Interaction

Fall 2007

Virtually unlimited knowledge

L.A. Cicero

Art librarian Peter Blank and Amber Ruiz, curator of the Visual Resources Center. The center is embarked upon a campaign to reach out to the broader Stanford community.

In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, there was no clear distinction between libraries and museums or between archives and treasuries. Such places, filled with books, natural oddities, relics, beautiful objects, manuscripts, stones and bones, could resemble junk rooms for the erudite, Wunderkammern, landing spots for bequests of all sorts. Books were organized by size or date of arrival or donor, not by content or use.

Slowly, systematic disciplinary and alphabetical catalogs emerged, and “libraries” became places that stored books and manuscripts—and little else.

Today, one doesn’t trip over skeletons or jewel boxes. But libraries—or cybraries, as University Librarian Michael Keller likes to call them—contain the world. Absolutely everything is there. The age of the collection has returned.

“The virtual makes that possible,” said Assunta Pisani, associate university librarian for collections and services. “One of the old limitations of libraries was space. There were beautiful rooms with displays, which then became larger and more organized, and decisions had to be made about space and efficiency. But now it doesn’t matter.”

L.A. Cicero

The relationship between hyperlinks and 17th-century collecting practices might not be obvious. But the chief virtue of digitization, from the point of view of Keller and his colleagues, is that you can dig deep—really, really deep. You can drill through a text to find the point at which child psychology veers into electrical engineering, the moment of the genesis of scientific arguments within philosophy, the places where biology bumps up against chemistry and physics, where relics and stones and texts can be viewed as part of a whole.

Informatics, which posits that everything ultimately is linked to everything else, now can actually link most everything through taxonomic indexing, a highly complex process of assigning semantic categories to clumps of text that then can be summoned in a certain, relevant order, relying on what Keller calls the text’s fingerprint. With that, instead of running through the stacks from Spanish history (DP, second floor) to social history (HN, way down in the basement) and then over to the Law Library or up into the Bing Wing to find Jewish law (KBM) and then back up to Green to check Spanish lyric poetry (PQ, third floor), it’s all in one place. Or it will be soon.

“I’m expecting 9 million books incoming, so the magnitude of my informatic challenges is going up dramatically,” said Keller, obviously delighted to have such problems, largely the result of Stanford’s collaboration with Google.

Disciplines fused

In Keller’s view, there’s an old narrative and a new narrative. The old one is a ribbon of text, a stream of characters organized from beginning to end. The new narrative is the old narrative with interruptions, with high-octane Java, with links and spreadsheets and videos and citations and whatever else will help the reader make connections.

L.A. Cicero

University Librarian Michael Keller

Keller started off his professional life as a music librarian. So how did he get from there to book robots, to the pioneering HighWire Press (online home to more than 1,000 journals) and to cybraries?

“It’s the training,” he said. “You study physics, physiology, mechanical engineering, the creative process. You read code, psychology, history, reception, patronage. We cover the whole waterfront. That’s the perspective we bring to the party.”

“Libraries are participating in a fusing of disciplines,” Pisani said. “We are acquiring packages of publications or information now, not just traditional acquisitions.

“The Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress assigns books to a specific place, and once there, the book doesn’t belong anywhere else. That’s being undone with digital. Before, I’d know where to browse in the stacks for a specific topic, but, by the same token, I’d miss books with different call numbers.

“That’s all changing. The order is gone. There is a new kind of order. Something really important is happening in the way knowledge is being delivered.”

In the years following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the people involved in the remodeling of Green Library sometimes worried that their efforts might be misdirected, given the advent of the much-discussed bookless library. It didn’t turn out that way.

Henry Lowood, curator for the Germanic, history of science and technology, and film and media collections, was on the staff at that time. “The doomsday projections didn’t carry weight at a place like Stanford because we’re able to acquire the new while maintaining the old,” he said.

Gerhard Casper, who came to Stanford as university president in 1992, had decided that the library would be rebuilt, and Keller, who arrived in 1993, could take into account the swift technological advances since the earthquake.

“My whole career is littered with cases of trying to figure out what people want in libraries,” said Keller. “Strategic thinking is part of my toolkit. What do you do with a great old building when you have the opportunity to rebuild?”

The redesign of Green Library called for a variety of spaces to account for the new variety of uses and resources: quiet, noisy, computing, group, individual, closed, open. Resource centers for humanities and social sciences were created.

“We returned all the big spaces to their original, we tore out all the foolishness that was constructed from 1919 to 1989, and with all those walls wide open, we installed lots of conduit for powerful signal,” he said.

Casper, at the dedication ceremony for the opening of the Bing Wing in 1999, remarked that the gaping holes at the construction site had reminded him of the bombed-out buildings of his Hamburg childhood. At no point, he said—his talk was titled “Who Needs a Library Anyway?”—did he or anyone else seriously entertain a libraryless future.

Subject specialists

Curators, or subject specialists, such as Lowood, who have advanced degrees, are up to date on the debates in their disciplines and on what is going on in the information trade, formerly known as the book trade.

“What’s accessible and interesting that we can acquire in order to make Stanford a distinctive place for musicologists or early childhood education experts or mechanical engineers?” Keller asked.
“The subject specialists understand how their disciplines interact and challenge one another, so this whole sense of multidisciplinarity is reflected in how we build collections.

“Librarians have always been multidisciplinary, up on all the big strategic innovations. We collect in all fields, we identify all subjects, we develop new techniques afforded by digital versions, we provide the means to analyze works by subjects, we make correlations ... we’re it.”

Pisani also pointed to the range of the activities of Stanford’s 35 subject specialists.

“We’re farsighted,” she said. “Some libraries have created separate organizations to acquire electronic content. Here we believe that content and knowledge are fundamental to a good collection development program regardless of how the information is being delivered.” Lowood, for example, said he will choose (or at least participate in the choice of) German materials throughout the collections, from ancient to high-tech, which he said “encourages a sort of interdisciplinarity.”

Though libraries today are no longer simply the sum of whatever arrives at their doorstep, they still seek and receive collections. Among Stanford’s outstanding special collections are the papers of Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg and John Steinbeck; an important series of 18th-century French political economy pamphlets; the records of the Farm Worker Archive and the National Council of La Raza; and a wonderful collection of artifacts and papers documenting the history of Silicon Valley.

And the special collections are not necessarily all in the department of Special Collections. The Archive of Recorded Sound, hidden downstairs in the Music Library, is the repository for some 300,000 recordings (including thousands of 78 rpm records), the entire recordings of the Monterey Jazz Festival, remarkable contraptions from more than a century ago that actually produce fine music, radio news shows from World War II recorded on heavy 16-inch discs, voices of the most prominent poets of the 1950s and all the KZSU tracks from the 1960s, among other treasures.

Special Collections used to be a sort of sanctuary, Pisani said, but over the past decade more and more students have been making use of its holdings. The subject librarians have close ties to their disciplinary counterparts in academic departments, who in turn use the library holdings as anchors for their classes.

“We want them to be familiar with primary sources,” Pisani said, “to really actually see a letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

New libraries

Among all the buildings going up in the next decade or so at Stanford will be at least two new libraries: engineering and art. The former is expected to be bookless within a decade or so. It will therefore have fewer non-professional staff members but more reference librarians to help with digital resources.

L.A. Cicero

Helen Josephine, head librarian of the Engineering Library, said that traditionally librarians in her field would have purchased materials along departmental lines, asking, for example, what does mechanical engineering need?

“But increasingly, those students and research are crossing disciplines, so they may be interested in the biological or medical applications of something in mechanical engineering,” she said. “So the materials they need to frame their research are no longer bound by mechanical engineering.” Thus various libraries end up coordinating their purchases and use.

“Suddenly the unobvious becomes obvious by linking across disciplines,” she said. “One of our design professors here says a good design is the one where you look at it and you say, ‘Of course, it’s so obvious!’

“Using that thinking, we’re looking at the library as a place for the intersection of all those ideas. So it’s not necessary that we have all the objects of information here. We can point to it online and help students make it applicable for their research.”

The new engineering library will be in a portion of the School of Engineering Center that also contains a cafe and a “research gym,” space that, by definition, is flexible. Josephine said she’s looking into ensuring a library presence there outside the formal confines of the library—maybe just a desk or a terminal—something to let students know that they can contact a reference librarian whenever or wherever they get stuck.

Unlike the engineering library, the projected art and architecture library—one of the central pieces of the university’s Arts Initiative—will have plenty of bookshelves. Many arts (and humanities) journals are not available online, and reproduction of images is not always reliable.

“The very nature of research in an object-based discipline is inextricably linked to an object-based learning environment, where the form of the book or magazine as physical object is often as imbued with cultural coding as its content,” said Peter Blank, head librarian of the Art and Architecture Library. “There is no substitute for placing such objects in students’ hands. We’re dealing with a different kind of data here.”

But clearly there is a limit to the number of art objects an art library can have, and Blank and his staff are also deeply committed to making the online Visual Resources Center (VRC), which houses digital images and slides, accessible, useful and integral to departments across campus.

In 2006 the VRC was transferred from the Art and Art History Department to Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR).

“SULAIR brought considerable technical support to VRC, as well as a different awareness of how visual materials can be used across disciplines,” he said. “We’re refocusing a somewhat inward-looking operation outward to make connections across the campus. Anyone on campus can log on to the ImageBase. We’re upgrading equipment, systemizing backups and cleaning up data. We’ve got an excellent team.”

When Blank says the library was “inward-looking,” he is referring to its origins along the lines of a traditional museum research library. Undergraduates couldn’t get in at all; graduate students could not check out books; and faculty members had limited privileges. That all has changed, and the library now circulates materials to the entire Stanford community.

Six-inch lean

Blank envisions the art library as a “laboratory space to support a discovery environment,” a place with foot traffic, viewing technology and rotating exhibits showing off an admirable collection of ephemera and art objects.

Stuart Snydman

A robotic page-turning and scanning device, the centerpiece of SULAIR’s array of on-campus digitization capabilities.

“We’re trying to recreate the whole environment to encourage students to visit, personally or virtually, and make it more of a learning space, a place for doing things, where students can see and touch—for example—how art was used as a political tool in the 1960s and ’70s in China,” he said, referring to the library’s collection of Maoist posters, on display last year.

“There’s something I call the ‘6-inch-lean,’ that moment when you’re showing students something and they move in just a bit to see the artifact better. Right then, they’re intellectually and corporally engaged. That’s our job. That’s why students come to Stanford.”

Blank emphasized that many of the objects in the art library that might appear to outsiders to be secondary materials, that is, documents about art objects, are, in fact, primary materials, art objects themselves.

Photography books, for example, are in many cases the object, the first or the only site where a photograph ever appears.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, the art practice site often was the magazine,” Blank said. “So it is essential to preserve that artifact in its original form. Same with Life magazine or posters. Those artifacts project their own media values.

“Most libraries don’t realize they even have ephemera. There were lots of pamphlets published by conceptual artists and contemporary galleries in the 1960s in which pieces would be described or illustrated.” Such was the case with the work of British artist Richard Long, for example, who “makes sculpture by walking,” transforming his wanderings into the artifact itself.

“So pamphlets were released as if they were catalogs, but in fact they were published documentation of the art piece,” Blank said. “They’re here because they appeared as catalogs, when in fact they have multiple purposes. I’m constantly finding stuff like that here and retrieving it.”

Virtual and comfortable

The physical site and contents of libraries have thus not been overtaken by the virtual. They need each other. The Lane and Bender reading rooms in Green Library, with their overstuffed chairs, the interplay of natural and indoor lighting and the generous wooden tables, are beacons. The grand old spaces (and less grand seminar and group-study rooms) were retained or revived. Libraries, after all, are meeting places, the most obvious site for cross-disciplinary communities to emerge.

A user survey in spring 2003 showed that students place great value on the library as a place to study and that they rely upon reference librarians to assist them with online resources.

Librarians, in turn, are using the Internet to bring in students and researchers. Branner Library, for example, at the School of Earth Sciences, features an informative and attractive blog with information on books, journals, pollution and earthquakes, updates on Geographic Information Services (GIS) and a list of relevant del.icio.us tags, a social-networking system for identifying useful bookmarks. The main Information Center webpage also has tags, blogs, research Q&As and a host of news items, all linked to appropriate resources.

“What’s exciting is seeing the constant evolution and reinvention of the services and information we can provide to people,” Josephine said. “I remember being an undergraduate at Doe Library [at Berkeley] and being just awed by that huge reading room full of card catalogs. It’s come full circle; we’re back to that awe-inspiring sense.

“I’m very jazzed; it’s very exciting. We have more of a feel that we can experiment with things and see what works. We don’t have to have everything perfect.”