 Thanks for joining us. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information. And you are joining us today for one of the project briefing sessions, quite a special one that is part of Week 4 of CNI's fall 2020 virtual member meeting. Week 4 is focused around responses to the current crises that are facing our community and facing a broader community than just us and where we're trying to help the broader community navigate those crises. It's hard to think of one that pulls together as many threads as what you're going to hear about today. A couple of mechanical things. We are recording this session, and it will be publicly available subsequently. There is closed captioning available, and please do use that if it's helpful. We have a chat going, and you're welcome to use the chat as we go along. There is also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. You can use that at any point during the presentations to queue up questions for our presenters. After we've heard from all the presenters, Diane Goldenberghardt from CNI will be moderating a Q&A session. With that, let me introduce our speakers and the topic. So we have with us today Elizabeth Burns, the president of Mary Grove College. We have Brewster Kale from the Internet Archive and who is very well known to our community and one of the recipients of the Paul Evan Peters Award. He's joined by his colleague Chris Friedland from the Internet Archive as well. And we also have with us Michelle Wu, retired from Georgetown Law Library, who's been doing some very important work with the Internet Archive. Now, the topic today, the sort of proximate topic, is what happens to an important library collection when a college closes? What do you do with it? What's the best and most responsible thing to do with it? Also involved here is the whole concept of control digital lending and how you can share what are sometimes very rare or specialized print materials where there's certainly no digital version available. But it's important, particularly in a pandemic and even when there's not a pandemic to be able to share it. And we're going to hear about how that is put in the service of seeing that something really good happens to Mary Grove College's collection. Now, as you watch this, I would just invite you to consider that with the economic fallout from COVID, we are, sadly, going to have a significant number of institutions in this country and beyond fail. For example, there is a scary recent report from the Association of American Museums that suggests that we could lose a third of the museums in this country after COVID because of the economics. So this question of how the assets of an institution have a good succession plan is really an important one to be thinking about. And I so welcome this presentation from Brewster, who has always sort of risen to the occasions when we need it as a society and his colleagues. So welcome, all of you. And I will now shut up and turn it over to Chris to start. Thanks, Cliff. And thank you for that gracious introduction. And thanks for the opportunity here for us to tell our story. And thank you to everyone who's watching synchronously and watching the recording. Again, thanks for your time. So as Cliff mentioned, libraries, even before COVID, we're dealing with tremendous space pressures. And I'm a former academic librarian. I was an associate university librarian at Washington University in St. Louis. And that physicality of the collections is something that my staff, my library team, were dealing with on a regular basis. And so libraries have always been trying to figure out, how can we make our collections as widely available as possible, let alone in the COVID era? But certainly, as COVID has come to the forefront and has made libraries consider, what does our print collection mean? So what we're going to do today is look back on a collection that's come to the Internet Archive through a donation. And that's the Marigrove College Library. So I wanted to paint a picture of what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about Marigrove College so that you have a baseline of understanding of who the college served, what the library strengths were. And then we'll talk with Dr. Elizabeth Burns, who is the president of Marigrove College. We'll then bring in Bruce Jocale to talk about the Internet Archive's role in accepting donations and the work that we do in digitizing collections. And then we're going to hear, we'll bring Michelle Wu into the conversation to talk about controlled digital lending and how CDL can help make these library print collections available in pandemic times and otherwise. And then as Diane mentioned and Cliff mentioned at the start, we'll have a moderated Q&A at the end. So if you have questions, please do use the Q&A feature or the chat feature to ask those. And we'll gather them there at the end. I'm looking forward to a good conversation afterwards. But I wanted to start here and tell you about Marigrove College. So Marigrove College, which you're seeing here, was founded in 1905 by the sister servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And they moved to their Detroit campus, which you're seeing here in this photograph, in 1927. So Marigrove was originally a woman's college. It became a coed in the 1970s. And in recent years, it was known for its graduate programs in human resource management and social justice. But in 2017, facing financial hardship, Marigrove eliminated its undergraduate programs. And then in January of last year, the Board of Trustees announced that the entire college would close in December. And so a central question for Dr. Elizabeth Burns, the president of the college, was what would happen to the library and its 70,000 volumes of books? What happens to the books in a library when a college closes? What happens to the community that calls that institution home? When I heard that Marigrove was going to be closing, it broke my heart. It broke my heart that there would be other students who wouldn't understand the social justice perspective that an education here gave you. It breaks my heart that the sisters had to give this up. In 1905, the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary founded Marigrove College, training generations of women to be teachers and social workers in the tradition of social justice. Its books reflected those values, eventually growing to 70,000 volumes. Think of all the students that sat at these tables and struggled with these books and wrote those papers. What are you going to do with that spirit? Who can be trusted with that? I'm Brewster Cale, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. The idea is to build universal access to all knowledge. Can anybody, curious enough to want to go and find information, be able to find it, read it, explore it, dive into it, and then be able to add back their voice into the library? You borrow something and you have to return it. But when you return it, you should be better off for having had it. So we showed up, there were 40 people working to pack up this library into boxes and putting them on trucks. And those then are digitized? Then the digital copies are put online but in digital rights management to make sure that they are lent only one reader at a time. Today, less than a year after the library closed for good, the Mary Grove College Library digital collection is available to people everywhere. When they told us that they were going to digitize the library, they didn't know exactly what that meant. So actually seeing it now, this was a stroke of genius. This internet library stuff is a pretty good idea. A library is much more than the books on the shelves. It is the center of a community. It reflects a history of 100 years of interests and passions and collections that have been built by librarians, faculty, students. I borrowed something from you. Might be a thought. And that thought made me better. Now what can I do with that thought that returns it to you in a way that makes you better? And having that collection all online to be used by people all over the world, that is the idea of the blossoming of this next generation of Mary Grove College Library. A tower of ivory swathed in a love so bold. A beloved dream of a sister of soul. As we move forward to a bright new day, the values we cherish uphold and sustain our born and new generations. Tower of ivory aflame. The decision to donate the books to the internet archive for digitization and preservation means that Mary Grove College Library will live on through generations of digital learners. So our conversations with Mary Grove started last summer. So I've had a lot of opportunity to talk with several campus leaders, including at the highest board level, as well as the librarians, about what this donation means to the internet archive and what it means for the Mary Grove community. And so I'd like to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Burns to the screen now for a conversation. And I'm also gonna stop my share. Hi, Elizabeth, how are you? I'm well. It's good to see you, Chris. Yeah, good to see you. You know, I think it's interesting. We've actually never talked, met in person. All of our conversations on Zoom, we were harbinger of things to come when we started our conversations. So I'm wondering if you could tell us today, tell us about Mary Grove. You know, what was the campus like and who did you serve? Yeah, so well, the video really did a good job of showing the campus, at least the main building, classroom building of liberal arts and then there's classes were also held in the Madame Cadillac building. But we, you know, as you said, we started in Detroit. We started in Monroe, Michigan in 1905, came to Detroit in 27, small Catholic women's college. My mom went here. And so it was really something to see it develop in the 60s, as the 60s changed, there was a lot of social unrest, disturbance in Detroit. And we had a change over in the student population, first going co-ed and then becoming a predominantly black institution in the late 70s that continued on. So when I came back, I'm a grad as well, when I came back on the Board of Trustees and then took over as president, it was predominantly women still about 60% and then 60 to 65% African-American and beyond that other students from other ethnicities as well. So we were serving that population. It had been a teacher's college. So there was a lot of emphasis on that but it was also providing a lot of skill building, taking students from community colleges and then also offering associate degrees as well as bachelor degrees and then the master's degrees. And most of the master's students were actually in the master of arts and teaching. So in the educational area, as well as having the first social justice program at the master's level and the human resource management at the master's level. So it was really hard when we in 2017 when we made the decision to close undergrad was very, very difficult but the finances just weren't there. So that's what happened. And we did the best we could for our students who were our students at the time and then moved on to try to make it as a graduate college, which we quickly understood 2018 was kind of our honeymoon year and had been re-certified by HLC and had gotten through all of that and then realized that in 2019, took HLC a long time to give us the blessing and so our marketing was tainted by the show cause. And then we just didn't have the students that were going to be able to support it even if we down south. So we started planning for the closure in December that allowed us the decision was made in time. So it allowed us to get a number of students finished with their master's degrees and make arrangements for those other students as you're supposed to do to transfer. So we did that. And then we started looking at what we were going to do and so that we weren't sure whether or not we were gonna go through bankruptcy. So because of that, before we made any donations, we needed to demonstrate and this was my instructions from the Board of Trustees to ensure that donation was a responsible and cost effective way of handling it. It's even to put something in a dumpster and haul it away, cost of money. We have the sisters, the IHM sisters who are our sponsors really are very much aware of eco-responsibility. Sustainability is one of our values as the college. And so we really needed to recycle what couldn't be sold. And so the librarians did a wonderful job both of serving the students in that last fall semester as well as seeing what did we have? We had a Detroit collection. We had theology. We had social justice, very broad social justice library. And would somebody purchase those and who would purchase them? It wasn't going to cover the cost because we were gonna be left with a number of not only books but also the other materials that a library, somebody who wants to buy books is not gonna buy a microfilm or microfiche or what have you. So we were still gonna have to dispose of quite a bit of materials. So it came down to the fact that internet archives was in the area. They were in Ann Arbor and one of our colleagues at Wayne State University also in Detroit knew and made that connection for us. And it was, I just had to run the numbers by the board and it was very clear that it was a wonderful way to preserve the library and also to make the donation was fiscally responsible. So it was great. We had the team here in late November. We made sure that none of our students would suffer by the few weeks before the end of the semester that they wouldn't have access to the books. So we made sure that everything was covered and they packed up the library and it was an amazing sight. It was an amazing sight. What was the reaction on campus from all levels of stakeholders, your students up to your board with the decision to donate the library collections? How was that received on campus? I think to a person, it was, as Valerie said, and Valerie's one of my classmates in the video, Valerie said, it was a great idea. It was a stroke of genius. We didn't know that anything like that was available to us. And when we discovered it and that I could demonstrate that that was the way to go, it was perfect. It was very well received. The alumna and alumni are looking things up on line already. And so the faculty were pleased as well. It was just a great thing to have happen to us. And so you were faced with this really significant dilemma of what to do with the library and you decided, I'm assuming you also talked with other libraries. You mentioned not wanting to recycle it, but did you look for other libraries who could try to take the collection as a whole? Yes, our library director, Mary Kidman-Sammi did do that. They called the local libraries and that just wasn't anything, they didn't have space, they didn't have an interest. They had what we had kind of the thing. So there were pieces of it that Wayne State the university library was interested in. But when they found out that we were going to go with internet archives, they basically said, well, then the whole thing should be there. We're not going to buy the Detroit collection because it's going to be available. It's going to be available to our students. And so that made a big difference. And our faculty, if they're off teaching and a number of them are still teaching either at Wayne or U of M or wherever they ended up, they know that those books are now online. So it was a great serendipitous, but we were very grateful, very grateful. Can you give us just a bit of an idea of what was it like in the library in that final semester? Well, most of our students were online even then. So this was pre-COVID, but they were still online. So it was very quiet. We were focused on our students. So we had basically limited the hours that the library was open. Prior to that, actually, the library had been a source for our community as well around the college. We are sort of located in a residential area and people had come in to use, mostly to use the computers. And so there were a number of people who were continuing to do that. And that sort of came to an end as well. And that made it, but there were, we have a senior center, senior housing basically located on what used to be part of our campus. And the seniors actually did get internet in their apartment dwelling in a common area. So they have a library now and they can use it there. So they weren't coming over as much anyway. So I don't think anyone was terribly disadvantaged, but it was sad. It was very quiet. Yeah. And so you face this really big challenge of what do we do with the library? You looked for responsible homes and you happened upon the internet archive. And maybe now would be a good time. Let's bring Brewster into the conversation. Brewster Kale, the founder and digital librarian of the internet archive. So Brewster, what was your reaction when you got the call that said, hey, there's an entire library that's in a college that's closing? This was a fantastic opportunity for us. The internet archive had been collecting physical books, modern physical books for years through donations, mostly through Better World Books, which are books that come from libraries, de-accessioning. But it wasn't a complete collection. The idea of having a complete collection of not only the monographs, but also the serials, the microfilm, the reference materials to be able to try to build an example, complete collection was huge. Another was the specifics of this Marigold College. I mean, that movie just makes me cry every time. It's serving such a social need that, boy, do we need it right now. We need it available to people everywhere. So the opportunity here was tremendous for us. What we do is we have box these materials up, know exactly where they are, all the pallets, and we digitize them non-destructively. So the key thing is to understand that we open the books and we don't even open them all the way. We photograph them, high res, I have a person turning the page, no robots, and use the card catalog from the original library to go and get as good mark records as we can. And then we put the book back away in a box and put it into climate-moderated environments that basically allow this to be preserved for the very long term. We may not be the last people that need to digitize these books. So they're not destroyed. Then the digital materials go online and they're made as available as we can. And that means the blind and dyslexic, they get access to it all, all the time with no fees anywhere they are in the world. We also make them available for machine learning so that things can be done that way. And also now we're weaving things into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is, well, where people start now to go and explore something. And if you go down to the footnotes, often you can't get there. So we make it so that you can click and if there's a page number, it opens right to the right page, no account, no nothing, no privacy issues, just wham, there you are. And if you wanna page back, page forward, then you just get it and that's what most people want. But if you want more of it, then you can borrow the book. And that allowing people to go deeper is what we're really about as a library. And so this Mary Grove collection, we digitize it very quickly. We're able to digitize about a million books every year. So the idea of the 60,000 monographs from that collection, we're able to do in less than a month. The exciting part going forward is going to be the periodicals. All the journal literature, magazines, even trade magazines and things that are specific to Detroit and specific to that institution and going and making those available as well is a work in progress where we're really moving along and taking whole donations. So the truckloads that came from the Mary Grove library, about half of the truckloads are periodicals. Also we're digitizing microfilm at scale now. And so we're accepting donations and we're really interested in donations of microfilm because it's quicker. And the films that were generated in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, they're really good looking. In fact, we're going from 400 dots per inch up to 600 dots per inch because the film looks so darn good. So anyway, I just would like to just say thank you to Elizabeth and the whole community there. And there was 40 people, mostly students from there that helped in the packing and came to touch the materials that had been put there over a century. And we think of ourselves as custodians towards making this live for another day. There's one person in Toronto that has reached out to us and just said, thank you. He's print disabled. I don't know what his disability is, but I think he has them read aloud and he's been going through two or three of these books from this collection a day. And it's the social justice angle. And that is, it was just heartwarming to see, rarely as a digital librarian, do we get to see what people are doing? We get the stats. There's tens of thousands of people that are using these materials, checking them out, reading them, maybe just browsing them. Who knows what they're doing? I don't know, but to go and find out some more. So your interest in this was the intellectual unit, right? It was the entire collection, the whole library. Does Internet Archive field many of these kinds of these donation requests? Yes. And we try to bring the collections together and keep them together because I don't know. I think if you look at the publishing industry, they just think, you know, it's just a bunch of books. It's like, no, this is a heart and soul of a community. And those books were selected and they made it through decades of weeding projects. These are the ones that won. These are the ones that you want to find out the answers. You wanna see the books to the left and the right of it, that there's a coherence. There's a community that is reflected in its library and we must in the digital realm, reflect those communities going forward. So even if a book is a member of several different communities' collections, it's important to know each of those. And even though it may be a duplicate, we don't digitize it twice, we put it in these different collections. Well, now we're getting more libraries that are coming forward in large part because of the publicity from the inside higher end. And just yesterday, a small college in Boston donated all of their physical books, but the college is not going away. They just didn't need the physical books anymore. They wanted the space back. We'd gotten half of the books from Trent University when they were remodeling their library and they decided to donate those. And so that was not a complete library, but it was half of it. And we've gotten a couple other whole libraries offers and we've picked up already two or three. So we're interested in these whole collections. And I think of it as very different from a recycling option, right? This is a rebirth. If we do it right, if we can work with the communities that are still extant in these libraries that are, we need to serve people remotely. And this is a way to do it. So we just heard from Elizabeth that she talked with other libraries and saw if there were other libraries in Detroit like Wayne State University and others who could absorb the collection. And I know from my own experience, taking on 70,000 volumes is a really steep task. So does that give, like what's the scale, the number of books that gives Internet Archive pause in dealing with? Are we talking tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? We're interested in all. We just got a new facility that will store 12 million books. So that we want one of everything ever published. Books, music, video, periodicals, microfilm, we can handle it all. And we show up with a smile. If it's a large collection like this one, we will send people and they'll recruit locally to go and make sure that the packing is done. We pay for the packing and shipping. We're very fortunate to have the funding right now to be able to digitize anything that's physically donated to us. A half a million objects were digitized, were donated to the archive over the last 12 months. And our digitization is going very well. That's not even counting better world books donations. So how do you make these collections available to users? What's the Lending Library parameters? The Lending Library parameters is we digitize it, make it available blind and dyslexic with no limitations on the number of concurrent readers. And then there's the machine learning, which is increasingly becoming important towards understanding the changing demographics and interesting things you can do in the digital humanities. So that's fabulous. But then there's the lending system. The lending system is one person per every copy. And we have more and more colleges and schools that are going and weaving their collections together with ours, so it's not just one copy, but there can be two or three depths on any particular title. So that if a reader wants it, then they can get it for an hour. If there's nobody else, then it just seamlessly keeps going and going and going, which turns out to be the case almost all the time. But often people are in and out of a book within 30 seconds or a minute. Often people are really just looking for a factoid or they're just trying to check out, is this a book I really want? And they just put it back on the shelf. And so often the lent loans are very, very short term. They're not being read and in general. There are some, but very few. Really these things are reference works. They're referenced in the same way you kind of think of things in a library, how they're in like a research library. So Wikipedia, you're in, you check things out. Yep, that's kind of what I was looking for. I'm out of here. And we would like to make that type of interaction really useful, because that's your typical library interaction, not a bookstore purchase substitute. And so when the internet archive, I know from my own experience working as a partner alongside the internet archive before joining staff that you were focused on scanning books that were in the public domain. And then it started moving into more modern books. And so the way that the internet archive makes those modern books available is through the lending system that you were mentioning, Brewster, is controlled digital lending, right? Yes, absolutely. If it's public domain or library public domain, which means it's the last 20 years, then it's freely available to everybody with no restrictions, bulk access. And this lending system is really restrictive. I mean, it's kind of clunky, but at least it does work. We've been doing it for nine years with the Boston Public Library who is the leader in 2011. And there are now 80 libraries that are participating in our program. Hathi Trust is doing a similar program. Stanford is launching their program. There's lots of different, this controlled digital lending is a good way to make sure that we have coherent, full libraries available, not just out of copyright materials, not just out of print materials, but a complete library that you can go and use as a library, but within a respectful structure such that it doesn't compete with the bookstore use case, because these are mostly people that are kind of in and out. They're more research library based. So let's bring Michelle Wu into the conversation. Michelle is a retired librarian and ongoing, I believe still has some academic responsibilities, but the way that I know you most closely is through your work with controlled digital lending. And so Michelle maybe could, if people haven't been paying attention or been living under a rock for the past year, can you help us understand how controlled digital lending works? Sure, so controlled digital lending in a nutshell is a mechanism by which libraries can circulate digital equivalents of physical materials that they already own. There are a number of ways to implement CDL, but all implementations share three common features. So those features are these. The first is that the library has to own, has to legitimately own a copy of the title that they wanna land through CDL. So ownership is usually managed through either acquisition or a gift. Any content that's acquired only through subscription is not considered ownership, so would be excluded from that. The second requirement is that the library has to respect an own to loan ratio. So for example, if it owned five physical copies of a title, it can circulate five online zero in print, three online, two in print, but at any given time, it cannot circulate any more copies than it owned. And then the last requirement for CDL is that the digital copy when it circulates is managed through some sort of digital rights management such that a user can't wholesale copy and redistribute it. So that is overall the general framework for any CDL implementation. And so Brewster mentioned that they're, in addition to the internet archives, implementation of control digital lending that in this year of the pandemic, that a number of libraries are also looking for ways of doing control digital lending as well. So there are now a number of libraries that are participating in a CDL or CDL-like environment. And I'm wondering if maybe you could talk just a little bit of how, you know, how do libraries benefit from control digital lending? Sure, so libraries benefit when their users benefit. So some of this answer is going to merge what benefits users and libraries. So I'll start first with the very general benefits that come to both users and libraries. And those come in actually enhancing libraries' core missions of providing access to and preserving information. So I wanna give you just a few examples of both how CDL helps access and preservation. In access, it provides more effective access, especially to underserved or disadvantaged populations. So Brewster has already mentioned the print disabled, but also consider people who are quarantined. People who are quarantined can't go physically to a library even if it's open. And the physically disabled may have means of getting to a library, but that might be very cumbersome, very costly. So it's also difficult for them. There are other barriers such as people living remote distances from their libraries or who work during the same hours that their libraries are open. For all of these individuals, getting to a physical copy of a book is very challenging. Checking out a digital copy through CDL is not. So it removes that barrier for them. Another example I think applies more broadly to everyone who uses a library. And that's simply allowing a library to provide continual access to its collections. Even when the physical collection or the physical building is closed. So obviously we saw this with COVID, right? When all of our libraries shut down. But you can also find it just in everyday instances. So when a library closes for construction or for maintenance, or when its collection or its physical building is damaged by a natural disaster, such as a fire or a flood, all of those will shut down access to their communities, but with controlled digital lending, even while that physical facility or that physical collection is unavailable, users will still be able to access those materials. On the preservation piece, the obvious answer is the way that we preserve digital works is very different from print works. The number of copies in best practices that we keep will just ensure that whatever we're digitizing through CDL means that that item will be available not just for today's users, but also for tomorrow's users. So that's the basic preservation principle. The bigger preservation principle, or I think a less obvious preservation principle is on the financial side. And this is where I'm going to illustrate it through an example. The University of Houston lost its library collection on Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. FEMA as part of its general view of disasters and funding of rebuilding, provided to the library at that time up to over $20 million to rebuild a collection. So essentially they were trying to spend money's acquiring content that the library and the public had already spent money's acquiring. So if you have CDL or if that library had CDL in place at the time, visual copy would have ensured that you didn't need to spend that $20 million or whatever was set aside to replace that collection on re-acquiring content. Instead, that could have been spent for other efforts that were more necessary during a disaster. So I'd say that is a benefit that most people don't think about, but I think it's fairly relevant in this day and age when we're seeing an increase in the number of natural disasters around the world. From my own experience, I was at Washington University when the University of Missouri system had a mold bloom in their offsite storage. And we, a number of libraries in the area sort of helped repatriate the collection. And then also the University of Missouri system had a large spend in repopulating those damaged materials. And I think, wow, if CDL had been more popular or more widespread at the time, what a tremendous cost savings and energy savings. Absolutely. Yeah. I wonder if we could bring Brewster and Elizabeth back in onto screen, because I think that it maybe have a couple other points to make here across the panel. And then we'd love to open it up for questions from the audience. But something that I'm wondering is, how without CDL, what would the pandemic response have been, Michelle in your view without CDL? I'm not even sure I can imagine what would have happened if there wasn't some version of CDL in place. I think that even if the theory hadn't been in play for a while, libraries would have found ways to digitize materials and make them available. Right now they're doing it under the theory of CDL, but I think they would have found a way to do that otherwise. And Brewster, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that point. It seems really obvious, I think once you sort of like, and it's very library-like. And I think that even if there is available in a library, getting access to it digitally, means that you do things differently. And that I think people are feeling much more free to go and reference books that are available online. Even if they, you know, it's not just a substitution here, it's something better, especially the older out-of-print materials. I'm really crushed that we're bringing up a whole generation without really access to the 20th century. If it's not online, it's as if it doesn't exist. And that's in the 20th century is large part not online. Therefore, we're giving kids these days a really distorted, weird, current view. And it's often a paid for or distorted biased view of what the 20th century was. And that's frightening because it was a very impactful century. And if we don't learn from that, all sorts of things, we will be a much poorer place. We will not be doing our jobs. And, you know, you just take Black Lives Matters, right? And you just take the civil rights work that was so relevant to what they were doing. Was that available to them? Were the magazines and newspapers and the zines of those days, were those available? Not really. You look online and it's like, oh, maybe there are some specialized database available to Yale students if they're online, you know, using the right IP addresses. But in general, was it? No. So I think we have the pandemic, certainly I think sped things forward. And everyone's a homeschooler. And, but I think people were kind of already that way before we were just kind of burying our head a bit. And so now there's no way to deny it. Let's adapt. Let's go and take advantage of this. Let's take advantage of the digital technology and deliver the library that frankly, is as good as the library I got the benefit from growing up. Now that it's so much easier now, but it hasn't been in controlled digital lending and things like the partnership with Mary Grove make that possible. We're about to open it up for questions from the audience, but I do have a final question for you, Elizabeth. You mentioned that the reception in the moment was pretty positive about the donation. Now that the collection has been digitized and made available, how are people responding? I think that they're using it. And that's pretty exciting. Some of them are, I've heard from a couple of alums that they've looked up some of their old books that they remembered using and see some of the notes and the margins and everything. It's kind of funny, but yeah, it's still very positive. The school, what's happening on campus is that we're in a partnership with the Kresge Foundation, the Mary Grove Conservancy, which is responsible now for the campus and the buildings, the property and the buildings, Detroit Public Schools Community District, the University of Michigan School of Education and the Kresge Foundation to build a basically a P20 campus here, which will still be an educational campus. We'll have early childhood, so we'll have the newborns all the way up through 20-year-olds on campus. Ultimately, when all the plans come to fruition. Right now we just have a ninth grade and a 10th grade, but the overall focus of the school, the ninth and 10th graders is social justice and design thinking, engineering, but broadly applied to community and making a difference in your community, which is very exciting. And for those students and the teachers to have access to what was in the Mary Grove Library is, it's just an exciting time. I mean, we don't know where it's going to end up, but it's where we need to be for the future for these students. Yeah, that's exciting to think about that legacy of the college and the legacy of the library collections living on through the, not only the students who were there on campus, but the network, as Brewster mentioned, the scholars in Toronto who are accessing these books on a daily basis. It's really amazing. I wanna thank you, the three of you, for your time today, and I'll pass back to Diane for moderation on the questions if we have any. Terrific, thank you so much, Chris, and thank you to all of our panelists, Michelle, Elizabeth, and Brewster. Thank you all for making time and sharing the story with all of us here at CNI. It's fascinating, and as Cliff mentioned, I imagine we'll see some more situations like this, but also I personally found it just so interesting to think about the concept of maintaining an entire library intact, which makes me think of just our archival collections that we try to keep intact, and yet here we put an entire library together alongside other materials and allow them to interact in different ways and discover them in perhaps new ways that maybe we weren't able to do before. So I just find this personally very fascinating. With that, I want to open the floor for questions. Thank you to all of our attendees. I would like to encourage you to raise your hands if you would like to interact directly with our panelists. I'll be happy to turn on your microphones. If you'd like to make a comment, ask a question. Please feel free to do so, or obviously please feel free to write your question into the Q&A and we can take those now. While we're waiting for our attendees to think about this presentation, what they'd like to ask, I was curious speaking in terms of interacting in new ways. Brewster, you had made a comment about machine learning. Would you mind elaborating a little bit more on that? What's happening there? In machine learning, actually some of the best results we're getting right now is from taking all of the transcripts of television news and then using that to go and analyze bias between channels. So there's a researcher named Caleb who's taken all of this textual data and made it so that you can search words and phrases and be able to see over time how they've been in different channels. How were they portrayed? And this has been used by journalists now all the time, sort of a go-to resource towards trying to understand how are things being portrayed. It's my friend, Jesse Osobel put it. We got so far in science with a microscope. What if we had a microscope? What if we had an ability to step back and see the whole picture, right? Can we do that? Can we go and have the same kind of tools that allow you to come up with insights that span time, geography that you couldn't do by just picking up and leafing through things? So these, and mostly digital humanities, they've been doing kind of the easy stuff, which is things like word frequency analysis, right? But can we go further than that? And these are some of the things that the Mellon Foundation has been supporting over the years. It's where the computer scientists and information scientists are going and libraries are being asked for huge collections of materials, even if it's just word usage so that they can go and make their grammar checkers better. And it's kind of great to go and get these requests from people like, well, do you have a billion words of this? It's like, sure, you know, here you go. You want Hungarian, you know? And so it's, and we're trying to get it so it's not just words, it's starting to be the images, layouts, bookarts, finding ex-Libris's. You can just do these fun things just with often just Python and these fairly easy things that even I can do to go and play in these datasets if they're bulk available. So where we've gone before now is we ended up with these APIs and these things that are just so dreadfully awful to use from these commercial players. And they don't trust users with taking a bulk collection and playing with it. We've got to figure out how to do that in such a way that we're not just losing the possibilities for fear of making these things more available. So that's the, we're trying to figure out how to go and bridge that gap but the exciting things on coming back. Just try Google books and grams. So just search on Google books and grams and then you can type in words and it will show you over centuries of how did those come about. I looked up library of Alexandria. Like when did that concept really come about? Before that it was a mosaion. It was a university but when did the library of Alexandria as a separate concept come about over the centuries? And you can see these things. Anyway, I'll stop leveling because I just... No, it's fascinating. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I believe Clifford has a question for you. Cliff, you wanna go ahead? Sure. Yeah, I'll jump in. So actually before I ask my questions I just wanna say thank you all for that amazing presentation and the video is wonderful as well. That's really quite tremendous. And for all the passion you bring to this because so much of this seems to me about you know, how do we do the right things here? And it's really important. I was very struck. I hadn't considered until you talked, Brewster, the notion of the integrity of an entire library collection and where that takes you. And in fact, if you go back through history you see entire collections being absorbed into new libraries integrally. You know, if you visit for example the British Library, you see George III's library just, you know, set off. I'm wondering whether you have thought or are thinking about the notion of acquiring the libraries of individuals. Particularly I'm thinking here of scholars or you know, literary figures, people like that who might amass quite a interesting and comprehensive personal collection and might perhaps also annotate it in interesting ways. Yes, absolutely. The Boston Public Library has the first presidential library that's still Extant which is the John Adams collection. And they digitized that and made that freely available. And those works are available in, you know, Penguin editions or whatever. I mean, so it's really the interest is in what did this man think? What was his intellectual universe as you can see through their books? And you know, fortunately back then you could actually own books unlike now where there's just these license and lease agreement stuff that makes everything a Netflix of problems. But anyway, but back then you actually own your books. And so, and also there are notations in them. So we just got an offer from a professor that's retired and has a large collection of books about Cuban American, but also the file drawer is full of the Xeroxes of all the articles, right? I mean, it's sort of the Zotero of the old days. And so that is sort of an intellectual corpus that was built up over the course of this man's career. I think it was a man. And can we do something with that? And we're finding that digitizing these materials even though individually, by digitizing all whole blocks of them and putting them online, it's not causing the stir among the commercial players to cause us to try to strip it down. The integrity I think is really important. And so the idea of having publishers go and say, well, you can't have that one, that one, that one, that one, that one, or we had one university press said you have to take the older edition of that book off of your digital bookshelf. We demand it. And it was like, that's wrong, right? Every sort of little tentacle of my librarian background says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You might wanna go and have a link from the older edition to the newer edition. So people know that there's something that's new to move forward. But the idea of destroying, digitally destroying past editions is wrong. That there is integrity. We're also finding for navigation purposes. So we were collecting a lot of 78 RPM records. And people give us these things. So these are like the Argentinian Tango collection. And it's this particular person's collection. So we see people maybe jumped into some song because of Google. But how do they find their way around from there? Where do you go from there? And going up to the collection and finding the other things that that person thought were important can be a very major positive in navigation, not just for the, I'm trying to understand that particular person. I just wanna find other things that are interesting. And we have pictures of the people, right? We have the Mary Grove movie. We have pictures of people. We have sort of this collection brought to you by, and it's a way of saying thank you to the donor, but it's a navigation tool. I'd say is the real value going forward. Wonderful. Thank you for that. Well, that was really interesting and prompted me to go searching for the Tango collection I have to. Wait. Well, thank you so much for bringing this topic to CNI. We really appreciate it. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recording now, but I'll invite any attendees who are still with us if they'd like to ask a question or make a comment off the record to please hang around. Just raise your hand. I'll be happy to turn on your microphone. Thank you to everyone who's joined us. Have a great rest of your day. We hope to see you back at CNI. Bye-bye. Many thanks.