It's Not Too Late to Save the Stacks
Why we still need to keep books in our campus libraries
I grew up, physically and
intellectually, in churches and libraries. Different in purpose, they were
nonetheless both built to impress upon the visitor admiration for the possible.
Their architecture varied from grand to bland, but their missions as I grew up
remained intact, as did certain expectations of what you would find inside.
In
the church, there would be a pulpit, candlesticks, bibles, hymnals. The
sanctuary’s role was to provide a shared contemplative space for congregants
and their God. In the library, there were likewise tables or desks for quiet
study and contemplation, a reference area, and — most important — shelves and
shelves of books where you could lose yourself while seeking information,
inspiration, or entertainment.
Contemporary
libraries, like contemporary churches, find their audience changed by
contemporary culture. Ask any librarian about technology and you’ll get an
earful of responses that range from enthusiastic to frustrated. The university
library in particular finds itself emerging as a locus of campus attention, as
the admissions officers have come to understand how information tech acts as a
great promotional draw for prospective students. Students, meanwhile, are
increasingly less familiar with the concept of a physical library — and with
those unexpected "Aha!" moments that browsing the stacks provides. We
are in the era of immediate-results information.
So
goes the prevailing conversation about early 21st-century undergraduates, and
as a result many campus libraries and librarians find themselves under pressure
to conform to the times with updated approaches to information literacy and to
storing and retrieving all that material.
I
have no argument with those new approaches. But I would like to make a plea for
the value of keeping libraries as physical spaces — as actual, rather than
virtual, edifices — and as buildings for housing books and encouraging the
conversations between human beings and physical textual materials.
During
a recent meeting at my college, a high-level administrator suggested that our
campus library — a relatively new and spacious building — was too full of windows
and good views to be devoted merely to storing books. Essentially, he was
promoting the idea of off-site text storage, with an eye to moving
student-resource departments — tutoring, the writing center, retention — into
the library. Study centers instead of book stacks.
I
have a stake in that proposal, as I am the writing-center coordinator. If I’m
honest, I’ll admit how much I would love to get my peer tutors out of our
classroom-building basement and into the library. It is a terrific space.
I
don’t think it’s the right move for the college, however. Downsizing the stacks
and increasing student and faculty reliance on virtual sources limits the
silent conversation between people and books, arrests the opportunity for
surprising encounters with unexpected materials, and thus dampens synthesis —
the very stuff of new ideas.
Off-site stacks gained considerable
momentum when Britain’s renowned Bodleian Library announced
it was installing a robotic retrieval system (here’s
a video of one such system at North Carolina State University’s Hunt
Library). Off-site automated storage and retrieval systems for libraries have
been around for awhile. The first institution to install such a system was
California State University at Northridge, in its Oviatt Library, in 1991. The
process sounds exciting and, in the long run, can save money. But few campus
libraries are large enough (or rich enough) to merit expending so much cash on
high-tech cataloguing and retrieval. Likewise, warehousing books at an off-site
location also costs
a bundle even when the retrieval system relies on less sophisticated
systems. An example: In my region, warehouse space starts at around $3 a square
foot for space that is neither climate-controlled nor has the requisite ceiling
height recommended for very-narrow-aisle-racking systems.
If
ours were a university with a large graduate-student population and an
extensive catalog of significant, primary, specialist, and scholarly texts, I
can see how investing in an off-site retrieval system could provide benefits in
terms of information housing and recovery. Undergraduates, however, have much
less specific research goals. They are only just learning how to access, read,
consider, and apply the texts. They seldom understand synthesis until it occurs
naturally — as it should — while they think they are looking for something
else.
Like
many avid readers, I’ve been engaging with texts since I teethed on my first
book of nursery rhymes. So I admit to a strong bias toward the presence of real
books in real library buildings. My students, however, seldom enter their
freshman year having spent hours browsing the stacks and need the physical
experience of libraries and bookshelves.
New
college students have grown up with forms of information gathering that provide
quick and unreflective answers, which is what the high-school system urges them
to do. They have no coaching in how to research the less-than-obvious, the
open-ended. No one has yet demonstrated to them how to branch beyond one text,
to synthesize, to object, or to change perspective. Some of them have never
stood, befuddled and overwhelmed, in a library aisle.
Students
benefit when instructors force them into the stacks. The tall rows of silent
spines may be intimidating, but they also open up possibilities and
discoveries. The curious, inquisitive, emotional human mind — which is not an
algorithm seeking one specific text or trained upon one set of parameters only
— can find on those shelves a physical object that provides something
unavailable through virtual technologies. It can lead a person astray. It can
challenge what we think we know and then it can suggest another book, another
author, a further shift in point of view. It can be a beautiful object in and
of itself, with visual and tactile aspects unavailable in virtual form.
Moving
into a library that has outsourced its retrieval system so that there are no
stacks in the building would be counterproductive for much of the work I do
with juniors and seniors. When I tutor a student in writing, I want the texts
in front of us so as to model how a close reader interacts with words on the
page. When I assist students with documentation of a text, they learn about the
organization and the logic of textual material from front matter to index and
footnotes.
For
in-depth assignments, nothing replaces the chance to introduce students
face-to-face to a nonvirtual librarian who can help them navigate the research
process. One invaluable lesson of standing next to a real person undertaking
real-time information browsing: Students learn that good information takes time
to locate. Even the experts have to problem-solve through some deadends and
overgeneralized hits before finding a good source. And when something suitable
turns up, students can share that eureka moment or the relief of genuine
gratitude with another person. All of this takes place in the physical space of
the library and its community of books and people.
Books
offer more chances for surprise and delight than we credit, probably because
physical texts are a tool that we have learned to take for granted.
My
favorite example of the surprise encounter the stacks can provide is from a conference talk
that the poet Stanley Kunitz gave some years ago. He said he was wandering the
aisles of the college library and feeling totally lost as to what his thesis
topic should be when he picked a book at random off the shelf. It was a
collection of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the page he opened to was "God’s
Grandeur." Kunitz told his listeners: "And there it was, before
me!" adding, "It changed my life."
Books
are so common as to have become — in the view of some college administrators —
optional residents of the library. But without the opportunity for a secular
communing with books in the quiet hum of reflection, study, concentration, and
silent conversation would be lost, the edifice spiritless.
The
stacks absorb sound but also attract thoughts. The titles on the spines offer
differing views and deepening perceptions. And surprise, too. A student gazing
out at the attractive view from the library window may see a hawk, feel
inquisitive, and discover Helen MacDonald’s H Is for
Hawk, or T. H. White’s The
Goshawk, and — who knows? — that might just change her life.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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