Editor, Advances in Librarianship, Volume 29 Associate University Librarian, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT, USA	January 2006
	“Librarians are out there being the advocates for the value of free access to information and the concept of respecting intellectual property rights, which is incredibly important and fundamental to our democratic society. There is a lot going on with the record, and I would predict in another ten years there will be another great change in how we look at information.”

What led you to becoming a librarian?
I started out studying art history, but as changes were made in the requirements to complete my graduate degree, I began questioning my employability and future in the discipline. My dad suggested I look at librarianship as a way to have a livelihood and then I could go back and do whatever I wanted in art history. I ended up enrolling in the graduate program in library and information science at Drexel University and became quite interested in the field and never did become an art historian.

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?
I would say I’ve been really fortunate to have had a number of assignments with a variety of challenges. They’ve been in areas that involve working with a lot of interesting people and with different applications of technology. And ultimately, I feel good about being able to contribute something to having people be able to more easily utilize information resources and the record of our culture in their lives.

What assignments in particular did you enjoy?
Shortly after I came to Yale I was invited to implement the concept of designing, building and introducing a new service here for our off-campus shelving in a very high-end preservation environment and with an efficient retrieval and delivery service. That pulled me into a lot of architectural issues.

Isn’t one of your libraries going through a major renovation right now?
Yes, the next phase of renovation of the Sterling Memorial Library involves a complete remodeling of a two-story underground library, the Cross Campus Library, built in the 70’s and connected by a tunnel to Sterling. The need to fix some structural issues that requires a full renovation of the facility gave us an opportunity to consider how to design library space. I have enjoyed working with architects, planners, faculty, students, and colleagues to plan a new design for the multiple ways that current and future readers learn and engage with others, with information technologies, and library resources and services. This has been a fun project to be involved with.

Any other assignments?
On another score, one of the really small but very interesting activities I was invited to be involved in several years ago was the creation of what we call Borrow Direct. This is a peer to peer intralibrary loan service developed collaboratively with three universities, and now involving seven of our Ivy League partners. The development of this very popular service illustrates a process improvement effort that provides much quicker interlibrary loan processing. Innovative automated design allowed us to eliminate manual staff work of locating and initiating requests, which in turn reduced costs considerably and time required to deliver requested materials. Interlibrary loan was the first focus of my career and it was fun to return to thinking about simplifying the processing of interlibrary loan and witnessing unprecedented satisfaction and praise from faculty and students who use the service.

How long have you been a librarian?
Surprisingly for 33 years, but I still find the profession exciting and interesting.

How would you like to see your career grow?
I might think of putting some emphasis on other areas of the field. My whole career has been in some way managerial or administrative. I am attracted to shifting balances rather than perhaps changing a position. For example, I may spend more time in the research arena. I’ve always done some of that but it would be nice to get more of my time carved out for research and teaching.

How often do you teach now?
About once a year for the past five I have taught a course on research methods at the University of Rhode Island. I also developed and facilitated an online professional development course for the Association of Research Libraries [ARL] with a colleague, Toni Olshen from York University in Toronto. That was a different experience. We never met the people that we taught which now number about 200. We conducted weekly chats, reviewed exercises, discussed assignments, and communicated totally online. We had students from the United States, Canada, and even as far away as Australia. It was stimulating to learn this different mode of teaching.

Would you recommend learning that way?
As an outlet for somebody to study without having to travel, it’s great. Also, if someone enjoys experimenting with how to facilitate exchange of ideas among people geographically separated, it’s very interesting. As a student, I’m not sure I personally would be a good learner in that context. I prefer the personal contact. But it is rewarding when someone approaches one of us at a conference to say they enjoyed the online learning experience, and I in turn often am surprised how people don’t look the way they type!

What else do you enjoy doing outside of librarianship?
You mean there is time for other things? [Laughter] Well, my other professional interests have been doing editorial work and teaching. Outside of that, I also enjoy experimenting with gardening and I find myself attracted to small renovation projects we have undertaken at home. I enjoy looking at buildings in different ways.

You renovated a house?
Yes, for example, several years ago we took a little 700 square foot house in West Virginia and re-did it, and that was fun. I live in a funky old house now, which fortunately has held up very well for its age of over 255 years. Although we haven’t renovated it, we enjoy imagining what kinds of additions we could do to it and then we add a deck or paint a section instead.

How many volumes of the Advances in Librarianship series have you been involved in?
I’ve done two and am working on the third. With the second volume I invited a colleague, Eileen Abels, library school faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park, to join me as co-editor, and that made life easier and created a better publication.

What is the mission of the serial?
To highlight key trends and issues in librarianship. Each volumes does so by giving a snapshot of current research and activities, documented by excellent literature reviews and presented through chapters that experts contribute. With support of a terrific Editorial Board, one of the things I introduced in my term is to give a theme to each volume. The first theme invited different external perspectives on libraries and librarianship, including for example, those of an architect, publisher and funder. The one we just finished for a 2005 release is on some user behaviors and how libraries respond to these and changing expectations for information services. Next year is our 30th anniversary, so we thought we’d look at some of the trends that were addressed 30 years ago and how they now appear. We will also offer a few chapters on what is needed to prepare the profession of the future.

I’m not a librarian, but it seems library service has evolved from lending printed materials to primarily providing access, support and advice about online information. This must have changed the missions of libraries and the role of the librarian. How do you think this will evolve five or ten years from now?
Definitely there are some major changes in the nature of activities, but I’m not sure if our basic mission has changed. I think our mission is holding pretty true, and that is to facilitate and help people have access to information resources. This is done through collecting and preservation to ensure that information will be available for future generations as well as for current use. We also make it simpler for people to identify information that will meet their needs. We help navigate through resources, whatever the format is. One of the more exciting areas is helping people really utilize the information and facilitate their creating new knowledge with it that helps them with whatever their enterprise is. It’s a very interactive relationship between users and information resources and we are there to help have things happen between the two.

At the Yale University Library System do you have an information literacy program where you teach people how to better navigate the internet or evaluate web sites which are better for specific topics?
We don’t call it an information literacy program as such, but I know in the professional lingo that is a phrase that’s used. We view this as part of our research educational program. We do assist our faculty in helping prepare students to develop their research methods. Part of that is their ability to discover and evaluate information resources.

So you don’t offer an actual course?
We do not provide, as some institutions might, a credit course that the library teaches in and of itself. We do work closely with a lot of the faculty in a variety of departments. A number of departments have requirements for their majors to have certain exposure to the library. Typically, we might come into a course and provide one or two of the lectures. We work with the faculty in many cases to try to help develop exercises and assignments that could help the student learn how to engage with information resources better. In more advanced courses we have librarians that might be teaching some of the research methods, for example, librarians with subject specialties teach the bibliography of the discipline. Primarily our subject experts work with faculty in the context of their courses. In addition, we periodically offer drop-in sessions to show a new tool, database or reference source that might be of interest to specialists or majors in a field. We find that these sessions are not quite as effective. We have more success working directly through the faculty and their course assignments. We have quite an array of pathfinders or subject guides in different disciplines which help people develop their strategy of where to look for resources in the area of their interest. Those are arranged by subject and also are accessible on the Web. We also have tutorials or online guides to help figure out what strategy to use.

Are library web sites the number one way libraries connect to the internet learning environment?
I don’t know if it’s number one, but it’s an important way. We have to think about how librarians can position themselves in the space that the learner is working. If that’s the virtual world, it’s an important space to find ourselves. We do that partly by providing web sites and offering interactive chats. We have a service called Ask! Live. Through their keyboard, a person can communicate with a real librarian on the other end. It has been quite interesting for librarians to receive questions and provide advice and assistance through these new technologies.

Do many people take advantage of that service?
It’s a growing number. We are experimenting with it.

How fast is the response of the librarian?
It’s instantaneous. There is someone right there on the other end, during the hours that we are scheduled to have the service available.

Is it the sole job of one librarian on the other end to answer the questions?
No, we have approximately thirty different librarians who take different shifts of an hour or two at a time. We are experimenting with what would be the best time to offer this service. We seem to be finding so far that many of our students would like to have it later in the evening.

What are your thoughts about the digital revolution?
I think its offering us some new challenges to better understand what our clients’ behaviors are, what their needs for information are, and what their expectations are for speed of delivery and accuracy. Sometimes as service providers so closely involved with information, we might be assuming they need more than they need, more than they think they need, more than they expect, or sometimes less than they expect. I think we are really challenged to keep up with understanding the changes in behavior, use of information, and expectations for it. That’s one of my particular interests, but of course, when you think broadly for the profession there are some huge challenges about how we preserve this information. How do we ensure that it will be organized in ways that we can have access to it? Digitization also democratizes all kinds of formats. I think one of the exciting areas is working with images. Images are information being presented in a very different way than the linear nature of written text. When you think about an image, what is it we are indexing? Is it what the person who created the image expected, or is it some detail in it that might be of interest? How do we ever find that then? For example, you have a photo of someone standing in front of a cathedral in Italy and you might traditionally think of it as simply a cathedral in Italy, but maybe it is also an illustration of fashion from the 1950’s. There are some very interesting challenges. The profession has developed expertise in collecting, organizing, preserving, finding, navigating and evaluating, and more recently helping people to utilize the resources.

Is there any concern regarding preservation and how easily digital files can be deleted?
No, because they are easily duplicated, so in that regard I don’t think it’s so much an oversight of deletion as it is a new technology. For example, if you have a disk of information that is five years old you need to make sure it migrates to the new operating system. That’s where standards become so important, and that’s where we do provide leadership. We think along the lines of providing standards that can be compatible to other environments.

It sounds like you are more encouraged about the digital revolution than discouraged?
Yes, you are not going to be able to run away from it, and so you look at it for the opportunities it provides us and find out where we can get involved. It is exciting and there are some incredible opportunities for different ways of thinking about how you use information. We can pull things together much more easily and effectively than we could in the past. However, it’s not without a price tag, and it’s not always easy.

And then there is always the competition with Google and the likes. How does that affect the future of libraries? Don’t libraries compete in a way with Google? Don’t they have the same mission?
I’m not sure they have the same mission. I view Google primarily as a tool and obviously it’s a business. Although I haven’t seen the mission statement of Google, I think it’s to provide good access to information. I think their mission is probably not quite as altruistic. It’s a publicly traded business. I just heard on the radio this morning that their stock has gone up to something like four hundred dollars per share, and so they have a different mission driving them. Perhaps they aren’t as concerned about preserving the free access to information over time, as exciting as Google is.

Are you for the concept of Google Scholar or Google Print?
To the extent that I’m familiar with what it is - to make more resources available. That is not a bad thing, but I think there does need to be recognition of different contributor rights and how you accommodate that. I think that whole thorny issue about the legality and copyright should be, and could be resolved. If the service offers a convenient way to identify a resource of interest from a huge collection and allow a preview of it, as we traditionally practice before we buy a book in the bookstore, then isn’t it an incredible tool. In terms of a concept of providing more information, I think it is quite exciting.

Over the last five years have you seen faculty in the library more or less? Do you see faculty doing research at their own computers outside of the library since they can still access your licensed databases through your web site?
I think there is a variation by subject discipline. Are they using the library differently or in different proportion? Probably. We still are pretty packed in here at times. We still have people who view the place as a good place to come and study, access information, collaborate with others, or sometimes just to escape the daily pressures of life to come and read a book.

What advice would you give a student who is interested in library science, but worried about the future of librarianship?
I guess I would wonder why they are interested in it if they are worried about the future. If they are interested in the future and the many ways people will use information in it, then I’d encourage them to obtain the values, skills, and fundamental orientation that librarianship offers in its professional education and practices.

Some people love libraries, they love books and learning and information, so they begin to research the profession and are alarmed by so many articles about the possible demise of libraries.
I really don’t think libraries are going away and librarians won’t be needed. I firmly think it’s one of the most exciting times to be a librarian. There is such demand for bringing the professional values, ethics, principles and skills that come with the profession. There are all kinds of issues like preservation, organization, and technology that really need addressing in the world of information. From my personal perspective on the service end, communities, scholars, students, and researchers still need assistance in going through and navigating all the resources available. Librarians are out there being the advocates for the value of free access to information and the concept of respecting intellectual property rights, which is incredibly important and fundamental to our democratic society. There is a lot going on with the record, and I would predict in another ten years there will be another great change in how we look at information. Advances in Librarianship is just a small contribution in helping people focus on some of these topics and offering insight for future interesting callings in our field. A person of any background can have an important position in a library and add to its intellectually stimulating environment.

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This article by Jacqui Tavis
j.tavis@elsevier.com