College and Research Libraries To the Editor: If we librarians are to "come to grips with the decade of the seventies" we must first come to grips with reality-not with one author's vision of reality. In reading your editorial, "The Greening of the Li- brary," [Jan. 1971] I was amazed that you, who work in a university, had swallowed whole the picture of the young as seen by Charles Reich. I also work at a university (as an aca- demic adviser) and have noticed that stu- dents share characteristics and assumptions which differ from ours. I also know that some of these characteristics and assump- tions are those which have always gone with youth, that the individuals who are students are as different from one another as we oldsters differ from each other, and that students are not the only young peo- ple in the world. What is more demean- ing and more closely allied with treating people as "mere numbers" than grouping an entire generation together? Suppose, however, that Charles Reich is right? Well, we'd better bring back the "little old librarian" because she was in- terested in the people who came to the li- brary. We'd better keep the "hard-working drones" because they will get the tools the new people will need in order to get "high on self-awareness." We'd better find peo- ple who see individuals rather than people as members of Consciousness I, II, III, or a soon-to-be-discovered IV. We'd better keep out the megalomaniacs who think they can help "explain mankind to man" rather than help men find their own ex- planations of mankind and themselves. I agree we need to ask relevant ques- tions. They must be relevant to our com- munity, our individual patrons (sorry about using that no-no word but it is diffi- cult to put "people" there and have it mean anything), and to what is, not to Letters what is relevant to the latest mass-media "in" idea. I sometimes think librarians would be more "relevant" if they refused to read anything published later than twenty-years ago and instead looked around the world on their own and through their own eyes. By seeing the people they serve rather than an abstracted vision of the mass, they would ask the right ques- tions and possibly even come up with the right answers. To the Editor: Dorothy E. Wynne Buffalo, New York In the long run, the ability of a library to serve people on any basis (as people, patrons, clients, or numbers) depends on the resources available to back up service. Without resources, people-to-people con- tacts in a library become a happy social hour and the need for librarians as such disappears, for any person willing to relate to another person will qualify. Charles Reich's (The Greening of Amer- ica) Consciousness III people may hold new insights into the relationships that ex- ist between people, but by denying the accumulated knowledge of Consciousness I and II people, the III's have entered a blind alley leading back to Consciousness I, for the corporate state (and its attendant accomplishments and failures) did not ap- pear by magic nor through evil intent. It grew out of need and it is continuing to grow; while individuals may be concerned about pollution, only the corporate state has the necessary technology to adequate- ly feed, clothe, and house the world's pop- ulation and eliminate pollution. A more realistic appreciation of the lev- els of awareness among people is the pat- tern, described by Clare W. Graves ("De- terioration of Work Standards" in Har- vard Business R eview 44:117-28 (Sept.- / 227 228 I College & Research Libraries • May 1971 Oct. 1966) .) of seven levels of human be- havior. Reich's three consciousness groups are roughly analogous to levels three, four, and five in Graves' scheme; how- ever, there is an important difference: Graves, concerned with the evolutionary development from level to level and the interrelationships between the various lev- els, does not see the level five (Conscious- ness III) person as anything more than one point in an ongoing series of levels of hu- man behavior. Therefore, while it is ap- propriate to develop library services to meet the particular needs of Conscious- ness III people, the groundwork for the succeeding levels must be laid at the same time. To the Editor: Larry Auld Oregon State University Corvallis, Oregon Perhaps CRL readers will be interested in the findings of a less comprehensive study which reinforces the findings of the 1968-69 Nebraska reserve book circulation study ("The Library Reserve System-Another Look," CRL, March 1971). The data of this less detailed study, which appeared in one part of my qualifying paper last year, were tabulated during a twelve-week period in the second semester of the 1969-70 aca- demic year at another midwestern uni- versity. The purpose of the study was to assess the use of art books in the university li- brary. Among other suppositions, it was as- sumed that the reserve books, which had been placed on limited circulation for the use and convenience of the students en- rolled in art courses, would be used and used extensively. Just as the Carmack-Loeber statistics re- veal little use of reserve books, so do the data in my art book study. The reserve book system employed in the university library was an operation similar to the one in Love Memorial Library; the method used in the study was less thorough, however. Da- ta in regard to the reserve books were tab- ulated once a week from filled charge cards. At the end of the twelve weeks, information from a sampling (every sixth title) sup- plemented the weekly tabulations. The sta- tistics were surprising and did not support the hypothesis that reserve books figure largely in the art students' use of library art books. Despite the limitations of this less exten- sive study, some statistics do reinforce those of the Nebraska team. The filled charge cards showed 667 circulations; the cards of the sample titles showed 269 cir- culations. Total reserve loans recorded were 936. There were 700 titles ( 1,060 volumes) on reserve, a fact which suggests that each title (but certainly not every volume) could have been circulated once. Comparable to the Nebraska study are the statistics tabulated from the sample ex- amined. In the sample (every sixth title) , cards of 117 titles provided information. These 117 titles, as I have said, circulated 269 times or 2.3 per title. Compare 2.3 with the 6.4/ 7.7 checkouts per title as can be calculated in Table 1-here, however, extrapolation makes a truer comparison bringing the 2.3 close to the 6.4 when the length of the period is extended to an academic year. Sixty-three of the 117 (or 53.8 percent) had not been charged during the twelve weeks. Compare 53.8 with the average 37.5 percent in Table 3 of the Ca1mack-Loeber report. Of the fifty-four sample titles that did circulate only fifteen were charged over five times (27.7 percent as compared with the 13/ 14 percent that circulated 4- 8 times as in Table 2 of the Nebraska study). The data from the art book reserve in- vestigation disclosed so little use that I con- cluded (as did Frank Lundy in his brief early report in Library Journal of the Ne- braska study) that there is a huge gap be- tween the professors' teaching methods and his students' study habits; that placing 1,060 volumes on reserve is an expensive process, one that should be revised or per- haps discontinued; and that faculty mem- bers not only should be more selective but also should encourage greater use of their reserve requests. I would say the findings of the 1968- 69 Nebraska use study are not unique, and I would agree that library reserve programs do need reevaluating. (Mrs.) Mary Jane Gibson Head of the Library Rochelle Township High School Rochelle, Illinois '