Charge
Beginning in January 2013, the Cornell NYC Tech Campus, currently located in the Googleplex building in Chelsea, will offer a Master of Engineering (M. Eng.) degree in computer science. The “beta” degree program will initially include fewer than twenty students and three faculty members. Additional master degree programs will follow in information science, operations research, and electrical and computer engineering. Future plans include an innovative two-year Master of Science dual degree to be offered by Cornell and its academic partner the Technion, as well an accelerated and tech-oriented one-year MBA. All degrees will reflect the mission of the campus, with a focus on collaborative projects, industry mentors, and entrepreneurship/business related coursework. The permanent campus on Roosevelt Island is planned to open in 2017, and eventually will house more than 2,000 full-time graduate students.
One of Cornell University Library’s top five strategic priorities for 2013-2015 is to develop innovative library and information services and digital resources to support the Cornell NYC Tech Campus. The campus community will need the means to collaborate, visualize, simulate, and share their next inventions. The Library will partner with IT@Cornell, student services, career services, and others to assure that students, faculty, and researchers have the technology, space, and tools they need to access information, and through onsite information professionals will provide knowledge management expertise for navigating an increasingly competitive and complex information environment.”
The purpose of this task force is to:
- Identify and work with all the stakeholders involved in the development and launch of NYC Tech Campus, including IT@Cornell, faculty, WCMC, the NYC team (Cathy Dove, Dan Huttenlocher), and others (e.g., the Department of Commerce, information professionals from Technion),
- In conjunction with the stakeholders, define the kind of services and digital resources the Cornell University Library will need to provide in order to support the information, research, and teaching needs of the faculty and students associated with the NYC Tech Campus,
- Project the financial resources (library materials, staffing, etc.) that will be needed to provide these services,
- Identify additional issues that may result from the partnership with Technion or commercial interests associated with the NYC Tech Campus,
- Propose an organizational structure that will succeed this task force within the CUL Library and IT@Cornell to represent the ongoing needs of the NYC Tech Campus.
Some of the services that have been identified initially (and may need revision) include:
Access to Collections
The anticipated breadth of multidisciplinary subjects and entrepreneurial collaborations with commercial and foreign institutions has significant implications for providing world class access to resources for users of a hybrid academic (non-profit)/commercial campus/foreign institution that are affordable, sustainable, timely and will require dedicated staff and collections funds. What will the staffing, licensing, and financial issues be to expand access to existing resources to this new community of users and what new resources will need to be provided?
Subject/Information Expertise
A number of librarian/information professionals should be embedded in the Cornell NYC Tech Campus hubs to provide research support services. The librarians will be members of research teams, instructing students in the use of information resources and discipline specific software, as well as serving as the onsite experts in information/data access and management, amassing competitive intelligence briefs, and the like. The librarians should function as a cohesive virtual library team, with a librarian/information professional in a leadership role, providing the overarching vision and management for the Cornell NYC tech campus information services. Close collaboration between the Cornell NYC Tech Campus virtual library staff and Ithaca/Weill Med library staff is expected and essential.
Space Implications
The library will provide 21st century information support for the Cornell NYC Tech campus through an extensive set of digital collections accompanied by the expertise necessary for navigating the challenges of that information environment. This model assumes no physical library space other than offices---but the community will need space and tools to collaborate, visualize, simulate, and share their next inventions. There were also be specialized databases that are IP- or computer-protected (such as Bloomberg terminals), requiring some physical presence that is carefully managed. The Library will partner with IT@Cornell to assure that students have the technology and tools they need to access information, and we will integrate our onsite information professionals into the individual and collaborative study spaces provided by the University on the campus. Partnering with IT@Cornell, student services, career services, intellectual property officers, and others will create a knowledge hub which would serve to satisfy the array of student and faculty needs. This would be a new and innovative model that is designed flexibly to keep pace with the growth of the Cornell NYC Tech campus.
Technology & Tools
Students at the Cornell NYC Tech campus will need access to the full range of information tools and technologies that the Cornell University Library currently provides to students at the Ithaca campus – and more. Working as part of the IT@Cornell team, the Library will ensure that students have full authenticated access to the specialized software, computational tools, and information resources that their education requires. The Library will need to provide customized discovery and access solutions for licensed information resources that focus on the specific subject areas and match the entrepreneurial nature of the new campus. For reference and research questions, it will be important both to have onsite consulting adjacent to specialized computing spaces and to make sure that help is never more than a Skype call or IM away, wherever the student is located.
The committee will have a one-year duration beginning December 1, 2012 and will submit reports of activities every three months with a final report due December 15, 2013. | 