The University of California at Merced’s library has more than 1.4 million items in its collection, but those books and media aren’t what catches the eyes of Haipeng Li, the library’s director, as he makes his daily rounds of the building.
What he sees instead in the airy open spaces, nooks, and ground-floor cafe are students huddled in groups, helping one another. Every seat is almost constantly occupied, even though most use of the library’s collections is electronic and could be reached from anywhere.
Merced’s collection was started from scratch, along with the campus itself, in 2005, when the shift to digital collections was already well underway. In 2014-15, the library had just over 123,000 physical books, compared with more than 1.2 million digital or electronic books, according to U.S. Department of Education data. Its entire collection was more than 90 percent digital or electronic (see table).
For the latest numbers on tuition, endowments, private giving, and research-and-development spending, explore this collection of 22 tables.
On its home page, the library describes itself as “not what other research libraries are, what they will be.” Unlike older academic libraries that have to deal with overabundance, “we don’t have to worry too much about getting a book-storage facility somewhere,” says Mr. Li.
But he has other costs to worry about. “We continue to face the challenges of space,” he says. Merced’s enrollment, at 6,685 students in the fall of 2015, is expected to increase by 45 percent by 2020 (see its rank among fastest-growing colleges here). As a result, scores more faculty members will need to be hired. And they will all need the library.
Academic librarians once had high hopes that the transition to digital would have a positive effect on their budgets. “In the beginning, we all thought, everything is going online, it will save us a ton of money,” says Mr. Li. “But that’s not true. Now that’s pretty widely understood.”
At most academic libraries now, usage of digital and electronic materials surpasses — often, far surpasses — that of physical books, and expenditure follows usage, says Terrence J. McDonald, director of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “Inevitably, libraries are struggling with this trade-off between digital and print,” says Mr. McDonald. It doubles labor: Physical and electronic holdings both require “very expensive” upkeep, he says.
Publishers work with vendors who bundle digital products and market them to libraries; libraries and library consortia often find themselves paying a lot for bundles that contain some material they want, along with much that they don’t. Managing budgets in that environment can feel like squirming in a vise.
Add to that the now-popular concept of academic libraries as the “learning commons,” with library staff members increasingly working with academic departments to support teaching and research missions. They are also involved in instructional design, information literacy, and specialized areas like digital humanities and research-data management. That transition in mission often comes with salary increases and other costs. Among them are the technology and other expenses associated with Merced’s undertaking, at the invitation of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded AIDS History Project, to digitize material from 49 archival collections related to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Some academic libraries have been removing physical books, generally quite tentatively — and often controversially — when books are “deaccessioned” because of scant use, but most commonly when digital equivalents take their place. Libraries often provide access to those e-books via subscriptions to commercial databases, or state and regional academic-library consortia, or nonprofit repositories. One of the best known of these, to which Merced subscribes, is the HathiTrust Digital Library, which offers at moderate cost a collection of more than 15.5 million volumes, digitized from 120 libraries around the world.
Merced also has access to the system’s California Digital Library, an enormous pool of digital holdings.
Other expenses for the modern digital library, says Mr. Li, include ever-rising journal prices, the costs of making detailed catalog records of materials that users access remotely, and upkeep of computer hardware and software, which is “a tremendous undertaking,” he says. “You can’t just stick something on a computer and hope it’s going to stay accessible.”
Materials budgets have, of course, already shifted considerably, over the last decade and more.
In 2016, digital and online journals and databases drew more than 60 percent of the materials-allocations budget at libraries at four-year public and private nonprofit colleges, library directors estimate, while print books drew 14 percent, down from 19 percent in 2010. E-books accounted for just under 10 percent of materials budgets in 2016, while print journals dropped from around 17 percent of materials budgets in 2010 to about 9 percent in 2016, surveys by Ithaka S+R, a consulting service, found (see table).
Even a library like Merced’s, whose collection is overwhelmingly digital, can’t stop building its print collection. Mr. Li notes that there are faculty members in various fields and even some students who still prefer physical books for close study or prolonged reading.
Students and researchers also have the option of borrowing printed material through interlibrary loan, relying in particular on the other four-year institutions in the University of California system, which together have nearly 42 million physical books and about 30 million other physical media, like DVDs.
It is too early, library experts say, to write obituaries for physical media, even as digital circulation increasingly dominates. In 2016, average total circulation of physical items at doctoral- institution libraries was about 69,000, while average total e-book usage or circulation was 600,000 and electronic-serial usage was 1.6 million, according to data from the American Library Association’s Association of College and Research Libraries.
The association’s president, Irene M.H. Herold, who is the university librarian at the College of Wooster, says those figures show that “there is still value in the physical format, and making sure that’s accessible,” even if “clearly there is a higher return on your initial investment for the electronic material.”
Librarians may speak with consternation of wishing to resist “the commodification of information,” but they tend to express optimism about the broadening open-access movement, in which libraries can assist or even lead research universities to become knowledge creators and knowledge disseminators, rather than just consumers who pay again for what their own salaried faculties have produced.
According to the Association of College and Research Libraries, 40.5 percent of doctoral universities and 22.4 percent of comprehensive institutions are participating in open-education efforts, such as publishing open-access textbooks.
“That’s the evolving approach of many academic libraries today,” says Ms. Herold. “Every conference I attend, this seems to be a topic of conversation.”
Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle. Email him at pmonaghan3@mac.com.