ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


590 I C&RL News ■ July/August 2000

College & Research Libraries news

Library buildings in a digital age, why bother?
Defending new library buildings and additions to college 

administrators and trustees

by Alice Harrison Bahr

T
he earnest predictions of the 1980s and 
early 1990s “that libraries would become 
superfluous—mausoleums for books—wh

so much was available online” hasn’t come 
to pass, according to David L. Marcus. In fact, 
writes Marcus, “Library visits now far exceed 
annual attendance at sporting events, con­
certs, and museums combined.”1

Many prestigious educational institu­
tions have com pleted new  library build­
ings. They include, among many others, 
Loyola University (Louisiana), Oregon State 
U n iv ersity , F o rd h am  U n iv ersity  (N ew  
York), Eastern Michigan University, Uni­
versity of Kentucky, Florida International 
University, Marshall University (West Vir­
g inia), Sam ford U niversity (A labam a), 
Augsburg College (Minnesota), Bellarmine 
College (Kentucky), and Wayne State Uni­
versity (Michigan).

Here are ten points to make to your ad­
ministrators when proposing a new library 
or addition:

1. Libraries have new functions in a 
digital age. Quoting Jerorld Orne, past com­
piler of Library Jou rnal’s construction sur­
veys, respected library building consultant 
Nancy McAdams emphasizes that “. . .  the 
new concepts . . . [applied to building mod­
ern libraries are] . . . service concepts—li­

en

brary as learning center, library  as informa­
tion utility, the sharing of resources, all work­

 ing together to change the emphasis from 
collection space to user space.” Most newly 
constructed libraries continue to provide 
shelving for books, but they also include 
space for networked conference rooms, elec­
tronic presentation rooms, lounge seating 
with Internet connections, electronic class­
rooms, faculty/student technology develop­
ment spaces, collaborative work and study 
spaces, teleconferencing spaces, and 24-hour 
cafes, computer labs, and group study rooms.

2. New library buildings and additions 
can shore up an institution’s aging tech­
nological infrastructure. For many institu­
tions, constructing a new library  provides a 
means of both meeting a myriad of academic 
needs and updating a campus’s technologies. 
I n s te a d  o f try in g  to d is trib u te  v id e o ­
conferencing and distance education facili­
ties throughout a campus, institutions can 
centralize them in the library, making the li­
brary the electronic hub of the campus.

3. Libraries continue to be retreats 
from the world. Another well-known library 
building consultant, Jay Lucker, who helped 
d ev e lo p  the M assachusetts In stitu te of 
Technology’s (MIT) strategic plan, has writ­
ten, “At the beginning of the 21st century,

A bout  the author

Alice Harrison Bahr is director o f  the library a t Spring H ill College in Mobile, Alabama, e-mail: bahr@azalea.shc.edu

mailto:bahr@azalea.shc.edu


C&RL News ■  July/August 2000 / 591

the MIT libraries as buildings housing physi­
cal collections with convenient spaces for us­
ers to consult these collections will continue 
to be important. . . . The Libraries will con­
tinue to be a place for self-education and 
discovery outside the classroom and labora­
tory; they will continue to be a haven from 
the pressure o f academic life and communal 
living. They will be a place of particular im­
portance to students, as part of the social and 
intellectual experience of an MIT education.”3

4. Everything will not be going digital. 
The lure of libraries with state-of-the-art tech­
nology, high-speed backbones that can bring 
video to the desktop, and electronic presenta­
tion, teleconferencing, and conference rooms 
will not render books obsolete. Futurists and 
technologists are clear on this matter. The is­
sues are cost, reliability, and politics.

First, there is the publisher’s/organization’s 
cost to convert print to digital formats. Walt 
Crawford answers the question, When will all 
existing library materials be converted to digi­
tal form? with: “Not in my lifetime, probably 
not in yours, and quite likely never.”'Although 
the Library of Congress’s and research librar­
ies’ digitizing o f nonprint and brittle materials 
“will yield digital collections that enhance and 
extend libraries. . . . They will not yield all- 
digital libraries. . . . The Library of Congress 
continues to acquire new print materials much 
faster than it digitizes old ones. If anyone has 
universal conversion as a goal— which I 
doubt— we’re moving backwards.”5

5. The cost o f a completely digital library 
is prohibitive. According to Crawford, the cost 
of converting libraries to completely digitized 
formats is too expensive and the rewards keep 
diminishing.6 More often than not, electronic 
files are more expensive than their print coun­
terparts, and Web access is more expensive 
than CD-ROM. No library can afford all avail­
able or developing electronic services. The 
increasingly digital library is increasingly ex­
pensive. As Peter Lyman, university librarian 
and professor in the School o f Information 
Management and Systems at Berkeley writes: 
“Nor is there evidence that the digitized library 
is cheaper, given the cost of technology and 
the necessity to invest continuously in new 
technology.”7

The cost issue, along with preservation and 
reliability, have other implications, as well. 
Spring Hill College’s Library now subscribes

to several online indexes and full-text journal 
databases. The library doesn’t own this infor­
mation. It pays to access it. If the companies 
providing the information go out of business 
or raise prices exorbitantly, the library has no 
physical copy o f these journals and books and 
it loses that information. In the past, libraries 
paid for a journal or a book and, barring fire 
or other mishap, the information was theirs 
permanently.

6. Electronic storage m ay not be reliable. 
Richard Bazillion and Connie Braun point out 
that “entrusting the scholarly record to volatile 
electronic storage in fact may endanger it.”“

7. The cou rts are  still battling ow n er­
ship issues in a digital age. Music and data 
may be on the Internet and in some cases 
access may be free, but that doesn’t mean that 
material may be copied at will at no cost.

8. Most technologists agree that reading 
books o n  a com p u ter is unsatisfying. It is 
rarely as comfortable as flipping, and writing 
on the pages of a book. Bill Gates himself 
acknowledged in a speech at Harvard that 
“even at Microsoft, when a document runs to 
three or four screens, people tend to print it 
out rather than read and use it in a digitized 
form.”9

9. T h ere a re  d eficien cies in m an y  p r o ­
gram s to  co n ten d  w ith. As Library Director 
Marilyn Gell Mason suggests, “The written 
word sparks images and evokes metaphors 
that get much o f their meaning from the 
reader’s imagination and experiences. When 
you read a novel, much o f the color, sound, 
and motion come from you.”10 Even revolu­
tionary guru Nicholas Negroponte confesses: 
“Interactive multimedia leaves very little to 
the imagination. . .

10. Books and lib raries p rov ide c o n ­
te x ts. As Marilyn Gell Mason points out, a 
printed document is essentially different from 
an electronic one.

With a print volume, “As you read, you 
are aware of how much has come before 
and how much is yet to be discovered. That 
. . . provides a context for an instant message, 
a frame that helps to understand where you 
are in relation to the material at hand. This 
context provides its own value system. . . .  In 
a hypertext world where you are propelled 
by your mouse from one screen to another, 
these contexts disappear. . . . ”12

(c o n tin u e d  o n  p a g e  6 0 8 )



592 / C&RL News ■  July/August 2000



608 / C&RL News ■  July/August 2000

Equalize the benefits for the 
theorist and the practitioner, and 
let each do the job he or she does 
best.

Many academic libraries have placed such 
an emphasis on publishing that all new li­
brarians are enrolled in committees in which 
topics for research are suggested, various 
avenues to publication are recommended, 
and encouragement, if not enthusiasm, is 
sustained by personal success stories; more 
time away from the work.

Publication is, and has been, useful, but it 
need not be mandatory. Librarians are just as 
valuable because o f their technical skills, sub­
ject specialties, and ability to mediate between 
the classroom and the collection. When a stu­
dent or professor seeks assistance from a li­
brarian, he or she has no interest in whether 
that librarian has published; what is required 
is som eone who listens well and is able to 
translate a frequently ambiguous or garbled 
need into a structured search of a database

( “L ib rary  b u ild in g s . . . ” c o n tin u e d  f r o m  p a g e  
5 9 1 )

If a b o o k  provides con texts, so do li­
braries. T heir ex isten ce provides a sen se 
o f past and present and im plies that “there 
is m ore to the study o f philosophy than a 
b o o k  by Kant, m ore to the study o f  sci­
en c e  than an article on geoph ysics. . . .  By 
their sp ace and su bstance they provide a 
sen sory understanding that know led ge is 
broad er than any o n e su bject field. . . .  It 
is this sen sory understanding that w e of­
ten forget w hen w e discuss inform ation. 
Humans are more than a collection o f e lec ­
trical impulses.

“L earning, kn o w in g , ta k e s p la c e  on 
many levels. . . . T h ere is som ething w e 
know  about know led ge w hen w e walk in 
a library that we do not know  w hen w e sit 
at a com puter term inal.”13

Notes
1. David L. Marcus “File this under shock, 

future,” U.S. N ews & W orld Report (July 12,
1999): 48.

or o f a collection that has been assiduously 
developed, monitored, and cataloged.

In a world o f overspecialization, librar­
ians may still be generalists (as opposed to 
the narrower and slicker term “information 
specialist”). They are then invaluable as me­
diators betw een the humble student or the 
prestigious professor and the worldwide col­
lection o f information (as opposed to “data”).

I believe we are about to experience a 
revolution in which the classroom teacher 
and the “library’s librarian” will achieve equal 
appreciation in every sense from the admin­
istration and from their peers. Equalize the 
benefits for the theorist and the practitioner, 
and let each do the job he or she does best.

Notes
1.  Alan Edelson, “Re: Electronic availabil­

ity,” message to Liblicense-L Discussion List 
at liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on O ctober 14, 
1999- Archived at http://www.library.yale. 
edu/~llicense/ListArchives/9910/msg00017. 
html.

2. Zachary Karabell, W h at’s  C ollege for?: 
The Struggle to D e fin e  A m e r ic a n  H ig h e r E d u ­
c a tio n  (New York: Basic Books, 1998). ■

2.  Nancy R. McAdams, “Trends in Academic 
Library Facilities,” L ibrary Trends 36, 2 (Fall 
1987): 289.

3.  Jay K. Lucker, “Library Buildings: Their Cur­
rent State and Future Development,” Sci-Tech Li­
braries o f  the Future 13, 1 (Fall 1992): 4.

4. Walt Crawford, “Paper Persists: Why 
Physical Library Collections Still Matter.” Online 
22, 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1998); 42-48.

5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Peter Lyman, “What is a Digital Library?” 

B ooks, Bricks, & Bytes, D a e d a lu s (Fall 1996): 
12.

8. Richard J. Bazillon and Connie Braun,
A c a d e m ic  L ib raries a s  H igh-T ech G atew ays 
(Chicago: American Library Association, 1995): 
19.

9. Marilyn Gell Mason, “The Yin and Yang 
o f Knowing,” B ooks, Bricks, & Bytes, D a e d a lu s 
(Fall 1996): 165.

10. Ibid., 167.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 170. ■

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