Now entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, in the library world we find ourselves in uncharted territory, an environment where the place of print collections and the physical books they comprise is being radically redefined, some would say threatened, for several reasons. What I will argue here today is that it’s possible in this new environment to thrive and be as cutting edge as the libraries at our peer institutions; but also to define a new proposition for printed books in general collections that continues to value the information embedded in the texts themselves at the same time it recognizes the special importance of these traditionally formatted texts to researchers as physical artifacts. And one of the things I hope to show is how connecting researchers to the contexts in which these works were written via the physical objects in which they are embedded is consistent with Río Hondo College Library’s mission—as well as the missions of libraries at colleges similar to ours.

Presenter: Mike Garabedian, Dean of Library Services

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