Faculty Newsletter BROOKLYN COLLEGE Volume XVI Number I We Are Dedicated Going Home Again, and Loving It By Ron Howell, English isette Nieves is thrilled about teaching at “There couldn’t be a better time to talk about Brooklyn College. From the look on her pan-Latino identity, post Obama’s election,” she Lface, she seems to be sitting on the top of said, with evident satisfaction at the outcome of the world, a world of scholarship, ambition, and the election. service that, in a sense, she helped to build. “And it was great to see so many of the Twenty years ago Nieves graduated from professors that inspired me,” she said, mentioning Brooklyn College Professor Antonio Nadal (Puerto Rican and and went off to Latino Studies), Vice President Milga Morales and Oxford University in Professor Joseph Wilson (Political Science) Cambridge, England, When Nieves was a student two decades as the college’s first ago, the word “pan” was generally not used Rhodes Scholar. with “Latino.” That’s because Latino New York After England, back then was almost exclusively Puerto Rican, there were years before the Mexicans, South Americans, Central in Massachusetts, Americans and Dominicans had become the Washington, D.C. and significant presence they are now. Lisette Nieves,Belle Zeller Princeton University (By the way, just as Nieves put her name on a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Policy and in New Jersey, where page of Brooklyn College history, she was also the Administration she earned a master’s first Puerto Rican selected to be a Rhodes Scholar.) at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and An activist with a social conscience, she spent International Affairs. recent years in the non-profit sphere, helping And here she is again, back where it all began. disadvantaged youngsters onto the road of success. “I love teaching,” she said, sitting in her office Nieves is an “entrepreneurial” do-gooder, in James Hall. “Coming back and doing this referring to her ability to build an organization professorship has been a real honor . like a and take it to programmatic and funding heights. homecoming.” “I helped start a non-profit in New orkY called As the Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Year Up,” she said, “where I was given a seed Professor of Public Policy and Administration, grant of about $250,000 to launch a workforce Nieves is teaching two courses a semester (over development program for young adults and link two years, beginning in the fall of 2011). Her them to opportunities on Wall Street.” classes, one undergraduate, the other graduate, have to do with politics and ethnicity. Lisette Nieves Profile .............................................................. Pg. 1 Just before speaking with us for this little Stephanie Walker, Helping the Library Survive ..................... Pg. 2 Working Together to Understand Ecosystems..................... Pg. 4 article, Nieves had been elsewhere on campus Archie Rand, Honoring a Pioneering Pianist ......................... Pg. 6 speaking at a panel sponsored by the group PowerPoint Has Its Lovers and Haters ................................. Pg. 9 Encuento. The topic was pan-Latino identity. Len Fox, Teaching Writing to ESL Students ........................... Pg. 11 Faculty Notes .......................................................................... Pg. 16 Collaborations ........................................................................ Pg. 29 1 Survival of College Libraries “In five years we grew to $7 million and were Nieves, like so many parents in Brooklyn quite successful . It’s still going strong.” these days, is a super parent, spending as much She no longer is the executive director of time as she can with seven-year-old Gabriel Year Up. (who when he grows up wants to be “a boss” or Nieves’ husband “a skateboarder”), even as she does research, Greg Gunn has been teaches and is active in various organizations. an entrepreneur In addition to being on the board of the also, and has gained Nation Institute, which seeks to “extend the some notoriety in reach of progressive ideas and strengthen the the business and independent press,” she is vice chairperson techie world. He of New York City’s Panel for Education Policy, was a founder of and a trustee of the New York State Teachers’ Wireless Generation, Retirement System. an education software As she speaks freely of mind-mapping, one Lisette Nieves in her company purchased does not envision Nieves ever retiring but, rather, undergraduate days by News Corp. for what moving continually among different points of financial news sites say was a handsome sum. interest, all creative and built from the bottom up. Gunn, an engineering graduate of the “When you really build something from the University of Chicago, met Nieves at Oxford, beginning it’s a very inspiring thing,” she said. where he was a Rhodes Scholar also. Forging a Path for the Survival of College Libraries Last May the CUNY Graduate Center wrote on its Web site that How do we cope? its library had been experiencing “overwhelming demand” for the At Brooklyn College, in the post digital world, scanning of pages. The Grad Center said it was “happy to announce we have long addressed soaring expectations the deployment of a new bookscanner [whose] software was designed by turning to our Academic IT unit. We have by the Academic Technology Department at Brooklyn College. .” programmers and designers who work side-by- Enter now Stephanie Walker, Brooklyn College’s Chief Librarian, side with librarians to develop products meeting who responded to our request to tell us about the new scanner and our needs. We should about the library’s emerging policy of using its services to earn income for the college. Lately Walker has been making the rounds, note also that we have through New York and beyond, telling colleagues about what had a tradition of we’re doing here and offering ourselves as a model for coping in openly sharing many of a new media world. —Editor these products within By Stephanie Walker, Chief Librarian our wider academic community. ibraries have been hit hard by the dual But then when the whammy of poor economic times and very severe budget declining budgets. These have come with L cuts began to hit us, increasing demands for technology development we turned to the idea Stephanie Walker, Chief Librarian and rising expectations from users. 2 Survival of College Libraries of commercialization, selling some of our proven I have seen a library host a site for another products and services, including a book scanner library before, doing so for a fee. That was the that costs half the price of other commercial University of Toronto Libraries, which partially scanners, and a hosting service for library Web hosted resources for the University of Guelph sites. These products have been strikingly libraries, back when I was working at the successful, though we are still in the “early days.” University of Toronto. Basically what we did was design software But I have never known a library to invent a for our own needs, and then effectively sold it scanner and start selling it. to other colleges within the City University of [Note: We sell the scanners within CUNY for New York. This grew and we added services, such $2800. Commercial ones cost anywhere from as hosting the Information Commons Web site $5500 to as much as $20,000 for fancy ones.] of the CUNY New Community College library. Besides the above-mentioned services, the You can see it only other way, at http://library. as far as I know, ncc.cuny.edu/ that a library has library/. That site raised revenue is actually living is by providing a on our servers, service related here at Brooklyn, to research. The and we provide Toronto Public not only hosting Library, for but also technical example, had a support. So, for business service. example, if Vee Companies would Herrington, the hire librarians New Community working at that College librarian, service to research Library Chief Stephanie Walker with (behind the table) Vitaliy Faida, Brooklyn has a problem, she and write reports College’s Network Specialist in Academic IT, and (in front of the table) Vyacheslav on specific topics. contacts us, and Gurgov, Manager of Entrepreneurial Initiatives, Programming and Web Development. we fix it. In return, Gurgov is one of the inventors of the scanner. We have not done they pay us a monthly fee. That’s one of anything along our products. those lines. The other significant project is a book scanner There has been a tradition of free services that we developed and are selling at about half that some of us feel now is not the only the cost of commercial scanners. Profits are reasonable option in our new digital environment. being used to support further development For example, regarding the invention of projects, I and other library needs. If you come into our know that EZ Proxy, the software that allows you library and use one of the scanners, those to log into our databases from off-campus, was are homegrown – we developed them, using written by someone who worked for a library. And commercial hardware and our own software. it was given away as freeware. We aren’t about to start giving away scanners! 3 Survival of College Libraries I have been asked: Should the Brooklyn Public Libraries have had serious budget cuts in Library be doing this? I have to say that I can’t recent years, and what we have been doing here make recommendations for other libraries, and is a way of addressing the needs that arise from certainly not public libraries, which have a whole those cuts. It’s an attempt to harness creativity, “I have never known a library (before ours) to invent a scanner and start selling it.” — Chief Librarian Stephanie Walker. different budget model.