University Libraries Without Books
Now, granted, I've been up all night tending to a leaky basement and may be hallucinating, but this NY Times piece about UT Austin removing books from its undergraduate library struck me as really fascinating.
I am especially intrigued by this bit:
While I have never attended/worked at a university is a significant division between undergraduate and graduate libraries, I understand how the UT Austin library divisions work (the research library is quite famous). My university has a frighteningly small collection (especially after coming from a moderately-sized research one university), but it compensates for the lack of holdings by offered a remarkable set of databases as well as taking part in a regional library consortium where I can go to any public university library (and perhaps even BYU) and check out books.
But there's something that sticks in my craw about the idea of libraries willingly emphasizing books less than they have in the past. Perhaps I've read too much Nicholson Baker (his long essays on the destruction of card catalogs and the ways books are destroyed in order to be microfiched are stunning). Perhaps I'm a curmudgeon, even though I know that, each year, my students know less and less about the library and how to use it.
Thoughts? Comments?
I am especially intrigued by this bit:
Quote:
The trend is being driven, academicians and librarians say, by the dwindling need for undergraduate libraries, many of which were built when leading research libraries were reserved for graduate students and faculty. But those distinctions have largely crumbled, with research libraries throwing open their stacks, leaving undergraduate libraries as increasingly puny adjuncts with duplicate collections and shelves of light reading.
The trend is being driven, academicians and librarians say, by the dwindling need for undergraduate libraries, many of which were built when leading research libraries were reserved for graduate students and faculty. But those distinctions have largely crumbled, with research libraries throwing open their stacks, leaving undergraduate libraries as increasingly puny adjuncts with duplicate collections and shelves of light reading.
While I have never attended/worked at a university is a significant division between undergraduate and graduate libraries, I understand how the UT Austin library divisions work (the research library is quite famous). My university has a frighteningly small collection (especially after coming from a moderately-sized research one university), but it compensates for the lack of holdings by offered a remarkable set of databases as well as taking part in a regional library consortium where I can go to any public university library (and perhaps even BYU) and check out books.
But there's something that sticks in my craw about the idea of libraries willingly emphasizing books less than they have in the past. Perhaps I've read too much Nicholson Baker (his long essays on the destruction of card catalogs and the ways books are destroyed in order to be microfiched are stunning). Perhaps I'm a curmudgeon, even though I know that, each year, my students know less and less about the library and how to use it.
Thoughts? Comments?
Comments
Originally posted by midwinter
Now, granted, I've been up all night tending to a leaky basement and may be hallucinating, but this NY Times piece about UT Austin removing books from its undergraduate library struck me as really fascinating.
I am especially intrigued by this bit:
While I have never attended/worked at a university is a significant division between undergraduate and graduate libraries, I understand how the UT Austin library divisions work (the research library is quite famous). My university has a frighteningly small collection (especially after coming from a moderately-sized research one university), but it compensates for the lack of holdings by offered a remarkable set of databases as well as taking part in a regional library consortium where I can go to any public university library (and perhaps even BYU) and check out books.
But there's something that sticks in my craw about the idea of libraries willingly emphasizing books less than they have in the past. Perhaps I've read too much Nicholson Baker (his long essays on the destruction of card catalogs and the ways books are destroyed in order to be microfiched are stunning). Perhaps I'm a curmudgeon, even though I know that, each year, my students know less and less about the library and how to use it.
Thoughts? Comments?
I was listening to some NPR something or another just the other day, in which what was billed as a "young and progressive" head librarian was yammering on about how the modern library had to compete with Starbucks and Barnes and Nobel, apparently by offering free coffee and wireless internet, permitting people to eat while reading, and providing private "study rooms" where The Youth of Today could feel comfortable hanging out in the vicinity of books.
Also, talking: feel free (on account of the mysterious generational talent for "multi-tasking", wherein talking to your friend, talking on your cell phone, perusing internet sites while keeping up your end of IM chat, eating, drinking, and, um.....reading are all part of a semi-mystical info-wash that just sort of marinates your cerebral cortex, presumably with pro-extreme results).
In other words, the modern library, if it is to survive, is obliged to get with the edu-tainment paradigm, because, it apparently went without saying, just, you know, reading really couldn't be expected to hold the interest of the kids.
Which may well be true, but I'm curious about the results.
Midwinter, do your library skill eroded students seem to suffer from other forms of cognitive disarray?
Cause if there really is a techno-enabled "new brain" that can navigate all these inputs and produce coherent, engaged results, then I say fine, if at the same time feeling slightly fearful of my new, augmented masters.
If on the other hand (and what I obviously suspect) this sort of cursory, web surfing style of information gathering produces cursory, facile lines of thought, wherein depth is supplanted by, um...."width"? (or whatever the term would be for a great many low quality point sources with specious "interconnectedness"), then I fear for the future.
Really, it's a fascinating notion, that the structures of technology become the ontological tail that wags the epistemological dog (which of course has been going on for a while, but which cyber-informational technology sharply foregrounds).
I would imagine the working out of these processes are, for the university professor, somewhat hair-raising.
Originally posted by addabox
I was listening to some NPR something or another just the other day, in which what was billed as a "young and progressive" head librarian was yammering on about how the modern library had to compete with Starbucks and Barnes and Nobel, apparently by offering free coffee and wireless internet, permitting people to eat while reading, and providing private "study rooms" where The Youth of Today could feel comfortable hanging out in the vicinity of books.
It actually works extremely well and, IMO as someone whose entire career has been spent in an academic library, is necessary to keep me as also a patron happy. Since we installed a cafe and 'information commons' (what libraries call large, centrally located computer labs), the atmosphere has changed 100% for the better and main library's role as the campus' information hub has been reinforced. Personally, I think it's just a logical transition and one of many obvious changes that librarians are actually slow in recognizing.
Originally posted by addabox
I was listening to some NPR something or another just the other day, in which what was billed as a "young and progressive" head librarian was yammering on about how the modern library had to compete with Starbucks and Barnes and Nobel, apparently by offering free coffee and wireless internet, permitting people to eat while reading, and providing private "study rooms" where The Youth of Today could feel comfortable hanging out in the vicinity of books.
Yeah. This is increasingly common. Even my paltry excuse for a library has a coffee shop in it.
Midwinter, do your library skill eroded students seem to suffer from other forms of cognitive disarray?
Cause if there really is a techno-enabled "new brain" that can navigate all these inputs and produce coherent, engaged results, then I say fine, if at the same time feeling slightly fearful of my new, augmented masters.
If on the other hand (and what I obviously suspect) this sort of cursory, web surfing style of information gathering produces cursory, facile lines of thought, wherein depth is supplanted by, um...."width"? (or whatever the term would be for a great many low quality point sources with specious "interconnectedness"), then I fear for the future.
As with anything, it depends. But if I put on my grumpy old man yelling "GET OUTTA MAH YARD YOU GALD DURN KIDS!!" hat for a moment...
...ok. The kids these days entering college are coming from high schools that can do little more than function as triage centers, and so they come with the standard skill erosions/decays/deficits in math and language skills. Lots of them have never set foot in the library. Lots of them don't read anything more sophisticated than People or Maxim. My students, in particular, have serial-killer handwriting. It looks like they write with those big 1st grade pencils. Lots and lots have significant reading comprehension problems.
The result is, in many ways, a sort of desultory intellectual life that translates into what might as well be an inability to engage in any kind of sustained inquiry?and even worse, a complete lack of interest in any kind of sustained inquiry.
But the problem is that it doesn't even result in a wide-ranging, shallow knowledge about a variety of topics. It's not even the kind of insular knowledge (i.e. information derived from a limited range of sources leading to the perception of understanding without any real knowledge) you get, for instance, here.
/grumpy old man hat off
But in the end, it's important to remember that ever generation bitches about the upcoming one.
Really, it's a fascinating notion, that the structures of technology become the ontological tail that wags the epistemological dog (which of course has been going on for a while, but which cyber-informational technology sharply foregrounds).
I would imagine the working out of these processes are, for the university professor, somewhat hair-raising. [/B]
Well put.
Originally posted by midwinter
But there's something that sticks in my craw about the idea of libraries willingly emphasizing books less than they have in the past.
In my view, and I've been quite vocal about this in the library world, a major future role of a library is as a advanced web application for information retrieval. Like a Goole/Yahoo/Amazon Pro. The problem is that librarians are still sitting in shock from the fact that their role has changed so dramatically. Library schools are still churning out librarians who are entering the field with no library experience (those with previous experience are in the minority) who expect to work in the libraries of 20 years ago. In addition, academic libraries do not pay well at all, so attracting good developers is difficult, and upper levels of library management in the US still don't realize it's a problem.
Anyway, the point is that the role is changing, but not as much as virtually any librarian believes. I know you've seen it changing yourself, midwinter, when finding political articles through libraries' online subscriptions and databases. For me, when I want to read an article from harper's, I dig it up from our electronic resources. If I want to pull out an old news article, lexisnexis is invaluable.
But this doesn't mean books will go away. One thing we've seen that hasn't sunk in with virtually any librarians is the dramatic increase in interlibrary loan over the past 10 years. While most users of the service are graduate students and faculty, it shows that this changing role has actually created another example of the long tail at work.
Librarians, however, are generally too uninformed about technology (even the ones who are central in the library/technology librarian scene) to realize that trying to emulate google is a bad idea for more reasons than I have time to go into here. As a result, you'll probably have more and more situations where librarians make people like you worry that books are obsolete.
A couple years ago the library was hiring a new librarian position (meaning all candidates had masters degrees) and when one of them was asked where she say the library in 10 years her answer was something along the lines of "all electronic, no books anymore.' I pressed her more about it and she stuck to it, so I all but told her that she was out of her fucking mind. 3-4 years later we are no closer to her prediction coming true than we were 8 years ago.
Anyway, Texas is different, but I don't know all the details that have brought them to make this decision. I've never been to their libraries when I've visited austin, so I don't know anything about the space. However, deemphasizing books at a time when library culture is reactionary (librarians following every trend put in front of them) without recognizing the iimportance of revamping the web presence to reflect this shift is a mistake, but it's one happening all over.
Perhaps I've read too much Nicholson Baker (his long essays on the destruction of card catalogs and the ways books are destroyed in order to be microfiched are stunning).
I've never read anything by him, but times have already changed dramatically. Digitization is all anyone care about these days. Our preservation department recently purchased a $120,000 kirtas book scanner and you'd be amazed at how much technology the thing has to care for books as it automatically scans them.
Is this an IP issue? It just seems that with storage space as cheap as it is, if, as libraries got ILL articles in, they'd KEEP THEM, they could spread the availability of that material.
As for Nicholson Baker: get Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (this one for the long essay on card catalogs). Both of them seem to be available at the U of Chicago library system. Isn't that where you are?
Originally posted by midwinter
The result is, in many ways, a sort of desultory intellectual life that translates into what might as well be an inability to engage in any kind of sustained inquiry?and even worse, a complete lack of interest in any kind of sustained inquiry.
I completely agree.
The analogy I've used recently is by trying to emulate google, libraries are basically attempting to put final cut pro's functionality into an imovie interface. You can't do it, because the point of the academic library is that it gives patrons 95%+ more than they can get online for free. Many librarians feel that we need to cater to these kids' ADD, thus making librarians part of the problem. The way I see it, if you want to use final cut pro, you have to learn how to use it. If you go to a university to learn, you have to learn how to find and read books and other academic materials.
This is what bothered me the most:
Rarely do today's students hunt for a book in the stacks, she said. Now they go online and may end up with a book, but also a DVD or other medium. But, she said, "it's unlikely there will be libraries without books for a long time."
Significantly, librarians are big supporters of the trend.
Now, I'm someone who literally orders video games through interlibrary loan. However, it's one thing to support changes in the role of libraries, it's another to become encourage poor research skills. I've written quite a bit in the past couple months on the issue of 'library as a space' and this architect is certainly completely unclear on the concept. I'm with Sam Demas of Carelton College when he says:
Demas uses the ancient Library of Alexandria as a frame of reference for the modern library. Decrying the specialized focus of many academic libraries, he turns to the ideal of the Mouseion?a ?temple of the muses??that was, ?in name and in fact, a research center, a museum, and a venue for celebrating the arts, inquiry, and scholarship.? Libraries such as this provide not only information resources but special collections, art exhibits, and performances; they also support scholarship and encourage engagement with it.
Originally posted by midwinter
Giant: one of the things that you seem to be addressing here is a matter that has bugged me for a long time. A jillion years ago when I was ILLing tons and tons of first editions of c19 books (so often that the library would call me at home to make sure they had the right edition of something), I asked one of the ILL librarians what they did when they got PDFs of an article. He said "We send it to you." I said "No. I mean, do you keep it in a file somewhere to expedite the process in the future?" He said, flatly, no.
Is this an IP issue? It just seems that with storage space as cheap as it is, if, as libraries got ILL articles in, they'd KEEP THEM, they could spread the availability of that material.
There are a bunch of issues. First, copyright is a big factor and certainly the main reason there is no system in place to keep them. It's become an even bigger issue because of the shift to online subscriptions with restrictive licensing agreements. Secondly, managing the articles would be very difficult. I don't know how it is at smaller libraries, but we barely have enough time to get articles to patrons without adding metadata. Even if we had the time, we would then have to fit a cataloger or other staff member in the process of recieving them (currently it's done by student workers). Third, there is no quality control. Often the articles are scanned by student workers who don't care, so there are a lot of mistakes like dark bindings or having pages cut off. Fourth, the current software (one vendor with a proprietary protocol that has become standard) is limited. That's actually a real mess of a situation that I won't bore you with, but hopefully it will start to get ironed out in the next year.
As for Nicholson Baker: get Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (this one for the long essay on card catalogs). Both of them seem to be available at the U of Chicago library system. Isn't that where you are?
Northwestern, but we have them, too.
Originally posted by pfflam
be afraid . . .
no shit...they cannot do away with books - it is impractical - there is something great about the written/printed word that a computer screen uses - hy do you think 99.9 percent of people perfer to print a pdf rather than read it on screen, I love finding info on the computer, but he printed word is not to be forsaken.
I've been saying for a long time, though, that once there's a better way to a) carry around e-texts and b) annotate them, we'll see a change.