At 1:00PM, when spring break officially started at noon:

I hate being the last person standing in the library.

Room 31 of the Main Stacks
Originally uploaded by Klara Kim

About a month ago, I had a fight with my friend and co-worker, Jessy (that would be Library Shenanigans and the History and Future of the Book Jessy). It was a rather polite, librarianly fight over the importance of academic library collection size.

At our small private liberal arts college library, when we give tours someone inevitably asks how many books we have. In the last seven years that I have worked at the library, our usual answer was “about five hundred thousand.” At a meeting last month, one of Jessy’s and my colleagues said that she’d done a little investigating in the catalog, and the number she came up with was closer to eight hundred thousand. She didn’t have all the information in front of her, though, so it was hard for her to answer our questions. 800K what? Item records? Non-serials item records? Did that include electronic books? Websites in the catalog? It wasn’t entirely clear.

I was in a bit of a Mood that morning, so I came out with something like “we should just say ‘a lot’ and refuse to answer that question. I feel like I could say ‘fifty thousand’ or ‘five million’ and get the same reaction from most people. If it has the books you want, a tiny collection is fine. If it doesn’t have the books you want, an enormous collection is inadequate.”

Jessy disagreed strongly. She pointed out that if you are researching a literary figure on the edge of the canon, you will be lucky if our library has a single critical biography, while a large research library might have several published over the last fifty years. She made the case that while sharing and ILL is great, even greater is being able to go to the stacks in your own library to get the books that you need. A library with multiple millions of volumes is more likely to have the books you know you need as well as the ones you don’t know you need until you see them on the shelf.

And on a normal day, I agree with Jessy. I think of the phrase “more is different” which I associate with Clay Shirky and Here Comes Everybody, though a quick Google search shows that he likely got the idea, directly or indirectly, from physicist P. W. Anderson’s 1972 article with that title. Regardless, I think it’s true that a collection of 2+ million books is not simply bigger but different in ways that are hard for me to articulate. But that wasn’t a normal day when I felt fighty about this issue, and the things I felt fighty about are like sand that I can’t quite get out of my shoes. Here are some of the things that are bothering me:

• Isn’t it weird that a collection can go from about 500,000 volumes to about 800,000 volumes just based on someone running a report?
• I think when people ask “how many books do you have,” they are thinking of books on the shelves. But in recent years, we have added electronic books in collections like Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online which means we own digital copies of darn near everything published in England from the time of Caxton to Lyrical Ballads. (The number is around three hundred thousand books, so perhaps that’s our collection growth right there in those two products).
• If you want to do research or teaching at my college on England in the 15th through 18th centuries, the previous bullet point should make you very happy. If you aren’t one of those few people–if you study a different time period or geographic region–that’s 300,000 books that you don’t really care about. As far as you are concerned, the library hasn’t grown at all with those additions. Yes, nobody uses all sections of the library, but in the past if you had heard that the library had added 300,000 volumes, you could bet that at least a few would be in your area.
• There’s ownership, as in physical stuff you own that sits on a shelf or in a drawer and where the doctrine of first sale holds. And there’s ownership as in digital stuff you paid for where you have some kind of perpetual access gauranteed by a contract. And there’s access as in digital stuff you have contractual access to now, but if you don’t sign next year’s contract or if the company decides it just isn’t interested in hosting it anymore the stuff will disappear as far as you are concerned. And there’s access in terms of stuff that you don’t have any kind of contract for but you link to anyway because it is useful but it could disappear at a moment’s notice. When people ask “how many books do you have,” do they realize they are just asking about that first bit? And do they care? And how do they interpret the answer?

My friend Jessy has been keeping track of library shenanigans–tomfoolery, pranks, silliness, and so on–for a few years now on a static webpage. Recently she took the plunge and started the Library Shenanigans blog. If you like Tetris or dominoes, or sexy librarians, or yetis you will love Library Shenanigans, I assure you.