Earlier this month, Clifford Lynch (executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information) and Mary Lee Kennedy (executive director for the Association of Research Libraries) wrote a piece that speaks to how research libraries are helping their institutions successfully weather the pandemic. Here’s a brief excerpt:
The internet emerged from the research and higher education community and changed the world. Research libraries were right there. Thirty years of strategic investment by research libraries, in partnership with the organizations that have led the internet’s development, has positioned higher education institutions to effectively (though, to be sure, imperfectly) sustain their instructional and research missions through the current pandemic, and to support a massive, unprecedented, international, emergency research effort to address COVID-19.
Research libraries have always been early adopters of technology. From the invention of the printing press to the birth of the Internet, they have adopted and leveraged new technologies to deliver innovative services, offer increased access, and assist the pursuit—and preservation of—knowledge. Because the pursuit of knowledge never ceases and is always entering unexplored areas, libraries have continually adapted in order to support learning and discovery. The very nature of our existence has prepared us to face the challenges of COVID-19 head-on.
The River Campus Libraries has taken some special action in response to the pandemic—like, taking advantage of temporary emergency access to digitized materials from HathiTrust—but a lot of what we have been able to offer, we have always had. For example, we deliver most of our journal content in digital full-text form and have an array of digitized collections that include the Robbins Digital Library, the Kodak Historical Collection, and the Rochester, New York Voices of LGBT History. For the last 10 years, the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) has provided faculty and students with support for their web-based scholarly initiatives through the creation of digital tools and resources. Recently, the DSL produced a series of faculty development workshops to help professors prepare to teach in a virtual environment.
As always, we are also looking to the future. It’s why we’re investing more time and effort into avenues for sustainable scholarship, and why we continue to be excited about Studio X, our AR/VR program and soon-to-be-space in the Carlson Science and Engineering Library, which will support student and faculty experiences, exploration, and experimentation in extended reality.
I am increasingly grateful for—and proud of—our staff who are not only digitally competent, but also leaders in their fields. Thanks to their skill and expertise, we haven’t missed a beat in supporting the work of our students and faculty through our collections, services, programs, and expertise. It hasn’t always been perfect, but it has been effective.
Mary Ann Mavrinac
Vice Provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean
University of Rochester Libraries
