What do you do with a million books when they've been digitized? Jonathan Bengtson, the University of Victoria's head librarian, poses the question, but there's no easy answer.
With digital media in all of its formats so prevalent in society, it's obvious that libraries are changing. But that doesn't mean they're diminishing in importance, or coming anywhere close to disappearing, Bengtson said.
"It's an interesting time to be here," said the 44-year-old, who took over the UVic library reins from Marnie Swanson at the beginning of this year. He points to a "convergence" of events affecting the library: besides a new head librarian, the university has a new strategic plan and there are budget issues to consider.
The American-born Bengtson is just the third head librarian in UVic's 50-year history, following Swanson and Dean Halli-well, who retired in 1988. Academic libraries are clearly moving in new directions as he assumes his post, he said.
"We're in a different space in libraries than we were even a couple of years ago. It all stems from the move from analogue to digital, and what that means."
But he's convinced the importance of the library as a place will not diminish. With well over two million visits a year, UVic's McPherson Library is the highest-use space on campus, he said. "People come for all sorts of reasons, like the café, where there's social interaction and where students come and meet with faculty. There are quiet spaces, spaces to engage with technologies of different types."
Bengtson brings stellar academic credentials and impressive library experience to his new position. His initial area of study was medieval history, from which he said he was fortunate to move into a library career.
The way he tells it, he became a librarian because of a simple physiological fact: he is tall.
As a graduate student at Oxford University, Bengtson applied for a library job at the university's historic Corpus Christi College, built in the early 16th century. Librarian David Cooper virtually hired him on sight.
"The library had very high wooden book-presses. David was about five feet tall, and I'm six-foot-six, so he opened the door and said, 'You're hired as the assistant librarian,' primarily because I could reach the top of the shelves."
The opportunity came at a time when he was questioning his direction in life, and whether he wanted to pursue a career in the classroom.
"We kind of found one another, libraries and I."
He went on to pursue a master's degree in library studies at University College London, where he met his wife, Sue, who was in the same program.
Bengtson eventually moved to a library position at the University of Toronto, and in 2004 became part of the groundbreaking work being done with digitization and the Internet Archive - an eminent non-profit digital platform. At the time, the archive was working with the university on bringing the world's book collections into digital forms.
That association presented an opportunity to be involved with mass digitization - something in which Canada played "really a quite extraordinary role" in the early days, he said.
"We ramped up to this stage for a couple of years in Canada where we were digitizing hundreds of books every week.
"We had 23 scanning machines running 14 hours a day, each machine doing 500 pages an hour."
It was, he said, a "revolution" happening in an unobtrusive space at the University of Toronto's Robarts Library. Bengtson coordinated the effort.
"We were moving what is now close to 400,000 books - mostly 19th-and early 20th-century, so [they are] public-domain books - into a new form."
Bengtson said there are two primary and enduring purposes of libraries: preservation and access. He said that when materials are digitized, the paper-based originals are kept and preserved, but there are still questions about how to preserve electronic or digitized objects.
"That's a whole issue right now in libraries. Because so much information ... is now being produced in so many different places, it's a matter of, 'What do we preserve and how do we provide access to it?'
"We're in this hybrid space right now." Bengtson noted that things have changed drastically since his own university days began in the pre-Internet mid1980s, when research involved using the card catalogue.
The changes are, if anything, increasing the vibrancy of the library's role, Bengtson said.
"I'm absolutely convinced that we're about to enter a Golden Age for libraries. Libraries are positioned as never before, and it's taken thousands of years of history to have a much more direct and interactive relationship with the learning process and the research process.
"It's really how the university itself is changing, and how teaching and research is changing. One of our roles is to understand information, to understand what data is real and what data isn't."
In the past, the library's role was more passive and focused on acquiring and keeping collections. Now, librarians have high levels of expertise in terms of digital systems and other programs that allow them to play a more collaborative role, Bengtson said.
"That's probably the biggest change that's coming for us. We'll have a service aspect to what we do, but we're moving much more toward thinking of a librarian as a scholar-practitioner."
Ultimately, the university library brings people and academic disciplines together, Bengtson said.
"The library's role is to begin to understand and connect across disciplines," he said. "We sit as the 'non-siloed' space on campus where some of these collaborations happen across skill sets and across faculty and students and community." [email protected]
