University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: May 4, 2006

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

After 29 years at UB as a professor and pioneer in the application of new technologies to the field of information and library studies, Neil Yerkey is calling it a career.

Neil Yerkey was one of the first librarians in the country to implement an online network that can build up banks of information on community resources and offer free access to the Internet. Buffalo Freenet is still going strong.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

A dedicated and innovative teacher who loves his job, Yerkey, professor of information and library studies in the School of Informatics, along with Jim Gerland, now director of informatics computing services in the school, was one of the first librarians in the country to implement "the Cleveland idea," an online network that could build up banks of information on community resources and offer free access to the Internet.

Such networks are ubiquitous today, but in 1991, when Yerkey and Gerland began putting one together, the World Wide Web was a newborn with one command browser and no Web servers. Access to the Internet was expanding rapidly, however, and Yerkey and Gerland recognized its vast potential outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.

Their community network, Buffalo Freenet, a public service of the School of Informatics, continues to provide free Web space to more than 600 not-for-profit agencies throughout the region and maintains three Web sites that provide information on library, health and disability services.

Yerkey's recognition of the coming information revolution was not limited to Freenet, however. He introduced cutting-edge courses on online bibliographic searching, systems analysis, database design, networking technology and Web access to databases in the school, then known as the School of Information and Library Studies.

He recalls how, in the early '90s, things began to move very fast, bringing change upon change in computer technology and Internet access that would spin everyone—professors, students and administrators alike—into a vortex of revolutionary transformation.

"This was not anticipated or even recognized by everyone," Yerkey remembers

"The School of Information and Library Studies had a difficult time getting the funding and equipment necessary to support important and necessary training for our students," he says.

"We were constantly cobbling equipment together and were always short, although we managed to keep moving forward during a period of breathtaking transformation.

"Since we merged with the communication department into the School of Informatics, it has been an entirely different story," Yerkey notes.

"We've received enough grant money, much of it from AT&T, to ensure that our equipment is up to date and supports our teaching. We've also built a lab that gives our students hands-on experience in building computer networks without being on the Internet itself."

The technological revolution that altered the nature, tools, content and direction of his discipline has had a remarkable impact on teaching itself, he points out.

"At the beginning, we had to incorporate really important changes in our field into every semester's classes.

"Then it became several changes a week. Now," he says, "new research and technological applications are spinning out almost every day, producing the need for new subspecialties and subspecialties of the subspecialties.

"Fortunately, UB has some tremendously talented new young faculty who are far more up to date on all of this than I am," Yerkey says, "and much more specialized than librarians of my generation had to be when we started out.

"They certainly stepped right in to teach the courses I began and have introduced exciting new ones of their own—courses I would like to take, in fact. They also are well able to keep up with students for who rapid change is part of life and who, by the way, produce work of amazing quality.

"After I retire, I plan to keep up with new developments in the field generally, and will teach here as an emeritus because I love teaching; but now I'm ready to bow out of the research and technology field and pass the baton," he says.

Before Yerkey—library automator, network technologist, database designer and information systems analyst—heads out the door with his Dobro to pick up his second career as a bluegrass musician, he comments on differences between librarians who are "book-based" and those who are involved in promoting and increasing the use of computer technology.

"There are concerns about the apparent 'split' that has raised in the field of information and library science," he says, "and our library faculty is very much concerned with seeing book and print-oriented resources recognized for their worth and used.

"Most librarians teaching today went into the field because they recognized the importance of selecting, preserving and making available information that at that time consisted of paper-based materials," Yerkey says.

"There is a certain warmth to books, to their texture, their feel, to the way we engage them as objects. We don't want to lose our relationship with the printed word."

As someone who has a foot planted in each realm, however, Yerkey holds that the online world is inevitable and that librarians must provide information access to students who are more used to reading things online than in hand.

"The paper versus technology discussion is an ongoing one in our field," he says, "and some librarians will choose to remain in the realm of print, while others are already deeply engaged in the uses of new technology.

"Perhaps we can continue to overlay our print- and book-oriented resources with technological advances so that the latter offer, if not as intense and intimate an experience of settling in with a good book, information more easily accessible to people who otherwise might not have it. That is my hope."

After June, except for the time he is teaching, Yerkey often will be found with his band, Gospel Express, at one of the group's 48-plus gigs a year. You can look for them occasionally at the famous Earl's Drive-In on Route 16 in Chaffee.

Not only does Earl's serve great burgers and host a great annual bluegrass festival in Earl's Sunshine Music Park, but Earl himself designs children's toy farm equipment, like "Earl's JD Cotton Picker," and in 2001 won the Broaster Company's coveted Golden Chicken Award for exemplary merchandising skills in the promotion and sale of "Genuine Broaster Chicken."

This may all seem irrelevant, but as Neil Yerkey will tell you, you can never have too much information.