The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

Coffee bars in libraries aren't the issue. How libraries contribute to learning is. And it is interesting to me that, in spite of our dorms being wired and lots of our collections being online and accessible outside the library, students still come to the library to do their work. And they ask librarians for help because the library is a complicated place these days, and research is often a baffling new world to them. (As an aside, academic librarians don't typically do research for students, as one respondant complained, but they may well help them learn to search and select items from a database. Reference desk work is basically tutorial in nature. If students walk away with a printout, don't conclude the librarian provided it without using it as a dialogic teaching moment.)

Whether coffee is part of the equation sidesteps the real issue: libraries as places are important because they offer a communal experience of research and inquiry which is, itself, communal and social. Are we imitating Barnes and Noble? Uh... in so far as we both try to make reading a social and intellectual activity, yeah, sure. (Actually B&N tries to invoke an old-fashioned library atmosphere, wing-backed chairs and all.) B&N is doing much better financially in their bricks and mortar incarnation than in their online venture. A few years ago we thought bookstores would be extinct as everyone shopped online. That didn't happen, any more than the allegedly "deserted" library has.

The question raised for this discussion is much less interesting to me than, for example, is it problematic that colleges and universities spend less of their operating budget on libraries year after year? (Libraries, I assure you, are not diverting acquisitions funds to buy coffee makers.) Or, even more basic, what is the role of research in an undergraduate education and what do we do in our courses to encourage it? But maybe those questions aren't as excitingly controversial.

: -- Barbara Fister, librarian, Gustavus Adolphus College (posted 11/15, 11:00 a.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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