— College Librarian Jeffrey J. Horrell. —
Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/03/11/jeffrey_horrell_named_college_librarian.php
Friday, March 11, 2005
In February, Jeffrey L. Horrell was named Dean of Libraries and Librarian of the College. He is the eighteenth College Librarian, a position dating back to Bezalell Woodward, who was appointed in 1773.
— College Librarian Jeffrey J. Horrell. —
The Dartmouth Review: The volume of information and research has exploded so exponentially that scholars can no longer claim to know their fields in the way Victorian scholars did, in broad disciplines like History or English, for instance, or especially the Sciences; rather, most scholars can only know how to work in their fields. And so the library has an extraordinary institutional importance. What role do the libraries and, specifically, the Librarian of the College play in the life of the institution?
Jeffrey L. Horrell: I think it plays an essential role. I think Dartmouth has an extraordinary tradition in terms of libraries. The College at present has traditions that I value and respect deeply, and everything that is here now is based on what was developed over centuries. Your initial point is quite true—the world is changing—but I think it is changing within the context of that tradition. The mission of this place remains what it was decades if not centuries ago in terms of the library: to provide, in whatever format that remains possible to faculty and students and visiting scholars, access to information.
I challenge you a little bit. It's harder now, probably, to keep abreast of the growing amount of information, but I think there are ways, and I think the library tries to do this, of presenting the information in ways people who want to gain can continue to have that breadth of exposure to research and information generally. People's lives are much busier now and people do focus only on their own area or discipline. But I think there are some easier ways to see things and have things brought to you—electronically not in the least. It may even be simpler.
But I can't emphasize enough that the Dartmouth Library system is in really good shape. Dartmouth has been fortunate over the years to have the resources that are here, people as well as fiscal resources, to develop these collections, and we continue to do so. It's a challenge. It gets harder as time goes on, of course.
I mean I've been here—well, it's my third week, so I'm still learning a lot of what goes on here. But I think wholeheartedly the service and ethos and the philosophy at the College is just extraordinary. I was here earlier in my career and that was the thing that really brought me back. Dartmouth in terms of its collections is not a Yale or a Harvard because down there they are so much bigger and have longer traditions and have the resources that come with those types of institutions. But Dartmouth makes up for it in the kind of service. If it's not here, you'll be able to get it. And the personalizing of the service—to help the students, to help the faculty, locate information. I have seen, in the just last couple of weeks—I've been in talking with staff, talking with faculty—people really care, and it's wonderful. That's what makes the Dartmouth Library what it is.
TDR: One of the main features of Berry Library is the way that it engages the traditional aspects of the research library with developing technology, electronic resources, and computing services. Books and technology can work together, I think, and in the best of all possible works can even be complementary. At the same time, do you think there are any conflicts between traditional research methods and their would-be surrogates, like digital databases and other virtual electronic formats? Maybe you could discuss some of the advantages, and also as the tensions, of the integration of technology with the traditional resources of the research library.
JLH: Something I'm concerned about, something Dartmouth should be concerned about, is the long-term viability, the long-term access, the long-term archivability of electronic information. You can go to the stacks, with the books on shelves, with mostly good paper, and they'll last for a long time. And there's microfilm that's recorded to last for hundreds of years. Electronic information is a more ephemeral kind of medium, and I think that's one of the biggest challenges that research libraries and institutions generally are going to face. It's one thing to be able to acquire information—electronic resources, data, text, images, whatever you have—and it's another thing to know if you're going to have it a year, five years, fifty years, a hundred years from now.
Well, the perfect example: traditional collections have only lasted by preservation work and conservation work, which has allowed the page to survive fire and water and pestilence and everything else that's happened. But those kinds of collections are still in really good shape. Dartmouth's collections are in really good shape.
Working out an infrastructure to be able to preserve digital information is something I think all research libraries have to grapple with. Various libraries are experimenting with how to do that: experimenting with digital repositories, or creating naming services so a digital object has an ongoing catalogue record, if you will. It was fairly easy to put things into storage facilities at Dartmouth, and we're able to put books and serials and College records and everything there. But into the future, as we continue to digitize on our machines, where is that going to live? That's a research challenge that institutions such as Dartmouth are going to have to face.
And, as well, we need to make sure that we in fact own that information. Earlier, ten years ago when I was at Harvard, when you were buying access to new information no one was thinking whether we should also be getting the archival rights to this. A company is merged with another company, or the fiscal resources of the institution change and you can't afford to buy that or the curriculum changes and you don't want that, the information that you acquired over that period of time, do you really own that or do you only have it available during the course of that lifetime? And we're much better now about securing archival rights and being able to migrate to other resources.
Dartmouth isn't alone in that. There are going to be multiple formats and different ways of approaching information.
And the very definition of scholarly information has changed. Dartmouth collected things fifty years ago that weren't necessarily thought scholarly but that are now the basis for scholarship. People are really lucky here that it got collected—pamphlet collections, other publications outside the mainstream, medical instruments, for example, but you can do research on it.
TDR: One of the major changes in the transition from card catalogues to virtual databases was that card catalogues forced the researcher to have at least some understanding of the taxonomy and hierarchy of knowledge in the library. A keyword search in a database makes that unnecessary, because it cuts across classifications and it would be foolish to deny this usefulness in sorting, indexing, and retrieving. At the same time, however, do you think that the ability to 'surf the internet' and the like has made the depth of research in higher education shallower and oversimplified? Sort of the difference between information and knowledge.
JLH: Well, its made it uneven, I would say. There's real concern about students' research techniques being inferior, and also just dipping into Google and saying, okay, here's what comes up and that's all that's integrated into research. And they think that's the whole world right there. It's clearly not. I think the faculty are in tune to that and are trying as much as possible to convey to their students and to their profession that the world doesn't have those boundaries. There's so much information that is not in a computer and it may not be for decades or centuries and so you get a slice of data. It is concerning.
But I think that's the nature of trying to build a library that is clear: the electronic resources are here, these are these kind of resources here, these are the things in Special Collections, these are the things in the Hood, these are the things in Dana-Biomedical, and this is what's here in all these different formats, so you don't think—'this is all there is.' Because that's a danger. Dartmouth has described its library as a "Digital Library" and it's something I think we should look at afresh, at what that definition means. I personally tend to think of it as Dartmouth Library with all this digital information in it. It's not just digital: that would be misleading in some ways, if people thought that everything that Dartmouth owns, everything I just mentioned, is all digitally available. Over time, there'll be more and more access to it in terms of cataloguing things. It will be just as important as the card catalogue in the digital world to be able to provide metadata—that's a term—so when people search the database of Dartmouth collections they're searching multiple levels. I think that danger you're alluding to is that when people miss those multiple levels.
I think we have to be concerned about some of those things that seemed old-fashioned—like card catalogues—but be sure that the ideas around them and the structures around them are still important, maybe even more so, in the digital world. But it's complicated, and I think that it's taken a lot of rethinking about what that world will be.
TDR: Because there is so much scholarship, the research library must be selective in the material he or she decides to acquire, something—as I'm sure you know from experience—that is as much a skill as it is an art. The work of the bibliographer in forming the collections, I think, was one of the highlights of Dartmouth's satellite library system, of the individualized areas. Do you think that the centralization and consolidation of services, in Sanborn, Sherman, and Cook, for instance, has hurt the College library system?
JLH: Well, Dartmouth has had a tradition for the last number of decades of having reference bibliographers, people with the subject expertise and multiple degrees but also work directly with researches. From my perspective is that's a wonderful combination, because there's constant interaction between those that are using the collections and those that are building the collections. At many institutions—the one I just left, for example—those are starting to come together, but there's still sort of separate bibliographers and separate reference folks. I think it's a much more instructive environment and much more for interesting for librarians to have those multiple roles.
In terms of everything that goes on here—the books wouldn't be bought, they wouldn't be catalogued, they wouldn't be shelved, they wouldn't be preserved, if it weren't for the staff. One of the most important things we as administrators can do is to support the staff, to help grow their skills, to help them think about their own professional lives. And that turns into a better environment that helps provide services to students and faculty members, it helps build the collections.
Overall, getting to your point about centralization, there's physical centralization, and then there's also the idea that we can bring the services together, strengthen them, and have more expertise. I guess my real thought about that is the collections are where they should be. The services are at the level they should be. People's expectations and needs are being met. It's a difficult matter how they should be physically configured, but I think the service is the most important thing.
But again, I just can't emphasize enough that the staff here are just remarkable. You know, I knew some in the past, and I'm just getting started, but every day I'm amazed by the knowledge and expertise and dedication to this place and to the students. Dartmouth should be proud.
TDR: Research libraries across the country seem to be in constant state of budgetary crisis, pinches on all sides—we've seen it at Dartmouth—due to decreased budgets, the staggering inflation in the actual prices of books and periodicals, and competing institutional priorities. How has Dartmouth responded to this state of affairs, and how do you think its going to go in the future?
JLH: It's a little hard for me to judge that at this point. Dartmouth was not alone in the kind of fiscal constrictions that it experienced a couple of years ago. I know very well from where I was that much more dramatic changes happened elsewhere from the lack of funds.
But I know as one looks forward—and I know things are fiscally tight and will probably continue to be so for some time—one has to think carefully and make judgments in terms of building the collections and providing services. You have to strike a balance all the time. I don't think Dartmouth libraries are going to go completely digital because these are research libraries and will always be that way. There are certain libraries—Feldberg, Matthews-Fuller at the Hospital, and Dana Biomedical—will have more of their information accessed digitally. Humanities, social sciences, other parts of the College Library are going to be in print for a long, long time. That material is having inflation not only in this country but all over the world. That's the nature of the medium.
And it may change faster than we think, but fifteen, twenty year ago people said we wouldn't be going to libraries, that they'll all be on computer chips and credit cards, and it hasn't really changed. It's phenomenal. Dartmouth is a prime example of that. The commitment the College has made to libraries here is remarkable. What's also remarkable is the commitment of the people, the students, to the community space. It's all very exciting. I can't imagine this place will not continue to be a first-rate library. The College will always commit the resources.
TDR: This is probably less serious. Baker Tower was modeled on Independence Hall in old Philadelphia, as a sort of reminder that the library is the guarantor of intellectual freedom, a mark of the importance of liberating role of the library in an academic society. What do you think that the architecture of Berry communicates about the modern age?
JLH: Well, I'm no architect. People have all kinds of opinions about Berry. What Berry represents is the ability to be flexible. It's a working laboratory, in a way.