In addition to being the University Librarian at U. of M, Paul Courant (and exec. director of the HathiTrust). Recorded during TEDxUofM in April.
Courant’s talk runs about 18 minutes. It’s an interesting, thought provoking, and motivating presentation. Highly recommended viewing.
“Libraries are utterly essential to technology, entertainment, design, learning, mixing, remixing, putting things together, taking things apart. Libraries are the great social mashup bins for everything we try to do with ideas individually and collectively. Libraries were not invented because people were interested in holding the cultural history of the past. Libraries were invented because people actually had to be able to look things up, physical constants and engineering data and things like that to be able to make progress in the world.” — Paul Courant, TEXxUofM.