Photographs of reading rooms in six famous old libraries provide what little decoration R. Bruce Miller, the librarian at the University of California’s new Merced campus, has hung on his office walls. The 18th-century Abbey Library of St. Gallen, the oldest library in Switzerland, has ornate bookshelves and intricate mural ceilings. At the monastic Library of St. Walburga, in the Netherlands, manuscripts are still chained to desks, as they have been since the 1500s.
“We put those up to be mindful about what we’re doing,” Mr. Miller says, referring to his staff’s work starting a new research library from scratch. “This is not about this week’s trend. This is going back to what libraries are all about.”
Given Mr. Miller’s plans for his new library, those shrines to the printed word seem like odd sources of inspiration. Instead of old vellum and parchment, imagine browsing the shelves at Merced and finding what Mr. Miller calls a “fake book": a slab of Styrofoam, bound to look like a book, with little more on its cover than a Web address for a database. Imagine a special collection that exists primarily online. Imagine a research library with an on-site collection of a mere 250,000 items -- books, sure, but also DVD’s and CD’s, all packed together on the same shelves. Merced officials boast that the library will open with access to more than 30 million volumes, but they are referring mainly to the books available through the University of California’s interlibrary-loan system.
With its focus on remote collections and digital resources, Merced’s Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library will either be a new model for research libraries or a brief experiment for a generation dazzled by the Internet. Mr. Miller’s vision departs from traditional library practices in every way, yet he believes he has “gotten back to basics,” serving up information for students and faculty members the way they want it, when they want it. When they don’t, he thinks the library should not be a warehouse for that information.
Mr. Miller’s colleagues say that he has always been an innovator. He came to Merced from the university system’s San Diego campus, where he specialized in technology for the library. He was always “agnostic about format,” says Brian E.C. Schottlaender, the library director at San Diego.
Duane E. Webster, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, says tight budgets in California have influenced Mr. Miller’s vision for Merced: There simply isn’t enough money to start a collection on a par with those at Berkeley or at Los Angeles. And with no traditions to uphold, Mr. Miller can write the rules as he goes.
“Rethinking the character and nature of the research library in the electronic age is a wonderfully exciting opportunity for a place like Merced,” Mr. Webster says, “because they aren’t carrying the baggage of legacy collections.”
Mingling Materials
Mr. Miller has decided to use his limited acquisitions budget to buy materials that he judges absolutely necessary for teaching and research in the university’s programs, then make those materials especially easy to find. Go to the Russian-history section of the shelves, and you might find a book on the Russian Revolution standing next to a copy of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film, The Battleship Potemkin. In most libraries, they would be in different sections, segregation that Mr. Miller calls “a historical thing.”
“We just get to start out with what seems logical,” he says.
He is putting rare items on the shelves, too. A signed copy of Epitaph for a Peach, by David Mas Masumoto, a writer and farmer who lives near Merced, would normally go into a special-collections vault. Here it will sit on an open shelf with other books, available for checkout. Mr. Miller hasn’t decided whether patrons will be able to check out a $1,200 leatherbound copy of Herbert Hoover’s translation of De Re Metallica, but he is seriously considering it.
Many of the special collections will exist only in ones and zeroes. For example, the library has started digitizing the collection of the Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute for Japanese Art. The institute’s scores of scrolls, screens, and paintings will remain at its museum in Hanford, Calif. Through digitizing, Mr. Miller says, the university will be able to use the digital images in courses or make them available to researchers, students, or the general public online. Such access, he says, is far more valuable than owning the artifacts.
Asked if Merced will eventually build some sort of large permanent collection of paper materials or valuable items, Mr. Miller shrugs. “Why?” he asks, though he knows large collections lend prestige to other research libraries. “We laugh at people who use the wrong bragging rights: ‘We are the world’s greatest library because we have nine million books on our shelves.’ Yeah, and you have to dust them every summer because nobody uses them.”
Delivery, Not Size
Faculty members at Merced seem willing to entertain Mr. Miller’s approach, for now. Many work in the sciences, fields oriented toward electronic materials anyway. Kenji Hakuta, the dean of social sciences, humanities, and the arts, thinks that people will miss the sensation of browsing through stacks of books. And he says time will tell how well the interlibrary loans work. But with budgets as tight as they are, he says, necessity has been the mother of invention at Merced. “It is almost incumbent on a new university to try out things,” he says.
In fact, librarians across the country have started thinking more like Mr. Miller. Mr. Schottlaender, who is incoming president of the Board of Directors at the Association of Research Libraries, and Mr. Webster say that research librarians and accrediting bodies are starting to reassess whether, when it comes to collections, size matters.
In the online age, “the notion of how many serials we have becomes much less important than how can we access them readily and deliver them effectively electronically,” Mr. Webster says.
Mr. Schottlaender likes the new directions that Mr. Miller is taking, but he doubts that the physical collection will remain as small as planned. He wonders if the commingling of paper, audio, video, and electronic items will prove to be an inefficient use of space. And he cannot abide the shelving of rare items in the common stacks, where patrons can steal them, scribble in them, or spill coffee on them.
“I can only imagine what kind of response that would get me in my own organization,” he says. “They would probably ride me out on a rail to Merced.”
Mr. Miller says if anything about Merced’s library is like the pictures of venerable libraries hanging on his wall, he hopes it will be an inviting place to study, or just hang out. But the definition of inviting has changed since libraries featured old leather chairs and old-growth-oak trim; here furnishings and floors will be decked out in recycled and sustainable materials in funky colors. The library will have a cafe and allow food and beverages in the stacks and reading areas, a fairly common practice these days. Large, flat-screen digital monitors may hang like picture frames on the walls, displaying information or images from the digitized special collections.
There won’t be a long, barrierlike reference desk; rather, librarians will sit at individual desks that students can mill around, much like the loan department of a bank. Instead of assigning librarians to departments or disciplines, Mr. Miller will assign them to crops of students -- the librarian of the class of 2010, for example. He sees that as an opportunity for students to get to know their librarians, but it also seems to be a strategy for a library with a small staff.
Even though Mr. Miller will send all sorts of materials out to students and professors through the Internet, he says he wants the building to buzz with activity. It will have a huge glass structure at its core that will glow at night like a beacon. If students aren’t drawn to that light, Mr. Miller is already thinking of more nontraditional ways to bring them in.
“Friday night -- rock ‘n’ roll in the library!” he says. “Students don’t study on Friday nights anyway. Let’s set up a band.”
