We have a new University Librarian, Jeffrey MacKie-Mason. I hope you will take a moment to read his message below, which outlines our mission as library employees.
To give you an idea of how he relates to you, he is your boss's boss's boss's boss. Please be on your best behavior whenever you are on the clock, but especially when you see him in the halls!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeffrey MacKie-Mason
Date: Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 1:02 PM
Colleagues,
For me, today is a day of special joy: my first officially working with you as the new university librarian.
I look forward to learning from you — and I mean this quite sincerely. Some of you may have been surprised, perhaps even disappointed, that I have not previously held a leadership position in a library. I have a lot to learn, and I hope you will be patient, and help me. On the other hand, I have spent most of my career dedicated to creating and building a school whose mission is “helping people use information, with technology, to build a better world.” Not very different from our library’s mission!
My commitment to you: I will serve you, as you work to serve the mission of this great library. Together we will be in service to Berkeley's faculty and students, and the public. We will help people find, evaluate and use information — with technology — to build a better world.
Our campus is the top public university in the world, and one of the very top research universities public or private. To support our campus, our library should be no less.
What do we need to accomplish?
The Commission on the Future of the UC Berkeley Library concluded in 2013 that "the most important contribution of the research university library in the next twenty years will be to provide the increasingly sophisticated human expertise required to successfully navigate [the] rapidly shifting heterogeneous terrain” [emphasis added]. I agree.
Every well-educated, successful participant in the modern world needs to be information fluent. With the explosive and low-cost abundance of information resources, everyone needs to be their own librarian, finding and evaluating information all day long, every day. That doesn’t mean there is no role for us: just the opposite. First, we are needed to help our students and faculty become information fluent. But even though every college graduate can write, we still need professional writers in our society. And even when we elevate all of our students and faculty to more advanced levels of information fluency, our second responsibility will be as expert informationists, working with them to solve their more challenging and advanced information problems in this “rapidly shifting heterogenous terrain.”
The rapidly growing availability of new data, and computational tools to analyze them, provides one of these emerging challenges for many. Most of our faculty and students are not yet trained or equipped to provide for all of their own data curation, management and preservation needs. As the core provider of advanced information service on campus, we must further develop our expertise and provide an ever stronger set of data services to campus. We won’t provide all data services by ourselves of course, but will create a complete portfolio through partnerships with other campus units.
The University’s mission is to “discover knowledge and to disseminate it to its students and to society at large.” To support this, we must make it easier for scholars to engage in open access dissemination. At the same time, we have to work to create a more financially sustainable publishing ecosystem so that we can afford to provide access to scholarship at the same time as we deliver our other services. Our faculty and students will benefit from more open and lower cost dissemination, and the whole world will benefit from greater access to Berkeley’s discoveries.
We have many great spaces for contemplation and study. But the ways are changing in which students and faculty engage with information, and with each other as they use information to advance learning and discovery. We need to re-envision and re-design many of our spaces to support an age of interactive, connected and collaborative learning and discovery. For example, students need more sophisticated, powerful access to local and remote information collections, and to use new technologies to find, evaluate and use this information. We can provide them with access, training and experience to prepare them for their future. Equally or more important, students need access to each other — face to face and virtually — to engage in connected, collaborative learning, discovery and knowledge production. We should provide spaces, technologies and human expertise to make our libraries the vibrant, go-to campus hubs for connected learning. The just-initiated renovation of Moffitt 4 and 5 is a first step in this initiative.
None of this is to say that we will abandon our collections, nor that we will stop building them. But our mission is not building collections for their own sake, but helping people to find, evaluate and use information. In some cases the most important way to help is to continue to build and preserve our tremendous collections of print and physical and digital objects, and we will devote considerable effort and resources to doing so. In other situations we should focus on providing advanced services to help people access, evaluate and use digital resources owned and stored elsewhere.
More than anything else we must provide professional, advanced service. Our people — you — are our most valuable resource.
We are at the dawn of the second Gutenberg age, with information production and dissemination growing explosively. Societies have evolved from primarily agricultural, to industrial, to service-based, and now we are entering the Information Age. At this time society needs ever greater knowledge institutions. What an exciting time for a university research library.
For me, this isn’t a job, it’s a passion, and I’m on a mission. Let’s make great things happen together.
Jeff
---
University Librarian
and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer
UC Berkeley
www.jeff-mason.com
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