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The Modern Research Library
Stanford's librarians (cybrarians?) and other information professionals are struggling with a new calculus, wherein the essential, traditional library combines with the transformed, digital library to become the library of the early twenty-first century. We are thus living and working in a dynamic situation in which the challenges presented evolve constantly. New technology-particularly that presented by the Internet-creates extraordinary opportunities, but the fit between the traditional and the new-because it is not always perfect-requires ingenuity and patience to arrive at useful implementations and interfaces.
How does the modern research library appear at Stanford now? It looks like people-readers and users, each with unique needs, coming to a huge, complex, diverse information space with demands for data, information, knowledge; for services and sources; for assistance and support in navigation and discovery; for the arcane and recondite-and finding their needs met. Some of this intensive activity is physical and observable. Much of it is invisible, via the Web, but no less dependent on the library's resources.
The Stanford Libraries, in their physical and virtual programs, are intent upon constantly creating and supporting a distinctive research environment; our curators achieve this in close consultation with faculty. For example, we have added rarities (rare books and manuscripts on pre-twentith century French political economy), arcane sets (archives of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a digital corpus of classical Chinese literature), and the unique (corporate archives of the Apple and Ampex corporations, papers of R. Buckminster Fuller and Doug Engelbart, and working drafts of John Steinbeck and Robert Creeley).
At the same time, we provide online services, subscriptions, and databases, making ever more information available electronically. The libraries at Stanford spend an ever-increasing proportion of their budgets on electronic content. There is little overlap between the books and the online content, but there is lots of competition in the flood of new and important information sources for the scarce acquisition funds of the library.
One key principle at Stanford is that all undergraduates should encounter original materials-perhaps an author's hand-edited manuscript, a century-old deed, a geologist's drawing, or a seventeenth-century scientific text-with which they can conduct original research, to interpret rather than be told, to understand how new knowledge is created.
Stanford also continues the tradition of bibliographic instruction-necessarily updated to current tools and methods-by guiding students through the pitfalls, dead ends and traps of the information chaos. Some of this instruction is narrowly directed, to a specific assignment of a single course; some is far broader. But throughout, there is an underlying methodology for successful information seeking that most students (and others) do not develop spontaneously. The library teaches not just which tools and techniques are available for a given topic, but explicitly teaches students how to formulate a hypothesis, develop a search strategy, adapt it based on preliminary results, and iteratively solve the research challenge. At Stanford, this method is known as the information heuristic, and it is provided as a lifelong cognitive toolkit for its students.
Information resources range from the ubiquitous (say, today's news wire services) to the truly unique (such as handwritten field notes of a pioneer linguist or the archives of an intergovernmental agency). The library has to provide commonly available books, but it is absolutely essential to the research as well as teaching missions of the University to acquire information objects that exist nowhere else, so as to bring together unique sets and combinations of resources, to assemble real depth in key areas, and to create a setting for intensive, exhaustive, creative, and authoritative research. Without the active, passionate building of unique collections, the library ends up as little more than a chain bookstore-a handy, but uninspiring cookie-cutter outlet for mass-marketing publishing. A real research library is-and needs to remain-vastly more varied, vibrant, and inspiring.
In aggregate, Stanford's cybrary is a wonderfully busy hive of activity offering a broad range of information-rich experiences that, coupled with teaching, experimentation and interaction among scholars, makes this University great, as it creates innovation and change for the improvement of our world.
Michael A. Keller
The Ida M. Green University Librarian
Director of Academic Information Resources
Publisher, HighWire Press
Publisher, Stanford University Press
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