Latest in the "let's kill all the libraries" movement: newly-formed Vermont State University

Quick midday post: the newly consolidated Vermont State, the latest college to kill the libraries, is really, really committed to it: 

https://vtdigger.org/2023/02/08/vermont-state-university-community-surprised-dismayed-by-library-and-athletics-changes/

Administrators announced Tuesday afternoon that the system’s member schools — Castleton University, Northern Vermont University and Vermont Technical College — will shuffle their athletics programs and transition its five campus libraries to an “all-digital” model. 

The library shift is set to take place by July 1, and will eliminate seven full-time positions and three part-time ones, according to Parwinder Grewal, the inaugural president of Vermont State University. ...

As part of those changes, campus libraries will shift online, meaning students will only be able to access books, academic journals and other materials online. Most of the physical books and other materials will be donated and administrators plan to “repurpose” the spaces. 

We're not talking about your basic Starbucks Memorial Library here, knocking out a few obsolete science journals to make room for the ever-essential coffee machines and treadmills.

All the books will be gone. 

I kind of get it. My students don't seem to go to the library much, except when I take them on a tour or make an assignment requiring it. 

But the no-books model has some issues.

1. How could you not like to go to the library and work with real copies of, say, The Illustrated London News or Harper's Weekly in big oversized bindings, especially when your campus may or may not have access to the increasingly-behind-paywalls digitized versions? Learning is so 2-D in a digitized world: we look at screens all day, every day. It's kind of exciting, as my students tell me every semester, to go and look at the actual materials. 

2. And given that budget cuts happen every single year in a university, and library budgets are especially prone to being given the axe--happens at Northern Clime every year--what happens when students don't have access to a particular paywalled resource?

3. What happens if you're working with a historical text (a novel, say, from Google Books or HathiTrust) where part is missing, blurred, or otherwise inaccessible? 

4. In a broader sense, won't this lead to more of a haves vs. have-nots situation, with this being one more place where resources are removed for the have-nots but kept for well-funded universities? 

Maybe this is all an irrational fear on my part. I guess it's reminding me of an exam I had to grade one time for an independent study student (not my student). The exam hit the basics but did not go one word, one thought, or one sentence beyond what was absolutely required. Did it pass? Yes. But it was like a ChatGPT essay: grammatically correct and without insight, a perfect C. 

Somehow I think that a curious student + a library with books has a better shot at a different perspective, which may be a romantic illusion.

Your thoughts? 

Deep silliness at the Chronicle: banning all but ebooks

Just in time for a little Thanksgiving levity, The Chronicle publishes an article so deeply silly that it'll do your heart good: "In the 21st-Century University, Let's Ban (Paper) Books". The credits line lists some books that the author has written, including one on our old friend the "digital native," but I'm having a hard time believing that he's ever read any.

First of all, the "digital natives" will have to be "weaned" off physical books, because . . . well, because otherwise how will this guy make any money? they won't be being all modern and 21st century and such. I always thought if technology made life easier, students would use it, because they're rational beings. But if they use physical books because books serve their purposes better? Now, that's just wicked stubborn, and those books have to be taken away, like pacifiers, for their own good.

Leaving aside the issue of paper versus e-form, what about content? Don't worry:

Much of what students need to study is already in the public domain and can easily, in instances where it hasn't already been done, be converted to electronic form. Most contemporary works exist electronically, as do a huge number of historical books and documents. This would be an incentive to scan more of them.

So copyright is no problem? These books are free? "Much" is in the public domain? Well, all right, then! Just point me to the planet where this is true, please.

What about our books? No worries there, either: "Professors would have a limited time in which to convert their personal libraries to all-digital formats, using student helpers who would also record the professors' marginal notes." I love this--"limited time." What happens then? Does Oskar Werner come in and incinerate the rest after the "limited time"? Has this person ever worked at a university where even getting the TPS reports in on time is a major challenge and subject to faculty complaints? Oh, and who's paying for all these student helpers and scanning? Universities in the grip of, in Roxie's phrase, "Excellence Without Money"?

Just in case you haven't got the point yet, there's a rousing scolding waiting for you in the conclusion:

The idea of having one's own personal library of physical books, so useful in earlier times, is no longer worth passing on to our students. ...Academics, researchers, and particularly teachers need to move to the tools of the future. Artifacts belong in museums, not in our institutions of higher learning.

I could tell you what I'd write on a student paper that used (1) sweeping generalizations, (2) illogical leaps of reasoning, (3) irrational and pointless abuse of a perfectly reasonable technology--paper--as "old" and useless, and (4) a complete lack of evidence for the conclusions, but I guess I'd better get busy scanning my notes while I still can.

Books as benevolent zombies

If you follow the links from More or Less Bunk's question "How do you skim an e-book" (my answer: you can't, and I own a bunch of them), you'll find a whole lot of articles on libraries getting rid of books. This is not a new event, of course, but it was a little chilling to read (at The Chronicle) that "It is no longer appropriate to treat most print resources as protected objects, or the college library as a museum for books," in part because the sight of too many books just frightens our little chicken-hearted students to death by being too "daunting." Books are not just dead but scary. They're zombies.

Huh? Are we talking about the same students who thrive on vampire, zombie, and torture porn movies and bloody video games? They're daunted by a stack of books? Seriously? And if they're "daunted," isn't it our job to show them how to get over it?

In my classroom, we're doing more library work than ever before, and the students seem to be really engaged by it. Maybe I'm fortunate that Northern Clime's librarians enjoy showing the library to students. By "showing" I don't mean forcing students to sit passively in a room watching as a librarian conducts Boolean searches and drones on for an hour that seems like a year. No, I mean getting them into the stacks to look at and leaf through the books. Some librarians like to say that e-books are the future, but really, bound books are the great undead, springing back to life in the hands of readers.

Let's take some zombie-age books as an example. Librarians like the one at the Chronicle say that books after 1850 aren't rare (although some seem to be doing their level best to make them so), and some say that Google Books makes getting these books less of a problem.

Well, let's see. This week I needed to read a reasonably obscure novel from 1870. Yep, Google books had it, or part of it: only every other page had been scanned. Descending into the entombed depths of the library, I found a copy of the original novel, from 1870, along with a number of other first editions on the shelves by this author. If this library were following the "books scare students" model of dubious library best practices, these would've been gone a long time ago. Instead, they were right there, waiting for someone to bring them back to life.

Library tales

The Little Professor has a post up about the University of Denver, which decided that a modern library could do without those messy paper things with pages. You know the things I mean: they have no digital content at all and are thus entirely useless. Best to put them in an off-site storage facility where they won't be in the way of students who want to hang out with their laptops. Here's someone who speaks for a lot of us:

Faculty members who have objected say that, while database research is important to modern-day academics, Denver researchers will invariably lose out on serendipitous discovery that comes with perusing a library’s stacks. “I know it’s kind of a touchy-feely argument, and I wish I had documented my own experience to prove it,” Headrick said. “But it’s very, very common in a lot of the social sciences. I’ll leave with five other books that I find while looking.

It's funny. We believe in digital serendipity: we find things when we're searching online that we never thought we'd find, and we boast about it. That's what Twitter is for, apparently. So why are we so apologetic about the "touchy-feely" nature of paper serendipity, which is at least as important to those in humanities fields?

And is anyone else getting tired of the argument that those of us who find it useful to look at books on shelves just don't get the digital age? I get it. I really do. Being able to search for and access texts online is a wonderful thing. But to sing the old song again, paper is a technology, too, and sometimes it's the most efficient one. I can scan through a book, read a few pages, check the index, and know whether to take it out or not in a minute or so.

I was thinking of this the other day when I went to our campus library, which was filled with students studying. (The presence of books doesn't seem to have hurt their ability to do this, by the way.) As I was checking out, the librarian helpfully pointed out that books could be delivered to departments if faculty ordered them. I appreciate that service and will probably take advantage of it at some point, especially if I'm pressed for time. There's a tradeoff, though, and its name is serendipity.

Bookless library, meet bookless book

We may have a winner in the "let's kill all the libraries" sweepstakes. Inside Higher Ed reports on"A Truly Bookless Library" at the University of Texas at San Antonio:

The difference between the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Applied Engineering and Technology Library and other science-focused libraries is not that its on-site collection is also available electronically.

It is that its on-site collection is only available electronically. . . .

San Antonio says it now has the first actual bookless library. Students who stretch out in the library’s ample study spaces — which dominate the floor plan of the new building — and log on to its resource network using their laptops or the library’s 10 public computers will be able to access 425,000 e-books and 18,000 electronic journal articles. Librarians will have offices there and will be available for consultations.

In other words, UTSA has built a library, a.k.a. a large expensive room with comfy chairs, so that students can do exactly what they can now do from their dorm rooms and the local Starbucks. Frankly, I don't know how it calls itself a library. From what I can gather, it lacks even the basics, such as an espresso stand or a set of treadmills.

More seriously, I can see how a College of Engineering may not need books; I don't know enough about the scholarship of engineering to say. What does confuse me is why UTSA felt that it needed to dedicate a space called a "library" when what they're envisioning is a place for students to hang out and talk to each other. Does UTSA not have a student union? Is there not a room in there which could be designated a "library" or quiet studying space? My assumption is that UTSA must be rich enough not to worry about it, so I won't worry about it, either.

My question is more about the bookless books in the bookless library--the 425,000 e-books that will be available to students. I have three basic questions:

1. Does UTSA have licenses enough for them all (something that's brought up in the comments at IHE)? Let's assume that two professors assign an outside reading from one of these books in their 100-section lecture classes. Does UTSA have 200 licenses for this book, or are some students going to be shut out?

Disclosure: I've had this happen in much smaller classes once when I assigned a reading from a licensed e-book. The first person was able to check out the book for 24 hours under the university's license and everyone else was out of luck--and very vocally unhappy when the class next met. I never used an online book in that way again for exactly that reason.

2. The second one may be more idiosyncratic: it has to do with the handling of books. Historiann's recent post details some of the issues, such as not being able to mark up the books as easily and not being able to flip back and forth as you can with a paper book. I'd agree, and to these I'd add another: doesn't the sheer amount of screen-time that you get from reading things online, even on a dedicated device, contribute to some eyestrain and fatigue? There's something about switching media (screen to paper and back again) that rests the eyes in ways that a prolonged exposure to one or the other can't accomplish.

3. Will UTSA check in with its students to see how they're faring in this brave new world? I'd be interested to see if they're taking some kind of benchmark measurements about what students know/how much they read and will check again a few years down the road.

Of newspapers, libraries, and H. L. Mencken

Tenured Radical has an interesting post up about her travails in getting the paper copy of The New York Times delivered early enough to read it before it ends up in the recycling bin. Hearing that the NYT is going to an online-only model in the future, she concludes with this: "Then I was struck by a brighter thought. At a certain point you have to stop running from a problem, and do the sensible thing: throw money at it. So off to the iPad store I go." She also writes about Jeffrey Hamburg and Anthony Grafton's article on saving the Warburg Library.

I've experienced some of what she's talking about-- (I used to subscribe to the Sunday NYT but had to give up because it usually arrived on Tuesday)--but the part about the Warburg Library was what caught my attention.

A visionary scholar, Warburg was obsessed with cultural exchanges of all kinds and in all periods, and tinkered throughout his life with new ways to frame and display visual images, in order to reveal their interconnected meanings across time and space. His unconventional tool for studying this shifting web of historical relationships was a picture atlas that remained in perpetual flux, and to which he gave the name Mnemosyne, or memory.

The library is in danger of having its special character changed and its stacks closed, not to mention the possibility of having parts of its collection sold, which would, of course, destroy the connections and interconnected meanings that were possible by seeing the materials in context. (Go read the article, which says this much better.)

Not everyone agrees, I know, but regular libraries foster those connections in a smaller way when you browse the stacks. There's a process, and I don't know what to call it, when you're gathering information on a topic and working with its concepts in the back of your mind. You browse through your own books, or journal articles, or the library stacks, and suddenly you're making more connections. Conferences have always helped with this, but in recent years, the online bookstores (amazon.com, Powells, and university press web sites) added to the process, as have Google Scholar, Google Books, and the online journal databases. It's not exactly research, because you're not "searching" so much as "informing" yourself in a casual way, and it's also not research because it's not in depth. You skim information; you don't take notes on it. But it's a useful and important process, because it feeds your mind with pieces of information that may not seem useful at first but may arise at a later state in the project. It's our own version of the picture atlas, maybe.

Why H.L. Mencken? Because Mencken believed in the value of books, and because Hamburg and Grafton quote him to good effect:

A center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean counters. It is a picture, in the words of H.L. Mencken, “to bemuse the vulgar and to give the judicious grief.”

And because it's his birthday, of course!

After some prodding, JSTOR does the right thing

Because I had been trying to keep a self-imposed ban on reading IHE/CHE as part of the positivity campaign, I'd missed the whole kerfuffle over JSTOR's new interface. Inside Higher Ed covers it well here and here.

Apparently what happened was that the new JSTOR interface, which includes its new current journals initiative, by default showed all materials, even those not covered in an institution's subscription. Oh, and instead of using OpenURL as Google Scholar does to show what's available at an institution, JSTOR provided a handy link to purchase the articles online for a handsome fee.

Quite understandably, this upset a lot of people, especially a lot of librarians, since students might be less likely to try another database (as faculty might) and might click on the pricey link instead.

JSTOR was shocked, SHOCKED to think that anyone believed they had done this for money:

"Did you have to make concessions that benefit your publishing partners but hurt the end user?”

“Absolutely not,” Guthrie, the JSTOR founder, told Inside Higher Ed on Wednesday afternoon. “We’re absolutely not trying to have users purchase articles they already have access to.”

To JSTOR's credit, the interface has been fixed so that you can opt to see only materials at your institution, and some OpenURL features have been implemented. JSTOR wants to be a web portal, in some ways, so that students will look there first for content instead of the MLA Bibliography. I get what they're trying to do.

But I'm glad that IHE and the librarians called JSTOR out on this, just as Facebook users have called out Facebook every time it introduces a new "feature" to decrease privacy and monetize users' personal information. It seems to me this is part of a larger trend where customers are pushing back when trusted, or formerly trusted, institutions are capitalizing on users' trust to make more profits. At the post office, for example, you have to decline all the expensive options and extras one by one, repeating "media mail, please" until the person behind the counter gives up and stops trying to sell you next-day delivery.

In these times, it's probably inevitable that institutions, even those that profess a noble mission, will use whatever means they can to make whatever money they can. Maybe that's why students need us to teach them critical thinking about all the alternatives, not only in the matter of databases but in other consumer-driven decisions as well.

From The Chronicle: "A Gentle Reminder to Special Collections Librarians"

"A Gentle Reminder to Special Collections Librarians" is not for the many friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable Special Collections librarians out there. No, it's for the ones who look at you as though you are standing there with matches and a can of gasoline if you ask to see an item. It's by a Yale Special Collections librarian, Todd Gilman, who was not able to see a collection he was both knowledgeable about and interested in because it was guarded by Cerberus a librarian who "believed she was doing her job—that her behavior was justified because I was foolish enough to just 'turn up' expecting to use 'her' collection." He adds this as the lesson:

Let this, then, serve as a gentle reminder to rare-book curators that your job is not to keep readers from your books but just the opposite: to facilitate readers' use of the collections. If altruism or professional integrity aren't sufficient motivators to get you to play nice, you might consider the fact that you have a job only because people want to read what's in those collections, and you will keep your job for only as long as readers feel welcome to approach you to make use of the materials.

I've had both kinds of treatment (mostly good) in visits to archives, but I always assumed that the few instances of bad treatment occurred because I was not one of the Elect in whatever way the local librarian chose to define it.

Have you found helpful librarians, or is Todd Gilman's experience more universal than not?

In a more moderate key: libraries as public spaces

I've been thinking about something that Rufus said in response to the earlier library post:

I can't listen to librarians talk about how we need to stop thinking of libraries as places with books without imagining a priest saying, "We need to really stop thinking of the church as a place where people come to hear about the scriptures and pray. Because, gosh, the new generation (digital natives- i.e. internet addicts) really just wants another place to hang around and dick around on their laptops."

Why are we so invested in the idea of libraries as a sacred, or at least special, place? Why are those who like libraries so outraged at the thought that they'll be dismantled for yet another Starbucks-like space?

Here are a few possibilities, but please--add your own.

1. They're one of the last public spaces around that don't require you to (1) do something or (2) buy something, and yet they offer you riches in return: books.
   
2. Yes, this is latent romanticism showing its face, but if you love books, you like being around them--leafing through them, admiring the covers, paying attention to the slick or rough feeling of old paper, the impress of the type, and everything else. You get ideas. The connection of past with present work and future possibilities is stimulating.
   
3. Browsing the shelves, you'll see things that you might not see with even the most assiduous and well-informed search.
   
4. You're around people, but you don't have to talk to them. Because it's a public space, it's energizing in a way that being at home isn't.
   
5. You can sit and read, and read, and read, without anyone asking you if you want anything (a refill, a different book). There's an assumption of privacy within public spaces that's hard to come by anywhere else.
6. A library is quiet, or at least mostly quiet. You aren't hearing people nattering away but saying absolutely nothing on cell phones.
   

If you grew up with books as an important part of your life as a child, I'll bet that you can conjure up a mental picture of your childhood library right now. Mine was a converted house, quite small, with scuffed, creaky wooden boards on the floor and most of the light coming in through some large uncurtained windows. If you sat on a bench by the window, you could read Alcott and decide to check it out, or P. L. Travers and decide that it wasn't for you (because when you come right down to it, Mary Poppins in the books is really Scary Mary).

I'm not saying that time, or libraries, have to stand still because of what they may mean to a few of us, but the idea that the library has functions other than just another place to chat and drink coffee needs to be considered.

Update on the "bookless library"

Two items from today's news.

1. From The Chronicle (behind the subscription wall--sorry) (now free, as JHoward notes in the comments; thanks, Chronicle!):

In Face of Professors' 'Fury,' Syracuse U. Library Will Keep Books on Shelves
By Jennifer Howard
A fight between humanities scholars and the library at Syracuse University over plans to send books to a remote storage facility has reached a temporary truce, with both sides agreeing to consider alternative solutions. The conflict began several weeks ago when the library announced it wanted to free up shelf space and save money by sending some of its print collection to a facility in Patterson, N.Y.
. . .
The reaction was so fierce because of the high value humanities researchers still place on hands-on browsing, Mr. Watts said. "The big issue in the letters and among humanists generally is the importance of being able to browse collections and not have them in a remote location," he said. Recent library renovations to create more computer and work space have caused books to be moved around, according to Mr. Watts, and "part of the fury has been fueled by what looks like the emptying of shelves."
. . .
[L]ast night, more than 200 students and faculty members attended a meeting of the University Senate to hash out the library situation, according to the university's student newspaper, The Daily Orange.

The senate meeting "was the most longest and most vocal in years," Suzanne E. Thorin, the university's dean of libraries, told The Chronicle. "It means there's a lot of burning passion on this." Humanities faculty members have made it clear they consider the library their "central laboratory," she said.

Yes, exactly: a "central laboratory." I don't have anything to add to this except to hope that the 200+ people who turned out have convinced Dean Thorin that (1) we're not just random kooks who have an unhealthy attachment to books and that (2) print culture isn't dead yet.

2. About print culture: over at Perplexed with Narrow Passages, Christopher Vilmar has a good post about Robert Darnton's thoughts on e-books versus printed books. A few excerpts:

The book is not dead.

As new electronic devices arrive on the market, we think we have been precipitated into a new era. We tout “the Information Age” as if information did not exist in the past.

Whatever the future may be, it will be digital.

Unless the vexatious problem of digital preservation is solved, all texts “born digital” belong to an endangered species. The obsession with developing new media has inhibited efforts to preserve the old.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. "Digital" is the future, but the future isn't here yet. We need both print and digital media right now. I'm hoping that conversations like the ones linked to here will increase our understanding. Didn't we learn anything from deconstruction? Both/and, not either/or.

Dean of Libraries hates books, libraries; views on espresso machines, gym equipment unknown

Via The Little Professor, who has an elegant post about why this is a totally stupid perhaps an ill-advised idea:

“Let’s face it: the library, as a place, is dead,” said Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University. “Kaput. Finito. And we need to move on to a new concept of what the academic library is.”

And there's more:

Despite the objections of “a minority of very loud faculty members,” Thorin said, the days of wandering through the stacks are over. “People,” she told the audience, of whom many were librarians, “the world has changed, and so have your students, and so have your faculty!”

She's totally drunk the "digital native" Kool-Aid, hasn't she? Yeah, those pesky faculty members, with all their prattling on about "knowledge" and "humanities." If we could get rid of them, maybe we could afford a new espresso machine and maybe even some treadmills!

And here's something from Richard Luce: "“To interact with one another — to talk, to collaborate, to think, to communicate, to be with one another,” he said. “Isn’t that what we do in our best libraries?”" If you don't have any content to the information you're exchanging, or any permanence, you're transmitting chat. Libraries as Twitter? (Sorry, Twitter, but although I've seen "come see what I've done" tweets a lot, I haven't seen deep thoughts on there. It's more an alerting service for thoughts written elsewhere than a mode for transmitting ideas.)

I had a long argument one time in my one and only library science course (as an undergrad). I remember it because I was a terminally quiet student in this class, the kind everyone hates. "What's the function of the library?" the professor asked. My answer was vaguely Arnoldian--something about keeping books that people couldn't afford to buy, classics, keeping knowledge alive, best that has been thought and said. Nope! The purpose of the library is to serve the people, I was told. If they want 30 copies of Dan Brown, then that's what you buy, and if you have to chuck Dickens to do it, well, Dickens is toast.

Miriam Burstein (Little Professor) calls this a thought experiment. I'd call it a thoughtless one.

[Edited so I sound more rational on this topic; I could hardly be less so.]

Update on this post.
See also Historiann's take on this issue.

Inside Higher Ed: Libraries of the Future

Speaking of old television programs, there was one called The Honeymooners that has been playing on an infinite repeating loop on one station or another for years. In one of the episodes, the main character, Ralph Kramden, decides to sell an apple peeler or something, and to do this he decides to have his friend Ed Norton help him make a TV commercial in which he plays "Chef of the Future." When I saw the "Libraries of the Future," guess what went through my mind.

These libraries of the future will--surprise!--have no books:

The university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas. . . . “We're already starting to see a move on the part of university libraries... to outsource virtually all the services [they have] developed and maintained over the years,” Greenstein said.

What's worrisome about this is that the article talks not about managing collections but about "outsourcing" the "storing and managing of books." This sounds like off-site storage, which is okay, maybe, for an obscure book of criticism from the 1930s, but I'm wondering if all books would be stored in this way.

I'm surprised that no one has made the efficiency argument yet about off-site storage. Quick quiz: which of these is more efficient?

1. Faculty member (or student) looks up a book, goes into the stacks, leafs through the book and others in the area, carries books to circulation desk, checks them out, and carries them home.

2. Faculty member looks up a book and sends a request for a book in closed off-site stacks. Library person receives the request and prints it out. Another library person (probably a work-study student) takes the call slip and hunts down the book in the stacks. Two days pass. Circulation desk emails the faculty member. Faculty member goes to the library to pick up the book, decides that she needs another one, and repeats the process.

Oh, and the Chef of the Future? His gadget completely fails.

Another Starbucks Memorial Library

From the Chronicle's "Is it a Library? A Student Center?" (behind the subscription wall--sorry). This one's at Goucher College:

Any new library building will have hissing espresso machines, padded chairs, and noisy study areas. But what does one make of a library with an art gallery, a restaurant, and open forum space that can seat at least 700 people? How about treadmills, exercise bikes, and rowing machines as well?

. . . Among those attractions, on a balcony overlooking the forum, is the exercise equipment—ellipticals, bikes, rowing machines. "We'll see how much they are used," Mr. Ungar says. "It's a gamble—something I insisted on, because I think that if we are going to have a place where you can do everything, exercise should be part of it."

There is also a studio for the campus radio station, classrooms, a commuter lounge with a full kitchen, a unisex bathroom with a shower, along with all of the usual trappings of a traditional library: circulation and reference desks, study spaces, computer labs, and a prominent space for the display and preservation of special collections.

Ah, yes--nothing says the vita contemplativa like the sight of sweating bodies on a treadmill. It's interesting that a mega-espresso machine is mandatory for new libraries but books are more or less optional, just one sideshow "attraction" among the rest. But at least this one does have books:

The stacks are one of the first things people see when approaching the building from the road, with the candy-colored shelves—blue, yellow, red—and quiet study areas clearly visible inside. It's an intentional placement, meant to signal that books still hold a prominent place in the building, despite all the other attractions.

On the other hand, this does kill two birds with one stone: instead of a brisk walk outside to wake you up when you get all dozy reading in the stacks, you can get on a treadmill and get the brain cells moving again, or refuel with industrial-strength coffee.

The same, but different

Dispatches from the same routine in a different place.

I love watching students walking along campus paths and reading, standing in food lines and reading, and sitting on benches in the sun and reading. I've seen a few students texting and walking, but more of them are reading books and walking. That's somehow reassuring: they apparently didn't get the "death of reading" memos that the media churns out hourly.

I especially love watching them because I'm on a strange campus and none of them are my students. Don't get me wrong--I love my students--but it's nice to be on a campus that's not your campus, since if you're on your own campus, people expect you to go to meetings and do other things incompatible with writing.

I'd forgotten how much I like working in a library and how much I get done in that atmosphere of enforced academic monasticism. Even with the clatter of work-study students moving books around, it's still a peaceful place.

When it's time for a break, I have a choice: there's fresh air and sunshine right outside the door, and there are stacks full of old and strange books to pick off the shelves and leaf through. The best ones are those that have a host of jokes and references that were clearly popular in, say, 1870 but are really obscure today (or should I say "to-day"?). That's the shorthand of a culture, recorded in texts in which the authors didn't even think that that's what they were writing. Who needs cryptological-anthropological mysteries when there's one lying right there on the library shelf waiting for someone to discover it?

Boston Globe: A library without the books

From the Boston Globe, with some interruptions by me.

Cushing Academy (yearly tuition: $42,850) is getting rid of its books:

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. . . . We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

And learn to spout clichéd language like "shape emerging trends and optimize technology"?

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

I know how Cushing Academy can save $500,000: put in a Starbucks instead. What's the difference? And that way they won't have to train the erstwhile "information specialists" to be baristas, too.

Tracy and other administrators said the books took up too much space and that there was nowhere else on campus to stock them. So they decided to give their collection - aside from a few hundred children’s books and valuable antiquarian works - to local schools and libraries.

“We see the gain as greater than the loss,’’ said Gisele Zangari, chairwoman of the math department, who like other teachers has plans for all her students to do their class reading on electronic books by next year. “This is the start of a new era.’’

And students mark up these books how, exactly? But not everyone is happy with the Brave New World:

“Unless every student has a Kindle and an unlimited budget, I don’t see how that need is going to be met,’’ Fiels said. “Books are not a waste of space, and they won’t be until a digital book can tolerate as much sand, survive a coffee spill, and have unlimited power."

So far we agree. But wait--there's more:

"When that happens, there will be next to no difference between that and a book.’’

Here's a test: Anyone out there still have a book on a 5 1/4" floppy disk, suitable for reading in the drive on your x286 processor Windows 3.1 system computer? How about a book on a 3" misnamed "floppy disk" or a Zip disk? Still have them? I do. How often do you read them? Daily? Weekly? Never?

How often do you read from books on paper that are over 100 years old? Daily? Weekly? More than you read the books on computer disks?

But of course reading old books on paper doesn't "shape emerging trends" or "prioritize the ramfoozle" or whatever the currently fashionable phrase is.

I know I've ranted about this before. But this is something that deserves a rant every time.

From the Chronicle: Who needs library chairs?

From the Chronicle about a new library opening at Fresno State:

“The collection level below the first floor is arguably the largest single-floor open compact shelving in the world,” Mr. McDonald said. It “can hold on a single floor upwards of 1.3 million items. So the books as such remain in the building, it is just that they are significantly compacted to make room elsewhere in the building for user centered services and seating.”

Although I still tend to think that books and not "user centered services," should, you know, be the focus of a library, I'm very glad that they've found places for the books and haven't thrown them away, even if it does mean Adventures in Compact Shelving.

And I'm willing to bet this: if Fresno State is like most campuses, it probably has a lots of chairs stashed away somewhere. Think about what chairs it probably has and what the library could do with them:

1. Those light-colored maple chairs from the 1950s could go in one area, along with the carved-in-graffiti tables from the era--a piece of history.

2. The steel chairs from the 1960s that were meant to withstand a Soviet atomic blast. You can bet they're still around.

3. Those plastic Eames chairs that came in back when the world was groovy. They were supposed to be so, so comfortable because they were shaped like your body and were so, so not.

4. The library chairs with padded seats and backs covered in woven fabrics that someone unwisely judged would be impermeable to spilled coffee and general crud. Those came in in the 1970s, and that's what most places have now. You can judge their vintage from the colors: 1970s = mustard yellow/avocado green; 1980s = patriotic red or blue, etc.

In short, there's probably only really a NEW chair shortage. If you grouped the old ones and made them seem a piece of library history, you could probably have a chair-filled library that would work for the present.

Library gaming (from Inside Higher Ed)

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article encouraging librarians to think like gamers:

“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said. The whole “gestalt” of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like “the stations of the cross,” all leading up to the “altar of the reference desk,” where “you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.”

So if this hierarchical model doesn’t reach today’s students, what will?

James Paul Gee, a linguist who is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul, argued that librarians need to adapt their techniques to digital natives. A digital native would never read an instruction manual with a new game before simply trying the game out, Gee said. Similarly, students shouldn’t be expected to read long explanations of tools they may use before they start experimenting with them.

Some thoughts:

Do I really have to play video games? Way back when, I tried a few of the text-based games that the Little Professor and Acephalous spoof so beautifully (heck, I even participated in MUD and MOO activities), but a game for me = less effort than work. If I have to put that much effort into it, I'd rather just work, thanks.

If preferring to experiment rather than to RTFM makes me a digital native, then I guess I am one, no matter how much I dislike the term.

I've seen the "library as church" metaphor before but had never thought of the reference desk as its altar.

It sounds as though those of us who are already building a "find this" model assignment and turning students loose rather than lecturing about the Library of Congress system are doing the right thing.

Wouldn't it be great if someone built a game that was based in finding library materials? To tell the truth, this would probably be more popular with teachers than students, but if it meant one less lecture on doing a keyword search, students would surely embrace it.

On a more serious note, it's true that most students would rather deal with technology for an hour than ask a reference librarian something that would get them where they want to be in five minutes. From the article: "Even then, he said, librarians shouldn’t say that they are providing formal training, but should say things like 'let me show you a short cut,' the kind of language students use with one another all the time."

Sometimes students are intimidated by the process, but sometimes there are other reasons. Although about 95% of the reference librarians I've encountered have been more than helpful, I've met a few who were so irritatingly condescending (a la the "priest at altar" model) that I steered clear of them: "This is the library catalogue online, you see? You can put in your search terms here, and then you can narrow your search by adding words." Sometimes, too, as the article says, they want to lecture about the history and nature of the resource before helping anyone to use it.

Oh, and "dead as Elvis"? He's totally alive.

Note to ProQuest: You missed one

We now have access to Proquest Historical Newspapers (well, the NY Times), and I am deeply thankful. I've spent some time just running searches to see what a thing of beauty it is.

However, it doesn't have everything. I had used the old paper versions of the Reader's Guide and Book Review Digest to locate a review of a book by Obscure Author a few months back and, having found one in the New York Times, looked it up on microfilm. It's not available in the Historical Newspapers collection, though.

The Historical Newspapers project is a real godsend, and I'm grateful for it. The work is done in India, to ensure accuracy (as I read in Business Week* at the gym this morning), and it's clearly a huge undertaking. I guess my point is really a plea to librarians: electronic resources aren't perfect, so please keep paper resources whenever possible so that we can cross-check them with the electronic ones.

*Our gym has the dullest magazines on the planet--this was the most interesting one I could find, which tells you something.

Library update

One of my students stopped by this week to talk about her term project. The class has several options for a project, but one option involves analyzing old periodicals. When I discussed this in class, some students didn't know that those were on the shelves, and only a few had ventured into the dim caverns of the library where they're kept. I waxed rhapsodic about the joys of reading old periodicals, winding up with, "And it's really fun!" Their faces told me that their idea of fun might involve something other than the library, but they still seemed interested (or had the good manners to seem interested).

The student who stopped by was one who had ventured into the dim caverns of the compressed stacks--and seemed to be as excited by that adventure of discovery as I am: "I love old books!" It's nice to know that some in the class share this feeling. Take today, for example: If it's dinnertime on a cold, dark, rainy night, and I've been up since 5:15 and on campus since 8:00 a.m. , and if the last thing I feel like doing is going to the library before heading home, I can usually find the motivation to track down books and make copies if I can go to the old periodicals/books area as a reward.

I mention this in part because of a recent comment posted to a previous post about book dumping at Cal Poly Pomona (go to the comments page to read the whole thing; I'm not sure about the etiquette of reposting the entire comment on the blog):

"The 200,000 books in storage are going to be thrown away. The library is being converted into a book crematorium."

The library: an enemy to books?

From the Chronicle about Harold B. Schleifer, Dean of Libraries at Cal State Polytechnic in Pomona. This is the kind of thinking that I fear:

***********
After getting an estimate of $240,000 to move and store up to 200,000 books, of the library's collection of about 700,000, Mr. Schleifer proposed to trim that figure by $80,000 by asking his staff to find 70,000 or more books the library could throw out. If a book hadn't been checked out in a decade, and if copies were available at nearby libraries, or if it was damaged, it could be pitched. (my emphasis).

The librarians were disturbed enough to write a strongly worded memorandum to Mr. Schleifer. The collection-management staff called the idea of discarding more than 70,000 books to save $80,000 "penny-wise but pound-foolish" and "antithetical to our professional values."

"If the decision is made to discard books at this level we will not be able to help you explain the decision to the campus community," the librarians wrote.

************

I know that the library's mission is changing toward digital media, and maybe that's all right for public libraries (though I really don't think so). But for a university library?

What about the faculty members who need the books, even if "they haven't been checked out in ten years"? I'd estimate that roughly a quarter of the books I check out haven't been checked out in twenty to forty years. (I've even been known to check out a few extra old books just to keep the library from exactly this sort of misguided lunacy.) That doesn't mean that they are useless books. It means that just maybe, they're books that need to be recovered or rediscovered; they're books that shed light on classics or are classics themselves. They're books that we'll never discover if the library, following current trends, decides that more coffee shops and computers are the answer to users' needs.

What about students who'll never know about these books or see them, if they're gone or at a nearby library?

And what counts as a "nearby library," anyway? Many students don't have cars; those that have enough interest to go down into compressed stacks to look for books may not have the transportation or the interest to go to a nearby library. The "order it and get it 24 hours later" model of keeping materials off-site may be necessary sometimes, but it's a pain in the neck and definitely a second-best choice regardless of whatever "strategic plan" rhetoric tries to justify it. Also, many libraries charge students for Interlibrary Loan materials (mine does: $2). Do we really want to put MORE impediments in the way of students having access to materials?

What about serendipity--finding something you'd never find if you weren't physically in the stacks looking for something? Sometimes you copy a journal article and discover some related materials that never come up in even the most careful database search. Also, it's sometimes faster to copy something or even skim through it on paper than to wait for those hefty .pdf files from JSTOR.

And about those digital resources? Guess what--they can, and do, go away. Library budgets get sliced all the time, and there's no guarantee that the archive that exists this week will be available a year from now. It's the same process: someone in administration decides that you don't need it, and so it's cut. Also, although I'm a huge fan of online resources, they aren't perfect. Sometimes the links don't work, or the journal isn't available as advertised. Or, as happened to me this summer when using microfilm, pages are just plain missing. It's clear that UMI is probably never going to go back and re-microfilm the last few missing pages of a newspaper issue from 1910. (This is apparently not a unique problem.) That's now the record of that publication, and if it's a flawed record, I guess we're supposed to say "so what?"

The heroes in all this are the librarians who wrote the "strongly worded memorandum" to Dean Schleifer. I'd like to raise a virtual toast to you all.

[Update (from the comments):

thought you might appreciate another update. I have an online petition up and running and have been using my lunch hour to give out information to students here at Cal Poly on the book dumping situation. Yesterday the campus police questioned me and about my activities.

HELP!!!!!

go to the website to sign the Save Our Books petition

www.calpolylibrary.com ]