Caveat Lector

At the libraries/e-science symposium that Purdue held last summer, our fine hosts unintentionally dropped a shocker: they’d closed a hefty fraction of their small branch libraries. Shut ’em down flat, moved their print collections, reallocated the associated positions.

I don’t think they meant that to be a shocker; they’d clearly grown used to their new situation. For MPOW’s delegation, it was a shocker. We have a considerable network of small libraries. I’m used to that, despite my sojourn at another institution whose library system actively resisted the establishing of small libraries. I’m so used to it that Purdue’s declaration shocked me, too. How on earth did they make that happen, I wondered. Wasn’t there great wailing and gnashing of teeth?

Since then, I’ve been pondering libraries and real estate, usually not simultaneously. (Yes, I’ve been a housing-bubble watcher since moving to DC. My coworkers then assured me airily that prices would never go down in the DC area. I wasn’t sanguine, but I kept my opinion to myself… so obviously I can’t prove at this late date just what my opinion actually was. People are saying the same thing about Madison at the moment. They’re wrong too, and trulia.com is starting to prove it.) My ponderings have led me to this: I wonder if at least some academic libraries are overinvested in public-service real estate.

The other day I was walking from a meeting with a valued colleague when she started on what I believe to be the Librarian’s Eternal Plaint: not enough time in the day. We all say that, every last one of us. I do. You do. We all do. Her edition contained something I don’t always hear, though. “… and we have to keep the library open and the desks manned somehow!”

Hm. Do we? I wonder. Do we have too many desks to man? Too many rooms and buildings to monitor (and clean, and secure, and provision with terminals and e-reserves scanners and circ gadgets, and route materials to, and put signs in, and…)? Maybe some of the staff and resource overhead that goes into routine space management and service-point provision could find more productive uses?

I don’t know the answer; I’m not being a fire-breathing revolutionary again. I just think we (writ large; this is a much larger question than just at MPOW) ought to be asking the question, instead of treating the spaces as sacrosanct. I think MfPOW might have been onto something, not spreading their human resources too thinly over too many spaces. Space is at a premium on college campuses. What could libraries gain in a space horse-trade? How much would general overhead costs go down with reductions in public-service square footage? Would we really need to build offsite storage if we got rid of public-service space in some of those branch libraries and stuffed the resulting empty places full of stacks (architecture permitting)?

I don’t know. I’d be interested in Purdue’s answers, and the reasoning behind MfPOW’s resistance to space expansion. I wonder if they’ve published about it. (And off I toddle to the library literature…)

I think this question is the real challenge of what I’m hearing called “embedded librarianship” to the library world order. Embedded librarians don’t need libraries-as-places; libraries-as-places just plain don’t make sense for the kinds of services they provide. They may need different spaces altogether, but we don’t quite know what those are yet, I don’t think. (If I were an embedded librarian, I’d want a good-sized office in the same building as faculty with a conference table and a big-screen computer monitor for group meetings and consults. Plus a serious high-speed Internet connection. But I don’t know if that’s right, if it’s what I’d still want, say, two years of embedded-librarian experience later.)

My gut instinct is prodding me quite hard, insisting that a lot of us are headed in Purdue’s direction whether we know it yet or not. Way back in the day (okay, okay, during library school; not that long ago), I interviewed a campus librarian who ran a small library, asking what she wanted more of in her day. Her answer? Unstructured time with individual faculty. Bumping into faculty in the hall, exchanging news, making her presence known, offering off-the-cuff help as well as making appointments on the spot to address in-depth questions.

What I didn’t see then because I took the space’s continued existence for granted, and see now because I am questioning the need for that space, is that she can’t realistically create those semi-random meetings chained to the desk in her little library. Is chaining her there just to keep the space open really the best situation, the situation that will make her most effective in her work with and for faculty?

Mind you, this battle is lost in many of the hard sciences. A librarian chained to the desk is a librarian faculty will never even meet, because they don’t go to the library, don’t think about the library, don’t give a flying flip about library-as-place. It is probably a lost battle among many undergraduates, too.

But it’s hard to give up space. Oh, it’s hard. Library traditionalism completely aside, it’s hard. Fundamentally, space is status in the academic context—you don’t have to work in academia terribly long before you start hearing about pitched battles over campus spaces, fought by many other stakeholders besides libraries. Moreover, giving up space feels disrespectful of the planning and effort that went into securing and running the space. It can even feel like closing off options for the future. From a human-resources perspective, small libraries represent mini-career-ladders for academic librarians to aspire to, in what has been a fairly flat profession and is becoming a flatter one.

Mm. I would really like to know what went on in those high-level library admin meetings at Purdue. I bet they were real humdingers. I just don’t think it’s coincidence that Purdue is able to be in the forefront of data curation in libraries in the US. They consciously reallocated resources away from keeping spaces open and toward other things.