EduCAUSE president to speak on distance learning, research libraries

Respected information technology leader and EduCAUSE President Brian L. Hawkins will visit the Cornell campus next week to help university leaders work through issues surrounding distance learning and research libraries in the digital age. Two public events are planned for April 25 and 26.

A professional association of more than 1,600 colleges and universities, EduCAUSE is dedicated to transforming higher education through information technologies in teaching, learning, scholarship, research and institutional management. Hawkins has served as president since 1998, when CAUSE (College and University Systems Exchange) merged with Educom to create the new association, EduCAUSE.

"Brian Hawkins, as president of EduCAUSE, has a broad vantage point from which to observe many of the developments in higher education that we are struggling with at Cornell right now," said Polley McClure, Cornell vice president for information technologies. "I've known Brian for well over a decade. He is a person who sees the future much more clearly than most of us and I think his ideas will stimulate good discussion about both distance lear
ning and the future of the digital library."

Before taking over the helm of EduCAUSE, Hawkins was Brown University's senior vice president for academic planning and administrative affairs and, earlier, vice president for computing and information services. He holds a Ph.D. in management from Purdue University and has written extensively in the areas of information resources, academic planning and the use of technology in higher education. He also has served as a consultant to more than 350 organizations.

On April 25 at 4:30 p.m., Hawkins will address the University Faculty Forum on Cornell's role in distance learning, covering many of the issues the faculty has raised about the proposal to create e-Cornell, a for-profit company to provide distance-learning programs. (See related story, Page 3).

On April 26 at 4:30 p.m. Hawkins will speak at Cornell Library's Information Technology Forum. Free and open to the public, the forum will take place in Goldwin Smith Hall's Lecture Room D.

Hawkins believes that the great research libraries face enormous challenges and currently operate in ways that are unsustainable in the long term. Unfortunately, too many people have been lulled into a sense of comfort that the Internet and its resources will alternatively meet these needs, he says.

The focus of Hawkins' talk will be the economics of research libraries; the missing elements that prohibit the web -- as we know it today -- from ever being an alternative or substitute for the library; and changes in the scholarly publishing paradigm that will be needed to allow universities to fulfill their missions in the digital age.

The library forum is co-sponsored by Cornell Library, the Office of Information Technologies, the Office of the Dean of the University Faculty and the Department of Communication. The series supports a campuswide initiative to enhance research and instruction in information science. For more information about the series, contact Edward Weissman at 255-5754 or esw3@cornell.edu.