School libraries' new page
Sacramento Bee 1/26/07
In 2003, consultants hired to redesign the 300,000-square-foot building called it "outdated" with an "aloof, cold appearance." Students and faculty surveyed for the consultants' report characterized the six-story library as "tired," "a big orphan" and "blah."
"The library is in desperate need of a facelift," wrote the Carrier Johnson consultants.
The consultants' proposal to revamp the library generated a lot of enthusiasm, said acting library director Tamara Frost Trujillo. But budget problems killed the $37 million plan to turn the library into a central gathering spot for students and faculty -- a campus monument that would glow like a lantern at night from the top floor.
"We were going to change the whole entry to the library," Trujillo said. "Space is a major thing ... how to make the library more inviting."
Against that backdrop, CSUS is hosting a symposium today on the changing role of academic libraries, as campus officials begin taking another look at overhauling the library.
Today's university libraries aren't the musty, cavernous stacks of old that students once avoided. Food and cell phones are more common than shushing librarians -- even books -- in some cases.
"The Barnes & Noble model coffee shops are becoming the norm," said David Lewis, who oversees the libraries at Indiana and Purdue universities and is a keynote speaker at the CSUS conference.
Without changing, he said, "the library will slowly, but surely, atrophy and become a little-used Museum of the Book."
More than 100 librarians from around the country are gathering at CSUS to discuss ways to make libraries more relevant to students who seem to get everything from Google.
And it's going to get tougher, with Google digitizing millions of books from the University of California system, Harvard, Oxford and other schools.
"If they can get them electronically, then what are the dusty books doing on the shelves?" asked another reformer on today's panel, Chandra McKenzie, library director at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The New York school went through a major overhaul in the last two years.
It's not just the requisite coffee cart, either. Often located centrally on campus, library officials have been taking advantage of their prime real estate to cater to students who want to study together -- and socialize.
Library staff members also are getting new job duties. They're helping students track information through online journals and electronic databases, analyze data and build spreadsheets, and offer support for professors.
No one expects books to completely disappear. But the new University of California campus in Merced had the luxury of breaking from traditions. It opened two years ago with just 50,000 books -- compared with more than 3 million at contemporaries like UC Davis.
The library is airy and expansive, where students check out laptops and are encouraged to rearrange the furniture.
"Rules? We have two rules in the library," said UC Merced librarian Bruce Miller, who also is speaking at the CSUS conference. "Tell us when you spill something so we can clean it up ... and don't use pizza as a bookmark."
The University of Virginia library has replaced the card catalogs with a cafe and added restaurant booths to a study area.
"We were among the first libraries to get rid of the 'no food' signs," said Diane Parr Walker, the school's deputy library director, who also is attending today's conference.
It was a quite a change for the stately red-brick and white-column school, founded by Thomas Jefferson, with a domed library at the center of his "academical village."
A new, bigger library at U.Va. was built in the 1930s, but Walker said it was intimidating. About 10 years ago, she overheard a student giving her parents a campus tour and saying of the library, "It's the scariest building on campus -- I never go there."
Walker said she recently overheard another student point out the new-and-improved library to her visiting parents and said, "They serve the best coffee ... and I'm in there almost every day."
Not all libraries have gone trendy, and students seem to be OK with it. At the UC Davis library, there's a low hum of students studying together at long, wooden tables on tiled floors.
There are no vending machines, and there's just one carpeted area with soft lounge furniture -- and seating for six.
Joe Levy, 19, a second-year UC Davis student from Marin County, was reclining in an armchair earlier this week to read a book, his feet propped on a large ottoman.
He escapes his fraternity house for a couple of hours every day for peace and solitude.
"It's where you can sleep -- take a nap if you want," he said. "You ever go to Barnes & Noble and try to read there?"