Moving books to an off-site facility, the library’s lack of research resources and the library’s budget were the main issues addressed at the second ‘What is a Library?’ forum held at Bird Library Friday morning.

The first open forum was held in December. The research, collections & scholarly communication department sponsored both events.

At the previous forum, the administration discussed moving books to an off-site facility four hours away in Patterson, N.Y. Protests from students and faculty temporarily halted the move, and the issue was re-addressed at Friday’s meeting.

The development of an off-site storage facility is inevitable, said Charlotte Hess, the associate dean for the research, collections & scholarly communication administration.

‘While it might sound odious and anti-research, an off-site is the only way libraries are able to preserve their collection,’ she said.

An off-site storage facility will also create more space at Bird, which is already too small to accommodate the growing number of students that study there, Hess said. She added most college libraries have one library seat for every four students, but at Bird there is only one seat for every 15 students.

Faculty members were also concerned about the quality of the library’s research sources. Faculty present at the forum said they felt SU’s research sources were not up to par with other universities.

Hess agreed that the lack of research support and space at the library hinders the ability of faculty members to be competitive in their individual fields.

‘The most worrisome is this recurrent theme of hearing, ‘We cannot be competitive with the limited library resources that we have,” she said.

Hess proposed several short-term fixes to compensate for the lack of space to accommodate research material: provide higher-quality online journals, reopen the Reading Room at Carnegie Library for students and move technology services at Bird Library to the basement, which would allow for approximately 130,000 more volumes of books on the fifth floor.

But Sean Quimby, the director of the Special Collections Research Center, said people needed to consider the criteria by which a library is judged successful.

‘We need to focus on a strong collection, as opposed to a huge collection,’ he said.

For a library to support an academic institution, it needs to buy more of the right materials to form a direct partnership with academic departments, said David Lankes, director of the Information Institute of Syracuse and an associate professor at the School of Information Studies.

‘The last thing I would like to see come out of this process is the number of volumes the library requires and refuses to throw away,’ he said. ‘The focus on things that we can count, as opposed to things that count, is a problem.’

The limitation of the library’s budget was also addressed. The library has always been underfunded, and SU administration should be responsive to the concerns that have been expressed, Hess said.

David Robinson, a professor in the geography department, wanted to know if the administration was considering the interests of the student and faculty who were voicing their concerns about the library.

‘The essential meaning of the library is totally unreflected – they don’t care,’ he said.

Students asked how they could help advance the efforts of the library staff.

‘I’m ready to act in a different way other than theorization,’ said Melissa Welshans, a graduate student in the English department who proposed that the students and faculty take part in a survey about their concerns.

But Hess said there was already too much information gathered from previous surveys and conducting another would be overwhelming.

Instead, she encouraged students to communicate with their peers and get them more involved.

It was discouraging to see that no one at Wednesday’s University Senate open forum was interested in talking about the library’s concerns, she said, because it was an issue that was widely and heatedly addressed last semester.

The Forum Planning Committee will organize another open forum in March after identifying the concerns addressed in the forum in detail and discussing steps to achieve tangible results.

shkim11@syr.edu

Published on February 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm