Not everything students want and need is online
Harold B. Shill recalls an overcast day in November 1999 when he and a friend strolled across the campus of Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, passing the college’s brand-new library. Mr. Shill, then the university’s library director, had spent years planning and pushing for the $15-million library building, and here it was, scheduled to open in a month.
His friend, an engineering professor, gestured toward the library and uttered something that would darken any librarian’s day: “It’s a shame that we spent all that money on this building now that everything is on the Internet.”
Mr. Shill wrapped an arm around his colleague and patiently explained that, in fact, everything was not on the Internet, and that students still needed books, journals, librarians, and, most of all, library buildings. “Just wait and see,” he said.
But Mr. Shill’s confident manner masked the anxiety he felt. The old library had occupied part of a floor in the main academic building. Mr. Shill wondered whether students would bother trudging across the lawn to the new library. He worried that his friend was right, in a sense -- that students would see Google or Yahoo as “everything,” or at least enough for convenience.
His worries evaporated when the building opened. Students rolled through the gates in numbers that shattered records at the old library. Those numbers have been climbing year after year since.
Even so, he’s never stopped thinking about what makes a good library building. What role do its carrels and cafes, its huge collections and hidden corners, play in drawing students and creating an atmosphere for studying, socializing, or even solitude? And what role does the library building play in an age that seems increasingly dominated by electronic resources and remote access?
The Internet brought predictions of the demise of the library and, on some campuses, the marginalization of librarians themselves. But now librarians increasingly find that administrators, professors, and students see the library building as essential, a romanticized heart of the campus. At the same time, though, libraries have changed radically from the stodgy and stuffy repositories of years past. Some people wonder whether libraries have loosened up too much, and what libraries will look like in the future.
In library-planning meetings and journal articles, and on e-mail discussion lists, librarians and planners turn again and again to a buzz phrase: “the library as place.” It was the title of a series of essays published by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the theme of a panel discussion at the recent American Library Association conference, and the title of a conference put on two years ago by the National Library of Medicine.
James G. Neal, the university librarian at Columbia University, spoke at the National Library of Medicine conference, where he said that universities are building “trompe l’oeil libraries.” These buildings have all the traditional trappings of libraries, like reference desks, shelves, and carrels. “But in fact what we are creating is something far more progressive and far more dynamic inside, in terms of social space, academic space, and learning space,” Mr. Neal says.
Indeed, libraries today feature not only the cafes and lounge areas that have become so popular, but also classrooms, conference centers, group-study areas, high-end multimedia equipment, computers outfitted with advanced software, and areas designated for lessons in information literacy, along with the stacks of books. And some new libraries dispense with the stacks altogether.
But even as libraries change, they retain an age-old aura. “The library is the one thing that stands for the kind of culture and learning for which universities are noted,” says Michael Gorman, dean of library services at California State University at Fresno and president of the American Library Association. “When you look at the glossy brochures that universities put out, hoping to attract funds, they always feature people reading in the library, because there is something iconic about that.”
Mr. Gorman calls the library the “great intellectual and cultural center” of the academic community. Librarians sometimes call the library a “third place,” a reference to a theme in Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. Mr. Oldenburg, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of West Florida, lamented in his book that good public places are disappearing in America. Society, he says, desperately needs third places -- places that are neither home (the first place) nor work (the second), but spaces that allow people from different parts of a community to come together and engage one another.
Mark Maves, a senior vice president at the SmithGroup, an architecture and planning firm, says he is “fascinated” to see some librarians describe their buildings “not so much as a library but as the academic counterpart to the student center.”
He has found that librarians are abandoning circulation statistics, which are falling at some institutions, as the measure of success they show administrators and trustees. Instead, they cite library attendance -- which means, he says, that librarians are competing more and more with the conveniences and comforts of the dormitory suite and the buzz of the student center.
“We’re working on some studies with Baylor University’s library, and we were stunned at how active it was at night,” he says. “It’s really become much more of a social hangout. There is not enough density of activity in a student center to compete with the ‘see and be seen’ that occurs in the library now.”
And some say that new, well-designed, and popular space can lead not only to increased use, but also to more support from administrations and legislatures. Richard M. Cochran, the library dean at Ferris State University, believes that the popularity of his new, $45-million library building helped protect his library from state budget cuts in the past year. Other libraries in Michigan saw million-dollar cuts in acquisitions budgets, he says, “while we saw virtually no cut at all.”
“Part of that,” Mr. Cochran says, “is that they see a new building out there, they see it doing its job. ... That’s part of the deal of selling a library in this day and age.” Ferris State’s library, which was designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates and features spacious, well-lit rooms and study areas, attracts an average of 45,000 patrons a month. The old library, which was converted into a student-services building, brought in only about 14,000 visitors a month.
After his library opened at Penn State Harrisburg, Hal Shill was interested in finding and ranking the features that brought people in. He and Shawn C. Tonner, director of the library at Reinhardt College, in Waleska, Ga., sent survey forms to fellow library directors, asking them about various aspects of their buildings and to rate how those aspects affected library use.
The responses from about 180 institutions revealed surprising patterns. For example, Mr. Shill found that the location of a library on a campus made little difference in its popularity among students. Library size did not matter, nor did the number of study rooms in a building or the availability of wireless access. “The presence of a cybercafe -- that was a wash,” he says. “It was not a statistically significant feature, but I would recommend it as a creature comfort.”
More basic comforts rated highly: the quality of natural lighting, the quality of work spaces, the quality of the heating and air-conditioning system, and the overall ambiance of the building. Computer and Internet access -- such as the number of data ports, the quality of the telecommunication system, and the quality of the public-access workstations -- were also vital to the success of a building.
Eighty percent of the libraries located in new or significantly renovated buildings saw their traffic increase when construction fences came down. Mr. Shill says that the next phase of his research will be to look at the 20 percent that did not see increases -- the majority of which were at public institutions -- and find out what went wrong.
His report had a salient point: If a library is deserted, it’s not necessarily because the Internet has taken over. It’s more likely, he says, that the building itself is outdated, poorly lit, underfinanced, and depressing -- say, a 1960s relic that is less attractive than another place to study, like a friend’s house or a local coffee shop. It could be that the library has not added amenities like data ports, group-study areas, and casual learning spaces to accommodate the way students work today.
His report has been a boon to librarians faced with the difficult task of selling a library-building project to a board of trustees or a president -- especially at a time when boards and administrations can be reluctant to spend money on libraries. When Sarah Thomas, the library director at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Arizona, went to ask for a new library, the president asked her skeptically: “What guarantees are we going to have that it’s going to make any difference?”
She cited the report, the factors that led to increased use, and the reasons why replacing the tiny, 1960s library on her campus would not only help library services, but would also elevate the profile of the whole campus. The president, she says, was sold.
“That’s what he needed to hear when he went to talk to donors,” she says.
Walking around his own library, designed in part by the Boston firm Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, Mr. Shill points out elements intended to please the patrons. Even the smallest things get a mention: There are big windows on every floor that suck in light, but patrons can control sunshades in reading areas if the glare is overwhelming. Thermostats pepper the building, allowing patrons to control the temperature in many reading areas and lounges. Computers are set up with enough room around them to allow patrons to work independently or in groups. Wires are hidden beneath tables and under floors to avoid unattractive visual clutter. A student walking in will find an information desk on the right; the circulation desk sits on the other side of the entrance, on the right on the way out.
“We live in a car culture, and we drive on the right side of the road,” Mr. Shill says. “Some libraries miss these things in their design.”
Mr. Shill, who recently retired from his job as library director, often visits other libraries when he is on the road. In St. Paul, a reporter accompanies him on a Sunday-morning tour of a modest library at Metropolitan State University, designed by the firm Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle. The library, which is a public-academic hybrid, seems run-of-the-mill at first, he says. But soon he is charmed. The cherry-colored bookshelves are elegant. The St. Paul skyline is framed in big windows on the building’s west side. Lounge chairs surround a fireplace. A Hmong tapestry hangs on a wall, in honor of that prominent ethnic community in St. Paul.
Mr. Shill notices the little things, as usual: Patrons can operate the solar shades. Pendant lights mean less glare for students while they study. The furniture in the study rooms is modular, allowing people to split up desks and huddle into groups. The dean’s office, darkened on a Sunday morning, sits in the midst of the action on the first floor, close to the main reference area and the computer bank.
“This is a service-oriented choice of placement,” he says of the dean’s office. “They have their finger on the pulse here, and they know what’s going on.”
And on a beautiful spring morning -- a Sunday, no less -- students are actually filing in, cracking open books, and logging onto computer workstations.
On a visit to Milwaukee, Mr. Shill arranges for a tour of the new John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University, also designed by Shepley Bulfinch. The library was built to be a multi-use facility, with an emphasis on information technology and collaborative learning. But it was also designed to attract students with comfortable spaces. It does not house many books; most of them remain in the old Memorial Library. The two libraries are connected through a skyway that also houses a cafe, where some of the two-year-old lounge chairs are already worn down to the threads.
“In the first 14 months of operation, including a quiet summer, we had a million turnstile counts,” says Nicholas C. Burckel, Marquette’s dean of libraries. That doubles the old library’s attendance on a campus with 10,000 students. Like other academic libraries, Raynor has areas that are open all night to respond to students’ study patterns. In the first semester, staff members counted 35,000 students who entered the building between midnight and 8 a.m.
After Raynor Library opened, the student union saw a significant decline in use. “Students jokingly refer to it as ‘Club Ray,’” Mr. Burckel says of the library.
Mr. Shill walks around the building and notes the creature comforts, as well as the features that most eyes would miss. “It’s unusual to have a whole building on raised flooring,” he says, tapping a foot on the hollow floor. The raised floor, under which conduits run, allows technicians to change wiring in the building with little trouble.
“Things are going to change,” Mr. Burckel replies, “and we want to be prepared.”
Since the advent of the Internet, and certainly since the announcement of the Google Print project, many people have wondered what role print items will have in library buildings. Many libraries are filled to capacity, and on mature campuses the buildings are crowded, making expansion difficult. Competition for space inside the library building can be intense.
This has led to different kinds of library places. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities has built a bunkerlike facility, called the Elmer L. Andersen Library, that stores millions of books in gigantic limestone caves far underground. The aboveground portion of the building consists of rooms where scholars can examine special collections.
Meanwhile, across the Mississippi River on the campus’s main quad, the stately old Walter Library went though a renovation to make the building more attractive to students, and it seems to have worked. It included ripping out the book stacks at the center of the building -- the volumes were sent to various libraries and storage areas, including the Andersen Library -- so that the space could be given over to offices for the university’s Institute of Technology. Elsewhere, gold was added to the ornate ceilings throughout the building, oak library tables were refinished to a caramel brown, and marble columns once thought black were scrubbed to reveal green with white veins. The building hasn’t looked so good since it opened in 1924.
But few people would notice one subtle change to the building, outside and around to the back: The university’s official signage no longer calls the building Walter Library. It is now simply, in big letters, “Walter,” with a mention of library functions in smaller print below.
Traditional forces reign at the University of Chicago, which is planning a renovation and expansion of the Joseph Regenstein Library, the main library. Faculty members there abhorred the idea of setting up a remote storage facility and instead insisted that the university find a way to keep all of the books on-site, easily browsable, for the convenience of scholars.
“The experience of most of these other libraries is that the off-site stuff doesn’t get used,” says Andrew Abbott, a sociology professor who served on a library-planning board. “People go to work where books are easily available.”
The library resolved to put a high-density storage facility on-site, which would house serials. “On one hand, we get the space savings. On the other, we don’t disorder the collection. The monograph collection will still be entirely browsable,” Mr. Abbott says. Officials at the university claim that when the library expansion is finished, it will be the largest library under one roof in North America.
Mr. Abbott, with the help of colleagues, is also putting together a report on the future of the libraries at Chicago. Surveys have been conducted among students. “We already know an enormous amount about student behavior in the library, which has been of concern to a lot of faculty,” he says. “In the last two years, especially since the university built a dormitory next to the library, it’s become more of a student union than it used to be.”
Luring students into the library to learn, and not just socialize or sleep, involves more than just giving them an Internet account and a cup of coffee. By keeping seven million books on-site, not only do researchers benefit, but students also have a mass of information that rivals the Internet -- something they can run through with their fingers.
“There is a real issue there,” Mr. Abbott says. “The faculty is united in thinking that this building is supposed to be the research center of one entire wing of intellectual life at the campus, and we can’t afford to let it turn into an Internet cafe.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Libraries Volume 52, Issue 6, Page B1
