Running out of options
State of the library: Part 3 of 3
West Virginia University needed new computers in its five-floor library, but it just wasn’t in the budget. To afford the technology, WVU tacked on a library and technology fee to its tuition.
To save money, Pittsburgh University merged its physics and engineering libraries. Cornell University closed its physical science library last year, and its other sub-libraries may face consolidation in the near future.
Syracuse University is running out of options, too.
With the recent economic slump, Bird Library, like other major university research libraries, is dealing with issues stemming from a lack of funding. The need for outside storage space, the repurposing of space to accommodate students and collections, and the increasing reliance on collaboration among universities are among the most prevalent issues.
Suzanne Thorin, dean of libraries at SU, said there is difficulty in appeasing different fields on campus but the library is still working on identifying the basic research materials it needs.
‘We’ll never be a big library. We’ll never be a Columbia. We’ll never be a Cornell,’ Thorin said. ‘So we just have to be very cognizant of the size of this library and how it’s used by the faculty and students.’
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Students cried ‘Save Bird!’ last fall after the library’s book-removal plan was announced, putting a spotlight on the longstanding issues SU’s library system faces.
The university backed down. The plan to move books from shelves at 98 percent capacity was temporarily stalled.
But SU was running out of options.
So was Pittsburgh, which added a separate storage facility three miles from campus, and West Virginia, which stores books at separate facilities on campus and off.
Pittsburgh keeps its shelves between 70 to 80 percent full. ‘No more than that. Eighty-five percent full is full,’ Miller said.
Miller, who came to Pittsburgh in 1994, said the library was extremely crowded when he first arrived. Built for only 1 million volumes, it had more than 2 million volumes then. So the university built a high-density storage facility that would hold 3 million books three miles from campus.
‘Who can afford to just double the size of the library? I know it’s popular to have every book at your disposal, but that’s not the reality anymore. Everybody I know is building these storage facilities,’ Miller said.
But even with a separate storage facility, Jack Siggins, university librarian at George Washington University, has to deal with shelves being at constant capacity.
‘We’re at the point where we have to take out a book for every one we put in,’ he said.
Shelves at SU are now at more than 98 percent capacity, Thorin said, and while library administration is still discussing proposals for additional storage, there should be more answers in April once the library’s current budget is analyzed.
With a tight budget, library administrators are always questioning what they would do with any extra money they receive. It could go toward off-site storage, a new facility or increasing collections to remain competitive, Thorin said.
‘And that’s where it gets difficult,’ Thorin said. ‘Because it isn’t as simple as just adding more books on campus. It’s not easy when you have this kind of situation for so long. It takes years to rectify it.’
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When Rush Miller arrived at the Pittsburgh 16 years ago, he was faced with a sign.
‘No food or drink,’ it read at the entrance of Hillman Library, the campus’ main library.
‘The first word students encountered was ‘no,” said Miller, director of the university’s library system. ‘So now we’ve gotten rid of all that. The library is becoming more multipurpose. We’re not just about books. We’re really about connecting students to information resources of all kinds to meet their needs.’
Libraries are slowly becoming everything to everyone – student centers, research facilities, stomping grounds between classes, cafes, tech services, tutoring centers, classrooms.
And because they no longer just house books, SU’s library has too many options.
‘(People) all have very different paradigms of what a library should be and what it is,’ said Terriruth Carrier, director of program management at SU. ‘And trying to figure out how you bring all those different paradigms together and make it work in one building is the issue.’
At SU, this means rethinking the way each floor is currently being used. Additional classroom spaces are being planned for lower levels, Thorin said. Administrative offices, currently housed on the second floor, will eventually be moved to the sixth floor to make room for more shelving.
Tech services will move back to the basement sometime this summer or next winter, where it used to be located for shipment reasons, to also open up space. Doing this would allow room for 130,000 additional volumes, Carrier said.
With its current 3 million-volume collection and shelves now at more than 98 percent capacity, though, the library needs to put books somewhere. Anywhere.
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Chronic underfunding has forced universities to re-evaluate their relationship with one another.
Interlibrary borrowing has increased more than 295 percent since 1986, according to the Association of Research Libraries, a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in North America of which SU is part. In the same time, interlibrary lending has increased more than 126 percent. University librarians have noticed that with this, total on-campus circulation within their libraries has dropped.
Siggins, a university librarian at GWU, said the libraries on campus had to turn more to cooperative arrangements with other universities in which they share collections.
As part of the Washington Research Library Consortium, GWU shares library collections and information technology with eight member universities in order to provide more resources to students and faculty.
As a librarian at one of the world’s largest research libraries at Cornell University, Anne Kenney thinks the biggest issue for libraries is shifting from being competitors to collaborators.
‘Much of the stuff we compete over doesn’t really make our institutions more competitive,’ Kenney said. ‘And a good bit of our resources are tied up in redundant operations.’
Interlibrary reliance used to be rare. But SU was running out of options.
Thorin said she thinks at a certain point the ‘arms race for books’ will fall by the wayside, and cooperation just becomes economical.
‘What we really want to work on is basic research material, knowing that we will always have to borrow,’ she said.
The challenge for libraries, Thorin said, is to make interlibrary lending revenue neutral so that ‘you lend as much as you borrow.’ SU currently borrows more than it lends.
To combat this, Thorin said, the university is going to start a ‘Buy, not borrow’ program next fall so that if something is being borrowed enough from another university, the library can just buy it and reduce wait time in the future.
One of the major complaints with the original proposal to move books four hours away was the wait time it would take for deliveries. But as people complained, it brought the issues to the forefront.
‘It just takes what I call last fall’s ruckus to really get the attention of the people giving out the money,’ Thorin said. ‘I think we’re on the front burner, so that’s good because I’ve been trying since I got here, and now they’re hearing and understanding.’
Published on March 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm
