CHE on bookless library at Merced

[Liblicense-L Listowner <liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu>]

Of possible interest:  The Chronicle of Higher Education contains several
articles this week on the opening this fall of the new UC-Merced campus,
including this on the library.
_________

THE BIRTH OF A RESEARCH UNIVERSITY:  Shelve Under 'E' for Electronic

By SCOTT CARLSON

Merced, Calif.

Photographs of reading rooms in six famous old libraries provide what
little decoration R. Bruce Miller, the librarian at the University of
California's new Merced campus, has hung on his office walls. The
18th-century Abbey Library of St. Gallen, the oldest library in
Switzerland, has ornate bookshelves and intricate mural ceilings. At the
monastic Library of St. Walburga, in the Netherlands, manuscripts are
still chained to desks, as they have been since the 1500s.

"We put those up to be mindful about what we're doing," Mr. Miller says,
referring to his staff's work starting a new research library from
scratch. "This is not about this week's trend. This is going back to what
libraries are all about."

Given Mr. Miller's plans for his new library, those shrines to the printed
word seem like odd sources of inspiration. Instead of old vellum and
parchment, imagine browsing the shelves at Merced and finding what Mr.  
Miller calls a "fake book": a slab of Styrofoam, bound to look like a
book, with little more on its cover than a Web address for a database.  
Imagine a special collection that exists primarily online. Imagine a
research library with an on-site collection of a mere 250,000 items --
books, sure, but also DVD's and CD's, all packed together on the same
shelves. Merced officials boast that the library will open with access to
more than 30 million volumes, but they are referring mainly to the books
available through the University of California's interlibrary-loan system.

With its focus on remote collections and digital resources, Merced's Leo
and Dottie Kolligian Library will either be a new model for research
libraries or a brief experiment for a generation dazzled by the Internet.  
Mr. Miller's vision departs from traditional library practices in every
way, yet he believes he has "gotten back to basics," serving up
information for students and faculty members the way they want it, when
they want it. When they don't, he thinks the library should not be a
warehouse for that information.

[SNIP]

Mingling Materials

Mr. Miller has decided to use his limited acquisitions budget to buy
materials that he judges absolutely necessary for teaching and research in
the university's programs, then make those materials especially easy to
find. Go to the Russian-history section of the shelves, and you might find
a book on the Russian Revolution standing next to a copy of Sergei
Eisenstein's classic film, The Battleship Potemkin. In most libraries,
they would be in different sections, segregation that Mr. Miller calls "a
historical thing."

"We just get to start out with what seems logical," he says.

He is putting rare items on the shelves, too. A signed copy of Epitaph for
a Peach, by David Mas Masumoto, a writer and farmer who lives near Merced,
would normally go into a special-collections vault. Here it will sit on an
open shelf with other books, available for checkout. Mr. Miller hasn't
decided whether patrons will be able to check out a $1,200 leatherbound
copy of Herbert Hoover's translation of De Re Metallica, but he is
seriously considering it.

Many of the special collections will exist only in ones and zeroes. For
example, the library has started digitizing the collection of the Ruth and
Sherman Lee Institute for Japanese Art. The institute's scores of scrolls,
screens, and paintings will remain at its museum in Hanford, Calif.  
Through digitizing, Mr. Miller says, the university will be able to use
the digital images in courses or make them available to researchers,
students, or the general public online. Such access, he says, is far more
valuable than owning the artifacts.

Asked if Merced will eventually build some sort of large permanent
collection of paper materials or valuable items, Mr. Miller shrugs. "Why?"  
he asks, though he knows large collections lend prestige to other research
libraries. "We laugh at people who use the wrong bragging rights: 'We are
the world's greatest library because we have nine million books on our
shelves.' Yeah, and you have to dust them every summer because nobody uses
them."

Delivery, Not Size

Faculty members at Merced seem willing to entertain Mr. Miller's approach,
for now. Many work in the sciences, fields oriented toward electronic
materials anyway. Kenji Hakuta, the dean of social sciences, humanities,
and the arts, thinks that people will miss the sensation of browsing
through stacks of books. And he says time will tell how well the
interlibrary loans work. But with budgets as tight as they are, he says,
necessity has been the mother of invention at Merced. "It is almost
incumbent on a new university to try out things," he says.

In fact, librarians across the country have started thinking more like Mr.  
Miller. Mr. Schottlaender, who is incoming president of the Board of
Directors at the Association of Research Libraries, and Mr. Webster say
that research librarians and accrediting bodies are starting to reassess
whether, when it comes to collections, size matters.

In the online age, "the notion of how many serials we have becomes much
less important than how can we access them readily and deliver them
effectively electronically," Mr. Webster says.

Mr. Schottlaender likes the new directions that Mr. Miller is taking, but
he doubts that the physical collection will remain as small as planned. He
wonders if the commingling of paper, audio, video, and electronic items
will prove to be an inefficient use of space. And he cannot abide the
shelving of rare items in the common stacks, where patrons can steal them,
scribble in them, or spill coffee on them.

[SNIP]

Copyright 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education