I have just found out that our local university (40k students) is moving almost everything out of its main library to offsite storage about 30 miles away. The university claims over two million items in its various collections around the campus, with the vast majority being stored in its six-storey 1970s vintage main library building. From what I can see, the plans are to convert most of the building into a glorified study hall, with users able to retrieve items on request from offsite storage. Obviously there will be a delay in getting the items. Will they shuttle items once a day? Once an hour? I have no idea.
Is this becoming standard procedure in other university (or even public) libraries? I would assume that this would be a good time to “cull” books - I hope they aren’t throwing any away.
I only recently started going to the library again. I was shocked at the variety of items that I could check out that weren’t literary works. Maybe that will be their future.
I work in a university library of sorts. We literally threw out 90% of the physical collection about 10 years ago. We used to haul up a cart full of paper journal issues every day. Now our current journals are 100% electronic.
We still maintain a physical site and an on-site staff. It’s still an important resource for students as a study space, both individual and collaboratively, and we still provide full library and librarian services such as assistance with searches, research, interlibrary loans, document delivery, software support for things like EndNote, we deal with the university and facility archives, among other things.
We check out remarkably few actual books. It’s been this way for quite some time, even before we weeded the collection.
Libraries are changing, but they are not going obsolete, I can assure you.
I went to the library a lot when I went to school in '96. Not once did I ever check out a book–I was there to plug into the Ethernet (this was before WiFi was ubiquitous). Even then, most of what I needed was online. I suppose I was a little ahead of the curve, but it’s been almost 30 years. Not exactly happening faster than I thought.
Would be nice to scan the books and make them available electronically before tossing them, though.
Local libraries around here have added computers, hot spots for patrons’ devices, puzzles, seed exchanges, job search centers, movie nights, board game gatherings, and various other things.
However, they’re still chock full of books, magazines, and occasional newspapers; and appear to have a lot of clients who want them. Me included.
What universities are doing is quite possibly different from what local libraries for the general public of all ages are doing.
One of my college profs said, “If you’ve never cut class for the pleasure of browsing the library, you’re missing one of the treats of your undergraduate experience.”
I don’t remember ever cutting class to do so, but I spent quite a bit of time browsing the stacks at the library. It’s a shame if today’s students can’t (or don’t) do so.
Our local library does all of these things as well, and has a large amount of books that can be checked out. It also is in a cooperative of sorts with other area libraries to share materials as needed.
Oh, and just this morning we had a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the brand new library building. It’s one of the gems of our community.
There is always going to be some stuff in off-site storage, but all of a sudden there is no room for any study tables without removing all the shelving? I call bullshit.
BTW in a modern library I expect the number of interlibrary/cold storage requests to be way, way down because all of that stuff will have been digitally scanned before being archived.
I didn’t skip class either, but I spent a lot of time between or after classes in the library browsing the many books that were freely accessible. Those are some of my fondest memories of my University years, indeed (especially since it’s also where I met a law student I ended up in a happy, 3-year relationship with but I digress).
There’s a vast range of different types of libraries. Libraries of deposit such as the LoC, which collect everything published in printing in their respective countries; university libraries; local lending libraries for entertainment purposes; … I would think that the challenges these different types face would be very different.
The books just sit there moldering. Darn near nobody is reading them, darn near nobody is checking them out. But they are labor intensive to maintain on display.
If the librarians find that substantially all of their direct customer service labor is facilitating patron interaction with online resources, the dead tree books are simply useless ballast.
It’s not that they need to remove the books to make room for study. It’s that the books are a useless obstacle to providing more and better of the services the patrons actually want.
They could build a new “library study facility” next door for umpteen tens of millions of dollars and take 10 years to build after a 10 year fight for funding. Or they could clear out what amounts to the junk-filled attic called “the stacks” and move the new services into there in just a couple of months.
I’m deliberately painting a very black and white picture; the reality of course is more gray and nuanced. But I will suggest that you were painting a very black and white picture as well. Yours is just more familiar to you than mine is, and hence seems less stark.
People seem to be lumping University and Public libraries here, and the two have entirely different functions. Everyone will just talk past each other.
One of the issues with going electronic that I see is balancing copyright against availability.
But I recall reading about a problem when cellphones first got decent cameras, that kids in Japan were using an app that allowed them to scan pages with their cameras from a magazine while browsing at the newsstand,and read it later on their phone.
Also recall an article where some scientific journals had significanty jacked up subscription rates for libraries.
I had recently wondered if there will be a resurgence of looking for original material in the stacks as a verification reaction to the greater ability to create fake sources emerges.
The advantage of browsing over ordering what you want is that you’re only going to order what you know, or at least think there’s a fair chance, that you want. When browsing, you might come across something which you had no idea that you wanted.
Which is fun; and educational; and, very rarely but not down to zero, lifechanging.
The big resource a proper library provides is curation.
There was a time when grad students discovered that getting to know the subject specialist librarian was an important step.
Web search engines might have made some of this less valuable, but overall, even with digital subscriptions and electronic availability of documents, there are limited resources and money and it takes effort to make and keep libraries useful.
I used to do the random browsing in the stacks thing. Something I miss doing. Unlike the Internet, you are usually pretty sure that the shelves are mostly full of material that real people spent significant effort to create.
Being blessed to live near major university libraries, I often enjoyed the free visit and browse on a rainy Sunday afternoon. With more of their stock moving from stacks to offsite storage, now only accessible to students or library card holders with an advance order, those days have not entirely gone, but I get a feeling that they will be gone before I do.
While that is disappointing, the struggle against paywalls to get recent journal articles is probably the bigger headache.