Academic librarians don’t often get to feel like rock stars. But at the Association of College and Research Libraries’ biennial meeting, which concluded here on Saturday, a pop-culture icon treated them like rock stars—or at least like information superheroes. At a conference that emphasizes information literacy and librarians’ role in supporting it, that was a welcome message.
Henry Rollins, the 1980s punk-rocker turned activist and spoken-word artist, brought the audience to its feet with a keynote-slash-performance piece on Thursday that celebrated information’s role in righting the wrongs of the world. Librarians are “harvesters, organizers, and more importantly protectors of information,” he told the crowd. “What you do is not only the definition of good; it’s the definition of brave.”
All in black, tattoos prominent, Mr. Rollins romped through reminiscences of his youth as a punk-rocker and how, early on, he also became “collector/archivist boy.” He started saving fliers, posters, tapes, and other documentation of the punk scene, spending what little money he had on page protectors instead of drugs or alcohol or food, he said.
He’s still collecting. “Punk rock was the scream I was waiting to hear,” he said. “I’m trying to preserve this history that people fought for.”
Access to knowledge will make or break 21st-century America, he told the audience. “There seems to me a concerted effort to suppress information” and prevent it from getting to those who need it, especially young people. “What we must leave them is the information,” he said. “You must be very, very brave in this America to stand up for the information.”
“I hope you get all of it, and I hope you let me see it,” he said. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
‘Gate Openers’
An estimated 3,000 people attended this year’s conference, which took “Imagine, Innovate, Inspire” as its theme. With poster sessions, roundtables, and a THATcamp, or informal “unconference,” alongside more traditional panels and presentations, the conference offered attendees many ways to think and talk about their roles not just as providers of information but as collaborators in the research-and-teaching enterprise.
Sessions covered information literacy and pedagogy, assessment of learning outcomes, library design, copyright and access, declining entry-level job prospects, how to better support faculty research, and other topics that affect people in many different library roles.
Academic librarians want to be regarded not just as gatekeepers of information but as “gate openers,” according to the association’s president, Steven J. Bell, associate university librarian at Temple University. In a conversation with The Chronicle, Mr. Bell said the association membership’s message to faculty members and students is: “We’re your partners in higher education.”
That message is especially urgent, given some of the attitudes expressed in the recently released Ithaka 2012 survey, which found evidence that many faculty members do not consider the library as central to research and teaching as they used to.
Librarians want to be at the table, he said, as academic institutions navigate the changes and challenges they face. “There’s a whole new world of research and services we could be delivering.”
Financial challenges show no sign of going away, but the people at the conference didn’t seem overwhelmed by budget gloom. Mr. Bell has been hearing from ACRL members that “things are stabilizing a little bit, but we’re not out of the woods.”
‘Weeding’ the Stacks
Although Mr. Rollins in his keynote warned about a dearth of information, some attendees worried about the opposite problem: too many books. At a panel on how to deal with “low-use print materials,” three librarians shared stories about how they had successfully waged war on overcrowding in the stacks.
Libraries have approval plans that help guide the book purchases they make from vendors and publishers. Doug Way, head of collections and scholarly communication at Grand Valley State University Libraries, said libraries should have what he called “the disapproval plan"—an orderly system for getting rid of outdated, unwanted material. (The phrase appears in the title of an article by Rick Lugg and Ruth Fischer on “rules-based,” data-driven weeding that appeared in the December 2008-January 2009 issue of the journal Against the Grain.)
At Grand Valley, in Michigan, having to get ready to move into a new building with an automated storage-and-retrieval system made the librarians rethink their stacks plan. Such units are “a black hole,” Mr. Way told the audience. “Once books go in, they’re very hard to get out.”
Mr. Way and his colleagues figured it was better to weed some books before they all got moved.
They came up with criteria to identify possible rejects: Has a particular work circulated at all? How often and how recently? How old is it? Is it on standard lists in its field? Is there a copy available at another library? And so on. The librarians then revised the list based on their knowledge of their particular subject areas. They weeded about 33,000 items over two months, according to Mr. Way.
At Lansing Community College, Regina Gong, head of technical services and systems, was faced with an aging print collection and ever-lower borrowing rates. Print circulation at the Michigan institution’s library has plunged 34 percent since 2009, she said; much of the collection is decades old, and 56 percent of the books have circulated only twice at most, if ever.
Meanwhile, more people than ever come to the library, she said. That’s become the prevailing pattern at many academic libraries, as students and faculty members use more and more electronic resources but still like to hang out and work there.
Ms. Gong’s library came up with criteria similar to Mr. Way’s. Librarians worked with an outside company to generate a list of more than 24,000 titles that could be culled. The librarians reviewed the list and agreed that 94 percent of the books on it could go. “I told you we were fearless,” Ms. Gong said. “We were aggressive.”
Nobody on the panel ever suggested the idea of a bookless library. Even after the purge, the Lansing Community College Library still has more than 78,000 books in its collection, according to Ms. Gong.
Part of what makes it possible to be ruthlessly efficient when weeding is the knowledge that copies of certain books will be preserved elsewhere and can be had through interlibrary loan. Paul Gallagher, associate director of discovery services at Wayne State University Libraries, talked about the Michigan Shared Print Initiative, a collaboration among Michigan’s publicly supported academic libraries to share the storage-and-preservation burden.
Mr. Gallagher was blunt: Not every book is a keeper. There’s no getting around “the fact of crappy books,” he said. Having rushed to build print collections in the 20th century, libraries in the 21st century have a whole lot of stuff on their hands, some of it not very good.
A lot of libraries are also running out of space to house all those books, crappy or otherwise. At Wayne State, Mr. Gallagher said, a high-density storage unit can hold 1.6 million books; it already contains 1.1 million. “We’re not going to be able to keep dumping things in the basement,” he said.
(As for what happens to books weeded from library collections, many are handed over to companies like Better World Books, which sell them and give a portion of the proceeds back to the libraries they came from.)
Faculty Resistance
It wasn’t until the Q&A period that anybody brought up what faculty members think about large-scale weeding at their libraries. “I would not want my faculty to know that I even attended this session,” one librarian in the audience said.
The line got a laugh, but the panelists acknowledged that getting rid of books doesn’t always play well with scholars, especially those in disciplines that are still book-centric. Ms. Gong joked that when the weeded books finally leave her library next month, they’ll be spirited away in the middle of the night. (She said afterward that isn’t really going to happen.)
Sharing low circulation figures and knowing the particular needs of a discipline help, but sometimes it’s better to spare faculty members all the painful details, the panelists suggested. “We tell them we’re weeding,” Mr. Way said. “We don’t necessarily tell them how much.”
