After 20 years of service to �ֲ���ý College, Vice President for Information and Library Services Eugene Wiemers will retire on June 30, 2015.

Vice President for Information and Library Services Eugene Wiemers will retire from the college on June 30, 2015. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

In sharing the news with the college community, President Clayton Spencer said that “it is difficult to imagine running the college without Gene Wiemers. He is the consummate institutional leader — he sets clear goals and objectives and works collaboratively across the college to achieve them. The results speak for themselves. Our integrated library and information services organization is regarded as a national model among liberal arts colleges.

“I am enormously grateful for Gene’s long and distinguished service to �ֲ���ý and for his wise counsel in my first years on campus.”

Reflecting on his two decades of service to �ֲ���ý, Wiemers said, “It is a cliché to say that our greatest asset is our staff, but it is true. My finest accomplishment has been to surround myself with people in libraries, archives and IT who are younger, smarter and faster than I am, and to learn from them every day.

“It has been a honor to work with them as we set very ambitious goals for �ֲ���ý and work toward continuously doing better.”

An emphasis on aligning IT and library operations to meet the goals of the college.

Wiemers came to �ֲ���ý in 1994 as librarian of the college, serving as a member of the college’s information services management team. He assumed leadership of all information and technology operations in 2000, bringing into a single organization the operations of the George and Helen Ladd Library, information technology, archives, media and telecommunications services. Wiemers became vice president in 2005.

He emphasized aligning IT and library operations to meet the goals of the college with uniformly high expectations of service. He organized the college’s first dedicated academic technology and Web services units, and worked to adapt the structure and function of all ILS operations to continuous changes in technology.

�ֲ���ý Professor of Sociology Sawyer Sylvester, who has worked closely with Wiemers as a longtime member of the faculty’s Library Committee, believes �ֲ���ý is fortunate to have had Wiemers as librarian during the library’s most expansive period.

“Part of his genius has been to join the traditional library with computing and improve each by that marriage,” Sylvester said. “Withal, his skill as an administrator is unparalleled, hiring a superb staff of librarians and giving them his full support.”

As information technology has changed the concept of libraries and the types of resources they should provide, Wiemers has been instrumental in keeping the college’s library and technology services current and relevant.

Recognizing that students were coming to �ֲ���ý with increasing expectations from academic and communications technology, he has welcomed their input, even as staff and faculty members worked to hone students’ skills. He has worked to infuse and upgrade technology in all the teaching, learning and office spaces on campus, providing uniformly high quality technology in all classrooms and meeting rooms, and has championed the automation of business processes throughout the college.

Wiemers oversaw the merger of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and the library’s Special Collections department in 2000, in the process creating the first �ֲ���ý College Archives. With colleagues at Colby and Bowdoin, Wiemers and his �ֲ���ý team helped to build the CBB Library consortium into one of the nation’s most successful collaborations of small college libraries.

From 2002 to 2004, he led the team that comprehensively reviewed �ֲ���ý operations, practices and systems in the Department of Security and Campus Safety and led the effort to support their work with new technologies. He has served on a dozen external review or New England Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation teams for liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.

Wiemers has served on multiple search committees at �ֲ���ý, including three vice presidential and one presidential search committee. He has also chaired or served on dozens of institutional committees, including the Facilities Master Planning Steering Committee: and all the college’s strategic planning committees since 1995.

“The dean of those of us who manage merged organizations.”

Wiemers has been an active member of his professional community nationally as a presenter at conferences and member of committees and review boards.

”He is the dean of those of us who manage merged organizations, the person we have turned to for advice and guidance,” said Elliott Shore, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries and former head of libraries and IT at Bryn Mawr College.

Before coming to �ֲ���ý, Wiemers held leadership positions at a number of university libraries, including those at Northwestern, Michigan State and the University of Minnesota. He also served as lecturer in Latin American studies at Minnesota and the University of Chicago.

Wiemers graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1970 with a B.A. in history, pursued Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and received a master’s degree and doctorate in Latin American history from the University of Chicago. In 1979, he earned a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Wiemers plans to continue enjoying life in the beautiful state of Maine, to travel with his wife, Nancy Jennings, and to “keep up with our two daughters and their families and careers.”

Cooperation that began on a low key in 1977 hit a high note today when Ladd Library and its counterparts at Bowdoin and Colby unveiled an improved online catalog.

Given the reputation of the CBB colleges as competitors, the most intriguing aspect of the new CBBcat might be that collaboration is at its core, says Laura Juraska, an associate librarian at Ladd Library.

Instead of drawing from separate databases at each college, the new CBBcat draws from a single shared database.

The Ladd Library card catalog of the 1970s, seen here, has given way to its latest iteration: an online catalog based on a single database shared by �ֲ���ý, Bowdoin and Colby colleges. (Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collection Library)

“The back-end change of going to a single database is a strong affirmation of CBB library cooperation,” says Juraska, who oversees reference services.

On the front end, users will encounter a streamlined catalog search experience. Where users once had to choose whether to search the �ֲ���ý catalog or the CBBcat (itself a three-database system), today visitors to bates.edu/library/catalogs see just one search window called the “Colby, �ֲ���ý & Bowdoin Merged Catalog.”

Another benefit is that users can target a search specifically to one of the three libraries. Still another is being able to browse, in a virtual sense, a shelf of books from all three colleges, neatly arranged by their call numbers, thus taking advantage of collections that the three libraries now regard as one.

The combined catalog builds on existing cooperative practices, including shared purchasing, especially of scholarly monographs — that is, books by scholars that plumb the depths of a specialized academic subject — and shared licensing of electronic databases and online journals.

“The new database enables our colleges to improve service, reduce duplication of effort and reduce operating costs of the catalog,” says Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and librarian of the college.

The new online catalog is the product of months of collaborative work by CBB staff members, says Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and librarian. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

The new setup affords a “common platform,” Wiemers says, “so that we can take advantage of the diverse talent all three colleges have in providing library service without having to multiply everything we do by three.”

Beyond CBBcat, the refreshed site will also feature a robust new search engine called LibrarySearch+.

This engine allows users to go beyond CBB content to include the library’s online journals, newspapers and article-indexing databases as well as other open digital collections and open-access archives. Users can limit, modify and define search results in much the same way as on an e-commerce site such as Amazon.

Since the books we’re talking about are primarily in print, the most visible end result of CBB cooperation — the interlibrary loan — still occurs in the real world of bricks, mortar and highways.

These days, a commercial service managed by the Maine State Library offers one-day pickup and dropoff service at the CBB colleges and other Maine libraries, so there’s no long wait for books to arrive.

Each act of CBB cooperation is “all about opportunities,” says Associate Librarian Laura Juraska.

That service is offered five days a week, and the CBB libraries add Saturday delivery, so students can have the books (or CDs, DVDs and sometimes vinyl LPs) they need by Sunday. “That’s traditionally the busiest day for college libraries,” says Juraska.

CBB cooperation started with reciprocal borrowing privileges in 1977. It’s has grown to embrace online sharing, including partnerships with Maine InfoNet, a collaborative of Maine academic, public, school and special libraries; and NExpress, which connects �ֲ���ý to liberal arts college libraries in Massachusetts and Vermont.

The work to expand collaboration and sharing has been supported by two major grants to CBB libraries from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Juraska says that each move toward greater cooperation “is all about opportunities. Once you have a single tool that people at all three colleges can use, then you can identify efficiencies, where one person can do the task for their colleagues at Colby and Bowdoin.”

And the very process reaching agreement on a single database has yielded its own benefits, because “it’s made us agree on things, come to consensus.”

When the libraries first automated their circulation systems in 1988, the CBB libraries had the choice of creating one database, but the time wasn’t right, said Juraska. “Now it’s so logical. Nobody doubts that it is the right thing to do.”

Old meets new as Roger Bill (center) and Hedge Hall (between the Bill and Dana Chemistry) welcome the new dining Commons (top left).

With last fall’s opening of a 152-bed residence located on the old Rand Field, Roger Williams and Hedge halls were removed from the roster of student residences.

This spring, campus groups and architect JSA discussed the buildings’ rehabilitation as classroom and faculty space. On April 29, one group met to evaluate the Bill’s and Hedge’s overall historical and aesthetic relevance.

“You really can’t tell the early history of �ֲ���ý without Roger Bill,” offered Kat Stefko, director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Indeed, though the Bill had a rebel-with-a-keg reputation as a residence (see ), it was dedicated in 1895 as a home for Cobb Divinity School. Just as �ֲ���ý was founded to educate Freewill Baptist youth, the divinity school, in turn, was intended primarily to educate Freewill Baptist ministers. It closed in 1908, a sign of eroding ties between �ֲ���ý and the denomination.

The chemistry building until the 1960s, Hedge has a more-storied architectural history than the Bill. Designed by leading Maine architect George Coombs (he also designed the Kora Shrine Temple next to Luiggi’s), Hedge’s pleasingly ornate style is Richardsonian Romanesque, named for architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Hedge compares favorably to Richardson’s Crane Library in Quincy, Mass., said Rebecca Corrie, Phillips Professor of Art and Visual Culture.

In designing new academic interiors, JSA will be guided in part by the informal, commingled nature of �ֲ���ý’ academic/social culture. Successful �ֲ���ý spaces, such as those in the new residence and dining Commons, “weave together formal and informal learning,” as one planning document notes.

Or, as College librarian Gene Wiemers put it, “�ֲ���ý students like to socialize and study at the same time. They don’t see a distinction.”