 This is Jerry Bain at the Coalition for Networked Information, Spring 2023 meeting, and I'm here with Mackenzie Smith, University Librarian and Vice Provost for Digital Scholarship at UC Davis. Thanks for being here, Mackenzie. Thank you for inviting me, Jerry. It's always a pleasure to be here. Great. So, reflecting back on your career so far, what are some of the most rewarding projects or efforts you've undertaken, and what are some of the most frustrating? Well, before I talk about projects, I just want to say that even to this day, there are not a lot of women in technology. CNI is a better than average, I would say, meeting, and if you go to more technology-focused meetings, you know, there are not a lot of us in the room. There are also not a lot of library leaders who have a technology background, so I can think of a handful of other women who are running research libraries that have a technology focus, and so I think it's been something I'm proud of doing, is just representing women in this particular profession at a time when it's something I want to inspire more women to get into, and I'm happy to say that through things like the ARL Leadership Career Development Program, I've been able to mentor other women into library technology leadership roles, and especially diverse librarians, so that's something I'm very proud of that has nothing to do with specific projects. Can I ask you a side question? Sure. What do you think are some of the ways that we could help encourage women to be more involved, or what do you think are some of the barriers that we could lift to encourage women to be more involved? I think it's a lot of self-induced doubt. So having confidence that you belong is something that, you know, it's hard to really inculcate into people, but that's why representation is important, and dragging people into it, and giving them opportunities, that's something I've really benefited from my whole career, are great opportunities which I took advantage of. So I try to create opportunities for other women in technology, and everyone really, to get involved and do cool things, because I think this is the future of the profession. Without moving on to your career, what are some of the most rewarding ones? So like a lot of women in technology, I feel like I'm a pretty creative person, and so one of the things I've done throughout my career is make connections that other people didn't necessarily see, and that started very early on. So way back in the 90s when I was working at Harvard, we got a grant from the Mellon Foundation to work with some publishers on the transition to electronic journals, which wasn't really a thing yet. And I was hanging out with the Computing in the Humanities crowd at Harvard and at Brown University, and they were teaching me all about SGML and what they were doing with the text encoding initiative, which was so cool, and I thought, why don't we do that for journals? So one of the things we did with that project is hire a consulting company who was expert at SGML, and that eventually led to the journal archiving transfer schema that is the industry standard now. So every article that goes into PubMed Central is in that schema, and it's everywhere. That's amazing. Yeah, I mean, that's just an example of where a spark, you don't even have to be the expert. You just have to know that this applies to that. Sometimes it helps not to be the expert. Right, you don't get scared off. Yeah, so I've kind of done that sort of thing throughout my career. And then, of course, I moved to MIT in the aughts and learned all about open. So I was in charge of the dSpace project, open source software, and that spun into open access and open educational resources. And that place is really inspiring when it comes to thinking non-proprietarily about the world and your impact on it. And so that's another thing that I really helped move into the library field. And so I'm very proud of that work, which of course is ongoing. And then now, you know, I work a lot on organizational development because I'm in charge of a library. So how do you build a library today that is technologically sophisticated, flexible, equitable, you know, all those good things that we want research libraries to be so that they aren't irrelevant and obsolete in 50 years? It can't be easy. There's a lot of resistance and not just from the people who work in libraries, but from a lot of faculty and administrators who really just put libraries in a box and they have no idea what we really do. So, you know, building an organization that will survive the next 50 years is interesting, but that's what I've really been focusing on. And it's, it's gratifying. Do you want to talk about the frustrations you've had? I mean, I don't want to get off on a negative tip, but if there's something you'd like to talk about. I think it is that complacency that people aren't curious about libraries and it's starting to change. I think people, especially in the current political situation that we find ourselves in, there's been a lot more attention on what's happening with public libraries. And, and so people are starting to realize that they're not doing what they used to do back in the 60s, 70s, you know, that they've really evolved into a different kind of organization. And that's true for research libraries too. So the frustration is just that so many people don't understand, you know, what we do, what we could do, that they shouldn't just pick up the phone and call IT anytime. There's a digital dimension to their question, you know. And I think I've made a lot of progress on that at my university, but all of my colleagues are struggling with that perception that we're still just the books and the stacks. And, you know, we don't have a role beyond that. Yeah, it's, it's hard to evolve. It's very irritating. Definitely. What do you see as some of the most pressing issues facing academic libraries today? I mean, you just mentioned one, obviously. What are some of the issues and what are some of the opportunities? Issues, yeah. Well, so there is a huge elephant in the room. And that is the fact that in the digital environment, libraries have lost the privilege position they had in the print environment. We don't own any digital content. Even things we digitize ourselves, you know, the lawsuit that was just settled against the Internet Archive is a good example of that, that we've given up the idea that we should own what we buy and now we license it so it's not ours. And we also haven't really nailed digital preservation of what we do happen to have our hands on. So there won't be any content in the future that we have any control over in the libraries. And we will simply be, if we're lucky, a very expensive licensing operation, and that's a tragedy. You know, there won't be a cultural history in the future if we don't figure out how to get around that. But I've seen no interest in really working on digital preservation. It was invoked for a while and now nobody seems to be working on it. You know, a very few people, I should say. And this licensing stuff, you know, is really frightening. And if we can't even scan our own books and then use those as surrogates in any scenario, we're hosed. Oh, it's so scary. So there are some opportunities that we have to tackle these issues. And an example of that is a project that you see, Davis, my current institution is leading for the University of California system. And that is to really take a look at what the world of research and education would look like if we could digitize all of our books and do something with them. Would there be transformative uses for scholarship? If a professor could download 500 books, do a quick text mining exercise on them and then return them in 10 minutes, you know, or I can think of many examples. But so we have a grant now from the Mellon Foundation to work on that problem and really do the background research that we as a profession are going to need to think creatively about the future and what we need to fight back on with these restrictive legal regimes, because it may be that we can't do what we want to do currently with the current legal system, but that there are some points where we could begin to lobby and advocate and fight for what libraries need to be able to do in the future in the digital world. What currently emerging technologies do you think are particularly promising and perhaps overlooked? Yeah, I wouldn't say they're overlooked, but there's something that libraries, research libraries, aren't spending a lot of their time on and that is cloud computing. So my library has a rather significant data science program that does a lot of the data science research and teaching around campus. And we're really interested in cloud computing because infrastructure is so expensive for high performance computing and for all kinds of data driven research and our students certainly can't afford that kind of infrastructure themselves and neither can early career researchers. So the cloud is really going to be incredibly important for the future of research, which is what research libraries support. And you know, I think of data as a first class object that libraries ought to be collecting, indexing, making available, preserving all that good stuff. So I think cloud computing is a really important part of our future, but we we aren't really advocating for, again, what we need. We're just sort of relying on what Amazon and Google and Microsoft come up with and saying, okay, we'll just, you know, use that it's it's not priced for the academic market. It doesn't really do what we need. So we need to be doing more to leverage that. But it's got a huge great potential for solving our problems. And then of course, the over hyped is got to be AI, you can't open a magazine now without some article about how AI is going to change everything. And you know, those of us who've been around for a while know that AI is not new. It's just kind of passed a big hurdle with these large language models. Now, which back things like chat GPT. So you know, now we have these generative AI models, which are impressing people, but they have their limitations. So they've opened people's eyes. And I think that's great that people are really getting creative now about what this could do and all the bad things it could do. But the reality is that it's still pretty limited. And so I kind of tired of hearing about that. I can understand. Yeah, it's been talked about quite a bit. So what are your future plans? Yeah, that's a good question too, because as I inch towards retirement, in the pretty near future, I want to take a sabbatical, I feel like our profession has really changed a lot. And that when you're on the ground working, you know, way too much, putting out fires, you know, coming out of the pandemic, and all of the effort that took to just pivot to online and manage, you know, freaked out students and staff and all of that, I've kind of lost touch with what I should be focused on. It's so reactive. So I'm really going to stop and take a sabbatical, which I wish more librarians could do. And technologists, you know, just just take a break to really look around you and and look at what the big issues are. And, you know, we just talked about AI, and I'm tired of hearing about it. But I also think there's a huge amount of potential for that type of technology in digital libraries. And, and I know a lot of other people are thinking about it. But as I said, you know, sometimes I see connections that other people don't, because I've been doing this so long. And so I just want to take some time off to think about that, and then decide what the next chapter will look like. Thank you for joining me, Mackenzie. I really appreciate your thoughts. Thank you, Jerry. Always a pleasure.