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Carol Mandel: 'Today the most important challenge is to ensure enduring access to digital information.' Photograph: Phil Gallo
New York University (NYU) has invested deep and creative thought to becoming a global network university — a university in which an internationally diverse community of students and faculty circulate easily and productively throughout a rich network of sites, portal campuses, and research institutes around the world. This vision drives our global library service objective: a seamless library experience at all of our sites.
Technology combined with fulsome digital content makes this possible, but realising this vision also requires a globally conscious and collaborative library organisation working together across distance and time zone.
Meeting demands of users
We are privileged to live in an age of such abundant digital content, but today's internet environment also raises users' expectations of instant gratification. Online shoppers are accustomed to search tools that get them to the perfect pair of shoes, along with suggestions for other products they might also want (and spend money on). Research, however, is a rather more complicated process, and libraries are not as well resourced as Google and Amazon.
Nevertheless, we're able to offer a wealth of new conveniences. Researchers can easily link out from our catalogue to a table of contents on Amazon or a public domain, full electronic text on the digital libraries Internet Archive or HathiTrust, and to a licensed database of journal articles or images. They can track and organise their citations in software linked to the catalogue and click on 'ask-a-librarian' whenever they need help, at any time of the day or night. Another advantage of the global network: an expert librarian is always awake somewhere.
Importance of well-designed space
In 2004 we conducted in-depth studies to understand how researchers and students are using libraries in a digital age. We learned something that many libraries are now discovering: well-designed space is one of the most important services an academic library can offer. Intellectual productivity and successful learning are the engines of a research university, and well-designed library spaces fuel that engine.
In New York City, space constraints are a fact of life. NYU has nearly 51,000 students, including more than 20,000 undergraduates and 16,000 graduate students at the Washington Square campus. Bobst is our flagship library, and last year users made 10,000 visits to it every day. The building was designed by Philip Johnson in 1970 with a dramatic atrium and interplays of light and views across the floors.
Our architecture was handsome, but the spaces did not match today's modes of library use.
A decade ago we began to update the building. Our renovation reflects a continual process of research and observation to deliver an inspiring and productive environment. We design in ways that make every cubic foot of space work as efficiently as possible. To date we have renovated half of our 12 floors, and with each renovation phase the building is ever more heavily used.
Challenges of accessing digital content
Today the single most important challenge that all research libraries face is to ensure enduring access to digital information – information that can disappear as quickly as it appears. While we have largely (but not entirely) conquered the technological requirements this challenge presents, the commercial and political barriers to doing so are much more daunting. We work in an intellectual property environment that is designed for commerce, but not for preservation and access. Publishers and other content owners are concerned about ready sharing of their digital property, and the design barriers to that sharing. These barriers also restrict libraries from making and using preservation copies.
The commercial environment is also focused on end user products, often to the detriment of enduring access. For example, the iTunes license is crafted for personal use; libraries cannot acquire – and thus cannot preserve – anything disseminated solely on iTunes. As research librarians, it is our obligation not only to serve our own local community well, but to collaborate with other libraries and with publishers, scientists, scholars, and other authors to shape a new environment of knowledge sharing in the digital age.
Carol Mandel is dean of the New York University division of libraries
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