UVa Library’s Plan to Cut Stacks by Half Sparks Faculty Concerns

The Alderman Library was the reason Geeta Patel came to the University of Virginia.

Alderman is the university’s main library, and its open stacks were what attracted Patel, an associate professor whose work, in languages and in women and gender studies, relies heavily on archives, to Charlottesville.

But plans to renovate Alderman — and cut shelf space in the process — have Patel and others worried that the library’s strength will be diminished.

Designs for the renovation, which will come before a committee of the university’s Board of Visitors on Thursday, call for a 40 percent to 70 percent reduction in the library’s shelf capacity, depending on what type of shelving is used. Built in 1937, the library is still equipped with its original plumbing and wiring and is in dire need of renovations to comply with fire-code and other safety regulations, according to the university. The renovations, led by a Chicago-based architectural firm, are slated to begin in 2020 and will cost an estimated $152.5 million.

Two faculty members in the university’s English department — John Parker, an associate professor, and a visiting scholar, John Bugbee — have drafted an open letter asking the Board of Visitors to withhold approval of the current plans.

The proposed cuts, “would directly undermine our core mission as a nationally recognized research university,” reads the letter. Over 500 people, including about 130 who identified themselves as faculty members, signed the letter before it was delivered on Monday afternoon.

The concerns of the Virginia faculty mark the latest chapter in a national trend. University libraries are increasingly consolidating their print collections, relegating books to basements or off-site storage facilities — or to preservation in electronic format — to make space for classrooms, collaborative spaces for students, and even coffee shops.

The University of California at Berkeley completed its undergraduate-library makeover in 2016, lifting 135,000 books in favor of a sleek space featuring meeting rooms, collaborative spaces equipped with cutting-edge technology, and nap pods. DePaul University revamped its flagship library with a “genius squad” counter, offering students tech support, and a “maker hub,” equipped with 3-D printers and scanners. And this spring at the University of Texas at Austin, thousands of items were culled from a fine-arts library before the faculty rallied to preserve the space.

Parker called the Austin incident “a very expensive mistake,” one he wants his own campus to prevent. “What we’re doing is trying to convince the University of Virginia to get it right the first time, so that we don’t have to go through a process like that,” Parker told The Chronicle.

He worries about Alderman’s books — over 1.7 million of them, according to circulation figures provided by the university. Once the library’s existing infrastructure, called the Old and New Stacks, is razed, where will its contents go?

Off site, it appears. The new Alderman will have five floors, as opposed to the current 10-floor structure (which features five “mezzanine” floors with low ceilings), resulting in a loss of about 40,000 square feet. Parker said that at least one of the five floors in the new Alderman will not house books.

So the loss of some shelf space is “inevitable,” said John M. Unsworth, university librarian and dean of libraries.

“We’re working within essentially the same envelope, with 40,000 fewer square feet of floor space, and trying to figure out, What’s the best we can do to present a robust print collection?” Unsworth said.

Alderman’s extra volumes will most likely be stored at the Clemons Library next door, and at the university’s Ivy Stacks storage facility. That’s an unsatisfying solution for the open-letter authors Parker and Bugbee, who say being able to browse the stacks is a crucial part of their scholarship.

“You go in looking for one thing that you think you need, and then you find out fairly often that that book actually wasn’t all that useful. But by virtue of searching for it, next to it or on the next shelf, you found three other books that you had no idea existed. And one of the three really turns your project upside down,” Bugbee said. “It sounds like a sort of romantic story, but I’ve had it happen to me enough that I really believe it.”

He’s among many scholars who tout the “serendipity” they find in the stacks. As Parker put it, “scholars in the humanities depend on the library as effectively their laboratories. That’s where they go to do their work.”

Parker fears that warehousing books off site will impede his ability to work that way. With fewer books at his fingertips in the new Alderman, Parker said, that sense of serendipity will be lost. Instead, he’ll have to defer to requesting books through an online catalog from the Ivy Stacks facility, a process he says could add days of lag time to his work — and the work of his students, since he frequently assigns projects that require library research.

“It’s going to increase the roadblocks between” the students and the books themselves, Parker said, “because they will find themselves more frequently unable to reach out and simply grab the books that they see cited at the bottom of a page in another book.”

Parker and Bugbee say that the renovation planning has not allowed the faculty and the university community adequate opportunity to make their voices heard.

Unsworth dismissed that notion, sending The Chronicle a four-page document listing outreach efforts, including eight open sessions held in February and a number of one-on-one, small-group, and town-hall meetings.

“I confess I’m slightly mystified by the continued mistrust here,” Unsworth said. “They’ve been heard loud and clear by the project team and the architects, but they won’t take yes for an answer. That’s a little puzzling.”

Elizabeth Fowler, an associate professor of English at the university who serves on the renovations’ steering committee and wrote a 2016 proposal on the project, said that the petitioners’ goal was compatible with the construction plans.

“At other places they are talking about whether any books at all belong on the so-called ‘information highway,’” Fowler wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Here we’re talking about how many millions belong at the center of our Grounds and whether it’s OK to send some of them a few hundred yards west into preservation-quality storage, from which they can be retrieved when we want them. That’s a high standard, and that’s us.”

Bugbee said he’s committed to upholding that standard.

“I am not, nor do I think the other 500 people who signed are, interested in being obstructionist for its own sake,” Bugbee said. The open letter is “meant to be a positive intervention,” he said. “We’d really like to see some change happen, at which point we could all go back to work.”

Correction (6/7/2018, 7:36 p.m.): This article originally misstated the number of books in open circulation at Alderman Library. It is more than 1.7 million, not more than two million. The article has been corrected accordingly.