Ann Thornton was appointed as the new university librarian and vice provost of Columbia University in May, replacing university librarian emeritus James Neal upon his retirement. Thornton has a long history with prominent New York City libraries, having previously served for nearly two decades at the New York Public Library (NYPL). Since starting out at NYPL’s Science, Industry, and Business Library as its first public training coordinator in 1996, Thornton has occupied a number of senior leadership positions. Most recently she served as Andrew W. Mellon director, where she was responsible for collection development, preservation, reference and research services, and exhibitions for the system’s four research libraries and 87 branch libraries. Before coming to New York, she worked at the University of Houston Libraries as a systems librarian. Thornton had been in office just over two weeks when LJ caught up with her to talk about the differences and overlaps between the two renowned New York institutions, and her plans. LJ: How has the transition from NYPL to Columbia been? Ann Thornton: It’s great—I’m meeting with staff and doing a listening tour, department by department. I’m also meeting with lots of different constituents on campus—the provost, trustees, deans, vice provosts, associate provosts, other administrators on campus, and some of the faculty as well. The students aren’t around right now, but I did talk with some of them during my interview, and I look forward to speaking [with them]—especially student leaders—once they’re back on campus. A few times a year there are all-staff meetings or forums. We’re going to have one in September where I will be interviewed onstage, in front of everybody, as another way of introducing myself. And I am writing to the staff every week just to give them an update on what I’m doing…. I talked to the staff this morning about the trustees meeting, for example, and what a great opportunity that was to get the libraries in front of very dedicated supporters. My very first day on the job I asked if there was somebody who could show me how to use the library. My assistant said, “Oh, you just tell us what book you need from the collection and we’ll go get it for you.” And I said, “No, I really want to know how to use it! I want to know how to go into the stacks myself and get a book. I want to know all the tricks for searching CLIO [Columbia University Libraries Information Service]. I want to know how to request something with my user ID and have it delivered from offsite storage.” Fortunately, I was paired with a wonderful reference librarian. She was very patient. She sat with me for a while and we looked at CLIO, we walked through the stacks. It was exactly what I wanted. Because I’m a librarian, I want to know how to use the library and I want to know what users are experiencing too. I’ve got to have the credibility of using the library as well as leading it. There are obviously great differences between a public library and a private university. What do you find they have in common? They’re both incredibly important New York institutions, but they’re different animals. The public library environment is very much in the public interest, with a close relationship with New York City and its elected officials. That’s a different environment than the one I’m entering, which is focused on a slightly better known constituency. Yet [Columbia] is local—and global, too, as NYPL is. Both of these institutions have multiple missions. At the public library we had a mission to serve the general public, and also to support scholarship, because it is a cultural heritage institution. The same can be said here at Columbia—the primary mission, of course, is to support teaching, learning, and research. And yet, because Columbia is one of the best academic research libraries in the world, and it has been collecting for a long time, it holds significant materials that represent our cultural heritage—so it has that mission too. I think one of the wonderful things about Columbia is the opportunity for those missions to intersect, and to be mutually reinforcing of the opportunity to use those unique collections in classroom teaching. We shared with the trustees just this past week some excellent examples of doing that, not just with physical materials but with digital collections that we’re acquiring. It’s incredibly exciting to see these collections being used in ways that really enhance the learning experience here. The library staff get engaged as well, and they’re increasingly partners with faculty in teaching and learning, and in research as well. That’s a big shift for all academic research libraries. Is that something you hope to promote at Columbia? Oh yes, and it’s already happening. The faculty who work closely with their liaison librarians are happy—I hear what good service they feel they get and what great rapport they have, really solid working relationships. They know whom to contact; they feel well served; they are frequently asked about what they would like added to the collections. But I think it’s less understood at a macro level how librarians are truly partnered with faculty in terms of teaching and research. We probably need to do more to tell that story, and are looking for the right ways to do that. Jim Neal was very oriented toward using his position as a platform for library advocacy. Now that you’re stepping into the role, what do you want to stand up for? Well, it’s early days, obviously. But I think there are a few opportunities. I’ve already mentioned the core mission of supporting teaching, learning, and research. I think that we need to continue to look for ways to increase our impact on that core mission, and I think the most important way to do this is by increasing our engagement with faculty and students, to really invite them into planning for the libraries. And I think that we have opportunities to think putting our collections, our space, and our staff to greatest use. This is, again, very much aligned with what faculty and students need. Beyond simply the core mission and thinking about how we use our resources best, we have to look to how we’re going to tackle the most significant challenges at university and industry levels—the kinds of issues and the conversations that we are participating in nationally and internationally. The really challenging issues of research, data management, digital storage, the kind of technological infrastructure that’s required for preservation and access—these kinds of issues are not things that [libraries] can simply solve by ourselves. We need our universities to be closely aligned with us. There’s also a need to look at this across the industry. And these things are already happening. We’re in those national and international conversations. Jim used his position here for so much good on the advocacy front, and we need to figure out where Columbia can make the biggest difference. I think we’re leading in many ways. We’ve done a lot with web archiving—that’s one of the areas in which [the libraries] could really make a very big push, but it’s something we have to be intentional [about], and make sure we have the support of our university. That requires a level of commitment beyond what we’ve already done. And I’m not there yet—I’m still very much learning and trying to hear from staff and from the communities that we serve, and from external folks as well, their impressions of where we’re particularly strong and where we can partner to be even stronger. This is an incredibly important library system, and one that, because of Jim’s excellent leadership, has positioned itself as a leader and a real player in a lot of areas. So now I’m just figuring out where we’re going to go big. Columbia and NYPL have a longstanding partnership. How do you plan to leverage that from this side of the equation? I expect the partnership to continue to strengthen. There are at least two ways that we are partnered with NYPL. One is the offsite storage partnership we share with Princeton University as well, and that collaboration is being strengthened through our work to transition that partnership from the management of a shared storage facility to the management of a shared collection. What that will do for our users is make it much more seamless to borrow from each of the institutions involved. ReCAP is the largest offsite shelving facility of its kind—over 12 million volumes—and this is an incredible resource. The way that we borrow from one another today is through interlibrary loan, or BorrowDirect. But that still comes with a bit of a wait. What we’re going for, is a way for any constituents of these three library systems to be able to go into their native discovery system and discover materials in a shared collection; to be able to request those materials regardless of who’s holding them just as easily as they would request anything from their own institution; and to have it delivered to their own institution, without having to go and check a separate catalog. This requires a middleware solution that we’ve architected with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and we’re now seeking additional support to actually implement. We’re so excited about this opportunity to serve our users among these three major research libraries—and also to think much more collaboratively about what we’re collecting, knowing that we’ll always need to have some level of duplication, but probably not as much as we do today. All three institutions are sending materials directly to offsite storage that we don’t anticipate will be used right away, and yet we think they’re important for research. We don’t need to be duplicating those, especially if our users can get them as easily as they would any other item from their own collection. We also have a partnership with NYPL and New York University (NYU) called MaRLI, the Manhattan Research Library Initiative. It’s not a formal partnership, but rather a construct that allows for reciprocal borrowing, and also allows us to go in together on some shared ebook and e-journal purchases as if we were a consortium, even though we’re not. That’s been a wonderful way to try some new pricing models and collaborative collection models. I do think it has benefited the NYPL constituency probably most of all. It really is making a difference in the lives of unaffiliated scholars, researchers, freelance writers, and so forth. Does Columbia have any plans for the libraries’ physical infrastructure? We’ve already begun a project, a move of some of the [Butler Library] reading room reference collection so that we could accommodate additional seats—I think 90 are being added on the third floor as part of a move over the next several years to add more seating for users, including different kinds of study spaces. This is a result of a campus-wide study, and what we’ve seen over the past decade at Columbia is a 25 percent increase in use of library facilities. It aligns with an increase in student enrollment over that time period, but we have about 4,000 seats and a quarter of those were added in the past decade. The space study recommends the addition of another thousand over the next five years, so we’re already pursuing opportunities to expand seating starting with this smallish move this summer. We’re looking at the feasibility of other expansion options, because we also know that we don’t just need more individual study seats. We need more group spaces as well, some collaborative study spaces—those are very much in demand. We also have flexible spaces in the library where we can work in partnership with colleagues to help advance digital scholarship and teaching. We have digital centers as well. These are spaces that have not only the kind of technology that you would expect, but specialized consultation services—technologists and librarians who can work with discipline-specific software. There’s a digital humanities center, there’s a digital music lab, a digital science center, and a digital social science center as well. Will you be doing any classroom instruction? I loved being a teaching librarian—it’s one of the things that I really enjoy doing. But I haven’t done it for some time, and I also really enjoy being a reference librarian. It’s kind of like a muscle, though—if you don’t use it on a regular basis it atrophies. So I don’t have any immediate plans to do that but I would certainly welcome the opportunity. What are you reading? Right now I’m reading a management book. [Laughs] I’m almost embarrassed to say that. It’s called The First 90 Days (Harvard Business Review Press, upd. 2013), and I got some good pointers. But I’ve almost finished it and— it’s good to be almost finished with a management book. I’ve ordered several books by folks who are on the faculty here. I bought a book by Mark Mazower on the Balkans [The Balkans: A Short History, Modern Library Chronicles, 2002)—it’s fascinating. And I bought a book about [Columbia’s] Morningside campus, Andrew Dolkart’s Morningside Heights (Columbia Univ. Press, 2001). Dolkart is an architectural historian, and I thought this would be a good way to learn about the history of the neighborhood and Columbia’s impact on it. I’ve also asked the staff for suggestions of things I might read about the history [of Columbia], and they have been wonderful resources. Someone pointed me, before I even started, to Columbia Library Columns, which was an in-house journal, and it’s a really fabulous resource. I’ve been looking at some back issues to try and immerse myself a little bit in the history of this place—which will take me a long time to learn. One of the things I loved about NYPL was the incredibly rich history of that library, and I never stopped learning about it, actually, the whole time I worked there. And that’ll be the case here too. I plan to stay for a long time.