A Q&A with University Librarian Adriana Popescu
A university librarian can shape how scholars discover information, collaborate across disciplines, and preserve scientific history for future generations.
After a few months at the helm of the Caltech Library, Adriana Popescu sat down to discuss her vision and goals for the stewardship of this esteemed research library.
Do you have a personal philosophy when it comes to library leadership?
Librarianship is not my first career. Before I became a librarian, I was an engineer. I grew up and received my engineering education during the communist regime in Romania, where access to information was very much controlled and censorship was a way of life.
When I came to the United States and discovered the world of libraries, it was totally new to me. It was fascinating just to be able to walk into a building full of books with no one telling you what you can or cannot read. Seeing that was when I realized what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life: to play a small part in connecting people to knowledge and information.
As a leader, I think what defines me is that desire to continue to be that connector and facilitator for anyone who is pursuing scientific discovery, learning, self-improvement, or personal growth. If I can play a role in making that connection and facilitating access to information and knowledge that then leads to creating more knowledge, that's what I would say is my philosophy.
When you think about the future of the Caltech Library, what is your overarching vision?
The Caltech Library has an incredible team of librarians and staff. My goal is really to foster and allow the amazing team that we have right now to be the best they can be and to achieve all the ideas that they're thinking of every single day.
When I started this job, I spent the first two months meeting one-on-one with everybody working in the Library. What I gathered from every single person is how much they appreciate working here and how much they appreciate the fact that they have the agency to come up with ideas, to experiment, to pilot, to try things out, and to be creative.
For me, whatever the Library can achieve in the future, it's only possible if I am able to continue to foster the creativity of the people we have now at the Library.
What is an issue that you're interested in navigating in your role at the Caltech Library?
We hear about the AI revolution and all the opportunities that may bring. For us here in the library, this whole evolving landscape presents a number of challenges but also opportunities. One of the opportunities is to look at generative AI as a tool that can help us be better librarians.
For example, we have large collections of records, papers, and correspondence from our Nobel laureates and faculty. For historians, researchers and biographers, we need to be able to describe what we have in rows and rows of boxes, and it's becoming increasingly difficult when you have to do that manually. So here comes an opportunity to apply AI to organize and make searchable a large collection of historical research materials that could be in different formats: paper, digital files, images, or videos. With the promise of AI, we would be able to offer all these treasures that we have for the whole world to use as it needs. Seeing this coming to fruition is very exciting.
No matter what side of this conversation you're on, our role here is to protect the rights of the creators, and at the same time, make sure that you have access to information. We are not gatekeepers; we are facilitators for thoughtful and informed engagement with generative AI tools. There are opportunities for the Library to help with better understanding what these tools can and cannot do, and we can guide users to select the best model or tool for the task at hand. To me, AI literacy feels like a natural extension of information literacy and something librarians have always been doing.
What do you hope students and faculty will say about the Library under your leadership?
What I hope is that students and faculty remember to acknowledge the individual who helped them find that elusive reference or that key piece of information that was missing; and that the Library will be acknowledged in their thesis, paper, speeches, and acknowledgements.
I also hope that under my leadership, the Library is recognized as a partner. Typically, you think of the libraries as a support service, and that's great, and we are proud of that service and of what we do. But I hope that there's true recognition of us as partners, that we're included in brainstorming sessions or in conference rooms, just listening for a while and helping make connections, because I can guarantee you that there are connections. That's what we do as librarians; we make those connections that can be critical in research or in any academic pursuits.