Re Mark K’s “cynical observation”: check the piece in the Times today about CUNY’s big drive into science research. And not mere “curiosity-driven” science, they point out–with a gratuitous sneer at my favorite faculty of the imagination. Rather mission-driven. Like, we’re going to find a molecule that binds to damaged cartilage in the knee, to speed the return of running backs from the disabled list. Science like that there.

The place where you can get help from the librarians. (Thanks everyone who raised the issue of library staff reductions.)

I don’t have much to add to what others have said, except for the cynical observation that “it will hurt faculty research” doesn’t seem likely to be persuasive to administrators in the increasingly adjunctified world of higher education.

The most basic problem seems to be that actually being able to browse through the stacks of books is definitely an important part of research for many scholars, but because this benefit is so difficult to quantify, it is essentially invisible to administrators. It’s very difficult to justify expenditure for benefits that can’t be measured or quantified, especially in a time of tight budgets.

It’s also a good point that researchers in different fields gather information differently, and how browsing and serendipitous discovery may be more important to historians than to researchers in most other fields.

In two weeks, we collected over 122 signatures on a petition…out of a faculty of just over 160.

Of course, the humanities faculty signed on en masse, but faculty from the sciences and professional programs were vocal advocates of “browsing the stacks” as well.

Electronic books open many doors but I worry that with future budget cuts, we may not hold the subscription rights to books we once had in our own stacks. We are already facing this problem with journal access. At a mid-level state university like mine, only a few students will do the legwork to even identify sources, let alone request them on ILL. If we don’t have the resource the students won’t find it. Viva browsing!

Who’s there to scan those chapters you want from the books on ILL or the article from the journal your U doesn’t have? I’m seeing a situation where supporting those requirements as well as serving our own students is harder and harder to manage. And with our library acquisition budget cut to 1/3 its former levels, who thinks it will be restored anytime soon?

When you nickel and dime your library, you nickel and dime humanities research which already is thought to be cost-free because we don’t require labs or investigators or the like. But if no one has the books, and no one keeps journals available (whether through leaving the private-sector model or what-have-you), if no one keeps the material available, if no one teaches the students how to use the materials we have, how can we be surprised that libraries turn into Starbucks and study rooms?

Years ago, I met a historian who worked on compiling “Sources in Women’s History,” the catalog of archival collections in the U.S. published in the late 1970s (we used to call it just “Hinding,” after the main editor). The editors had sent out a questionnaire to hundreds of archivists. Many, many came back claiming that this or that archives held NO collections relating to women. The historian telling me this story related how she literally drove around the country, visiting these archives and uncovering family paper collections with scores of letters by women, and (her favorite example) college archives at coeducational institutions with hundreds of files on women’s organizations. How could colleges with women students imagine their archives did not document women?, wondered my colleague.

I don’t want finding aids standing between me and the books. To perform my research effectively, I need to go into the stacks and rifle through the books myself. I need to flip through shelves of books at a time to work efficiently. I refuse to relinquish my chance to do this so that the library can replace books with computer terminals where students check out facebook (or watch pr0n, apparently).

Yes, special collections rooms do not open their stacks, but this is by admission a special situation, intended to protect the rare and fragile.

The only way off-site storage could serve historians is if we each got a spacious private office in the library with lots of shelf space, and the books were delivered to us by the hundreds. But that wouldn’t save much space, now would it?

The same arguments that are now used about why we “just can’t” expand today’s libraries could have been used a generation ago to justify standing pat with the cute but relicky little “old libraries” on campuses that have now often been repurposed to other functions. The critical importance of physical access to knowledge for at least some kinds of humanistic inquiry can’t just be dismissed. That is, there are surely practices in most disciplines that will not be much harmed by going all remote. But other methodologies just as surely will be, and it’s hard to see why the special interest discipline of library science, in alliance with the comprtollers, should be allowed to be the ajudicator here.

Some point out that shelf browsing is a way to rediscover the value of forgotten materials, but when (as at my library) books were shelved in several different classification schemes, and often lost *within* the building, it wasn’t really all that productive.

I served as chair of my university’s library watchdog committee, and I heard a lot of faculty hysteria over the plan to move books to offsite storage. You know what the real threat to historians’ book culture is? Not off-site storage, but expensive journals, controlled by for-profit corporations and absolutely vital to our scientific and medical colleagues’ research. Their costs are insidiously eating into library budgets, meaning that they can’t afford to buy the books you and I write (and want to read) anymore. It’s hard to convince those colleagues, and even our social-scientists, that there is something important to our discipline that mandates communicating in a format of 200 pages or so.