IRIS Photos

Last Books Evicted from UT Undergrad Library

Or, "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Books"

Sarah Thomas

San Antonio is an appealing location for the ALA Midwinter meeting.  The weather, compared to Ithaca’s usually cold January, is mild, and pedestrian pathways wind along a riverwalk with greenery and twittering birds overhead.  I packed in several valuable sessions on Saturday and Sunday, making the trip well worthwhile.  On Saturday, at the Elsevier-sponsored digital libraries seminar, there was a first-rate lineup of Fred Heath, vice provost and dean of libraries at the University of Texas; Lee Hisle, Librarian, Connecticut College; and Dan Greenstein, vice provost, California Digital Library.  Heath delivered an outstanding talk on the transformation of the Flawn undergraduate library to its current service model as a collaborative library and computing center.

In April Heath had invited me down to Austin to give a presentation on trends in library architecture as part of his strategy to expose library and IT staff plus faculty and library board members to the diverse interpretations of library space for modern academic users.  While I was there, the Daily Texan, ironically, edited by Fred’s son, broke the news that the Flawn Center would reopen in September in a different guise from its then incarnation as the undergraduate library.  Books and reference services would move out, and many more computers would move in. 

Opponents to the idea quickly mounted a campaign in the press.  The New York Times carried a front-page story, and it made national television news.  The shock waves accentuated the absence of books and reference librarians, drawing the initial conclusion that the library was losing its soul and abandoning its tradition to join the techno age.  In the last several months, Texas has had time to refine its message and to assess the impact of change on the Flawn Center.

In his talk Heath addressed the difference between the perception and reality of the change, the economic factors behind his decision, the sustainability of the research library, and shifts in information-seeking behaviors.

The reality of the Flawn Center in 2005 was that Information Technology services, not the UT Libraries, was the chief tenant of the 100,000-square-foot Flawn Center.  The Undergraduate Library had gradually yielded space over previous decades to a hodgepodge of administrative uses and had lost its coherence.  It lacked twenty-first-century infrastructure and was shabby and worn.  Nonetheless, it was at the hub of the campus, and students continued to pour through its doors seeking study space.

The economics of supporting even a relatively small collection of 90,000 volumes resulted in an expenditure of approximately $500,000.  Fourteen staff and additional FTEs in students were dedicated to selection, circulation, shelving, and stack maintenance.  Heath calculated that this ratio of staff to collection was particularly inefficient, and if extrapolated to the UT Libraries’ entire operation, would represent an investment of $40,000,000.  Budget pressures motivated the Libraries to eliminate circulation in the Flawn Center and to reassign the staff supporting circulation to other priority areas.  Most of the volumes, along with reserves, were transferred to the Perry Casteneda Library, the main library.

Heath characterized the undergraduate library at Texas as an anachronism.  When undergraduate libraries came into vogue, postwar, post-Sputnik enrollments brought increased student bodies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.  Collections expanded rapidly as well.  Undergraduates pursued a core curriculum, predominantly the “Western canon.”  The “main” library often maintained closed stacks.  The need to page books from the closed collections for undergraduates was a burden for staff.  The confluence of these factors led to the creation of undergraduate libraries with specially built collections and dedicated staffing.  In an environment when books were the predominant form of information access, duplicate holdings for undergraduates made sense.  Heath links the social change introduced in the late 1960s and early ’70s by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement with the changes in the curriculum but ascribes the progressively diminishing relevance of the undergraduate library to the new modes of service and the new environment being created by modern librarians.  Large, open-stack collections, OPACs, and electronic access all offered new approaches to learning and discovery.  Boundaries blurred between teaching, academic computing, and the library as course management systems matured.  Opportunities for partnerships with IT, the Writing Center, and the School of Information promised to provide students with a synergistic experience.

Student behaviors suggested a different sort of program for the Flawn Center.  Texas’s LibQual results informed the administration that students valued extended hours for study, but not the Flawn Center’s information access or mediated services.  Students have been strongly supportive of the change, and use of both Flawn and Perry Casteneda remains high. 

It was useful to compare the Texas situation to our own.  Many of the reasons for elimination of the undergraduate library as a separate facility exist here at Cornell.  Two years ago we ceased buying many of the duplicates shelved in Uris, because the expense of maintaining that collection was no longer justified by use patterns.  Undergraduates pursue a much more varied and advanced course of study, necessitating earlier and deeper encounters with the published literature.  The students’ embracing of electronic access and the Library’s innovative online services have encouraged the Library to think about how to move beyond the traditional library to best meet the needs of the Cornell community.  Unlike the Flawn Center, located several minutes’ walk away from the main library, Uris is immediately adjacent to Cornell’s largest concentration of library holdings and staff.  And the Flawn is a typical postmodern concrete structure, not its university’s most distinctive and distinguished building, as Uris Library is.  Consequently, we have different opportunities and different considerations.  The contribution of the University of Texas, however, is to highlight the benefits of collaboration, the rethinking of the location of physical collections in the electronic age, and the flexible reassignment of staff to meet changing trends in library use.  As we continue to evaluate the best opportunities for Uris, the changes under way at Texas are worth examining more closely. 

Planning for Uris’s renovation is simmering now as we seek the endorsement of the university and the sponsorship of donors to enhance it aesthetically and functionally.  Preliminary plans call for a restoration of the Dean Room, with its original carrels refinished and other nods to its historic character, but with the addition of group studies in the Willis Room and North Alcove; comfortable soft seating in front of the fireplace, warmed by a gas log; and updated wiring and infrastructure.  The Council of Librarians discussed the future of Uris at its November meeting, coming up with many creative ideas.  I hope that in a few years Uris will be a model for other libraries to follow and that it will continue its role as a cherished place of learning for Cornellians.

UrisPlanSmall
Click to see large image of the Uris Dean Room Plan