In A Win for the Stacks, we hear about how Syracuse University faculty are petitioning and protesting a plan for the library to move a portion of the collection 250 miles offsite, where they would be available for next-day delivery to faculty and students.

Then there is Reviving the Academic Library, an opinion piece by Johann Neem. Neem believes that “The library is a means to an end: enabling students and faculty to access archives.” And from his essay, it seems like he thinks that is the sum total of what a library should do. He blames “the emergence of the field of library sciences” (apparently a recent event in his mind) for librarians’ desire to convert libraries from archives into “vague learning environments which, when boiled down to their essence, are nothing more than computer labs with sofas and coffee.”

I’m not going to pick these articles apart. It has been done in the comments on Inside Higher Ed (an alternate title for this post is “Supercilious faculty and
defensive librarians”) and also in the FriendFeed threads where I first heard about the Syracuse situation and the Neem piece.

Instead, I’ll do something I usually try (and fail) not to do here, and that’s give advice. Not directly to the players in these articles, as I don’t really know the background for the Syracuse story or how Neem arrived at his conclusions. This will be more general advice. First for faculty, then for librarians.

Advice for faculty

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It’s fun to get riled up and self-righteous on behalf of the preservation of Western Civilization (believe me, I know all about rile and self-righteousness, and you can check the archives of this blog if you doubt me) but it’s more productive to get to know the librarians and make your case for what role you think the library should play before things blow up in public meetings.

I understand faculty and students who value browsing the library stacks (see my advice for librarians, below), but I think it’s time to recognize browsing the local stacks as a pleasurable, useful activity, rather than a core research strategy. Even if you are at an enormous, inclusive library like Harvard’s you are still missing a great deal that is electronic-only. And you should certainly re-think passing on that strategy to your students who are likely to end up at institutions where the library has far narrower collections, or where the library has already moved to a collection that is more online than printed.

Putting aside that libraries have long been more than an archive for books, if you wonder why the library is taking on amenities that you associate with a student center, I’d like you to do two things. First, talk to students about this. Talk to a lot of students, not just the ones who know what you think and will tell you what you want to hear. Find out how students want to do research and homework, and why they still choose the library over the student center (if, indeed, they do). Second, please visit your library after 10PM during a busy time of the term. Too many faculty never see the library when it is fully in use by the student body. Perhaps you will be surprised by the variety of activity going on in the library, and how students move from quiet solo study, to group study, to social conversations and back again.

Advice for librarians

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I have misgivings about the truism “the user is not broken,” but let’s think about that for a minute, since it’s a commonplace in library blogland. I think one of the most useful readings of that phrase is that when readers tell us something, we should assume that they are speaking in good faith and that they know what they want.

So when student and faculty readers tell us that they want books they can open and handle and that stacks that are browsable are one of our core services as far as they are concerned, shouldn’t we respect that? Yes, budget and space problems are causing friction at many libraries, but I think too many of us think that people don’t browse any more, and some users are telling us that we are wrong.

We keep telling students that we have a hybrid library of printed and online sources, and that they shouldn’t privilege the online sources just because they are easier to use. Shouldn’t we take our own advice there?

Lastly, I think we all (librarians and readers) need to re-think what browsing and serendipity mean now. I think librarians have not done a great job in helping people browse that hybrid library. It used to be we could go to the reference stacks, plant our feet and look around for well-known or likely sources. Now, a big chunk of our reference books come to us from online packages that are segregated by publisher and have no call numbers so we can’t easily browse them alongside the printed works in the catalog. I’d love to see an iTunes style interface for libraries that can flip back and forth between “cover flow” and text lists, and which incorporated links to online sources and catalog records for printed books.