Being a librarian is no longer to act as the guardian of a collectionbut to act as a facilitator. John Fitzgerald had a number of academic interests that took him from Cork to Tuscany and back before he finally settled and took up the position of university librarian at UCC. Anne Byrne reportsI also realised why the early writers, when they were trying to describe paradise, chose the Tuscan landscape.

John Fitzgerald grew up in Macroom, Co Cork, where the "introduction of the kiwi fruit was a major event". Later, as a young adult, he remembers returning home from a year in Florence, and going into a shop to ask for garlic. The assistant's response was a firm rebuke: "We don't do that sort of thing here." Fitzgerald's indecisiveness after he graduated with a BA in English and history has led him down interesting byroads and across the seas before he returned to Cork, where he is now the university librarian at UCC.

"I finished my BA in the early 1980s and looked at journalism or teaching. I opted for a HDip and hated it, though I loved the interaction with the second-level students." He has fond memories of his own schooldays and the reading aloud of books such as Stone Mad and Coral Island. "I was interested in lots of things and had a resistance to specialisation." He didn't complete the HDip and instead went to UCD to study librarianship.

"I was offered a job in TCD, computerising their card catalogue, destroying the prized possession of the librarians, items that had taken thousands of hours to create," he says, laughing. "The card catalogues were duly wheeled out of the Berkeley and the terminals wheeled in. We recruited people working at home to key in the information that was held on the cards. I went around on a motorbike distributing boxes of cards." When not astride his motorbike, Fitzgerald was pursuing an interest in Italy and its culture. "I had started learning Italian when I was offered a scholarship to Florence for a year to begin what would later become my MPhil. Florence was wonderful. I learned about food. I also realised why the early writers, when they were trying to describe paradise, chose the Tuscan landscape. I had no idea of its fertility and beauty." His research concerned EU digital library policy and included a comparison with the Nordic countries. Fitzgerald forsook academia to take up a job in a start-up expert systems software company, in London. "It had nothing to do with libraries but involved information processing at its purest level. The whole artificial intelligence and expert systems wave was in full swell.

"Machines would replace people, after we encoded their experience. Of course, as we all know, that hasn't happened." The company developed systems for the financial-services sector and duly went broke at a time when it was "fashionable to be insolvent. You could call it the insolvency boom. I came back to Ireland and was very fortunate in being offered posts successively in the electronics and the pharmaceutical sectors. I was an research and development librarian in the private sector, a very unusual animal in library terms." Then a post came up in UCC, as head of library automation. It seemed to Fitzgerald as if it offered a convergence of a whole lot of paths he had been following. It involved a drop in salary but he says, for him, job interest is the primary concern.

"I wanted to learn and be interested and challenged. I was also attracted by the public service ethos. The college has a very clear mandate to try and improve social and economic conditions through education.

"If it all sounds a little grandiose, it's a privilege to work in a beautiful environment with a beautiful campus and be given a good degree of freedom. I also like being close to a young population." Fitzgerald was duly promoted to university librarian.

UCC's Boole library was built in 1983 when the student population was 5,300.

Today, there are about 13,000 students and the physical capacity of the library is unchanged.

"I started a campaign internally for more funding and additional space. It was not just about bums on seats or books on shelves but also about a better service to postgraduate students and other researchers. There is a very high proportion of staff engaged in research." Postgraduate student numbers have increased by 45 per cent from 1990 to 2000 and are set to further increase in the future.

The college's bid for funding for a new research library was successful. The Higher Education Authority had already funded a new library (soon to open) in TCD under cycle 1 of its PRTLI funding. UCC was successful in the third cycle. Substantial monies were also gifted to the college from private sources.

UCC is the process of recruiting architects and hopes the new library will open in 2005. Planning permission has not yet been applied for as it is envisaged that the layout of the new library "will encourage the integrated use of print and electronic information". There are also plans to carry out a programme of digitalisation of the college's more important print and manuscript materials. This will protect and conserve the originals as well as providing access for researchers.

UCC does not have a collection of medieval manuscripts but it does have a very significant collection of modern Gaelic manuscripts. "The scribal tradition continued up to the early 20th century," says Fitzgerald. There are also estate and company archives such as the Murphy's Brewery Archive - which details tied houses, work practices and the names of past employees - and the Bantry House collection, with about half a million items.

Fitzgerald would like to see more collaboration between the various college libraries in the State with a pooling of resources and, perhaps, some central storage. "We have established IRIS, the consortium of Irish University and Research Libraries (www.iris.ie), which allows the user to search all the major academic library catalogues simultaneously. But it's very difficult to make headway. IRIS would benefit from additional funding by the HEA." Fitzgerald says: "Being a librarian is no longer to act as the guardian of a collection but to act as a facilitator, particularly since the advent of electronic publications."