Page 72 - 4188

70

our students. In North America, we do this, generally, by hiring
practitioners as part-time faculty to cover important areas of practice that
don’t coincide with our areas of research specialization. But we also
need to engage part-time and adjunct faculty in a dialogue with the full-

time research faculty: this is key to a coherent curriculum, but it must be
a conversation among equals, with an understanding and respect for the
particular kind of knowledge each party possesses. We also make a

place in our schools for other categories of faculty, whose principal
interest is in the management of research projects, engaging students in
hands-on learning, and the application of research to current problems in
business, government, and community settings. Increasingly, innovation

comes from outside the university, from commerce, but also from
cultural production, from politics, and from social networks. The
challenge this presents to library and information science is not only to

contribute its own innovations, in order to demonstrate the value of what
we do, but also to keep up with those contributed by others, so that our
students are appropriately prepared for the world in which they will

work—not limited to learning about the past, but aware of what the
creators and seekers of information already know and what they will
need in the future, so that, as information professionals, they can

develop the collections, services, and practices for that future. To
accomplish this, we try to discover, infer, and explain the principles that
guide practice, and we teach those to our students, so that during a
lifetime of practice, they are equipped to understand (and also to invent)

new practices, as instances of abiding principles. For our students
graduating now, these changes in practice, in the information profession,
will not be insignificant, or infrequent, or inconsequential. To take just

one example, consider the digitization of all the books in the library—as,
for example, through the Million Book Project or through Google
Books. For all intents and purposes, this will be accomplished very
soon, and then we can expect to see fundamental changes in what people

can and will do in the library, especially in research libraries. My own
background, as a faculty member, is in American literature, and my
current research interests include the applications of text-mining to

literary research: I have spent the last four years, and will spend the next
two, overseeing multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary research
groups that are working out an understanding of how the digital library

of the future needs to be constructed and configured to support this new
kind of humanities research. In order to do new kinds of scholarship,