Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994

The Research Library the Day After Tomorrow

Program Session III: Introduction

James F. Williams II, Convener
University of Colorado

Good morning. I am very happy to welcome you to the third general session of our program which has been entitled The Day After Tomorrow. Our first two general sessions were designed to give us perspectives that should help us conceive and build a newer, better research library. We heard about technologies last night, and we certainly had an exciting session of scholars this morning.

It is now time for us to shift our cognitive mode to what I hope will be a new economy of attention that has a very high signal-to-noise ratio. We are going to hear from our colleagues, three practitioners in the field--a public librarian, an ARL colleague of ours with special experience in research agenda in the area of special libraries, and a library educator. They have been asked to share their professional perspectives on the changing roles, services, attitudes and visions in public libraries, special libraries, and library education.

Our first speaker this morning is Joey Rodger. Joey is currently President of the Urban Libraries Council. Following library school at the University of Maryland, her career began as a research associate with King Research. In 1980, she was engaged for three years doing public library planning and evaluation studies. She left King Research to become the Coordinator of Evaluation and Information Development at the Fairfax County Public Library of Virginia, and in 1984 she became the Chief of State Network Services at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. From 1986 to 1992 she was Executive Director of the Public Library Association. She is a very active strategic planning consultant and management consultant, and she has served as a regents lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley. Her scholarly record is centered on public library users and uses, on reinventing central libraries, and on planning and evaluation.

Our second speaker is a fellow ARL librarian colleague. Miriam Drake is the Director of the Libraries and the Information Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is noted for planning and implementation of the Georgia Technoelectronic Library, for her information awareness courses for students and faculty, for innovative uses in U.S. government information, and for her service on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board. Mimi's career includes an assistant director's post at Purdue University, in industry as a management consultant and market researcher, and chairman of the OCLC Board of Trustees. She received both her B.S. in economic analysis and her M.L.S. from Simmons College, and she did graduate work in economics at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous articles and conference papers on management and the management of information technology. She is the current president of the Special Libraries Association. Mimi was recipient of the 1992 Hugh Atkinson Memorial Award for Innovation and Risk Taking, and she recently received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Indiana University.

Our final speaker will be Dan Atkins. Dan is the Dean and Professor of the Graduate School of Information in Library Studies at the University of Michigan. As an electrical engineer undergraduate at Bucknell University in the mid 1960s, he designed and implemented an online circulation control system for the library. Following doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana in the early 1970s, he joined the faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. As a teaching scholar whose research agenda has progressed from computer architecture to architecture advancement, information technology infrastructure, electronic knowledge communities and on to digital libraries, the progression of his career and wisdom has been equally active. He has moved through the ranks of being an assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science to become the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering, and then on to enter as Dean of the College of Engineering in 1992, to his current post as Dean of Graduate School of Information Library Studies.