With the arrival of the information revolution, what happens when book meets byte?
By Matt Jennings
Photographs by Bob Handelman
It's just after eight on a seasonably cool weeknight in September, and though the fall semester is just a few weeks old and the night is young, Middlebury's new library is hopping.
Twelve of the 16 computer stations on the south end of the main level are occupied, a handful of adjacent media workstations (television monitors attached to DVD players) are in use, and of the 10 or so lounge chairs that occupy the north end of this level, only one is unclaimed.
On the second floor, there are more chairs and more occupants. A line of recliners on the east side faces the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that, in daylight hours, offer a stunning view of the Green Mountains. Students are folded, slouched, and curled into the chairs, reading Chaucer, Chinese texts, and books on Jewish thought.
The polished maple study carrels and rectangular tables are in heavy use, as well. Five students sit around a long table that is strewn with paper and books. Three of the students have laptops, and all five are engaged in an animated conversation about economic theory. In a nearby carrel, a young woman, with her shoes off and feet propped on the desk, is leaning back precariously in her chair, a spiral notebook open in her lap. On the other side of the wooden divider, a guy wearing a backwards-turned baseball cap and frayed gray T-shirt sits hunched over a laptop, furiously pecking away at the keys. In fact, the only area of the library devoid of students is a lonely section in the back of the main level, where nine microfilm stations sit unused.
Perhaps it's the novelty of the gleaming, airy $40 million complex of marble and limestone that has brought out droves of students on this night, but that's not a likely explanation; those present are hardly gawking (that came earlier in the month, when they first arrived on campus) or wasting their time. No, they appear to be using the library precisely the way it was intended.
"In today's world, a library is a place for conversation, collaboration, activity," says Barbara Doyle-Wilch, the College's dean of Library and Information Services. When she first started working as a librarian in Marion County, Indiana, in the late '60s, Doyle-Wilch says, libraries focused on their collections, rather than the people who used them. "The comfort of the user was not important at all," she says. "That's why you had hard, uncomfortable chairs and dim lighting. The presentation of the collection was what was important.
"This mindset—'the more extensive your collection, the better you are'—still lingers somewhat as an indicator of a library's value, but less so in the liberal arts arena. I think we're more focused on judging the value of a library by how well it allows a community to do its work and whether its collection—and infrastructure—is supportive of teaching and learning."
Of course, it wasn't that long ago that "libraries were ... simple places. Books and journals came in, and, after they were cataloged, books and journals went out," the Yale Alumni Magazine wrote in February 2002. "But while the fundamental concept hasn't changed—the library still exists to house information and provide it to whatever public it serves," the magazine continued, "the institution itself has recently undergone a radical transformation, both in the kinds of material it houses and in the ways it makes its holdings available."
Thirty years ago, Doyle-Wilch says, 90 percent of a library's budget was spent on books. By the 1980s, there was a solid 50-50 split between books and scholarly journals and audiovisual holdings. Today, 75 percent of a library's budget is generally spent on journals (mostly in electronic form) and multimedia holdings. In addition, libraries at academic institutions such as Middlebury are investing heavily in data sets, purchasing access rights to a vast array of statistical information, such as the United Nations Common Database, which provides a wealth of information culled from 30 specialized international data sources.
"The past decade has witnessed a greater emphasis on teaching what's current," says Doyle-Wilch, "and this means embracing technology."
A jar of quills sits on the windowsill in Barbara Ganley's corner office in the Center for Teaching, Learning and Research, located on the main floor of the library's east end. Her bookshelves are packed with the works of literary giants, such as Shakespeare, Twain, and Joyce. It's exactly the type of office you'd expect a writing instructor to have. But upon closer examination, there are apparent incongruities: the collection of books on cybertheory, for example, on a shelf next to Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.
A few years ago, Ganley (above right, with student) noticed a widening chasm between the lively voices found in the e-mails of her creative-writing students and what she describes as the "listless, empty-vessel writing" found in their papers. Searching for a way to integrate into the creative-writing curriculum the eloquence that these students expressed in their favored medium, Ganley turned to the weblog—a Web site, written in journal style, in which the author links to other sites of interest. Though "blogs" have become de rigueur in 2004, they were relatively unheard of when Ganley was introduced to them by colleague Hector Vila in 2002. After she incorporated the tool into the curriculum, she realized that she had discovered a bridge over the creative chasm. Almost immediately, students were posting sparkling prose and critical theory to the blog, sharing their insights not only with Ganley, but with the entire class. Ganley (and Vila in his courses), in turn, found that she could embrace the Socratic model of providing students with questions, rather than answers, while stepping out of the center of the discussion.
Though blogs have been used as a tool for distance learning in online courses, Ganley bristles at the notion that the tool has replaced human interaction or classical instruction. "Not for a minute am I giving up that type of engagement," she says. "By no means are we displacing the classroom experience; we're enhancing it, extending it." She gestures toward her door; about 100 feet from the center is a cluster of computer stations. "A student could be out there right now, posting an observation stemming from our discussion in class this morning."
She holds up a copy of Janet Murray's discourse on the future of narrative in cyberspace, Hamlet on the Holodeck. "Murray argues that if Shakespeare were alive in the time of blogs, do you think he wouldn't use them? Look at Dickens and Thackeray and their methods of serial writing. Blogging is the natural extension of that way of thinking." Though she maintains a professional blog of her own—http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging—
in addition to her course blogs, Ganley insists she's not a technophile. Until she brought blogs into her classroom, she says she was "a reluctant user of technology." Smiling, she adds, "If you want to see the true technophile behind this, go see Hector."
Hector Vila stands about six feet tall and has wavy brown hair that is beginning to gray. He's a native of Argentina, but decades spent in New York City have left him with a distinctive New York accent. When he walks into the library's Wilson Media Development Lab on a Tuesday morning for a session with his first-year seminar group, he bellows, "Good morning, children," to which 14 students seated at computer stations arrayed around the room reply, in unison, "Good morning, teacher." The quaint, 19th-century greeting and response would seem forced or weird anywhere else, but for some reason, with this group and with this teacher and in this oh-so-very-21st-century learning center it feels, strangely, right.
The students in Vila's first-year seminar, "Future Communities: Technology and Social Revolution," are in the throes of creating digital stories, the latest innovation in the evolution of creative storytelling, that counts stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, and the printing press in its lineage.
Ganley and Vila see digital stories—the combination of video, audio, and recorded narration to form a complete narrative—as an emerging form of academic discourse, but right now, Vila's students see digital stories as another source of first-year angst. Vila confides that he purposely overwhelmed them with the technology—the students are struggling to master the complex editing software, Premier, and many are using super-VHS machines for the first time—so that eventually using the tools will become second nature. "Right now, they hate me," he laughs. "But they'll thank me later. This is the world they're entering."
But the digital-story exercises are more than a means of preparing students for a technological age. Already, serious research papers and even Ph.D. dissertations are now incorporating digital stories to augment text. ("Imagine doing an in-depth literary analysis of a Seamus Heaney poem that includes an audio file of Heaney reading the text," Ganley says. "The best scholarship is intensely creative. The brain is associative. This type of work releases us from the tyranny of linear thinking.") And the method of creating a digital story pushes the boundaries of creative expression.
"John Updike said that everyone should write poetry because it makes one more aware of language," Vila says. "I think this is another way of doing that. The scripting component for this type of work is extensive. Language becomes more vibrant; vocabulary becomes very important."
Vila is an academic maverick. Though he has a Ph.D. in English and wrote his dissertation on Henry James ("I couldn't have a more traditional academic background," he says), Vila has been a step or two ahead of his time; only now is his way of thinking becoming mainstream. He's been enamored with digital expression and the idea behind blogging since the 1980s. The Internet wasn't even a commercial reality then, existing only in an exclusive, insular sphere within the government, military, and the most technical realm of academia. For years, he and his like- minded colleagues searched in vain for the academic model they were interested in following, before realizing recently that they are the model.
He thinks this type of teaching, with its reliance on the latest technological trends, is more accepted today because of the students themselves. Even those who would describe themselves as technological novices have never really known a world without e-mail or the Internet.
A glance around the media lab reinforces this impression. At one workstation, a student clutches a mini iPod in his left hand, his head bobbing to the music emanating from the tiny headphones nestled in his ears. His eyes are glued to the flat-screen computer monitor, as his right hand click-click-clicks the computer mouse. A series of images flash on the screen; every few minutes, he'll gently put the iPod down on the desk, grab a pen and scribble notes in the margins of his spiral notebook, where his scripted narrative is written. All around the room, the other students are engaged in similar endeavors. For the past hour and a half, pairs of students have been recording their scripts in Vila's office on the south side of the library; when they return, they struggle to match their narration to their images on the screen. They've read too fast; they have too many images; they don't have enough music.
"Do I have to credit Simon and Garfunkel for this song?" a student shouts.
"Credit everything," Vila answers, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Children, the frame of mind you need to have is that this is like writing a research paper. You need to cite everything, just as you would in an academic text. At the end of your story, there should be credits for images, for video, for songs."
Some students are further along than their classmates and are quick to pop out of their chair and help out when cries of "How do I render an image again?" and "How can I make this photo black and white?" ring across the room.
And this speaks to a third tenet of blogging and digital storytelling: the creation of a close-knit academic community. On his professional blog, www.mediainquiry.org, Vila echoes Ganley and writes: "[This is] an effective way of replicating the best of the Socratic education using technology—this can be done, this is being done, right here, right now, and in this class; it's now online, but the community, the Lyceum, is formed."
The night before, eight members of the class gathered in the lab for the second in a series of informal get-togethers that offered those in attendance the opportunity to work on their stories in a group setting outside of class. The idea sprang from a student's post on the class blog and resulted in a continued dialogue (in class and online) about the merits of collaborative work. That evening, the eight students not only helped critique scripts and assist in trouble -shooting problems, they learned from one another—through their stories—what it was like to grow up on the South Side of Chicago, to watch a sibling die in a Burmese refugee camp, and to come to Middlebury after being one of only 100 students at an all-Jewish secondary school in Kansas. That session was exactly what Doyle-Wilch was talking about when she said a library is the place for "community, collaboration, and activity."
Since the 1960s, the speed and storage capacity of computers have doubled every two years, meaning that today's laptop computer has more computing power than all the computers in the world combined in 1970. This continuous, rapid rate of innovation obviously has an extraordinary impact on the educational model. In the online journal Issues in Science and Technology, William Wulf (president of the National Academy of Engineering) and James Duderstadt (president emeritus and professor of science and engineering at the University of Michigan) observed last year that "the university has entered yet another period of change driven by powerful social, economic, and technological forces." Noting the stunning rate of computer innovation mentioned above, they added, "In thinking about changes in the university, one must think about the technology that will be available in 10 or 20 years; technology that will be thousands of times more powerful, as well as thousands of times cheaper."
Though Wulf and Duderstadt were focused primarily on the research university and the increasing prevalence of long-distance learning, their observations were no less relevant to the residential liberal arts college. Middlebury's library was designed to meet the College's needs for the next 100 years. This fact applies not only to the building's innovative environmental facets (high-efficiency windows, a sophisticated climate-control system, energy-efficient lighting) but also to technological change and the evolving world of knowledge management.
"When we first started building the library, I commented, 'What we really need is a pole barn,'" Doyle-Wilch laughs. "We were extremely careful not to put anything in that was not adaptable space." And she's right. Aside from stairways and office walls, there are no permanent structures within the library shell.
Making provisions for future adjustments to accommodate changes in the nature of information storage and retrieval is relatively easy when compared to what Doyle-Wilch and other educators see as the biggest hurdle: meeting the wide range of needs of a diverse set of users. "Everyone wants the library to meet their need," Doyle-Wilch says. But the needs of an 18-year-old creating a digital story can differ greatly from the needs of a faculty member researching the transcendental idealism of Immaneul Kant in relation to the Chinese T'ien-t'ai Buddhism of the sixth-century philosopher Zhiyi. Though Ganley would tell you that this doesn't have to be true—a faculty member could just as easily conduct a large portion of the research online. (For instance, the electronic journal www.friesian.com/kant.htm has a wealth of information on Kant and Zhiyi, complete with hyperlinks to academic papers and editorial essays.) But that doesn't account for the fact that, as Doyle-Wilch says, "there are faculty members who have conducted research one way their entire career; their mindset is much more linear than the hyperlinking mindset of the students."
In many cases, simple economics helps make the choice easy. "Often it's an economic choice," says Doyle-Wilch. "We don't have the storage capacity or the financing to buy the same thing in different formats (the same journal, in print and electronic form, for instance).
"But as much as things have changed," she adds, "the fundamental mission of a library hasn't changed at all. We still provide access to history; we still provide the tools people need to conduct their research. That hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will."
And for now, the "relics" of yesteryear, such as those nine microfilm machines tucked away in the northeast corner of the main level, still have a place in the 21st-century library. On a recent evening, all was quiet amid the Canon Microfilm 400s and Microdesign 950s. But with a flick of a switch, one of the machines hummed to life, emanating that familiar pale yellow light.
Got Books?
Bibliophiles concerned that the modern library no longer collects books will find it reassuring to know that the College library acquires roughly 17,000 books a year, a figure that has remained relatively stable the past five years. These acquisitions join the ever-expanding 1 million-plus library holdings (this includes reference works, government documents, films and videos, archives, and manuscripts).
The library also houses the Abernethy Library of American Literature, which contains more than 19,000 volumes of work. The manuscripts, many rare, represent 1,000 authors, including Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Carlos Williams.
There is also the extensive collection of newspapers and periodicals. The library's lower level contains more than 1,200 issues of current periodicals (ranging from Rolling Stone to Anthropological Theory) and 50 newspapers from around the world.