by Cara Bonnett

Consider: The coolest thing to be done with your data will likely be thought of by someone else.

That’s the idea driving Paolo Mangiafico to explore new methods for managing and archiving the deluge of digital information at Duke. Mangiafico, formerly on the staff of the Duke Libraries, is the University’s new director of digital information strategy. His mission: to make sure Duke’s vast and varied digital output—from course Web sites and dissertations to wikis and raw scientific data—will be available to future scholars to use in ways we can’t currently imagine.

“The academy is based on building on the work someone has done before you,” Mangiafico said. “We need to provide incentives for people to share data, help other people get to that data and mash it up, and make sure the stuff persists over time. Someone might not think to do those mash-ups until twenty years from now.”

Mangiafico’s efforts—one element of a new University initiative funded in part by a Mellon Foundation grant —are aimed at developing not just a digital attic, but a technological infrastructure and set of policies that will add value to researchers’ current work. The endeavor also stirs up some sticky issues, such as how to turn research data into “knowledge in the service of society” with greater efficiency and how to reward digital collaboration in an academic environment.

Because the traditional tenure system is still tied to print publication, researchers may feel especially protective of their data—despite the documented citation advantage of open access articles, said Kevin Smith, Duke’s scholarly communications officer. “There’s a mental roadblock: If I make the data available, will somebody else jump my claim, take my data and publish my article before I do,” said Smith, whose blog, http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/, explores legal issues such as authors’ rights, copyright and fair use.

Despite these concerns, the open access movement has made progress nationally, with a 2008 mandate from the National Institutes for Health requiring scientists to submit finished papers to the PubMed Central database to allow public access. And there has been progress at Duke, too. This spring, the University instituted a requirement that all theses and dissertations be contributed to an open access repository.

But there is further to go, said Ricardo Pietrobon, associate vice chair of surgery at Duke and director of Research on Research, a collaborative effort to maximize research productivity and patient outcomes. According to Pietrobon, inefficient access and distribution systems in biomedical research, for example, can mean a ten-year gap between publication of a clinical trial and implementation in clinical practice. “The more we can streamline that conversion of information to practice, the faster we can improve patient care,” he said.

Even at Duke, where the community is interested in sharing, coordinating parallel campus efforts can still be challenging. Systems are already in place to manage and preserve vital University records, such as Board of Trustee minutes, payroll records and student transcripts. And the University Archives works closely with the Office of News and Communication, for example, to preserve all Duke press releases and new multimedia content such as podcasts and “Duke on Camera” video clips.

However, while a 2006 survey of 120 interdisciplinary centers and 50 academic departments and programs across Duke identified a handful of existing digital repositories (see sidebar below), there are no long-term plans for management and preservation of “born digital” data such as electronic course catalogs or department newsletters, University Archivist Tim Pyatt said. “What worries me is the stuff I don’t know about—keeping track of the new content that comes up that doesn’t have that paper equivalent,” Pyatt said. “Hundreds of us are trying to find these solutions independently. We need to be thinking about this together, so we’re not spending multiple resources to solve the same problem.”

That’s where Mangiafico, who led the Duke Libraries’ first digitization projects in the 1990s, comes in. As more materials take on new life in the digital world—from Duke’s famed ancient papyri collection to past issues of Duke’s yearbook, the Chanticleer,—he wants the Duke community to think more strategically about what is worth saving and, for what is saved, how those digital assets might be used in the future.

“It’s hard to decide what’s important in advance, but the tools and infrastructure we build now need to factor in the long term,” Mangiafico said. Only through that kind of forethought and coordination can the University facilitate the kind of data-driven “mash-ups” that will fuel the next generation of unexpected collaborations. Mangiafico predicts: “With enough eyeballs, you make better discoveries.”

About the Digital Information initiative

What: The initiative is a joint project of the Office of the Provost, the Duke University Libraries and the Office of Information Technology. It has been funded in part by a $325,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with Dartmouth College.

Who: Paolo Mangiafico, who was named Duke’s director of digital information strategy last fall, will support the provost’s new digital information steering committee, to be made up of faculty, archivists, information technology staff and representatives from other areas of the university.

Next steps: The committee will begin discussions this spring about goals, priorities, policies and potential pilot projects. Mangiafico also plans to assemble an informal group of information technology, library and other staff to share best practices and work toward common approaches.

Beyond Duke: Duke and Dartmouth share an advisory group to guide development of a digital information strategy that can serve as a model for other institutions. The advisory group, which comprises university information technology directors, library directors and vice provosts from Duke, Dartmouth, the University of Chicago, Princeton, Yale, University of Virginia and Williams, met for the first time in December and plans to meet again this fall.

Online repositories at Duke

Here are a few examples of existing campus repositories:

• Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository: a full-text electronic archive of scholarly works by Duke Law faculty
• Duke Student Portfolio: an electronic archive of undergraduate student work (text, audio and video files), managed by the College of Arts & Sciences
• DukeSpace: a project of Duke Libraries and University Archives that provides access to electronic theses and dissertations, as well as selected University records
• MedSpace: Duke Medicine Digital Repository, Medical Center Archives repository
• Faculty Database System: an electronic collection that includes faculty directory information, as well as curricula vitae and research

Staying Ahead of the Digital Avalanche

Part detective, part digital archaeologist. That’s how electronic records archivist Seth Shaw sees himself. He excavates data from 3 1/2-inch floppy disks, digital camera memory cards, and hard drives circa 2000. A Nobel Laureate in economics even revealed his username and password to Shaw in order to donate his e-mail correspondence to the Duke Libraries.

And unlike the archivists of generations past who could set boxes of letters or old photographs aside for later cataloging, Shaw faces the twin ticking time bombs of technology obsolescence and “bit rot.” “When you stick papers in a box, you don’t have to go back and check every month to make sure they’re still there. You don’t assume the box is spontaneously going to die on you, like a hard drive might,” Shaw said.

Shaw is on the front lines of a new Duke initiative to preserve the “born digital” artifacts that might someday document the work of a future Nobel Laureate or help tell the story of campus life in 2009 when the University marks its 100th anniversary in 2024. His job highlights the uncertainty inherent in trying to ensure that the University’s most precious digital resources are preserved and usable beyond the short lifespan of current technologies.

In an effort to capture the first rough draft of Duke’s current history, for example, Shaw wrote his own computer program to copy seven years’ worth of multimedia files off servers and hard drives in the Office of News and Communication. He left with 211 gigabytes’ worth of University news and the knowledge that each passing day generates a new flood of digital data he can’t possibly hope to sift through, let alone store.

Meanwhile, Shaw also faces growing skittishness among prospective donors, who fear what one Duke student called the “promiscuous access” of online data sharing. “It’s one thing to have a box of papers on the shelf in the library that someone might pull down,” Shaw said. “It’s a whole different story if you donate your papers and someone could type your name into Google and find your files.”

In an era when the first draft of scholarship is written in wikis and blogs and researchers can store an entire career on a Flash drive, Shaw sometimes feels as if he’s trying to outrun an avalanche. “We’re trying to make preservation decisions in a foggy crystal ball,” Shaw said. “There is no future-proofing. We’ll always be trying to keep up with technology.”

Yvonne Belanger

Photo by Duke University Photography

Since its founding in January 1999, CIT has increased innovation in University classrooms by providing training and project assistance to over 1000 Duke faculty, responding to thousands of inquiries, awarding over 170 grants and playing a leading role in several major university initiatives.

The Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) and the Duke Libraries have much to celebrate about the Center’s first ten years. Since its founding in January 1999, CIT has increased innovation in University classrooms by providing training and project assistance to over 1000 Duke faculty, responding to thousands of inquiries, awarding over 170 grants and playing a leading role in several major University initiatives. CIT’s reach has also extended beyond the Duke community through publications, presentations and collaborations that have raised the University’s profile and enabled other institutions to benefit from innovation and lessons learned by faculty at Duke.

Photo by Duke University Photography

CIT Director Lynne O’Brien at the CIT Showcase in 2004. This annual event draws hundreds of faculty and staff from Duke and other local universities.

Duke established the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) in response to one of a number of recommendations made under a “Strategic Plan for Information Technology in Teaching and Learning.” CIT’s founding director Lynne O’Brien came to Duke from Brown University where she was a member of the faculty and manager of instructional computing services. O’Brien’s experience as a faculty member has given her significant insight into the best ways to connect with Duke faculty while building strong relationships to clearly articulate and advocate for their needs with the University’s senior leadership.

Over the past decade, CIT has worked collaboratively with partners in departments and schools across Duke to provide faculty with the tools and services that would enable them to harness the potential of the latest technological applications for teaching and learning. “CIT was an invaluable resource and collaborative partner in the effort to promote the effective use of instructional technology inside and outside of the classroom,” reflected Robert Thompson, professor of psychology and neuroscience who served as dean of Trinity College from 1999-2008. Long-time CIT Advisory Board member and Distinguished University Service Professor Len Spicer said, “Through the seed money that [CIT] put into a number of initiatives, excitement and energy is conveyed from faculty to faculty…from one classroom to another and one discipline to another. There’s no doubt that CIT and its programs have increased technology awareness and perspectives of how technology can be used effectively in classrooms across campus.”

The First Step: From Chalkboard to Blackboard and Beyond

One of CIT’s first challenges was to provide faculty with an easier way to create course web pages. The solution was the system now known as Blackboard, which CIT implemented in partnership with Arts & Sciences Computing and the Office of Information Technology. From fewer than 150 course web sites in the first semester, Duke’s Blackboard system has expanded to include a majority of undergraduate courses, with over 3200 active course sites every year. “I think CIT has made a big difference for undergraduate education and has improved the classroom experience immensely by helping faculty move from home-grown systems into the common platform of Blackboard,” said CIT Advisory Board member Spicer. While many faculty use Blackboard to create and manage course web sites with little or no assistance, for those who do need help or want ideas, CIT offers a range of options to accommodate faculty needs, including online tutorials, custom workshops and even personal office visits.

As the types of technology used in the classroom have changed, so have the ways that Blackboard is used to support teaching and learning. In the beginning, faculty used it primarily to share their syllabi, post announcements and send email messages to students. Now, many faculty routinely also use Blackboard to collect electronic assignments, offer students self-graded practice quizzes, share lecture recordings, and provide a space for student-student and faculty-student interaction through the use of blogs and wikis. Blackboard course sites often give students access to rich multimedia course materials such as images, audio and video as well as library resources such as electronic course reserves. In the spring 2008 semester, all Blackboard course sites were enhanced with Wimba Voice tools, enabling faculty and students to capture and share audio recordings directly within their course websites.

Working with campus partners to support Blackboard and assist faculty in using this tool is only one segment of CIT’s activities. From its beginning, CIT has put considerable emphasis on increasing awareness among faculty of the broad range of instructional tools and encouraging faculty to think creatively about how to use them to address teaching challenges and achieve their goals in the classroom. Each year CIT sponsors dozens of workshops and other events where faculty can learn about these tools from CIT staff and colleagues who have tried them. The CIT programming culminates annually with an instructional technology showcase that attracts hundreds of faculty and staff eager to share their success, inspire their colleagues and learn from peers.

The Rise of Multimedia and Collaboration

Audio and video have both played important roles in the classroom for decades, but the cassettes and VCRs prevalent in the late 1990s have all but disappeared from Duke classrooms. Addressing needs articulated by faculty for better ways to share multimedia via the Web, CIT launched a streaming media server pilot in the spring of 2001; this pilot evolved into a robust service that is now managed by the University’s Office of Instructional Technology. Duke students and faculty have come to rely on streaming media as well as an array of other tools for creating and sharing multimedia course content.

CIT staff distributed iPods
to all first-year students in 2004.

The University’s 2004 iPod project, which led to the current Duke Digital Initiative, greatly increased faculty use of audio and video and heightened their awareness of the ways in which creating and collaborating with rich media could enhance learning. Digitized images, audio, and video have become common teaching tools in Duke courses. Laptops and multimedia wireless mobile devices give students and faculty access to audio and video from virtually anywhere. Students are no longer passive consumers of multimedia; in many courses they also employ audio and video to capture content, share, and collaborate. iPods, web-based audio recording tools, and, most recently, tiny Flip cameras are used in nearly every discipline. Lab facilities are still in high demand for class meetings and high-end computing, but individual students no longer need to go to labs to complete homework assignments requiring audio and video recording. Music and film enrich an array of courses. Audio and video production are also common activities in courses such as second language learning, writing-intensive courses where students and faculty frequently exchange recordings of feedback, and the many courses where students conduct interviews and gather field notes.

Vicki Russell has embraced these web-based devices and other new tools. As director of the Writing Studio and a faculty member, Russell has worked with CIT on a range of projects to support her classroom teaching and enhance the services offered by the Writing Studio. “I find myself intrigued and energized by the myriad of possibilities available—from Blackboard and Wimba, to iPods, Flip videos, and most recently virtual worlds,” said Russell. “I appreciate the opportunities CIT provides me for training, support, and networking, as well as grant support for innovative projects. I particularly admire the overall attitude CIT has towards technology—that it is not the El Dorado but does offer tools for measured and thoughtful ways to achieve certain learning objectives.”

Innovator, Matchmaker, Navigator

Faculty consider strategies for maximizing new learning environments during a May 2008 CIT workshop.

Lisa Croucher from Duke’s Global Health Institute examines an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, part of CIT’s exploratory equipment pool.

CIT assistant director Amy Campbell demonstrates a web camera available through the Duke Digital Initiative to a faculty member in the CIT lab.

Ingeborg Walther (German) and Daniel Foster (Theater Studies) participated in CIT’s 2004-05 Instructional Technology Fellows program. With support from the program, Walther and Foster enhanced their courses with multimedia.

Chemistry librarian Anne Langely presents a joint CIT-library study of e-book reader technology entitled, “An iPod for Books?” at the CIT Showcase.

The Center for Instructional Technology uses a variety of strategies to support teaching and learning and promote innovation. Some projects receive financial aid, but most of the Center’s assistance takes the form of consulting, advising in course planning, and helping faculty navigate the network of campus resources and services to find the tool or service that best meets their needs. The CIT staff also provides guidance to faculty interested in web-based technologies such as Flickr, YouTube, or Google Earth, showing them how these freely available tools can be used effectively in the classroom.

In addition to funding innovative projects and faculty development, the Center operates a lab where instructors have access to a range of technologies that might not be available in their home departments. The CIT Instructional Technology Lab, opened in the fall of 2000, provides tools and support for digitizing text, audio and video as well as an inventory of equipment that faculty can take out on short-term loans to “play” with. Examples of equipment currently available for exploration include GPS devices for combining geospatial data with images to create visualizations and a 3D SpaceNavigator for interacting with three-dimensional virtual environments. By experimenting with the Lab’s equipment, faculty learn whether or not the devices have any potential for use in the classroom. The Lab, located in the Bostock building of the Perkins Library complex, is also a venue for workshops, training and consulting.

The Center also spreads innovation by connecting faculty across departments and schools when they share the same challenges. Providing opportunities for faculty to learn from one another and encourage each other to try new ideas and tools has proven to be one of CIT’s most effective strategies for disseminating innovation. Faculty gather to share tips and strategies on teaching with tablet PCs or meet for lunch to discuss effective methods for online teaching.

The Center’s support for different faculty communities has ranged from assisting with logistics and identifying common interests to giving faculty stipends for more formal long-term efforts. An example of these long-term faculty collaborations can be found in one of CIT’s most popular and successful initiatives, the Instructional Technology Fellows program. Since the inception of the Fellows program in 2002, seventy-five faculty have participated. Fellows work together in one of several ways: as a cohort for anywhere between a semester and an entire academic year on individual projects; in a series of sessions clustered around a theme; or as a group within a discipline working together on a joint project. In 2008-09 CIT has supported two separate groups of faculty fellows—one focused on teaching in flexible learning spaces and another on integrating student video production projects into their courses.

CIT Collaborations with Library Colleagues

Making the Center for Instructional Technology a department within the Duke University Libraries has contributed to the Center’s effectiveness. As technology has become a more integral part of the academic life of Duke’s faculty and students, CIT’s academic consultants and librarians have found increasing opportunities for collaboration. “The campus-wide process that led to creation of CIT was a recognition and validation of the role that the library plays in the technological life of the campus, “said David Ferriero, university librarian at the time of CIT’s founding. In recent years, librarians and CIT consultants have frequently worked together to explore the implications of new hardware and software tools for the classroom and the library. CIT academic technology consultants and librarians have investigated the ways in which the mobile devices many students and faculty bring to campus could provide access to library resources and services. Using a Sony e-Reader from CIT’s lab, librarians and CIT shared ideas about how students and faculty could use the new generation of e-book readers to view electronic text and other digitized materials. Exploratory equipment from CIT has also supported recent trials of roving reference services with iPhones and ultramobile PCs.

CIT staff and librarians also collaborate directly in their support of Duke courses. In Associate Professor Jen’nan Read’s Sociology 161, “Social Determinants of U.S. Health Disparities,” librarians Joel Herndon and Linda Daniel worked with CIT consultant Shawn Miller to provide students with technology training and library resources in support of student projects. Students in Professor Read’s course used a variety of technologies to successfully combine maps, census data and other research about Durham in their study of health disparities in the local community. Miller recalled, “When I first met with with [Dr. Read], she wanted to know about possible uses of census data and maps for her students’ projects—so I brought Joel [Herndon] into the conversation…Linda [Daniel] was already building a LibGuide for Jen’nan.” Miller’s experience using visualization tools was combined with Herndon’s data skills and Daniel’s subject expertise to provide broad-based support for the students’ projects. “I think this kind of synergy is really what we’re aiming for when we pull together different resources to make a project something much better than what we perhaps might have been able to do on our own,” said Miller.

Photo by Duke University Photography

…when I saw the facilities at the Link during my ‘new faculty’ orientation, I knew I wanted teach there. Little did I know that the technology and equipment would be equally matched by the exceptional quality and professionalism of the librarians and support teams at CIT. They introduced me to the technology and created outstanding presentations tailored specifically for each of my two courses …[and] created Library Guides for my Blackboard sites that were also uniquely tailored to meet my course needs. My experiences working with CIT have been terrific.

— Jen’nan Read, Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Health

Although CIT is based at Perkins Library, its services are not confined to the building. The staff travels around the campus, taking events to departments and visiting faculty offices to offer one-on-one consulting and training. CIT staff also gather groups of faculty in departments and schools to shape the development of new services and to evaluate existing ones. In recent years, these groups have provided feedback on everything from CIT grant offerings, tools offered by Blackboard, and the success of strategic projects such as the Duke Digital Initiative.

Partnerships Within and Beyond Duke

Assistant Professor of the Practice Jeffrey Forbes from Computer Science participates in a 2007 panel presentatation with colleagues from the Pratt School of Engineering, describing their year-long CIT fellowship to explore tablet PCs. “Just having people with similar interests come together to talk about pedagogy and instructional technology is extremely valuable,” commented Forbes.

The growth of CIT’s programs and impact has been fueled not only by library connections but also the Center’s involvement in University initiatives and partnerships across campus. When a library endowment offered an opportunity to strengthen partnerships with local schools, CIT’s strength in both pedagogy and outreach made the Center the ideal home for the new PepsiCo K-12 Technology Mentor Coordinator. The Foreign Language Technology Services group in Arts & Sciences, established separately from CIT, ultimately joined with the Center and now functions as its Instructional Media and Language Technology Services group. This merger has resulted in better interdisciplinary connections and the ability to share staff and resources across the language labs and CIT lab. The success over the past four years of the Duke Digital Initiative has also resulted from productive collaborations between CIT and other Duke staff as well as external partners such as Apple and other vendors. These programs, in turn, have shaped the direction and growth of CIT.

CIT has also enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership with the School of Medicine’s Clinical Research Training Program (CRTP). Through synchronous interactive videoconferencing, CRTP delivers courses simultaneously to learners at Duke and at the National Institutes of Health headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. Over the past five years CRTP and the Center for Instructional Technology have pooled resources to fund joint positions that support the shared needs of both groups in instructional design and program evaluation. “The success enjoyed by the CRTP over the last decade…would not have been possible without our incredibly productive relationships…with the director and staff of Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology,” said William Wilkinson, executive director of CRTP.

The Road Ahead

As the Center for Instructional Technology enters its second decade, it continues to support the academic mission of Duke University by helping instructors find innovative ways to use technology to achieve their teaching goals. Exciting developments in multimedia, mobile devices, and the next generation web of visualization and collaboration tools will present plenty of new opportunities in coming years for CIT and the faculty they support. University Librarian Deborah Jakubs said, “The Libraries value the opportunity to further innovation in teaching and learning through CIT’s diverse initiatives that advance Duke’s technological capacity.”

A Personal Reflection

Harsha Murthy

Everywhere you hear it, read it, see it: Change. Whether we embrace it, fight it, worry about it, or do our best to ignore it, change is going on all around us every day. Nowhere is this truer than on college campuses. With each incoming class there is a new pattern of faces and characters, a kaleidoscope of ambition and high-jinks, of potential and achievement. At their best, universities challenge students and then send them into the world transformed, prepared to realize their dreams.

Those of us fortunate enough to attend or be associated with Duke are particularly lucky because the school (through its leaders) has been committed from its inception to doing things differently. In his inaugural address as the first president of Trinity College in 1910, William Preston Few spoke about the need for the University to take the lead in changing to suit the new conditions of the post-Civil War era, to produce graduates of “efficiency and trustworthiness” and to break from the “chaotic educational conditions” that had hindered the South. Few’s vision of Duke becoming a national force in education and civic life while maintaining its own identity (including eschewing “bigness”) was echoed years later when Terry Sanford, in his 1984 valedictory address as president, spoke of Duke’s commitment to pursuing “outrageous ambitions.”

We alumni are torn between wanting the University to pursue those “outrageous ambitions” while also wishing it to remain as it was during our own student years. Sometimes we cling to what we experienced not because it was good or even pleasant, but because that is how we remember it. The very immutability of our alma mater is a source of comfort because there is so much else that we can’t hold onto—or keep from changing.

This inextricable tension between change and tradition at Duke has found its most tangible and visible manifestation in the Perkins Project, a phrase that inadequately describes the multi-phase, multi-year expansion and re-envisioning of the Duke University Libraries on West Campus. Since the 2005 opening of the Bostock Library and the von der Heyden Pavilion, followed by the 2006 re-making of the first floor of Perkins Library, the University has been engaged in transforming the meaning of the university library, what it is and what it can be in the life of the institution. In so doing, our University has re-established the centrality of the library as the focal point for the institution’s mission of promoting teaching, research, scholarship and even tolerance and community. It is convenient to speak of the new Perkins Library complex (Perkins, Bostock, and the von der Heyden Pavilion) as a place, focusing solely on the attractive buildings and their elegant furnishings. However, the more fundamental change has been in how people at the University engage with each other inside and outside the spaces.

First, it is worth remembering what Perkins Library was to so many of us who graduated from Duke before this transformation occurred. It is fair to say, I think, that it was an after-thought: a necessity but not something to celebrate or even much remember. The impression began with that first visit to Duke. I don’t recall any campus tour guide taking students into Perkins. With a wave of the hand, the guide would say (if anything), “This is our library,” and then she would move forward down the Quad, pointing to the Medical Center entrance and making the quick U-turn past Allen Building and on to the more attractive features of the residential side of West Campus, where the benches were filling with easy-going undergraduates relaxing on a spring afternoon. Yes, the library was an after-thought.

It was not the first place (or maybe even the last place) most of us would cite if asked about our favorite places while we were at Duke. I can remember retreating there, as did my fellow undergraduates, during reading periods and final exams, more to escape the relative chaos of the dorms than because the library provided any special attraction.

Yet, I don’t want to say that the old Perkins lacked any charms. There was a mystery about the stacks, and in their decrepitude they evoked a sense of communing with deeper gods of academia. The stacks and the Gothic Reading Room both conjured up the romance of libraries. These were the trappings of tradition that many of us wanted from our college experience and which we got in full measure. One actually could smell in the mustiness of the volumes, the history of scholarship, what Professor Linda Orr referred to in a 2006 Duke Magazine article as the “smell of book perfume.” The Perkins of yesterday was a place to be alone. You went there to escape contact with other students so you could write your paper or cram for your exam or read the reserved book your professor had set aside.

To come back to the library today is to have a completely different experience. I have referred to the library’s transformation as “extreme makeover, the University edition” (referring to the television program that takes the small, inadequate and usually dilapidated home of a struggling family and razes it to the ground before putting up a brand new home, replete with the latest appliances and interior design razzle dazzle). The most obvious change is the proliferation and ubiquity of computer technology and how its intrinsic portability has altered our relationship with information. Virtually every student carries a computer; digital video kits, iPods and cameras are common classroom tools. So, why with all the easy access to information from almost anywhere, would a student want to be at the library? Because the space is invigorating and because it creates community around the academic experience.

The new Perkins Library inspires its users to be part of something larger than their individual classes and assignments. The transformation of the buildings has created a library where students and faculty want to be. I recently walked through the Link, the teaching and learning center on lower level one of Perkins, and marveled at a space full of classrooms outfitted with all sorts of technology and furniture that is bright and moveable. I learned that students can participate in video conferences, that teachers can project and manipulate image files for neurobiology or cathedral construction on the classrooms’ electronic screens or diagram schematics on whiteboards. I stopped to speak with a student in one of the breakout rooms who said she was working with two of her classmates on a business plan and profit-and-loss statement for one of their finance courses. I don’t recall having any such collaborations during my undergraduate years!

At the new Perkins Library, students come to collaborate, to check out books, to use databases and to seek the assistance of librarians—and they are there during the day and all through the night. And students also are choosing the library as a place to spend time to study, to write their papers, or to read—all activities they could do elsewhere. Moreover, spaces like the von der Heyden Pavilion, with its coffee shop/café, create an informal atmosphere that is different from the solitude of “hard scholarship” and the structure of the classroom. I am pleased on my visits to the campus to see students meeting with faculty members or administrators in the Pavilion. Where talking might have elicited “shushing” long ago, the new library hums with the sounds of collaboration, laughter and gentle snoring (which happens in the oh-so-comfortable chairs of the reading rooms and will probably continue as long as Duke students “work and play hard”).

When I speak to recent Duke graduates about the library, I am delighted to hear universal praise. I understand that the library is now the second or third most visited spot on campus (after the Chapel and Cameron Indoor Stadium). Indeed, in a Duke Admissions website poll asking students about their favorite places at Duke, several locations in the library were on the list. The library is now a place in which to see and be seen! I also understand that student tour guides now regularly take visitors and prospects to the library, announcing proudly “This is our library.”

There is an especially beautiful view from a fourth floor reading room in the Bostock building. From one side you can look through a glass wall down into the Carpenter Reading Room on the third floor. But if you turn in the other direction, looking out through glass that is a perfect Duke blue, you see the Divinity School and the Chapel. From another window you see the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences (CIEMAS) and the Duke Forest further south. When the sun comes through those windows, it is easy to understand the unity of the vision of Duke’s founders.

The transformation of Perkins Library is being guided by a dedicated group of administrators, faculty members, librarians, alumni and architects who understand that they are doing more than changing the library’s physical footprint: they are also enlarging the library’s role on campus.

I am hopeful that the last phase of the Perkins Project, the renovation of the original 1928 and 1948 library buildings on West Campus, will get the same degree of support—financial and institutional—that created the Project’s early successes—the Bostock Library, the von der Heyden Pavilion, and the transformation of the 1968 building. This last phase, the Cornerstone Phase (the cornerstone for the University is visible on the front of the 1928 library building) will bring renewal and change to the part of the library that houses its most distinctive collections in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library and Duke’s history in the University Archives.

The library may be the place on campus that best exemplifies that combination of efficient learning and collaboration in the development of civic character that William Preston Few spoke about. We strive to be exposed to great ideas and great people and to be inspired enough to find the way to best realize our individual dreams. At the Duke University Libraries, we are changing the buildings to reveal the greater truths about learning communities that lie within.