By outward appearances, there is little about Ball State's Bracken Library—bulky, boxy, brick—to suggest its kinship with the sleek and swift Gulfstream G-Series of corporate jets. Step inside, though, and some of the similarities become more apparent.
Like the aviation industry has done since the mid-'90s, Ball State's academic and information technology captains in 2009 replaced aging instrumentation inside Bracken Library (an early generation computer lab) with a new, higher-tech "glass cockpit"—the Helen B. and Martin D. Schwartz Special Collections and Digital Complex—that already is transporting students and faculty to exciting new heights of collaboration and innovation.
As you would expect with the business end of any executive or commercial aircraft, the library's new glass cockpit also is located right up front, commanding a conspicuous 3,000 square feet of space on the ground floor, just across from the main circulation desk. Its multiple large-screen displays, particularly those within the complex's digital newsstand, are always on and allow students to quickly gain a fix on their position in relation to the day's events before they take the controls for imaginative flights of their own or their professors' planning.
Among the first to test the performance of the university's latest teaching and learning technology is a group of students assisting Jim Connolly, director of the Center for Middletown Studies and associate professor of history, who with colleague Rodger Smith, associate professor of theater and director of Ball State's Institute for Digital Entertainment and Education, is producing a documentary on the history of the Borg-Warner company in Muncie.
Using the Schwartz Complex, the 14 students involved in the immersive learning project are able to quickly and efficiently navigate through all of the components of the production—recorded interviews, narration, digitized documents, archival photographs and film reels, music tracks, etc.—in one place all at once, instead of having to research, find, bring together and review the various parts that may be (and usually are) widely scattered among the library's vast holdings. Similar to modern-day pilots needing to make timely course corrections because of air traffic, turbulence or bad weather, they can merely call up alternate, computer-generated flight plan information on their screens, as opposed to rooting around for paper charts, checking compass headings and airspeed and manually plotting a different course.
So, just as the Gulfstream G-Series represents the latest evolution of engineering invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright more than a century ago, the Schwartz Complex "epitomizes the new duality of today's modern library, where traditional library services merge with new technologies," observes John Straw, assistant dean for digital initiatives and special collections. He finds the equation of the two seemingly disparate objects especially pleasing.
During a previous tenure at the University of Illinois, Straw explains, he worked as a protégé of Maynard Brichford, former president of the Society of American Archivists and something of a legend within the field. The senior scholar edited a book in 1979 that included a reference to libraries and archives as "windows on society," recounts Straw, who thinks, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that perhaps Microsoft Corp. took some inspiration from Brichford when first naming its popular Windows software back in 1985.
"And look at what Windows and similar technology has done since then in terms of creating progressively larger and larger windows on our world," Straw urges, adding that today's powerful computing environment has moved users beyond even the concept of windows and into a more creative and collaborative "open space."
"That's what we're about here," he says. "We're about breaking down walls to learning and creating that open space that, when you really think about it, potentially accommodates a lot more information than can fit in any one building. Within the physical boundaries of this library, for example, we can maintain about 1 million volumes. Using the Schwartz Complex, we can provide students, faculty and researchers with access to a virtually endless number and array of resources."