Last Look

Wittenborg
Photo by Cade Martin

If you relish change, being a librarian is one of the best jobs in the world these days.

These are times of infinite possibilities. The best research libraries are intellectual crossroads where intersections among faculty and students, tradition and innovation, people and resources, and the university and the world produce exciting results. These are heady times indeed.

Libraries are all about discovery, creating new knowledge and archiving materials to keep them safe in perpetuity. I am amused by the expression “new media.” Libraries are in business for the long haul, and we’ve already run through a lot of media.

In the U.Va. Library, our oldest “new media” are Babylonian clay tablets (c. 2350 B.C.). We have scrolls on animal skin, manuscripts on vellum and later on paper, old books, mass-produced paperbacks, photographs, films, recordings on magnetic tapes, eight-tracks, CDs, DVDs and resources that are entirely digital. All of these were new media at one time.

Books, for example, appeared in the mid-15th century when Gutenberg invented movable type. For centuries, you could only get to books if you were very rich or had access to a library. Books were so expensive to produce that they were chained to the shelves. Only the advent of mass publishing made books widely accessible at a reasonable price.

I believe that a library’s role is to help create knowledge and make it available as broadly as possible. Today digital technologies are opening the doors wide — copyright permitting — to a vast world of information and knowledge accessible to anyone who has an Internet connection.

Thanks to the Google Books Project, the Open Content Alliance, the Million Book Project and other efforts we’re involved in, millions of books in the public domain are free to anyone with computer access, anywhere, anytime. And snippets of copyrighted books are included in search results so that people can discover what’s out there on that topic and see where to buy or borrow it.

This is truly the democratization of information, and the best part is that, generally, these texts are interactive. You can search through texts in ways that would not be possible in a printed form. In the old tradition of libraries, scholars are using “new media” to ask new questions and create new knowledge. I love that.

New technologies and new formats have not replaced print, and I don’t believe that they will. They have simply added a new level of richness we have not had before. Now, in addition to text, we can have sound, images, moving images, visualizations, simulations, blogs, podcasts, social networks and a host of other possibilities. All can intersect to create new knowledge, and I’m delighted that the U.Va. Library can be one of the crossroads where that happens.

This morning I saw the “international media wall” that the Office of the Provost has made possible in Alderman Library. The intent was to “bring the world onto Grounds.”

Seeing the silent feed of television being broadcast from Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe — just a few of the more than 50 stations that will be feeding the satellite dish on Alderman’s roof from around the world — made my wait in line to get coffee at Alderman Café that much more interesting.

Read more on the U.Va. Library and the Google Books Library Project.

View the U.Va. Library’s Digital Collections.