Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2007

Opposite page, top left, the Health Sciences Library in 1982; top right, as it appears today. “Meet me at the library” used to mean “so we can put off studying.” Now, bottom left, students go in groups to work, often connecting their laptops to plasma screens, bottom right, to create their own classroom. “One of the big changes in education from when I was in school is that sanctioned or assigned group work is really an important function, ” says Paul Jones, above. He’s director of ibiblio, a free public library of digital materials on the Internet.

work and have access remotely,” said University Librarian Sarah Michalak. “The big benefit is that they can pull it up on a desktop, not take a tedious trip to the library.”

“Students like their researches digital,” said Jones, who acknowledges that this means they often ignore an abundance of material. “It’s hard to get them to go to a book or a non-online journal. It’s easier to educate them as to where the good resources are on the data in their area, to say, ‘This is a respected journal. This is a bunch of kooks. This is a fan writing about something — he may get something right. This is a scholar writing about something — he’s mostly going to get it right.’”

The digital revolution is drastically altering not only the means by which the University’s libraries deliver information but also the scope of what they do. “Libraries will be aggregators and collectors of knowledge produced by the whole institution, including themselves,” said Gary Marchionini, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor at SILS. “They will also slice and dice or redistribute the resources they have. The role of the professional librarian is becom-

ing much more a creator of information than a manager of existing information.”

If he’s right, some of that information creation may occur at facilities such as the Health Science Library’s new 8-by-10- foot, rear-projection display wall. It lets scholars envision molecular structures, say, or gene sequences or emergency preparedness maps or works of art on a scale and at a level of detail impossible on a desktop.

“Libraries used to host discoveries that had already been made,” said Wallace McLendon ’ 71, the library’s deputy director. “Now the discoveries can happen in libraries.”

Corresponding changes are afoot at SILS. The school has long considered itself to be in the business of training information professionals, some of whom happen to be librarians. Some of those professionals now enter the work force as Web masters, information architects, database administrators, usability testers and engineers. Now, the school has a number of digitally driven initiatives under way, among them an international curriculum to train the digital curators of the future.