STEPHEN OSADETZ: And to be honest, before I got into academia,

I had a very limited sense of what librarians actually do.

I thought that the librarian was somebody
that you visited if you had a question and you
weren't able to navigate whatever online or electronic catalog
you had in order to help you find a book or to check the book out to you.
But that's not nearly the barest sliver of what librarians do.
Can you walk me through, particularly with reference to digital resources,
the different types of roles that librarians occupy?
LAURA WOOD: Well, some of the roles that librarians have
always occupied we continue to do.
And we often talk about them in terms of the acquisition, the description,
the curation, and stewardship or preservation of content,
whether that's text, book form, or digital content,
whether these are images or film or other kinds of formats.
STEPHEN OSADETZ: And content can include the metadata that's associated
with the particular item or--
LAURA WOOD: Most of the time the metadata describes the content,
but I suppose there are plenty or an increasing number of times when
the metadata itself could be a corpus.
So that's interesting, to me anyway.
But I think more and more today, beyond those acquisition, description,
curation terms, we're also seeing some very exciting roles in the library
that I think surprise people a little bit.
For example, with our map librarians, the growth
of geospatial data in digital forms and the ability for us
to use GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, to study maps
and to study geography and to use geography in other disciplines
has become a very, very rich area for more innovation
and a great deal more exploration.
So that's a nice example of a growing area in libraries.
Other things might include multimedia creation,
as that becomes part of the increasing pedagogical shift for how
to help students actively learn about their discipline,
but also how to produce scholarship in new ways.
And the combination of text and image and other forms
such as video, which has just skyrocketed
as an important vehicle for communication.
And any form of human communication becomes an important vehicle
for scholarly communication as well.
So those follow fairly naturally into the digital world,
just like they do in the digital world, in face-to-face nonscholarly contexts.
So another area is visualization and visualization techniques
and digital preservation.
How do we store and preserve the integrity of digital objects,
not just for current use but for ongoing long-term storage?
And that's an area where there's an incredible amount that
is unknown and untested over time.
We are developing a lot in the areas of digital preservation.