A plan to consolidate several reading rooms at the Library of Congress and offer “one-stop shopping” to patrons in search of information has rattled some library staff members, who worry that it will undercut specialized reference services and expertise. But a top administrator said the plan would not affect service and was part of the library’s efforts to keep up with trends among researchers, who increasingly work online and across disciplines.
Roberta I. Shaffer, associate librarian for library services, laid out the consolidation plan in an internal newsletter last October. Affected reading rooms and services include the microform and machine-readable collections, local history and genealogy, newspapers and current periodicals, government documents, and science and business.
Under the plan, the reading rooms will be moved out of their current spaces. They will be integrated into a “centralized service point” located in and around the famous Main Reading Room, according to Ms. Shaffer. The goal is to turn that central space into “the ‘center of knowledge’ that its architecture clearly envisioned it to be,” she wrote.
No jobs will be lost, but more than 50 reference librarians will be affected by the changes, according to the Library of Congress Professional Guild, Local 2910 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. In a statement posted this week on its Web site, the guild spelled out its “strong opposition” to the plan.
The consolidations “will severely undermine reference service with increasingly greater damage over time,” the guild said. It argued that “navigating the library’s collections—unparalleled in scope as well as size—requires a specialized level of expertise that is easily eroded through retirements and the culling of reference collections in a ‘consolidated’ environment.”
‘Degradation of Service’
Saul Schniderman is the guild’s president. The reference librarians, he said in an interview, believe that the proposed changes “will lead to a degradation of service” at the institution. Guild members are weighing in now in hopes of mitigating the effects of the plan, even if they cannot derail it outright, he said.
About two-thirds of the affected librarians are guild members, Mr. Schniderman said. More than 1,500 Library of Congress employees, out of a staff of about 3,300, belong to the guild.
The guild’s arguments against the plan are laid out in a series of papers by Thomas Mann, a reference specialist at the library. The papers make the case, from various angles, that the plan will threaten the library’s long-established best practices.
In one paper, Mr. Mann recounts how he recently helped three researchers working on three very different projects. Doing so required highly specific knowledge of library resources that were not always available online.
“High-quality service is best provided by leading researchers through stages in a research process,” he wrote. “It is accomplished by first showing them overview sources relevant to their topic, and giving them mechanisms for discerning the best sources on the subject of interest if they then wish to proceed to the next stage.”
Service Will Not Suffer
In an interview, Ms. Shaffer, the associate librarian for library services, said that the first steps in the plan would take place by the end of the year. She played down the idea that the quality of reference service would suffer as a result of the consolidations.
Creating a central service hub would not dilute a “vertical” or dive-deep approach, she said. But it would create “a lot more opportunity for horizontal exchange of information, which we don’t have with these multiple reading rooms spread across three buildings,” she said.
The old reading-room model, serving on-site researchers and devoted to one subject in depth, makes less sense than it used to, she said. Researchers today “pull information from a multiple fabric of options,” she said. Use of the reading rooms has declined in recent years, according to Ms. Shaffer, although she did not have statistics supporting that assertion immediately at hand. And she said that the consolidations, while not driven by budget cuts, would free up resources that could be used to meet other research needs, such as an increased demand for color copiers and a desire for flexible teaching-and-learning spaces.
The consolidation plan is just one part of a much larger drive at the library to keep up with changing times, Ms. Shaffer said. For instance, BibFrame, its Bibliographic Framework Initiative, involves a major rethinking of how to describe and link content. “We’re looking for a way to describe it that can all be connected,” she said.
The library keeps expanding its digital holdings and has been joining national and global projects like Science.gov, the WorldWide Science Alliance, and the Bioheritage Diversity Library. All of that work has made it imperative to rethink how traditional library services are organized and delivered, Ms. Shaffer said.
‘Effect May Be Limited’
That doesn’t reassure Peggy Ann Brown, a researcher based here who specializes in American history and uses the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, in the library’s Madison Building, a couple of times a week. She has no problem with the library’s desire to digitize materials and provide access to digital resources, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of other reference support.
“I am concerned that the in-depth knowledge of the reference librarians will not be readily accessible to researchers when this staff is integrated with the reference-librarian staff in the Jefferson Building,” she said in an e-mail. “They are able to do the deep background research necessary to trace the history of a publication through its various incarnations; they are familiar with a wide variety of publications and can make research recommendations.”
It isn’t clear yet how much the consolidation will ultimately affect researchers. “If people can still get to resources of the library, the effect may be limited,” Jordan Jones, president of the National Genealogical Society, said by e-mail. “However, we remain concerned about the overall number of hours, the level of experience of the library staff, and access to library holdings in history and genealogy.”
This is not the first time that the library’s plans to reallocate research space have raised scholars’ hackles. In 2008 plans to relocate the European History Reading Room set off an outcry among specialists worried that serious research at the library was taking a back seat to tourism and exhibitions.
