Prof Paul Gandel gave a talk on 9 July 2010 entitled “Myths, Stories and Possibilities: Blind Faith in a Cloudy Future”. The talk was organized by the LAS Social Committee and held at Level 5 in the National Library. Paul had been a film maker, librarian, chief information officer and faculty member. He also studied a variety of subjects starting with history, fine arts, photography and library science. From his multi-faceted life and career, he shared some of his sucess stories.
At Syracuse University, he received funding to upgrade the network. However, with the recession raging at the time, it was not enough and he was trying to work out how to get more funds. A staff from university development talked to him about a potential donation from IBM. Paul proposed the idea of a “green data center”. He did not know much about the concept at the time and approached an academic who got really excited about the concept and together they fleshed out the possibilities. The idea was pitched to IBM and the university received US$5m to build the “greenest data center”. It cost more to build and to run the green data center compared to other data centers. However, it was a bold idea with a value proposition for the future.
As CIO, he formed a Technology Leadership Council at Syracuse University. He invited staff from each school to the Council. The group assessed the state of IT and prioritized and developed the strategic directions and initiatives at the university. By getting people together and involving them, the idea of us against them was changed. Once the group came to a consensus about which projects to focus on, there was action taken to implement them as there was joint ownership.
He set up the Helin Library Consortium which was created to serve 16 institutions, both private and public. It provided a common catalogue with reciprocal borrowing for members and includes a repository. It operates with only 3 employees. It does not follow conventional organizational structures. Paul felt that it was important to learn to build real but different and creative organizations that suit the needs of the present.
Paul felt that with the changes in the way information is used today, information professionals need to bridge the gap. They need to leave their comfort zone and learn new skills in different areas such as:
- forging links between people, information and tools
- mining and processing research data
- facilitating collaboration between distributed groups
- ability to work as partners with researchers
- develop subject matter expertise
For academic librarians, he suggested finding out how to add value for their users and even anticipating what would delight them. He proposed that librarians work on how they can increase the research productivity of faculty and how they can improve the teaching environment for faculty.
For issues faced by librarians such as rising cost of subscriptions and rising cost of digitization, Paul’s advice was to look into how to solve the problem, and build a business model to address the issues.
He emphasized that librarians and information professionals need to have a vision so that they can work with enthusiasm towards it, together with a strong understanding of our core values. He encouraged us to believe in ourselves and to be bold.
Contributed by Yeo Pin Pin