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B&C: It's interesting that as a librarian you are so excited about digitizing books, which some might see as a threat to the traditional form of the library.
MK: Our fundamental role is indeed evolving, but it remains in basically the same six categories: selection; cataloging, indexing and abstracting; distribution; interpretation; preservation; and the newest one, supporting the extraction, analysis and presentation of the material. That is, how does one make an effective presentation? How does one help a student write and deliver a report that includes sounds and moving images? These six functions have remained largely unchanged, except for the last one, for decades if not centuries. It doesn't really matter whether the collection consists of digital objects, physical objects or some combination of the two.
In my view, in the next 10 to 20 years, more and more information will be coming to us in digital form. For reading, for viewing maps, for looking at art images and photographs, I suspect books will continue to be useful and important, and we'll see them published. But people will find more and more of their information online, and the number of books will decrease. For instance, we're planning a science and engineering library here where our goal is to have no books on the shelves. We probably won't have achieved that goal when we first open the doors, but as a planning proposition, we're trying to imagine it.
At the same time, all indications are that we will still need physical libraries because people want to meet with one another. They want to work on projects collaboratively, and they also like to work in clusters and groups. So providing the opportunity for people to meet one another and to find information in a mediated way will continue to be important. For instance, when we rebuilt the library we're sitting in right now, we wired a lot of technology into the walls, but we also created lots of spaces where people can sit and read in different ways, different table configurations, different group meeting spaces. They've made use of it all, even as more and more material has gone online. Now, some of that may be due to the fact that the library's more comfortable than the students' dormitories, and that you don't find kids running up and down the halls naked, shouting in the middle of the night. [laughter] The distractions are measured.
B&C: So, what is your vision for the library 10 years from now? What is it going to look like compared to what it is now? Is it going to be that different?
MK: One important construct to recognize is that for the kinds of work done at this sort of place -- study, research, teaching -- the emphasis of what a library provides is not necessarily on the artifact. As it happens, before the Internet, before the Web, the information carriers were books and journals and documents printed on paper, or occasionally written on vellum, cuneiform tablets and papyrus fragments -- but the emphasis has been on the information, the knowledge, the wisdom, the commentary and criticism.
Of course, the medium by which this gets delivered is sometimes of deep and wonderful interest. We have a great collection of rare books and manuscripts, and many faculty and students are very interested in the artifact as a piece of evidence. But if you accept the premise that university research libraries are about the provision of content, the ability to penetrate and logically navigate a mass of information, the ability to extract what one needs and make use of it to generate new ideas, new dollars, new interpretations, then the library as a building or a collection of physical artifacts becomes less important than the ability of that institution to feed the desired information when it's needed -- and as long as it's needed -- to various of the primary clientele...