategic plan That RL UK has and already has a lot of these elements in it So one of the the kind of a good case study For this sort of model dealing with scale and dealing with the network is the way that libraries are now Acting as kind of stewards not just for their material, but for this material that's out there on the network curating distributed materials Of course European your piano did this from the start DP LA as well in their Site on the Great War they have materials not just from your piano, but drawn from New Zealand from DP LA and from Australia from Trove These Kinds of projects. I think are really great the fashion site that your piano runs that again curates for the network 400,000 items apparel There are biological samples These kinds of things that are being curated by specific entities that are set up again in a lightweight way in the same way That DP LA was a fairly lightweight in your piano is a fairly lightweight institution giving the scale that we're dealing with to handle the Coordination but having a lot of the work actually happened in a kind of decentralized fashion the actual scanning we now have Groups University of Minnesota has set up a kind of sub-site that leverages DP LA to curate materials around African-American history So they are now dealing with I think this is an old slide I think they're up to about a million items through their umbra search where they've said You know we have a specific expertise in this area We have specific researchers who are interested in this and they've gone out and tackled How you kind of deal with the curation in this area? I think an even more interesting and More contemporary model is doc is documenting the now Which is a project that has set up? tools and practices tools and practices, but not necessarily even a lightweight centralized organization to actually allow distributed libraries to go ahead and archive social media photographs documents from unrest in the United States in our time and then to be able to synthesize that together into collections so Documenting the now has had think a lot of success in being right at the moment right because they know that Now in a kind of born digital age you have to collect while the material still exists You have to kind of go out there And they know that the best people to do that collecting are those right in the community Who actually interact with the community who can co-create with the community? So they're providing this kind of platform for Saving materials for putting it in a library setting it on a preservation path that I would not normally have But then turning around and saying okay if you do that in Ferguson and we do that in Boston We can interoperate our materials. They're gonna have the same metadata standard They're gonna have all stuff in fact don't even worry about those things. That's all going to happen behind the scenes I think these kinds of projects that are proactive and that are distributed but that interact are a great kind of contemporary example of togetherness this is Happening at scale. There are millions of items being saved, but it's not being done by one institution It's not being done by DPLA although. I hope some of this material will go into DPLA it's happening out there on the network and it leverages Thousands of people literally to deal with a question of scale and how we save the history of our time At Snell library. We're doing the same thing. So we're thinking about and again I saw this in strategic plan of what what does your library do? Well, and then let's enable your library to do that this this whole point I think is really key of no longer necessarily being well-rounded right the legibility of the library is oh Yeah, my library sort of has it all I go to my library to get this Now libraries can get that well-roundedness from the network. We're very lucky in that. We don't have a huge collection Of books, but we can get them very quickly for people We have lots of virtual books that we can provide and we can get physical ones for you as well but we do have some specialties and we want to in fact be angular rather than well-rounded we want to Emphasize actually what we do really well and what we do really well on the special collection side is that we have a lot of material about Boston we have an urban campus sits right in downtown Boston and We don't have extensive holdings from across the United States, but we have really good collections from the communities right around us and We have taken on curating this material and curating it for the Boston area around certain things So we have a project with six other six other institutions on the desegregation of the Boston public schools, which if you're not familiar with Boston history was a very tense period in race relations in the city And where busing began and students were bused to different neighborhoods to sort of integrate the schools It was really a huge upheaval. There were huge Fights and around this and many documents that were saved by northeastern other institutions so Thousands of these things now are again Synthesized together a new synthetic collection they exist physically at other places, but they've been digitized and We have kind of brought them together by linking up in a lightweight way with these other institutions So They have all taken their materials digitized it Put it into DP LA. We're actually leveraging pieces of the DP LA infrastructure But we're also leveraging our local expertise within our archives to curate and Describe and contextualize this material So a relatively small collection some thousands of documents, but it's an important moment in the history and culture of Boston And we realized we could really take an approach to this that would help curate it for everyone to use We also actually have pretty extensive holdings of newspapers in Boston and other materials We are librarians have actually gone out into local area neighborhoods to record Oral histories of those neighborhoods. So we have one in lower Roxbury our campus is sort of right on the border between Roxbury and Boston and the traditionally the African-American community the sort of center of culture has been in the Roxbury area We had a year ago Librarians again working with the community go out and actually record oral histories that we now preserve Digital video of in our digital repository service and we are putting those together with these other materials We also have access to maps from Boston public library We have our own maps Across time and so in general we realize that our angularity is really around our situation here in Boston And how we can sort of take these things and bring them together And so our thinking really is now we are going to focus on the Boston area And think about how we can enable research about this and some of this will involve our own collections But some of it will involve going out and being together with other local institutions and in fact through DPLA other national institutions Where we can pull together Boston materials and provide services around them So someone who wants to find anything about Boston can sort of come to northeastern Can study it can pull it together We also have in the library one of our other strengths is we have a big digital unit It's one of the things that really drew me to northeastern. We have Developers in the library software developers. We have People who work in digital scholarship We actually have a very vibrant digital scholarship group that's based literally in the library And we have a lot of researchers at the university who are very good at dealing with large-scale Data sets and they exist across the university in history and English and network science Computer science and so we're leveraging all them to also integrate into this idea of a research center around Boston data from the city And other data sets about Boston so that will become again synthesized into one collection So we're seeing sort of Boston as a kind of four-dimensional space Going back through time and then the three dimensions of the city where we can locate all the documents about the city all the maps all the data You know these hundred and thirty four data sets include everything from where trees were planted Every week of every year going back through time Real estate records all these things so when we when a researcher comes and wants to study something like the desegregation of the Boston schools We can provide them with a lot of what they need We can provide them with maps of where people lived where they were bused to what the communities were like We can provide them with the documents from those communities So we become a kind of service organization around this specific research topic We can help them do more with that as well as I'll get to in just a second around Dealing with the scale of the data. So the library is user interface when someone walks up the steps into the library What what are they imagining is sort of happening there? And I think here we still have work to do and we have work to do at Snell I'm sure you have work to do as well. I think all libraries sort of present themselves in a specific way We have recently begun a kind of top-to-bottom Re-envisioning of the library that involves physical changes, but also changes around much of what I just mentioned And a lot of this is this is our entry now changing the space to think about it as a set of services and service desks and access points and help points To help people not only with what we have there, but also what they might be able to access It's really really inspirational our offices for DPLA were in the Boston Public Library And this is the brutalist Philip Johnson wing of the library This is a photo the day it opened 40 some years ago and They recently renovated it as well and this is the the new Shot of that kind of entry point you can see the kind of difference in it And and I won't get into the flashiness and all that stuff But I think a key point about it is that it's trying to emphasize that there's there's material in the library There's material That you can access through your library. It's both virtual and physical I think a really great example of this is that they have a set of touch screens that In the lobby that show you Materials that are being digitized one floor down in the digital suite where DPLA was based and you can actually go up and Sort of surf through Boston and some old photos and actually pull it up on your phone and go out into the neighborhood And so they're connecting I think in a really interesting way the kind of virtual and the physical So they're sort of bringing these worlds together through the kind of almost lobby Acts as a kind of different read on what's happening in the library So I think you know this is one example But but we were really thinking it's at snow of how do we actually present all of what I've just said To our audience and how do we also deal with with this question that we are in fact? I think like many of you we're pulling books from shells. We're having to Move towards shared print storage. We need the space for other purposes We unfortunately can't build up or out. We're in an urban campus. So it's sort of our physical space is what it is And I think here we have been less good at articulating What's happening there? I think when a lot of campuses try to move their books they have angry faculty with pitchforks and Torches and University librarians are run out of town And we have so we've gently started to move books off campus. I took this photo this week we're moving about three hundred thousand books off campus to to the annex and and Even love that name. This isn't being recorded as this right So right that that idea that it's it's like adjacent now it happens to be a hundred miles away That's it. We're gonna take that out right of the video, but it's an annex It's like it's just next door. It'll show up when you need it We might even deliver it to your desk or we may digitize it and send it to you What what have you it'll be there for you? But but as I've been thinking about this Again the articulation of this to faculty. I think we've done we've done not a great job at sort of Rearticulating again the library and the library collection and I think here I think about Explaining the different uses that people have for library collection. So let me give you one example That I really like from my fellow historian and friend Michael Malley You know, he was pointing out about about books and that when people think about books They sort of they have one impression of it, which is you know, they're value They're really valuable, you know, I've written a few books you spend years on it and you Think about that that value and that's all you can think about and you have trouble thinking about your use of the books even though it may be different and So Mike has this great line about, you know We're taught to write as if our audience was a learned learned man of leisure with servants and We're taught to read like sous chefs gutting a fish quickly ruthlessly under time pressure And I really love this idea because it's completely true, right? 90% of our uses of Library materials we hate to say it are not you in your smoking jacket in your personal home library Gently turning the pages you're you're going in you're reading the intro and the conclusion and you're looking at a citation You're doing those quick things for those purposes Right a quick scan of a digital book is perfectly effective And so I think if we think about the many different uses that people have for library collections we can begin to kind of Think about again that network and the scale and what things we actually need proximate What things can be in the annex? What kind of uses occur that are more sous chefy and what things are more Learned man of leisure or woman of leisure And and we are starting now. We launched in the fall a new interface for our library virtual interface from for our library that kind of levels out these different and articulates these different uses so we do Think about everything that we have is one collection But we're focusing on virtual browsing One-click opening the availability of materials wherever they are if we link out to them world cat or other places We're trying to integrate as many books as we can and to say okay for these kinds of uses fine We'll get you a physical book if you if you really want it But you may be interested in a virtual book or virtual materials For a quick citation for a quick look to see if you may need to look at it further That is really key. We're also trying to enable new things So I think again from the researchers perspective. There's a lot of confusion out there about things like publishing There are all these new venues that are I get questions all the time like what should I publish in an open access menu? Why why should I do that? Is it gonna hurt my reputation? What is this plus one thing? What's you know, they don't get it We live and breathe it but most researchers are just head down focused on their world and so we have started to set up a sort of publication services within our library to Help researchers understand. What are these different venues? So the white rose? I was really interested in see this I want to articulate to historian why they might want to publish an open access monograph I have two of my books that are open access they get read far more than my my other best-selling book on the history of math and But their openness has actually been of a big help to me It's sort of out there always working for me because people find it online and they can take a quick dive into it And if they want they can purchase the book. So what is this whole landscape? I think we have to articulate better to researchers. We talked a lot about And I heard yesterday a lot about how we create financial models Around publishing for us, but I think we need to involve faculty in this much more and to say Here are some reasons to sort of work together with us on that Just briefly there's lots going on around digital scholarship and the services that we need to provide on it I think a library is a great place for this We have specific librarians who help with all aspects of digital scholarship help to data mine and do scale We have lots of projects at Northeastern Many faculty working on large-scale Purely digital projects that may start with physical objects like newspapers in the 19th century But then go in and do data mining to see how for instance poetry was Reprinted in newspapers across time. This is Ryan Cordell's a viral text project where he's worked With a computer scientist David Smith to find replicated texts across time in the 19th century Doing really cutting-edge cutting-edge research, but it's aided by the library as well We also have dedicated we have two dedicated data visualization librarians Who do things like GIS work in our help researchers with them? So as we're pulling books out off of one of the floors of our library, we're putting in a suite I've I've perhaps wrongly talked about it as a food court But a place where there will be all these folks who you can drop in find out what we have in the library What's out there in the network help you with the issue of scale? It's all in one place It's all our library But it's a new vision of a library that we're thinking about together So thank you very much