The transcript represents the radio edited version. The interview is edited for clarity.
MATTHEW WITT: Hello, I'm Matthew Witt, and today on Crimson Gold Connection, we have an interview with our new Dean of Library Services here at Pittsburgh State University, Professor Eric Deatherage. Hi. Hello, sir. Good to meet you.
ERIC DEATHERAGE: Good to meet you.
MATT: I'm wondering, can you tell us a little bit about your background?
ERIC: Sure. Well, let's see. I grew up in Nevada, Missouri. My mother worked for the library at Cottey while I was growing up. So, I spent pretty much all of my summers playing in the stacks, I would say. So, you know, I don't think I really caught the library bug that early. I had thought I would do some other things. When I graduated, I went into the military and worked in law enforcement for a few years. Got out, got a bachelor's degree in anthropology, and got my first job in librarianship.
My junior year was spent as a reference assistant, basically answering questions at the reference desk. This is right at the very beginning of the internet. So, Google wasn't really onboarded as much as we take it for granted now. We were Google. So, I mean, we would get calls to settle bets, and we'd have, I mean, at that time we had probably, I'd say five or six people deep waiting to get questions answered at the reference desk. Things have changed a little bit since then.
Let's see, I got a master's in library sciences from MU. I also have a master's in administrative studies from Missouri State University. I have a doctorate in education, specifically in adult education, from the University of Arkansas. So that's a little bit about me.
MATT: Yes, that's a lot of credentials. Okay, well, I'm wondering, is there anything like the Axe Library that is different from other libraries you've been at or worked at, or maybe things you've kind of had to adjust to, any surprises?
ERIC: I would say that Axe is a great place to work. I mean, we've got a lot of really great people working here. Librarians have been really great. I come from, I think, the workload is slightly different, but not significantly so from where I came from. So I was the director of the library at Crowder College down in Neosho for about 13 years before moving over here. So a lot of the admin work I'm familiar with, I served on a lot of the same types of committees and things like that. But so yeah, I would say it's relatively similar.
I think your outreach program is probably a little bit more robust than ours was as far as trying to engage the community and trying to engage the faculty and the student body. You actually have people who have been hired to specifically do those jobs. Where I came from was a much smaller library. It all had the same pieces. So, we had a smaller staff, and all of us did. Essentially, the work that I was doing there is spread across about four people here. So, it's a lot more specialized here, a lot more help. There's not a lot of, usually you have somebody to go to ask a question because you've got specialty librarians just right around the corner. That really hasn't been the case for the bulk of my career.
MATT: Wow. I'm thinking about the special collections here at the Axe Library, like in the basement with the Haldeman Julius related to that, and so forth. It's very impressive.
ERIC: Yeah, Sarah's our archivist down there, and she does a fantastic job. They've got some really neat resources, down there. I haven't been able to because I'm only like, I'm only like a month and a half into this gig. So I haven't been able to spend a significant amount of time with her. But I know that we've talked a lot about a lot of the services that she's provided. She's got a few programs coming up here pretty soon. And yeah, it's been a positive experience. You guys really have a great archive. In my prior job, we didn't have an archive, and we created one while I was there. It's nice to have something as mature as we have here.
MATT: Axe Library has been remodeled in the past few years, and I wonder what the status of that is? Is that completed?
ERIC: I would say we live in an environment of continuous improvement. That is what we do. Everything, I mean, everything from the space that we work in, that we serve in, to how we perform our duties, all of it is regularly evaluated, and to try and move forward and become more functional tomorrow than we are today. I would say there is still an active plan. I don't think all the pieces are completed yet. The bulk of them are, we are very blessed to have the space that we have here. We really, really are. There are some additional pieces, I think. There's some instructional classroom space in the basement that we've been looking at and a few other pieces that I think are on the original planning that just haven't gotten done yet. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that we could do more, but what we've got is exceptional.
MATT: Okay, that's good to hear. I'm wondering about the future of libraries. We have, like you mentioned, Google. We have so much digital information available on our portable screens. What's the future of books and periodicals?
ERIC: Well, I am a believer that there will always be a place for physical paper books. I don't believe that's going anywhere. I think that its footprint is going to diminish, and it already has, but it will. Long-form reading, especially in a fiction environment, a lot of that is still done in paper. And if you look at a lot of the surveys in the literature and libraries, students will tell you that they prefer paper books over e-books. However, when we look at what they're actually using, a lot of times the e-books are what they're saying they want and what actually occurs are two completely different things. So, that's just the nature of people. I'd say the future of libraries. So there are several different tracks I can go on this.
First off, AI is going to be significant. There'll come a time in the next couple of years where you'll sit down at your computer and you will have an AI artificial intelligence engaging with you with the catalog, you know, helping you do searches. It'll make you a lot more efficient and effective in your work. And, you know, if used appropriately and not abused, it can actually be a learning tool. it's just... Just like any other tool, though, if you use it in a manner with the intent of enhancing your learning, then you'll get positive benefits. But if you use it as a crutch to keep from engaging your learning environment, then it becomes a negative. Another option, another function would be virtual reality in libraries. That is coming.
So my doctorate is in adult education, which has a lot to do with engaging experiential learning. And that occurs in pedagogy as well with kids and stuff, but it's more prevalent with adults to engage in experience as you are attempting to learn things in the classroom. What that does is if you, if you're learning, if say you have a lecture in a class, say you go, you have a history lecture, okay? And you're lecturing on, say, a Civil War battle. If you can, then go over, say, to your library, and you can put on a VR headset, and you can walk through the battlefield, what that does is it provides you an additional neural pathway that engages a different part of your brain. And the more pieces of your brain that are engaged, the more likely you are to encode that new information into long-term memory storage.
So I would say that one of my, you know, if we can develop funding and, you know, we're at the beginning stages of planning, preparatory planning, I would like to see us have a VR collection here. We could use that for anything from supplemental learning procedures for nursing or pre-med, or learning how to use particular equipment that maybe the university can't afford to purchase the physical item, if we can get a VR-based mechanism that the students can come over and use. I really think that's an enhancement. I've seen it in some libraries. It's an enhancement that I think we should definitely be looking at.
MATT: And we certainly have a lot of Civil War history since you met in this area. Sure, you would know that growing up in Nevada. Yep, I sure do. And the library still has its yearly book sale, correct?
ERIC: It does.
MATT: Like in the spring, I believe.
ERIC: I'm not, like I said, brand new, so I haven't got the whole schedule down, but I think it is in the spring.
MATT: Yeah, I think that was a traditional time. And I wondered, do you gradually kind of weed out some of the maybe older, not so well-used books?
ERIC: Yeah, that's not a used book. We've got to do that. And that's not a new thing. That's, you know, in order to maintain and upkeep of a quality collection, you've got to evaluate your resources based on your collection development policy. You've got to constantly be looking at the curriculum of the institution, trying to discover what materials vet the materials for how they contribute to that curriculum, look and see, especially in the sciences, when books become older, a lot of times the information becomes obsolete.
I mean, if you've still got encyclopedias as an example that have not made modifications for planet numbers in the solar system, you're not doing your job, essentially. So I would say, and that doesn't just happen to physical resources, that happens with electronic resources, too. A lot of that's done in an automated way. Some of it, we rely on teaching our clients and our students how to limit their searches to, like, say, the last five years or so. I'm trying to keep up with those resources across the board, which is one of the things that librarians do traditionally.
MATT: As you mentioned, the planets, I'm thinking, is there still a lot of scientific journals coming into the library?
ERIC: Oh yeah, most of them are electronic now. I mean, we've got a lot of really robust digital collections, databases, e-book collections, and the like. We do have a few physical materials that we've just not been able to replace with a more accessible material type. We prefer to try and evaluate how our clients are going to be using our services and then try to meet them where they're learning. And a lot of that tends to be online, although the physical space in the library, there's a lot of literature out there, making sure that your space is study friendly for different types of study. That goes back to a lot of the self-regulated learning research that exists out there.
For instance, if you're wanting to study by yourself, We need to have those spaces available so that if you need a corner with a table and you want to be left alone, we need to have a corner with a table for you to be left alone. If you want to study as a group, we need to make sure we have tables large enough, quiet areas for folks who really want a quiet study, and also areas where people can be a little bit louder if they want to engage in any type of gamification of learning, that type of thing.
So really, the study space, when you look at the physical space of the library, I think regular people who aren't librarians just look at it as like a room, and here's some tables. But folks who have been trained to do librarianship, we look at it as, in what can this space be used for? You know, how is this useful, and what's the best way that we can engage this space to help students and faculty be as successful as we know that they can be?
MATT: I see. Anything else you'd like to add?
ERIC: I don't think so. I mean, I'm really having a great time here. All the people here at Pitt State have been nice and... You've got a great culture. Students have been wonderful. I really don't have any complaints. It's been a wonderful experience so far.
MATT: Okay, great. All right, we've been talking with the new library dean of the Axe Library here at Pittsburgh State University, Professor Eric Deatherage. And Professor, thank you for taking the time to talk with us.
Thank you, sir. Have a good day.
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