Credit: Nick Romanenko

Marianne Gaunt, vice president for information services and university librarian

President McCormick announced this summer that University Librarian Marianne Gaunt had been promoted to vice president for information services. Gaunt, who has been university librarian since 1997 and maintains that title, has led and continues to lead great changes in Rutgers libraries and the nation’s libraries. She is president of the Association of Research Libraries, serves on the board of the regional library network PALINET, and is founding chair of the Virtual Academic Library Environment (VALE), a statewide academic library consortium. She was president of the board of trustees of the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc., and is a member of the board of directors of the New Jersey Center for the Book. In April 2000, Gaunt received the Distinguished Service Award from the College and University Section of the New Jersey Library Association.

So, you have a new title – vice president for information services. But you’re still the university librarian. What’s changed?

I think the new title is recognition by President McCormick that University Libraries, like Computing Services, reaches across the entire university. The word we use to describe ourselves is “systemwide,” because we’re really not centralized. Our challenge is to decide what should be systemwide and what should not. Checking a book out, for instance, should be pretty much the same experience in Camden or Newark as it is in New Brunswick. But hours of operation are local, because they are based on the needs of the individual campus.

You’ve been university librarian since 1997. How have the libraries evolved since then?

The amount of work we’re putting into digital information has increased tremendously. We have many more computers, both for use of the staff and for students. The bulk of our collection budget now goes for electronic information. We’re very interested in electronic books, for instance, and one of the decisions we have to make is how much of our resources we should commit to that. And then, of course, there’s open-source software.

Tell us more about that.

By “open-source software,” we mean software that libraries can use to build their electronic infrastructure – they could write programs to suit their needs, but the infrastructure, the basic system, would be open to all the libraries. They wouldn’t have to buy a complete system from a vendor, and then have to pay somebody to rejigger it every time they wanted to add something new. Rutgers is part of an international grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish specifications for new, open-source library infrastructure software.

If such open-source software were available now, how would you use it at Rutgers?

We envision an open-source system replacing our current catalog, circulation, and acquisition systems, and connecting to other university systems that we use to do our work. Right now, those systems are integrated, but proprietary – which means that every time we upgrade one, we have to upgrade all the others individually, which is very costly.

What would this mean to the average user of the libraries?

There are lots of stovepipes of information in our current systems. The user has to know what he or she wants, know which drawer to open, and go there. But most users want something like a Google box. Our whole mantra is integrated infrastructure. The onus shouldn’t be on the user to know which drawer to open.

Are we headed for a time when everything will be digital? And is that a good thing?

I don’t think we will see things totally digital in our lifetime. One issue is copyright. Another is that the space – the physical space occupied by libraries – has value as a social space and an intellectual space. Also, special collections are hard to digitize.

How did you become a librarian?

I’m a Jersey girl, and went to Montclair State as an undergraduate. I was all set to teach high school French, but one summer I had a job in the Clifton Public Library. The librarian there took me under her wing and showed me what an important and interesting job this was. She nominated me for a graduate school scholarship in library studies, and I got it. After I graduated, I went to work as a librarian for DuPont, in Wilmington, Delaware. Eventually, my husband was transferred to Rhode Island, and I applied for jobs at Brown University and the Providence Public Library, and got hired at Brown. I came here from Brown.

Does the stereotype of a librarian you just described, who goes around “shushing” people, bother you?

Yes, it is tiresome. And it’s so far from the truth. You know, I’ve changed jobs about once every five years. I like change, and change is happening really fast in libraries. That wasn’t true when I started. And whenever I tell people what I do for a living, they tell me, “My! That must be a fascinating career!” And it is.