Well, I think the top of the hour is in play, so I'm going to kick things off. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a great guest covering an important topic, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I'm just delighted to welcome Tony Zanders. You see, ever since the beginning of the forum, ever since our first month, we've been focused on, among other things, the role of libraries and what they mean for higher education and what they mean for society as a whole. We've hosted guest after guest who has been giving us different views of the library world. Now, Tony comes to us with a view from the software entrepreneur side, library technology side. He is just a dynamic, wonderful person, and I'm absolutely delighted to bring him up. So without any further ado, I'll beat him up on stage. Welcome, Tony. Hello. I've never seen myself this big on a Zoom. Well, here, let me make it even bigger still. How's this? Nice. Nice to be here. Thanks, Brian. Oh, what my pleasure. Where are you today, Tony? I'm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I'm in our office. I just shut my door to try to get some quiet. And yeah, it's about 72 degrees here outside, about 60 degrees here inside. And how's the humidity? It's perfect for now. We're still dealing with the beginning of allergy season. We got about three more weeks before the humidity comes. I remember this. I used to teach in Shreveport. So I remember summer as I would just beat. Well, listen, Tony, the tradition we have in the forums, we ask people to introduce themselves, not by talking about their past, but by talking about their future. What are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big topics? What are the big projects that are just really top of mind for you? That's a good question. I've never heard that framing before. The next 12 months, I think, are going to be in two areas for me personally. I think every day we're talking with libraries, library managers, on how are they grappling with coming out of the pandemic to run their organizations in this new normal. And so that's one area that I spend at least an hour a day talking with folks on. At Skilltype, we use data to help them make better decisions. And so that's one area. I think the second area is exploring how to help libraries become sustainable from a financial perspective. And so libraries are cost centers on campus. And that historically may have worked out if you knew for sure that you were going to get a certain budget. But that's no longer the case. That certainty started to go out the window. And so I also think pretty deeply about how to generate revenue for libraries. And I think we're going to make some progress on that conversation this year as well. I'd love to hear any solutions you have on that topic. And I'm sure quite a few people in the audience would love to hear that as well. Now how and Skilltype, tell us about Skilltype. How's it coming? And what does it do? Yeah, it's coming along quite great. We're in a much different situation today than 12 months ago. And so about four years ago, I decided to leave Epscope, which is a global database company. And really spend my days working with libraries to understand what were their biggest challenges that weren't being solved at all. And the recurring theme was managing our organizations, people. And that led to us building a community of about 12 libraries, some professional associations like the Black Caucus of ALA, NACIG, others. To start rethinking the way we manage our talent. And that community winded up producing a software platform that has a focus on using data to help us make better decisions as professionals. But also helping our organizations make better decisions using what we understand about our skills and our skill gaps as an organization. So we're trying to have a more data-informed conversation around our career goals and our organizational goals. So at a high level, that's what Skilltype's hoping to accomplish. Wow, that's quite a lot. When you mention skills, do you mean skills in terms of library science and organization, or do you mean management skills? All of the above. And so as we understand, libraries are very complex organizations. When you look across all of the core competency frameworks that are created by, say, the American Library Association or the Special Libraries Association, you can start to understand that there's actually hundreds of discrete competencies that are required to run a modern research library. And so that includes some things that are very specific to libraries, like electronic resource management or digital asset management. But it also includes business skills like HR, public speaking, license negotiation, IT, data. And so libraries sit at this interesting juncture on campus where they have to meet the needs of students and their space students can come to. But they also are in the academic realm as well, partnering with faculty on the research side. So there's a lot of competencies that are required today to run a modern research library. Oh, that's extremely important to hear. Do you... Well, I have more questions, but let me just turn this around. So first of all, it sounds like everyone's going to be digging into skill type and learning about what you all do. But let me just emphasize the Future Transform is a conversation venue for all of you. So this is the place for you to put your questions to Tony. If you'd like to ask him about libraries after COVID and how they change, or if you'd like to ask about libraries in terms of financial sustainability, or in terms of the issues that he was just talking about, in terms of what skill type addresses, in terms of management of a complex organization, a dynamic environment, this is your time. This is your place to do so. And again, you can hit that raised hand button for a join us on stage. And I promise to make you big or just typing your question in the Q&A box. And, you know, I don't even get a chance to finish saying that before someone asks a question. This is great. So we have a question from John Hollenbeck. Hello, John. And John asks, we put this up on the stage for everyone to see, aren't libraries based on scarcity? How do they pivot to electronic text on the Internet? A big foundational question. Yeah, I'm not sure that everyone would agree with that. I think there's a general expectation at especially larger research libraries to try to provide access to the world of information resources on behalf of patrons and on behalf of researchers and to be the gateway to helping interpret that world. And so you have a variety of types of collaborations. Entire consortia are created for the purpose of creating the largest possible shared collection as possible. And so I think I'm following the line of questioning around scarcity, but I think the other side of that coin is that it's the library's role to secure rights and privileges and access to the broadest set of scholarly research on behalf of their customers and to help ensure that that research can be accessed at the right time. And so you have library consortia, but you also have collaborations like the Hathi Trust and others that are trying to, Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America. There's a litany of groups that are trying to remove the barriers to access to remove that scarcity. Well, that's a great way of putting this. Thank you. In fact, John wants to join us on stage. So let's put him on so he can talk with us and develop this further. Hello, John. Hello, hello. I didn't word that very well, I guess. Thank you. What I meant by scarcity is like the library of Alexandria was the only place all those scrolls existed. And I always feel like school was instituted on the notion of knowledge scarcity, that you had to go to see Brian Alexander to learn something. And so libraries kind of, you know, what I mean by that is that libraries to me are conceptualized as buildings that have the book. But now with electronic media and the internet, the book is more ubiquitous. Even research libraries. And I'm wondering, you know, so that to me would be a foundational shift from, I'll just say gatekeeper. I guess I'm not, today is my non-expressive day. But you know what I mean. Yeah. So yeah, I think I have a better understanding now. So that shift began to take place in the 80s before I was born. And so I was born in 1986. Oh, God, don't say that. I had to do it. But a couple years before that, you had this transition from the card catalog to the first integrated library system. And that was out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And so the library's been at the core of helping reconceptualize itself to meet these new expectations that researchers and students have since forever. And so even looking past the 80s, when we went to the ILS, the next decade or so where that started to transition again was getting into electronic resources. So not just managing the print resources in a networked environment, but now starting to publish research in an electronic format, which brought on its own need for better tools for management and description and access. And then you fast forward another 10 years to the 2000s, where we're starting to get into digital asset management and starting to scan and digitize born print materials for discovery and for access, right? And so I think the reconceptualization of libraries has been taking place for decades. And it's been run and governed by the librarian community itself. They know best what are the more efficient ways to provide that service. And so today, fast forward, we have to sort of reframe our understanding of a library much broader than the brick and mortar building itself. The way students are trying to access these resources and faculty are trying to organize these resources, oftentimes is outside of that brick and mortar building, right? And as universities start to invest more in distance education and remote learning, the pandemic really just put an exclamation point on a number of trends that had been sort of bubbling up for years. But we really have to reconceptualize the library to serve a sort of locationless community. And so the most important ingredient in this equation are the people. It requires experts who understand the needs of the patrons, but also understand the needs of the institution, which involve their economic constraints, the legal constraints, the copyright and the privileges constraints, along with making sure interpreting that complex web to provide that seamless access to students and researchers and doing it in a way that serves a community that may never walk through your gates or your doors. Well, that's, first of all, I just got to thank you. That was the best history of the library in the past 30 years that I've heard in under two minutes. That's amazing. That's a whole lot to cover. John, does that help? Does that help address? It helps. It's interesting because there's so many different aspects to this. And I look at libraries, librarians is helping tame the fire hose and helping with things like we call information literacy now, but I also reflect on going back as far as Vannevar Bush with the idea of linking texts and the great Brown Intermedia project that got swamped by hypercard for some reason. But, you know, just all these attempts to come up with ways of linking and organizing knowledge that I think really is the problem of our day that, you know, even Dewey wrote about in democracy and education is we just have too much stuff. And how do we make that workable and realizable? Well, we turn to librarians for invaluable help. John, this is great. Thank you for coming up. Take care. Thanks for having me. Friends, if you're new to the forum, this is how to ask a video question. You can see it's very easy and that we're very kind. And even to people who don't have beards, no, I'm kidding. But let me welcome a few other questions that have just come up. And here is one from Rebecca Jones. So let me flash this on the screen. Tony, delighted to see you presenting here. What is the development you've seen in the past 12 months that raises your concern the most for post-secondary, higher education libraries? And she's asking about Canada and the U.S.? I think... I'll put that back up on the screen again because that was... Yeah. Thanks for that. And so I think the biggest concern is sort of lack of empathy towards the situation the library workforce is in. I think there's been... Just to tie this back to John's line of questioning, there's been this sort of impression that the libraries are these sort of buildings in spaces and these sort of boundless collections that manage themselves. And we all can agree that that's not the case. But that's the sort of impression that we approach the institution of librarianship with. And the cost of that has been that we are currently in a talent crisis where we not only are experiencing collective burnout and a shortage of the expertise that we need. As we're shifting from a primary print in-person experience to a fully digital, fully remote experience, the skills that are needed to provide the same services are quite different. And so we're in this digital shift that's taking place, which only exacerbates the talent crisis that we're in because the curricula that's been developed by information science programs, those curricula were designed during a time where we were mostly in-person and we were mostly dealing with monographs. And so there's this lag of the training and the curriculum and it simply hasn't caught up to the pace and rate of change of the demands that are being placed onto the libraries. So yeah. I was going to say even now in 2022, after all, you know, a generation of the web, I mean, we're still lagging. I would certainly say so. And I think that that's a consensus agreement, but certainly open for disagreement. The way curricula is developed at an information science program, the way decisions are made and what goes into that curricula is over a century old. And so it takes on average about 10 or 12 different votes from various committees at a university to add a course or a new topic to a curriculum. And so if we acknowledge the rate of change with technology and with society and with user behavior, it's moving quite at a pace that that voting model and the decision-making model for the curricula development simply hasn't caught up with. That's a huge issue. And that's a great answer to Rebecca's excellent question. In the chat, a couple of people have added a couple of notes that I wanted to hoist back up for people to see. Kimberly mentions the pay scales from librarians versus IT professionals is really harming the profession because you can get paid more in IT. So I actually have a strong conviction on this. And so the pay scales and pay grades that she's describing, I think, need to be at the top of the conversation. Those are quite outdated as well. Again, based on job families and the institutional structures of the library before this digital shift took place that I just described. And so HR departments haven't stayed abreast of the evolution we just walked through starting in the 80s that today the typical library job and experience looks a lot similar to an IT job and experience. And so an information professional is no longer stacking books on the shelf as the primary work they do. They're helping students and researchers troubleshoot broken URLs or they're having to contact vendors to understand why a certain article no longer belongs in a package or why is my device not connecting to the Wi-Fi or I'm on campus but the proxy server isn't acknowledging my credentials. These are very technical and very specifically IT types of tasks that reference librarians have to address. Systems librarians, technical services. And I haven't even gotten into the entire web services side of things where a lot of the interactions take place through online chat and through authentication and other issues. And so it's my view that the pay scales have to start to right size to acknowledge the IT nature of the library work. That's a great cause. Thank you for saying that. And there's one more to add to this to all these different information technology skills. Valerie Hawkins reminds us of the sequence information literacy, digital literacy, data literacy, digital dexterity, which librarians often end up having to teach and advocate for. Well this is okay so first of all first of all Rebecca great question to start to to get us rolling with this. And friends you can see how the Tony has a huge wealth of knowledge and a lot of passion and the incredibly rare ability to say this with great concision. So please come up with your question. I can only get to say finish saying that sentence ever because you guys have so many questions. We have one from Tom Haymes coming to us from the Houston Texas area. Tom says do you think most outsiders like non-library faculty students administrators they understand librarians as curators of information rather than curators of artifacts physical holdings? I don't I'm not sure that outsiders know what to think of the the modern information professional. I don't I don't believe that most outsiders acknowledge their existence at all. Again I think that people I hear I have conversations all the time with people that don't realize that people actually work at libraries. The conception is that there's this building I can walk into. I can get access to wi-fi. I can perhaps get a coffee. I may see some books. I may not. I can sit down and I don't have to really interact with anyone. And that coupled with the dawn of e-commerce and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and you know the proliferation of Starbucks and all of these trends I think really hide the work of the modern information professional. And so I I think even your description is a bit generous because it does assume that people acknowledge the the work and presence of librarians and I don't I don't think that society does. Wow that's a and you and that's a dark view and that's one that we should change as much as we can. Friends we have we have time for your questions that I want to encourage you to to bring them in. We have a lively activity in the chat Tony where Kimberly Fillmire says that educating up is a constant for academic libraries and librarians. Not a question just an observation which I think absolutely true. And she says in terms of what libraries do with technology information and everything else. While people are are are thinking hard about about their topics let me ask one if I could press on that point of information literacy. I mean enormous credit to the library profession for coming up with information literacy in the 1980s before the web began or I should say Tony when you were a kid the great decade. Yes apparently so and and and the idea that libraries can help librarians and libraries can help us all sift through the wild west of the digital content frontier. I'm curious right now ever since 2016 we've been more as a society we've been more and more anxious about fake news about misinformation about disinformation and right now with the war in Ukraine there's even more demand for this. In fact yesterday I saw the first deep fake video of Ukraine's president. What what can academic librarians do to help us and us meeting people in academia first of all to help us sift through and develop these skills to handle this wild information world. I think firstly just continuing to occupy this unique space on campus that is both one that is non-academic so libraries have to interface with the facilities and security department on campus. They have to interface with student success and and and other groups that on campus that aren't related to the classroom and the academy but they also very much so are embedded in the academic work of a research institution and so I think the first thing is for the for us all to acknowledge that unique hybrid role of both being able to have a value add conversation with a faculty member in 30 minutes later have a mental health related conversation with the student who feels pressure. That is a very unique role on campus and so I think firstly just to acknowledge the unique role of the library. I think secondly I've seen many institutions incorporate the library into freshman orientation and really embedding info lit as a key part of the introduction to the academy and so those are two sort of things that I believe first we just need to acknowledge that there is no other group or expertise on campus that can do both as well as the library but also find ways to seek out their services because libraries also sit across all majors and disciplines across all academic departments and so each department on campus has a different vantage point when it comes to things like fake news and information literacy so the library is the one to tie it all together and so it's very much so a service center and I always have to just emphasize that it's the people so if you find a live guide or a web page that is providing insight on how to navigate fake news there's a person who authored that live guide right and so it all comes back to the people and the expertise and just looking at them as a service provider that will reinvent itself to meet the needs of the time and we've been seeing that well before the 80s but my introduction to this as a library technologist is when that card catalog converted to the ILS so but they've libraries have always adapted and evolved to meet the the needs that were presented to them that's true that's true well this is thank you for that very very excellent and actionable answer to my very parameter question we have more questions coming in and this is from JD Mosley match it who asks so how should our higher ed libraries pivot if they are still a collection of physical books that are molding on shelves where can our traditional librarians turn to get tips for how to change well one answer is skill type and so we've aggregated thousands of library trainings from the world's best library conferences professional associations it's become the single best place to find out what are the best practices for any given challenge that I'm facing so you can find many examples nowadays of libraries who have responded to this particular issue by doing analyses of the usage of their collections and understanding how long has it been since a particular book has been checked out and if the book hasn't been checked out in a really long time there's an argument that that book shouldn't take up precious real estate in our campus and so as a result an entire economy worth of companies have sort of been created to serve this need by not only providing that that collection usage analysis but then providing actionable steps for libraries to then move the books out of that physical space into things like off-site cold storage or centralized collections where instead of each of our institutions all holding a copy of a book that may or may not ever get checked out again we can collaborate as a consortium or a group and hold a single copy and through things like interlibrary loan and other tools we can make sure that the off chance someone wants it someone can get that book in a in a in a decent amount of time and so I would just encourage your library to sort of attend the conferences sign up for skill type go to various presentations on this topic but there's a lot of things happening around things like off-site cold storage automated storage and retrieval systems so as ar as rs's and things like this university of utah is an example of a wonderful warehouse they've installed one of these beautiful systems oh great so yeah there's a lot there jd that's a great question and a very practical question and I think Tony again just gave us a wonderful set of marching orders on how to do this thank you and more questions have come up one from our dear friend George station out on the west coast Cal State Monterey Bay George asks how can we encourage more publishers to support fuller ebook access e.g. on the users as routine and not quote hard this this is a great question so that takes us I don't know if you've all experienced this but this is often an issue of publishers which will make available a limited number of digital copies kind of representing the analog space so that there's only a few copies that can be checked out in time rather than the infinite supply of pdfs and so on what do you think what do you think Tony so as an sort of entrepreneur at heart I started my career in Silicon Valley and and develop my professional worldview surrounded by companies like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn in its early days and the host of other companies and as a result my worldview always is that if there is a problem that needs to change or be disrupted there is a way to use technology to change that we have to support the innovation we have to support entrepreneurship we have to support experimentation we can't have a a combative view towards these things because the solutions to these sticky problems are oftentimes going to come from the edges of of our of our work and so I believe that universities should hold more hackathons I believe that libraries should be a part of those types of 72 hour events where you bring together computer science students and and librarians and IT staff and you kind of start to create this culture of not only experimentation but but but innovation and trying to to generate as many potential solutions to this problem in a short amount of time as possible and creating a culture and habit of it and so any industry that we've seen that has sort of a predatory relationship with its its customers has been disrupted from the outside and so I think I'm looking at students and researchers on your campus that are the ones who are the biggest victims of this problem you're describing and I think the university should be investing in them and supporting them to use their expertise whether that software development whether that's design thinking to to to put together solutions to try to tackle these problems and if as higher education as a community becomes more experiment friendly and more startup and innovation friendly I think it's only a matter of time before publishers and vendors see the writing on the wall that that the next wave of ebooks and and licensing will not be predatory there's people interpreting web 3.0 and blockchain as a potential solution for this particular problem you described I wonder how that would work in terms of possibly having blockchain backed checkout records or just individual copies that are that are backed using that to try and prevent piracy is that the idea and so I'm not the expert here I think that the decentralized approach of the way information is stored and on the blockchain provides some really interesting tools for universities and university presses and and the publishing side and the research production side of universities to circumvent publishers that have been deemed predatory and so there there are people right now that are thinking about the sort of supply chain of of how research is produced and trying to understand how can universities become more independent using that that technology infrastructure because right now the power has been consolidated with a few and we have to rethink the entire supply chain if we're going to sort of get ourselves out of this the situation but to rethink the entire supply chain George thank you for the really good question in the chat Tony people have mentioned two other options one being open access and scholarly publication and also some large-scale negotiation for increased access I think this is already Hawkins mentions large-scale negotiation for scholarly materials but before before I say more about that we have Carolyn Coward who has one of the best library jobs just in the world I want to make sure that you guys know that she's the head librarian at Jet Propulsion Laboratory so I'm just in Envia for every day and she won a cup on stage hello Carolyn sound can you guys hear me yes hi Carolyn no hang on hang on I'm driving I'm driving hang on oh please be safe um yeah I might need to come back and reconnect hang on hang on okay no problem wow that's commitment that's cool well Carolyn is wonderful and we're getting a great 3d view of the inside of your car Carolyn and while she's doing that while she's doing that let me bring up one more question that has just come up that builds on what you were just talking about Tony and your answer to to George this is from Naomi Thomas and materials and textbooks sure if you could be more specific is there something that you're curious about I think from the skill type perspective our goal is to ensure that each library professional has access to the right training material and support they need at the right time and so we look at sort of the training that's required to become an expert in the area of say course materials course reserves that's sort of our role in this community in this ecosystem is to try to make sure of this vast world of resources that are being produced each day to learn about a topic like say course reserves right our goal is to make sure that people have access to the right one at the right time because the librarians and the library workers that support the university they're too busy to sort of comb through this this vast world of conferences and webinars and workshops and so that's sort of our goal but I'm curious what you were getting at with course reserves course materials Naomi please if you want to join us on video just click your raised hand that I can bring you up or otherwise just type in a new question to say a bit more because it's a great great topic and we have let me bring up Caroline now now that she's I think in a safer location hopefully yeah in a parking lot hi Caroline still driving still driving I've got a meeting on lab at noon so I'm trying to get there but I'm bringing up these really critical issues and ideas I want to challenge okay just a little bit about me yes I'm the head librarian at NASA propulsion laboratory but I spent 20 plus years in higher education as an information literacy librarian high impact practices when we used to call it bibliographic instruction working for the California State University system for first-generation um inter really behind the eight balls so really testing in a library engineers not so much they're like in a my garage you know manual what manual areas and librarians yeah I'm telling you you mentioned this occurring the message my challenge is to work out that information mess that's in all the involved in data governance at JPL the organization focus on that embedded in that that will pull the more traditional services along especially from faculty and staff thank you that's a fantastic yeah um I'm in I'm in full I'm in full agreement with Caroline I think that uh what we're observing today skill type has a lot of insight into what skills are needed at libraries what skills library workers are interested in learning and I think things are 100 moving in the direction you state to be more sort of digital in the work and more data driven in the work I think part of the challenge gets back to a sort of remark I made earlier that in order to sort of reconceive what our work looks like and I'm not a librarian but I just work with them every every day to sort of have these conversations we need to create a workplace environment that is more supportive of the goals of these professionals I think right now we're noticing collective morale issues we're noticing burnout we're noticing the effects of never having right size the pay grades to look more like IT we're noticing lack of management experience people being promoted to higher levels of responsibility because they did really well in say e-resources or in research data but that doesn't translate into management and leadership and so I think the pandemic sort of brought an exclamation point on these organizational issues that many of our colleagues that went through library and information science programs they never really learned the things that were being taught over in the MBA program and so I think we're observing that a bit and in order for us to make this leap to where Caroline's describing I think we first need to address the the organizational culture and a lot of the issues that are being surfaced that right now are stifling people to reinvent themselves and so I think once we take care of the needs of our people we we work on the pay issue we work on the morale and the the the support and management issue I think we now will have a healthier environment where we can do the the the more exciting work of um rethinking what does librarianship look like in say 2030 well first of all can I just say thank you to the two of you for having a conversation in extraordinary physical circumstances uh that's uh carolin is amazing uh and I appreciate that to ask you your question and Tony I love I love your answer I mean you're you're positioning librarians not only as IT professionals but also as entrepreneurs as uh in that space uh 10 years ago I heard the faculty librarian from a major chinese university describe his team as information entrepreneurs I was always struck by that um we uh to circle back one Naomi Tofness um she both had an answer to your question and she wanted to join us on stage so let me just quickly beam her up on stage see if we can make her uh mic and camera work um Naomi Naomi we can neither see nor hear you um in that case Naomi a good thing to do would be to relaunch this browser window and then your browser should ask for access to your microphone and camera so just give that a try while you do that I'll read your answer that you typed in as a text question um her question it looks like this or response my specific university position seems unique and then I spend most of my time with course materials and it has become a revenue generator from my university which is very interesting she's a post university uh and we can see her now let me just let me bring her up while you while you think about that hello Naomi hey I'm gonna switch you over here so I can stare at you and not at my other monitor yeah so uh I wish that my position like existed elsewhere right so that's why I wanted to bring it up so um essentially in like a nutshell I would say that my position is like a typical reference librarian for faculty where I'm like helping faculty while they're developing courses and selecting course materials that are like appropriate for their courses but also I have to like think a lot about um you know accessibility and stuff because we're mostly online school in a way that faculty as subject matter experts don't always necessarily think about that first um so and uh I get to work remote halftime so uh you can see that I'm in my home office right now um so I I wish that this existed elsewhere you know and everybody has had to figure out what online learning means in the last two years so there's like no excuse for that anymore um I feel and so like everybody's trying to figure this out but also um there's no new positions in libraries that I see you know like people are desperate to hold on to the the few positions that their institutions are allowing them to have um and they're not they're not able to like expand out um in a way that would allow for a position like mine um I'm going to turn my camera off now for uh everyone's privacy but I just wanted to communicate that oh it's great to see you it's great to see you thank you for uh thank you for your your persistence Naomi and thank you for telling us about about your story what do you think um tell me yeah I think Naomi raises a good point that I think jumps back to the leadership conversation that we had I think uh what we're seeing is this generational shift that's been being discussed for I don't know from according to some decades of that there's this uh there was this retirement um there's this delayed retirement bubble that started to grow in 2009 when the economic downturn happened and the people who were expected to retire decided to hold on a bit and that bubble started to grow which started to reduce the supply of open positions uh and for the last decade since the downturn through now through the pandemic the bubble has been growing and um that bubble started to burst due to the pandemic which created I remember at one point in 2020 there were of the 126 association of research library members there were about 30 open university librarian positions at once wow like simultaneously and I think I had a tweet thread about this two years ago or whenever and so there is this generational shift that's taking place and this next generation of leaders aren't bringing a lot of those ideas into their role they have more of a blank canvas on how jobs should look how the organization should look and so I think that's sort of a array of sunshine or silver lining rather to the pandemic is that new leaders of libraries have a different disposition they're more people oriented and they aren't bringing a lot of the preconceived notions around what jobs should look like they they are open to rethinking what our role should look like uh and so that's one response I think we're going to see more progress on Naomi's challenge this decade than than last thank you that's a that's a that's a great vision uh and Tony and the Naomi again thank you for for your thoughtful outlying of the question twice we had in the chat is an interesting perhaps response to this Tony Alene Frank says when it comes to OER I'm a librarian at two places they're totally committed UMCC and you the people both universities are using OER for their courses the community college where I work is getting their feet very wet librarians are helpers in that so that seems to be like a new kind of librarian for that for that world friends work we're almost out of time and you've been terrific at asking all kinds of questions and I wanted to take the moderators privilege and just quickly ask one question on my own Tony and this is a big one and then and this points about two hours south of you um I'm wondering about the role of higher education and the climate crisis doing a lot of work on that and in particular I'm wondering what is the role of the academic library in the climate crisis I mean I you can see some some immediate role such as continuing to provide research materials for research universities on the topic are there any other ways that you can foresee academic libraries playing a role as campuses join the rest of the world in this big struggle yeah I think academic and also public libraries have a very particular interest in being at the table during this conversation I'm born and raised in New Orleans Hurricane Katrina was sort of a turning moment for my entire family and I remember Tulane University was gravely impacted by the flooding that took place and it actually interrupted some of the undergraduate thesis work I was doing at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane and that's not uncommon for libraries that are say in Florida or or being impacted by by sort of erosion and things and so since the libraries does have a disproportionate amount of physical assets that need to be protected they have a very strong interest in this conversation I think they also have experience with how to handle the handling of these rare books rare assets that can be learned from and serve as as as a guide for the rest of the institution and so part of the heaviest burden of responding to things like like rising water part the heaviest burden of that is placed onto the the library system it's one thing to get the students out it's one another thing to get other resources out but research universities have a large physical footprint and in the libraries are managing that and so I don't think it's just about providing research to the experts to make progress on solving climate change I also think it's about emergency preparedness and and how do you sort of galvanize and and and prepare to protect the destruction and damage of physical assets that's a terrific answer thank you Tony I really appreciate it I also appreciate the fact that we have just shot past the end of the of our scheduled hour you've been terrific Tony answering a wide range of questions hitting all kinds of aspects of the work you do what's what's the best way we can keep up with you and skill time should we follow you on Twitter or do you have a newsletter what's the best way mostly active on Twitter and LinkedIn I wasn't able to keep up with the the maintenance of a newsletter I tried but yeah just I'm publicly available at at at Zander's my last name very very good well thank you so much I really appreciate it we're going to check back up on you and keep up with the skill type thanks so much thank you and don't go away friends I need to point out what we're doing next and what else is coming up so looking ahead if you want to keep talking about this and clearly from the chat you do uh please just use the hashtag FTE on Twitter or go to my blog Brian Alexander so that we can hear more about what you're thinking we can keep the conversation going now if you'd like to go back into our past discussions about libraries and other related topics just go to tinyurl.com slash FDF archive and if you'd like to look ahead to some of our other topics again we're looking at everything from the climate crisis that we're just talking about to public higher ed web three how to pay for college you just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more thank you all for terrific questions thank you for volunteering so much about your individual work your careers thank you all please keep supporting libraries keep doing great work above all take care and be safe we'll see you next time online bye bye


Thank you very much. Thank you. Great pleasure, great honor to be here, Julie, Madam Chancellor, Minister. We still remember your several achievements as Foreign Minister of this great nation, and it's a great honor to have met you. Gareth, of course, we go back a few years, and I will say something about the negotiations and what you personally did to give the world chemical weapons convention, and of course, the G family, I actually really did work with John for quite a while in the Hague, where I was chief of staff, and my day started very, very early in a meeting known as the flying meeting that had been established by John, where the senior staff of the OPCW will meet every morning around a table standing up, and each one of us should say what he or she was doing, and he would give us a good direction. But I actually met with him before that, when as a young diplomat negotiating the chemical weapons convention benefited enormously, and learned enormously for this guy, from the neighboring by virtue of the alphabet, Argentina, Australia, delegation, was explaining at the second row, at the second row, was explaining to the young third secretary that I was, what the hell was going on with the schedules and the chemicals and all of that. And I'm saying it is half jokingly, but he had this art of the scientist explaining how to make policy into something workable, which is quite unique, and he had it. So an honor, a real honor to remember him. And Gareth, to remember you mentioned the CWC, and I still remember one day this negotiation was long and very, very complicated. We had what we diplomats called a rolling text, so the text that we were trying to negotiate, and for each and every article of this convention, I think we had six versions, with multiple brackets, square brackets, round brackets, footnotes, et cetera. It was unreadable, until John and the Australian delegation led by the minister came, and I still remember a day-long session of the city I was sitting there somewhere. When you explained a path forward, you brought a text which was incredibly clean and so attractively looking when Australia, as always a voice for moderation, a voice for common sense, put together the elements that you believed could be accepted by all. Of course, it was not that easy, it was not going to be, and people would not accept that day that that was the CWC, but I can tell you that that was the moment where we felt we could get out of that maze of words that did not have any sense, and then we had the commissioners. Thank you for that. And back to what I'm supposed to do here, which is to give you an idea of what is going on in the area that the IAEA has amended, which is essential for international peace and security, basically nonproliferation, but much, much more. We are at a moment where by a strange convergence of geopolitical considerations and global phenomena like climate change, the appearance or reappearance of pandemics, we are again reminded of the globality of the challenges we have and how we need to work together lest these things lead to a very dark place. Nonproliferation, which is basically trying to avoid that more countries do have them now get nuclear weapons, continue to be as challenging as it used to be a few years ago. In fact, it was around the time that you were Foreign Minister, around the 80s and the 1990s that some countries started to push the envelope and circumvent the norms that they were supposed to be respecting. And this led us, of course, among other things to the findings after the First Gulf War when, to our collective dismay, we discovered that the nonproliferation regime we so loved was quite limited and was not giving us the real assurances that it should be giving us, in fact, the inspectors of the IAEA were diligently checking that Iraq was complying, of course, with the obligations set by itself in its own declaration. Of course, a few blocks from the place where the inspectors were inspecting that nothing was happening, a full blown nuclear weapon program was being developed. How about that? The international community reacted to that in trying to devise a stronger regime by giving the inspections a wider scope and allowing, when there is a reason to do that, the inspectors to go beyond what a country declares. And this was the beginning of a new process which is not fully completed because the additional protocol, which is the instrument that was brought as the name says, an additional protocol to the safeguards agreement, is not fully universal. But we are walking in that direction. You may see that still we have unresolved cases where we are struggling with the possibility that countries may move from latency to reality. One big collective failure was the DPRK, where up until 2006 North Korea did not have nuclear weapons, was approaching them and a number of initiatives including the an agreed framework that was an incentive sort of deal that would give North Korea some things including civilian nuclear reactors in exchange for them dropping their weapons program, faith. And as a consequence of that, 2006, the first nuclear weapon test to be followed by five more and everybody seems to be waiting for another one, which could take place any day. In any case, what we see is through satellite imagery is that they are preparing for that. We will see when that happens, but in any case, is a country that not so far away from you is developing considerable nuclear arsenal. Iran is of course the bread and butter of what we do in Vienna and what a tragedy it's been so for the last 20 years or so, because we failed to find a way about it. There have been ups and downs, there have been moments where it was believed that an arrangement on Modus Vivendi would be found. A good moment or a moment of hope came when a big agreement, this famous JCPOA, was signed in 2015 by the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, but this agreement was abandoned unilaterally by the United States in 2018 and Iran, as a retaliation for that, started leaving the obligations or not observing any more, any limitation that they have until now where the JCPOA is nominally in existence, but it is an empty shell. And now we have conversations, negotiations trying to revive it, the last round of that in Doha, but unfortunately without decisive progress. We, the IEA, is working very closely, is accompanying this negotiation because of course the role of the agency is to be the guarantor, is to be the one that checks that whatever is agreed on paper actually is respected, but we are not there yet. And the issue is extremely important, not only because of the Iran's own situation, but because other countries in the region are watching closely and some have even indicated in quite the public way that they would consider themselves arming themselves nuclearly if Iran was to be seeing approaching nuclear weapons capability. So as we can see, the specter of nuclear proliferation is still reality and the work of the IEA to try to avoid this situation through international inspections continues to be indispensable. But non-proliferation is not the only, of course, area where the work of the agency is fundamental. We can refer to issues, for example, like nuclear security. Nuclear security is preventing people, especially non-state actors, from getting their hands into nuclear material for hostile purposes. This was an issue that was not paid much attention to until September 11, of course, where it became clear information, intelligence coincided in indicating that it was in the thinking of many of these groups to try to get nuclear material either to make a bomb or to disseminate panic through radiation on what is called a dirty bomb. Basically, not a nuclear weapon, but a weapon, conventional weapon that has in it elements nuclear material that can cause, of course, radiation and panic with it. Presidential summits took place for some years trying to reinforce the norm and the IEA is working constantly, hardly any day passes without us getting to know and working with governments trying to avoid smuggling of nuclear material. This occurs quite frequently, I wouldn't say almost daily, although, of course, this is not in the public eye. Nuclear safety is so important. And when I refer to nuclear safety as opposed to nuclear security, what I invite you to think is things like Chernobyl, things like Fukushima, accidents in the operation, in the normal operation of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear safety is at the center of our activities because the IEA has normative powers, is the place where you set standards on safety, how nuclear power plants should be operating. And this is fundamental for the viability of nuclear energy as a source of energy. And I'll be saying a couple of words about this in a second. So nuclear safety is so important. And it's on Fukushima, perhaps a useful segue for what I will be doing when I leave Australia, since I will be traveling on to the Pacific, to Suva, since you may know that Japan, after the accident, accumulated important amounts of water which was used to cool down their reactors. This water is there and it has to be treated and discharged and of course there is a lot of concern, even some groups here in Australia and in the islands in particular, which have a very long and heavy history related to nuclear in general, with large, because of the nuclear testing that used to occur in this region, including in this country. So for the Pacific Islanders, the issue of radiological material, the issue of the world nuclear does not evoke something nice. So I felt it was my responsibility to come here, to come to them. Never ever has the Director General of the IEA visited them, listened to them. And my intention by going there is to explain what we are doing with the government of Japan to indicate to them how we are going to be working before, during and after the discharge of water, which will be treated to a level that will not contain any radioisotope that could alter the environment. But of course there is a lot of skepticism about this. Many people, to put it in simple English, don't believe that this is going to be the case. So this is why we have to go, we have to explain and we have to be held accountable for what we are going to do. Nuclear safety and security and also nuclear weapons combined in a very unique way in the tragic circumstances that Julie you were evoking about Ukraine. I was already in Ukraine twice and I'm trying to return. After the military operations started on February 24, two things happened. Russian forces occupied the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, Zaporizhia, where six nuclear reactors operate. And they also occupied Chernobyl, where in spite of the fact that there is no nuclear generation activity, there is a big operation led by the IEA to decommission the famous or infamous reactor number four that you know about or so in the HBO series. That place is covered under a big dome and the IEA is working there on the meticulous painstaking work of taking the material out of there while protecting the environment. These places were occupied and with a lot of anxiety in the public opinion, there were announcements about the possibility of contamination of a new Chernobyl, as some were saying it. We were able to return to the repair work, establish a good mapping of the radiation situation there, and set up a campaign of assistance in that part of the country to re-establish the safety of this important emblematic site. But we still have the unresolved situation in and around Zaporizhia. We have the peculiar, unique situation there that this place is under the control of the Russian forces, but it's still operated by the Ukraine, sorry, operators, thus creating a volatile, very tense situation which goes against common sense and every conceivable principle of nuclear safety. This nuclear power plant is not being inspected as it should be. It contains roughly 30,000 kilograms of plutonium, 40,000 kilograms of enriched uranium. So we need to go back and we are trying to do that, but of course issues that for the diplomats around here will be quite interesting, like the territorial integrity of Ukraine or the possible precedent that inspections under Russian occupation could signify have prevented me from going there. We're still negotiating, we're still trying, and we have definitely to go back to Zaporizhia. But this fresco of problems and dilemmas that we have are not all. We are also living in times of what has been rightly been described by the head of the sister organization, the International Energy Agency, not Atomic, but Energy Agency, as the world's first energy crisis. Nuclear energy is already providing more than 25% of the world's clean energy that exists today. In Europe, half of the clean energy that is produced is of nuclear origin. There is some, I say this here in Australia where there is a debate about the possibility or not of having nuclear energy, but there is some debate in the world about nuclear energy being in the decline. It's just the opposite. We are not, I would say, nuclear lobbyists. We deal with science and facts, countries and especially, and I would say special interest for Australia, particularly in Asia, are moving decisively into nuclear, much more nuclear. As we speak, China is building more than 20 reactors. India is doing the same. The Philippines has decided, for example, to go for or to revive an old nuclear power program that they have. And this, of course, in Europe, and in particular, again, harking back to this issue of the geopolitical situation, especially Eastern European countries, and you would, of course, imagine what's the reason behind this, are decisively moving to more nuclear. Since most of them had it already, but Poland, for example, which didn't have nuclear, is now moving into nuclear, but Romania, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, are all building more nuclear or Romania or considered France, of course, as you have heard, perhaps, is also multiplying this program. The United Kingdom as well, Belgium that had decided to phase out is slowing down because, oh, what's happening with the gas prices and what are we going to do? If we turn off nuclear power plants. The same is happening in other places in Latin America, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, continue, and some others are looking into this. This, to say, as I indicated a minute ago, nuclear energy is not the magic wand. Nuclear energy is not for all, but it's clearly playing an important role in the current energy crisis. There are interesting, very interesting new vistas when it comes to nuclear energy with the introduction of small and modular reactors. Hardly a week passes without me receiving a minister of energy from a developed country, in particular African countries, inquiring about small modular reactors and trying to see what is necessary, and the agency, of course, is going to try to help them getting the human capacity that they need to have those if they can. So, of course, this is a matter, as I was saying, that will require extreme safety measures. The IEA is there just for that. As I was saying, we are not in the commercial side of this. We are looking into the conditions that have to be fulfilled for nuclear energy to fulfill this role of helping us decarbonize the global economy, which is the real challenge we have in front of us. So, nuclear energy and its role in the current energy crisis and the efforts to decarbonize. By the way, we are now attending, which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, the COPS, the conference of the parties of the Climate Change Convention. I was there in Glasgow, and now the organizers of the next one in Egypt in Sharma Sheikh have invited us. So, again, a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have the director general of the IEA addressing an environmental event. Times are changing. And perhaps, finally, a note on nuclear applications that we are trying to promote. And this is also part of our mandate, one of the noblest, perhaps, when it comes to helping countries in radiotherapy, in nuclear medicine, in oncology. Last March, last February, sorry, in Africa, I launched with the president of the African Union, the president of Senegal, Race of Hope, a big project intended to give countries, especially developing countries, capabilities in radiotherapy. In Africa, today, 70% of the population don't have any access to radiotherapy. In Africa, more than 30 countries do not have a single radiotherapy unit. It is a scandal. People are dying, who should not be dying in Africa and in the rest of developing countries. And I'm very happy to say that I've been discussing with the foreign minister here about the possibility of having Australia helping us in this region also work in this area. So as you see, dear friends, the IEA is an organization that does much more than push paper. It is an organization that is there to control that there are no weapons to help countries that want to decarbonize their economies and to cure when possible. What an honor to be in this time at the helm of this organization. And what a pleasure to be talking about these things here in Australia. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Mr. Grossi. We do have some time for questions. We have a couple of microphones that it would be great if you could wait until a microphone arrives before you start your question. And as is conventional, we would like you to keep your questions short and end with a question mark. So who would like to begin? Yes, please. Thanks. In the future, do you envisage any new technologies which may enable nuclear safeguards to be done differently or better than they are now? Well, not in the future now. There is a lot of, I would say, introduction of technologies that allow us, our inspectors, to do a lot remotely. Of course, the nature of the inspection requires physical presence in many, many cases. It is, after all, an investigation, in a way. And you need the ability of the inspector to be there. But there are instruments, for example, that allow us to assert in the presence of amounts of radionuclides and nuclear material without getting into a fuel element, without getting inside a reactor, which are simply amazing. So, yes, there is a lot of evolution in that regard. And it is needed because if it wasn't the case, we would simply not be able to do the amount of inspection we have. The number, I mean, the amounts of nuclear material are growing exponentially. And with all these developments I mentioned, with the explosion of reactors in China, in India, in all these countries, we would have to grow as an international organization at pace. And, of course, this would never be possible. Even if member states would be able to pay for that, we would become a huge institution and manageable. So, indeed, we see a lot of progress there and it's happening. Yes, thank you for the question. I saw a video of you in COP talking to Gillian Tett from the economist. It was quite an interview. You saw that? Yes, brilliant. You handled it so gracefully. So, firstly, congratulations and thank you for that. But it illustrated for me the challenges in communication of facts and science within a world of sound bites and interests. So what advice would you offer to this audience of professionals and influences on the realities of nuclear energy and science-based evidence within the context of the challenges we are now facing? Well, thank you for the question. He's referring to something that happened to me in Glasgow. In Glasgow, I was having an open debate in an auditorium, quite big, a bit bigger than this one. And the Gillian Tett from, you know, when editor of the Financial Times was questioning me, and there was a question about Fukushima. And I said that no one, and I would think about what I'm going to say, and if you know it or not, I said, of course, Fukushima was a big tragedy. No one is banalizing this. It should have never happened. We know why it happened. But I said, talking about narratives, I said, in Fukushima, nobody died from nuclear radiation. You know what happened? There was a big laugh. There was a big laugh. There were a few environmental activists there, and they were laughing, you know, in a hostile way, in a defiant way. And I told them, don't laugh. What are you laughing about? About the death? About the what? And I explained the reality. I explained the sources for the information I was giving them. Of course, I'm not sure whether I convinced some, at least, of these people, but it goes to the heart of what you are saying. The narratives there are very strong. The image of nuclear energy is bad. You can say that the TG of the IAEA said it. There's the Simpsons. There is, yes, yes, the gooey green thing. And this has shaped millions of people's mentalities and approaches on it. Of course, when you have things like Chernobyl or where you have things like Fukushima, then, of course, everything makes sense for these people. So you have to strike the right balance. For me, it is a never-ending job or a never-ending effort that we have with our communications team at the agency trying to establish the facts. We know that in some cases, and this may include, for example, some of our friends in the Pacific, they will not believe it. They will think that whatever we say is not true or it's part of a conspiracy. Well, in front of that, the only thing we can do is, as the saying goes, keep cool, keep calm, and continue. Because at the end of the day, policymakers will take the right decisions on the basis of the facts. And those who do not, in the end, we see that are in a minority. And I'm not taking, in this, I say it with a lot of respect and without taking a beauty contest approach. After Fukushima, of all the countries that decide that we're talking about facing out nuclear issues, there's only one that has really done it seriously. This is Germany. But apart from that, some said it and they are not actually doing it or putting some footnotes into it so they can delay as much as they can. Right, I mean, it's politics and we have distinguished politicians here in the room and there are parliamentary majorities and elections to be won or lost. So it is one of the most important things. And I think, and may I call it that as well, because I believe and I say this to industrialists, nuclear industrialists often, and also to the IAEA itself. There has been, the nuclear world has been opaque, a bit arrogant on the edge. And it has to open and offer itself to the debate and confront the laughter with fact. Thank you. Director-General, thank you very much for your tour of the world, of the challenges and opportunities we all face. I'm very lucky to work for the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office. You know very well. Yes, I do. I wanted to pick up on one issue that you raised and the issue of human capacity. Yep. And also evidence-based policy making. In terms of the initiatives that you've put forward, and I know I is a priority for you, in terms of gender equity in the nuclear industry, can you tell us, all of us who are here today, that includes obviously people from the Australian government, but also our foreign representatives, what have you seen works the best in terms of encouraging greater gender equity in the nuclear industry? I should say that this is one of the most important things that we have in front of us in terms of the structural outlook of the industry and even academia when it comes to let alone nuclear, STEM. The statistics continue to be dismaying and only a fraction of nuclear, not nuclear, again, engineers are women every year and it is not because there is no female talent out there. There have to be an important number of changes that still need to occur. When I started as Director General, the workforce of the IAEA was 28% women and the rest men. I have it at 40 now and I promised I would get to 50% by 2025 and I told my head of human resources to get ready to have it by 2023. Why? Because it is an issue that has to do not with appointing people because of their gender, it has to do with the way we recruit, it has to do with the way we operate, it has to do also with the opportunities that women have and this is the other side. One can say for a bureaucrat it is not that difficult to appoint more women, although I can tell you it is. There is a lot of pushback when you try to do that, a lot of pushback, even lawsuits that occur. It is amazing, but it happens. What we need to do at the same time is to look at what we are really doing. The area of gender balance is an area where there is so much blah blah. It is very irritating because I am invited to events where people talk about this and what are we really doing. I established something that is relative, if anything, impact, but we are trying. We established a fellowship just for women. It is not very original here. It is called the Marie-Grie fellowship, but it is a person that inspires me, a woman that was winning Nobel Prizes when she was not even able perhaps to sit at the same table and her husband, who was quite a good guy in the end. When you look at Lisa Meitner, an Austrian who actually was the one to get nuclear fission, it is Otto Hahn who was working with her and got the best ideas from her that got the prize, but not even invited her to the ceremony. This is why I say Pierre Curie was a better guy. Still, we needed to recognize that and we created this fellowship. Australia is also helping. I am having 100 fellows per year. Women that have an opportunity to pursue high degree careers in nuclear are joining. I am sure that you would have ideas about that. We have to continue in this effort reaching out. I am working a lot with women in nuclear, women in nuclear global, and the chapters of women in nuclear nationally. But this is a problem that goes beyond, as we know, goes beyond. I have seen it. I am a father of a good number of young women, seven. I say it because they are in the professional world, and I have seen firsthand the problems that they met. Going to school, then going to college, then joining the workforce. So the task is huge, but I think that we are in the right direction. Not at the speed I would love and I would like, but moving in the right direction. And by the way, women make the best inspectors.


So the properties that we like to discuss in physical chemistry, we like them either to be extensive properties or intensive properties. It's very convenient when we combine two systems either to be able to add two masses together and get the total mass, or to ignore the fact that we change the system size and leave properties like the temperature alone. So extensive is convenient, intensive is convenient. We want to figure out for every property that we're interested in, whether it's extensive or intensive. So the first thing we're going to do right now is consider whether the property of multiplicity, we'll get to entropy sooner or later. But the property of multiplicity, we want to find out whether that's an extensive or an intensive property. So let's imagine, go back to our example of a lattice gas or any type of lattice model, you can imagine that this is describing a lattice gas. So I've sketched two different systems here. Let's call them system A and system B, two different microstates. The first system, I've drawn a box with a volume of 20 and N. So for system A, the volume is 20 and I've drawn 10 molecules in the box. For system B, the volume is also 20 and I've put 10 molecules in that box. So now what we want to do to think about whether the properties of the system are extensive or intensive is combine the two systems together. So if I say, let's combine systems A and B together and make this combined system AB, where I've put them both together, then for AB, the volume of that combined system is just 20 plus 20 is 40. The number of molecules in the combined system is 10 plus 10. 20, those are both extensive properties. The volume and the number of molecules are both extensive properties. What about the multiplicity? On the left side in system A, the multiplicity of the system, the number of microstates I could have drawn that had 10 molecules in a volume 20, I can choose 20, choose 10 different ways of putting 10 molecules in 20 boxes for system B. I could also have chosen 20, choose 10 different microstates consistent with this macro state of the system. So they both have the same multiplicity as each other. What about the multiplicity for the combined system AB? There's two ways to think about that. We could think of it as number of ways of putting 20 molecules in 40 boxes, but that's not quite because I haven't taken away the barrier between these two. Really system AB, the right way to describe system AB would be to say how many ways are there of putting 10 molecules in this box and putting 10 molecules in the second box. So the multiplicity would be 20, choose 10 for the left half and multiplying by 20, choose 10 on the right half. So the multiplicity for the combined system, it turns out, is not the sum of the two multiplicities of the individual system. It's actually the product of the multiplicities for the individual system. It's also not the same as either multiplicity. So volume and number of molecules are extensive properties. Multiplicity is not an extensive property. If it were extensive, I'd get 20, choose 10 plus 20, choose 10. So that's kind of inconvenient. The multiplicity is neither an extensive property nor an intensive property, which makes it not as convenient as it could be if it were either extensive or intensive. But the good news is we can define a new property. If I take the natural log of the multiplicity, I can multiply that. Take the natural log of multiplicity, multiply by any constant we want. Right now, k is an arbitrary constant. The reason I've taken the log of the multiplicity is because I know based on how logs work that the log of a product is equal to the sum of the logs. So if I wanted to know this new property that I've defined, the entropy, turns out this will be the entropy. If I want to know this new property for the combined system A and B put together, we've just convinced ourself over here that the multiplicity for the combined system is the product of the multiplicity of A and the multiplicity of B. Logs behave in a way that the log of this product, log of WAWB, that's equal to the log of WA plus the log of WB, both of which are still multiplied by this constant k. But k times the natural log of a multiplicity, that according to our definition up here is just this new property S. So that's the S for system A. And then added to K log WB is this new property S for system B. So the reason to define this new property the way we defined it as the natural log of the multiplicity is because that guarantees that the S for a combined system will be the sum of the S values for the two individual systems. Which means that S is an extensive property of the type that we're looking for. So this definition we make just in order to come up with a property that's as useful as the multiplicity, but in addition becomes extensive as well. So and as the title and my comments have already given away, this property has the name entropy. You're probably familiar with entropy already as a measure of disorder in a system. You may or may not have seen this particular equation before. But what this definition turns out to do is it allows us to calculate quantitatively numerically the value of the entropy or this property for systems that we're interested in. And just to give you a small example of how that works using this equation. Let's say we have a chemistry problem. Let's say we have an electron that's in the 2p orbital of a hydrogen atom. So we know 2p electrons that can be in the 2px or the 2py or the 2pz orbital. So there's three different possibilities, three different equivalent equal energy options for that electron to occupy. Three different orbitals the electron can occupy. So it has a multiplicity of three. If we would like to know what is the entropy of that electron, we just need to calculate k times the log of w. So w we know is three, we can take the natural log of three. In order to do something with this expression, we have to talk about the meaning of k. So earlier I mentioned that k is an arbitrary constant. Turns out that if all we're interested in is making entropy become an extensive property, then k could be any arbitrary constant we want. In fact, the value of k that we're gonna end up using is chosen for some specific reasons that we'll be able to discuss later in the course. But the value of k, when we take the value of k to be Boltzmann's constant, specifically 1.38 times 10 to the minus 23 joules per Kelvin, then that will be very convenient for us when we start talking about gases and other particular physical systems. So the value of k that we're actually gonna use is this particular value of k. And we'll see later in the course why that particular value is the right value to use. But using that value, if we want to calculate a numerical value for the entropy, if we take Boltzmann's constant 1.38 times 10 to the minus 23 joules per Kelvin. Multiply that by the log of three for the multiplicity of the three states that this electron can occupy. Then log of three, our calculator tells us is 1.1. So this numerically works out to be 1.52 times 10 to the minus 23 joules per Kelvin as our answer. So we can calculate the numerical value of the entropy for this electron occupying one of three different orbitals. And again, for now, the important feature of the entropy is that it's simply an extensive version of what we already think of as the multiplicity.