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Gorman among speakers at Oxford library's anniversary

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By Shirley Melikian Armbruster

Michael Gorman, dean of Library Services, was among five renowned librarians and scholars to speak at "A Celebration of Libraries," an international event to mark the 400th anniversary of the refounding of Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England.

Gorman spoke in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford on "Libraries: their value and values." He and Michael Keller of Stanford University joined British and German speakers at the celebration, which drew librarians from national libraries in Europe and the National Library of Congress, plus scholars from throughout the world.

Following the European model, the celebration included a relatively small group of about 120 people, which allowed participants to interact with the speakers and each other following the presentations, Gorman said.

Gorman is the author of "Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century," which won the 2001 Highsmith Library Literature Award recognizing an author who makes an outstanding contribution to library literature.

His next book, "The Enduring Library," will be published in February 2003. In the book, he discusses that even in an era of electronic information distribution and retrieval, the importance of libraries is not diminished.

"This is not a revolutionary time. It is just an evolution in which we are being enriched by another form of communication" said Gorman. "Just as many books are being published as ever."

Gorman said his concern is that many students bypass the library because they find some information on the World Wide Web, without understanding how superficial and limited that source often is. The danger in higher education is that education could become a mere massing of information without the acquisition of knowledge, he said.

"We should reward reading and the use of libraries far more than we do," Gorman said.

A native of Oxfordshire, England, Gorman started reading between the ages of
2 and 3 and has had a love affair with books and libraries for 55 years. He started his career at the age of 16 in that country and studied at the Ealing School of Librarianship. He worked in the British Library until 1974, when he was visiting lecturer and later acting University Librarian at the University of Illinois. He came to Fresno State in 1988 as Dean of Library Services.

Gorman is the author of more than 150 articles in library and other periodicals and author and/or editor of several books, including the internationally used "Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2)."

He was recently featured in LOGOS, the Journal of the World Book Community. He is the recipient of several national awards and is a Fellow of the British Library Association.

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