Scholastic Maverick

With more than 20 years of innovation and accomplishment serving as director of Harvard University Libraries (HUL), Sidney Verba ’53 has become the yardstick by which all librarians will be measured. Throughout his tenure, Verba has managed to keep Harvard ahead of the curve, never afraid to experiment with new technologies and inspirations to our evolving library system. From expanding our library’s connectivity in the Library Digital Initiative, to increasing storage via the Harvard Depository, to spearheading Harvard’s partnership with Google to digitize thousands of public-domain books, Verba has proven to be a genuine freethinker and pioneer.

According to Interim President Derek C. Bok, Verba is preparing to retire, saying he wants to spend more time doing research. He will step down at the end of the academic year, after being first appointed in 1984 and leading a distinguished career as HUL director of length only matched by Thaddeus W. Harris, Class of 1815, who held an equivalent position from 1831 to 1856. We hope that as Verba leaves his post, his vision to digitize Widener carries forward.

Verba sought to revolutionize and redefine the concept of the digitized library catalog through his vision to outmode traditional paradigms of searching such as HOLLIS and WorldCat. This vision culminated in the birth of the Google Print Library project (since renamed the Google Book Search project), which in its culmination will not only enable users to obtain the customary title, author, publisher, or ISBN of a book by simple query, but also allow them to search within the content of all scanned volumes for keywords, sometimes returning even full passages from the text in question. The intended goal is to eventually make all public-domain works available online alongside excerpts from copyrighted material with the appropriate permissions. The result, no doubt, will be a triumph for information flow that democratizes access to knowledge in an unprecedented way.

Today, Google Book Search project is still in beta testing, but already 10,000 public domain books are indexed and available in search results; many full texts are available via PDF download. These are small steps on the way to the eventual goal of creating a comprehensive virtual catalog of all books in all languages. Verba had that ambition when he served as director of HUL, and we hope that his dream will be realized in his golden years, after a monumental tenure as an advocate and pacesetter for academia.