The university's struggling library system has found a new leader.
Patricia Steele, Indiana University's dean of libraries since 2005, was tapped to head this university's libraries last Thursday and will take over as dean Sept. 1.
The libraries, which amass less information and have fewer subscriptions than any of the university's five peer institutions, have been without a permanent dean since Charles Lowry stepped down from the position in April 2008.
When he left, Lowry stressed that strong libraries can serve as a major recruitment tool for professors and graduate students who depend on them for research, but Steele steps into her new role at a time when the libraries' funding will be crunched.
As the price of journal subscriptions has steadily increased over the last four years, library officials have cut the university's journal collection every year during that period. Provost Nariman Farvardin cautioned that Steele shouldn't count on new funding to turn the libraries around.
But Steele, who has extensive experience with digital libraries, envisions a future where the university's libraries can become more efficient by exploring new technologies and the Internet.
"We are in a world where often people feel if it's not electronic, it doesn't exist for them," Steele said. "Many of our users work that way and I'm familiar with the shift in information resources that we purchase and provide."
Farvardin said Steele was chosen because of her vision and experience.
"She has already been dean of libraries where the libraries are actually more highly ranked than our university's libraries, so that was a tremendous asset," Farvardin said. "But I was very impressed with her vision for the libraries in general and what the future might hold."
Steele is a member of the library team working on the Google Books Library Project, a collective of university libraries that has digitized millions of books and published them on the Internet.
She is also a member of the project's Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which focuses specifically on digitizing academic journals, and co-founded HathiTrust, another university-run digital book collective.
Farvardin said he believes Steele "has a lot of experience with how to most efficiently manage the resources available."
While Steele admitted inevitable obstacles will arise, she said she's undaunted.
She plans to increase the university's store of information through electronic media, which are often cheaper than their paper counterparts.
Steele said she was "very proud" of the partnerships she forged with other academic units at Indiana University and said she hoped to make this university's library more efficient through tailoring it specifically to the demands of academic departments and students.
"The whole idea of what a collection is has changed so dramatically in a digital environment," Steele said. "If the library is not able to provide what users want, it's an excellent time to look at all ways we approach it."
Timothy Hackman, an English and linguistics librarian, has said that the library has already customized its collection, warning in an April 30 article in The Diamondback that "we're getting to the point where all the stuff is important."
"We've already gotten rid of the fat, now we are getting to the stuff that hurts," he said in the article.
But Desider Vikor, the library's interim dean, expressed confidence in his successor.
"She comes at a time of both great challenge and promise to the UM libraries," he wrote an e-mail. "She will bring us new energy and perspective as we work together in realizing excellence for the libraries."
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