NYSHEI News

The Business Incubator Association of New York State has asked its members to stand up for ARIA, and let legislators know what greater availability to high-end information resources would mean to their efforts.

Representing the interests of incubators across New York, BIANYS is committed to fostering the development of the state economy, innovation and entrepreneurial ventures.  The same goals are shared by NYSHEI through the Academic Research Information Access (ARIA) act.

NYSHEI is grateful to David Hochberg, Executive Director of BIANYS, for bring ARIA to the attention of his members and urging them to speak up.  The continued partnering of the higher education and research sectors with industry and entrepreneurs will only benefit all New Yorker’s.

Jeanne Galvin was recently elected by the CUNY Council of Chief Librarians to serve on the NYSHEI Governing Board.  Ms. Galvin joins the Board immediately and joins Louise Sherby of Hunter College as one of the two CUNY representatives on the board of the New York State Higher Education Initiative.

Jeanne Galvin has been Chief Librarian at Queensborough Community College, CUNY since March 2007. Prior to this appointment she was a member of the library faculty at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. Prof. Galvin has an MLS and an Advanced Certificate in Librarianship from Queens College and an MA in Philosophy from Fordham University.

Ms. Galvin has a strong belief that information is the key to economic progress and that information should be accessible.  She brings her vision at a critical time for NYSHEI.  Prof. Galvin joins the Board as the Academic Research Information Access (ARIA) is gaining momentum and New York inches closer towards establishing an information infrastructure upon which can be built a worl-leading innovative economy.

Governor David Paterson issued an executive order creating a task force on higher education-industry partnerships charged with spurring the state economy.

The Task Force on Diversifying the New York State Economy through Industry-Higher Education Partnerships, established by Executive Order No. 19, will study best practices and generate recommendations on fostering business incubation, growth and emerging technology commercialization.

Governor Paterson also announced David J. Skorton, President of Cornell University, the land grant university of the State of New York, to serve as Chairman of the Task Force, and Daniel Doktori, the Governor’s Director for Higher Education, to serve as Executive Director of the Task Force.

“This is a promising action by Governor Paterson,” said NYSHEI Executive Director Jason Kramer.  “This Task Force demonstrates the Governor’s commitment to fostering an innovation economy.”

“I expect the Academic Research Information Access (ARIA) act will figure prominently in the Task Force’s recommendations, due on December 15.  Information is the cornerstone of the modern economy, and the collective strength of the state’s public and private academic and research libraries will need to be leveraged to fulfill the Governor’s vision.  Again, NYSHEI, ARIA, and the academic and research libraries of NY continue to move to the fore of state policy discussions,” said Mr. Kramer.

Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital’s OK, but Save Our Books!

About two dozen faculty members and students, clutching signs that read “Don’t Gut the Library” and “Keep our books on campus,” picketed the administration building at Ohio State University yesterday, The Columbus Dispatch and the Associated Press reported. The protesters were upset over the culling of printed materials—275,000 books and other works, they said—from the university’s libraries between 2005 and 2008. Another 55,000 items have been discarded in the past four months, according to the picketers.

“What people here are concerned about is the idea of a research collection, much of which will never be digitalized,” John Burnham, a professor of history and one of the protesters, told The Chronicle in an e-mail message. He said that researchers in disciplines like African studies “are particularly concerned” that the materials they work with will not be available in digital form.

“It’s true that a great deal has been opened up online and more will be,” the professor observed. But “the currently faddish business model” means that there is less and less physical space for books, and less opportunity for the kind of scholarly browsing that results in “serendipitous discoveries.”

Will we see other protests, on other campuses, about the streamlining of research-library holdings as the great digital shift accelerates, budgets shrink, and storage space becomes ever tighter? “The factors that led to the protest are those that face any great library now—and the research personnel who use the library,” Mr. Burnham said.

In a telephone interview with The Chronicle, Joe Branin, OSU’s director of libraries, said that the institution remains committed to its print collections. The university’s main library will reopen in August after a three-year renovation, and it will still contain more than a million volumes. But the book depository the university opened two decades ago for library overflow is almost full. The recent culling has targeted duplicate items “so we can make more room for material moving in,” he said.

“There’s a consolidation of print collections around the world. I don’t think that can be changed,” Mr. Branin said. “Keeping large collections is not inexpensive. And we want to keep a large collection, but we want it to be a useful, rational collection, not just whatever has been accumulated over hundreds of years.”

Tight space isn’t the only force at work. Researchers’ behavior is shifting away from print. “All the data that we gather indicate that there’s a growing preference for online digital access to information,” Mr. Branin said. That means, for instance, that it’s no longer economically feasible to maintain separate departmental libraries in journalism, business, theater arts, and social sciences. He understands that “for some faculty and students, that’s very emotionally upsetting.”

Not everything should be in a local collection, he believes. OSU is working with a statewide consortium of libraries to figure out how to make best use of one another’s holdings. “For us as research librarians—and I said this to the protesters yesterday—our goal is to try to preserve the record of scholarship,” he said. “We have to come up with a better system nationally and internationally. There are just so many inefficiencies in the way we’ve been doing it.” —Jennifer Howard

The New York State Assembly Committee on Economic Development, Job Creation, Commerce and Industry issued its report of the 2008 legislative session.

Included among the legislation cited was NYSHEI’s own Academic Research Information Access (ARIA) act.  ARIA was listed among bills favorably reported that would “improve the economy” and “create jobs.

\NYS Assembly Committee on Economic Development, Report 2008