At the heart of the campus?

Right now a controversy is raging in the United Kingdom, as many readers will know, about the future of public libraries. Libraries, under threat from funding cuts being experienced by local authorities, have become a kind of icon in the struggle to find a new kind of society that maintains decent values and is yet affordable in these straightened times. And yet, a vox pop survey carried out the other day by a British radio station on a typical English high street did not come up with a single passer-by who had been inside the local library within the previous month.

This finding was on my mind when I met a small group of students who were proposing to interview me for a student magazine. In passing I asked them how often they used their university library. Of the five present, one said he used it very frequently, another said he was there occasionally (principally just before an exam), and the other three could not recall when they had last been in it. ‘It’s all on the web now,’ one of them offered.

I don’t know of any academic who would not put in a spirited defence of their library and of the need to resource it generously. And yet, how many of them use it? Is it that we are addicted to nostalgia that keeps us from making realistic judgements, or are we right to defend libraries even though many have lost the knack of using it?

No doubt some of this depends on what subject is being studied or researched, but in the end I would be aghast at the idea of leaving behind the idea of the university library as the heart of the intellectual community. But it may be the case that we need to re-conceptualise it, and gain a batter understanding of how a library, as a centre for books, information technology and other resources, can be at the centre of learning and scholarship today. If we don’t do this and do it well, it will not be long before someone starts to think of the library as an unnecessary extravagance; and then we will really have lost something.

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Libraries in peril

Recently I was present at a conversation between two university librarians, and it was not an uplifting experience. Coming from very different types of university, both had identical concerns about the future. Libraries, they suggested, were now so expensive that most institutions could no longer afford them – partly because of the unreasonable greed of the major publishers. Funding sources were drying up, books and journals were becoming much more expensive, nobody had quite worked out the appropriate relationship between online sources and hard copy, some academics had become lukewarm about the importance of libraries, and so forth. Libraries, one of them suggested, were in many ways still treated like the old monastic depositories of books, in a world where such facilities were not readily understood – but were not resourced anyway to carry out that role successfully. Many had reinvented themselves as providers of digital resources, but sometimes without that being worked properly into a teaching and learning strategy of the host institution.

Were they right to be so pessimistic? Actually, when I visit other universities and get a tour of their campus, I can still expect, every time, that my tour will take in a major library and that will be presented as a core facility. But you need only take a short walk in one to see how confused the planners sometimes are. You might see computer workstations scattered around the place, or you might see shelves, but often these are just hosted in different parts of a building that does not seem to have a clear information strategy. Computers and the information they contain are treated as if they were books and journals that just look different, whereas in reality they are very different research tools. Study spaces, collaboration spaces and social spaces are usually there, but again without the building having been designed to develop these strategically and integrate them into learning techniques.

But in the end it is funding issues that most threaten libraries. As universities experience ever more severe cuts, library budgets are obvious targets. Stocking libraries with books has become almost an eccentric pursuit, as limited budgets go into journal renewals and online subscriptions; and indeed not enough of these. Right now students increasingly vote with their laptops and stay at home to surf out their sources, which we can only hope they will credit. But because of the explosion of information that is freely available, the library has become ever more necessary. But universities need to have a policy for developing libraries that goes beyond just stocking them; they need to use them as learning and research development tools, properly supported and used appropriately as students are trained to find and evaluate information.

A modern university library needs to be something more than a slightly gloomy building in which everyone says ‘Sshhh!’ They need to provide structured and then independent learning tools. And they need to be equipped to play that role.