Do Libraries Really Need Books?

"I love libraries. Books talk to me," says Madeline M. Wake, dean of the nursing

ALSO SEE: Colloquy: Join an online discussion on whether college libraries should be redesigned to place less emphasis on books.

school at Marquette University, who will become provost in August. She likes to walk through the stacks and pull out books that catch her eye. "As I was growing in my education, that's the way I processed stuff," she says.

But her students learn differently. They turn to the Internet instead of books. So she's looking forward to a new library at Marquette, to be stocked with computers and digital-media centers. She hopes that they will help teach a generation raised more on cathode-ray tubes than printing presses.

"My guess is that people are reading the things that they really rely on for information online," Ms. Wake says. "So to pretend that we're living in yesterday isn't helpful."

These days, many college administrators and trustees agree with her, saying outright that the book will soon be the information medium of the past, if it isn't already. Although most new and planned campus libraries still follow traditional designs, a few colleges have responded to pedagogical trends -- and promises of a bright technological future -- by consolidating the stacks to make more space for computer technology, attractive study lounges, and group-learning areas. In this vision, the library becomes a hub of activity, a "one-stop shop" for information and technology tools. Trustees and administrators, and even some librarians, aware of declining book-circulation figures and the tremendous popularity of new Web sites and databases, are giving new media and defined spaces for study the most prominent place in library construction and renovation.

For example, at the Walter Library, at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, a $53-million renovation took the book stacks out of the building's core, moved them to the basement or to other campus libraries, and replaced them with computer labs, a digital-media center, and a supercomputer institute. The renovation also brightened the reading rooms and added networking jacks and outlets to the old oak library tables. Other institutions -- the College of Charleston, Duke University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology among them -- have renovation and construction plans that emphasize the new technological roles of the library.

Some librarians, describing the duties that accompany their new roles, invoke the terminology of the times. "The library's mission in the old days was to acquire, organize, and make information available," says Richard W. Meyer, dean of libraries at Georgia Tech. "It's being rearticulated now as a pointer, an entity that provides a way to link users and knowledge together -- to be a portal, an organized entree to information. And it's not just physical. It's also virtual."

Meanwhile, some campus libraries continue to expand their book collections, but are housing them in compact shelving, separate buildings, remote storage, or vaults inaccessible to casual browsing. With space limited and money tight, such arrangements are sometimes a necessity. But they could impede in-depth research and further marginalize already underused book collections, say some professors and librarians. If buildings both reflect and influence the ideals of a culture, they say, these libraries could tacitly be teaching undergraduate students that if they can't find it online, it doesn't exist or isn't important.

Old and New Libraries

The divergence between the book and the computer is realized in the design of Marquette's $47-million library project, a three-story skeleton of scaffolding and concrete that is rising next to the boxy Memorial Library, a relic from the 1950s.

The new library will hold a small collection of popular and recent books, along with reference material and part of the special collections. But most of the building will be devoted to multimedia stations and instruction rooms, computer labs, reading rooms, and group-study areas. Inside the front door, the building will open up into a grand space, filled with computer workstations and anchored by a reference desk where librarians can field technical questions along with the usual queries. Most of the university's 1.3 million books and print periodicals will be stored in old Memorial. On an elevated bridge connecting the new library to the old, a coffee shop will sit; the librarians hope that it will lure students to check out the books on the other side.

Initially, Marquette's plans emulated those for Fordham University's library, a more-traditional structure built just five years ago. But the trustees balked at the idea of an old-fashioned library. "We sent the management back to the drawing board saying, 'Look, we don't want to build something that is yesterday's technology or yesterday's library,'" says Wayne R. Sanders, CEO of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, who took a lead role in the project. During the planning, he and other trustees discussed with university administrators how students would learn in the future. "We came to the conclusion it will be much more integrated to the technology side, to the Internet," Mr. Sanders says. "It'll be a process you and I follow now, where we do our information seeking on a net -- either the Internet or the intranet -- and let it guide us."

That's already happening, says Nicholas C. Burckel, Marquette's dean of libraries. Undergraduates already get most of their information from online sources and other technology, he notes, arguing that a library should guide and cater to people who use those new technologies. In the old days, he says, patrons needed only their eyes to gather information. Now they need equipment like DVD players and computers, along with librarians who can help them find and use valid information on CDs and the Internet.

Going Too Far?

Some faculty members, however, wonder if the new library will give too much emphasis and attention to computers and other new technology, outshining the traditional print media. Lance R. Grahn, chairman of the history department, represented the faculty on the library's planning committee. He already sees many students limiting themselves to quick database searches, and he worries about how that reliance affects their education. "Too many students think that they can go to the Web, get their answer, and the learning is done," he says.

The new library's design will hardly change that perception, he suspects. "One of our top issues as faculty -- especially as humanities, and book-based, faculty -- was a concern about physically separating, and so intellectually separating, the books from the Web," he says. "Despite everyone's best efforts, it will signal to the students that books and journals are old-fashioned, and that computers and the World Wide Web and e-learning are modern and up-to-date."

The doubts about the new library's emphasis also resonate with graduate students like Scott Celsor, a doctoral candidate in theology. "It concerns me that they are overemphasizing the role of technology in the future," he says while at work on a paper in one of Memorial's periodical rooms.

Mr. Burckel has doubts, too. The dean, a historian by training, has dug up some of the presumptuous things that futurists of old have said about technology and education, like the mid-20th-century prediction that all students would someday earn their degrees through television. "I'm enough of a historian not to be cynical about prognostication," he says, "but enough to know that prognosticators are not always accurately predicting." And he laughs about a recent interaction with a student who thought that a reference book was "the print version of the CD."

But if students aren't willing to walk upstairs to check out a book or printed journal -- and many aren't -- putting that printed material in a building 50 yards away won't do any further harm, he says, arguing that increasing the traffic in the stacks relies on good pedagogical strategies in the classroom, not on lures devised by librarians. "If you allow a student in your course to get an A, and he or she has not consulted primary sources, and you have not required them to use print sources, there's no way the library can make that happen."

If students aren't checking out books, or aren't getting unrestricted, immediate access to books, they are missing out on a vital source of instruction, says Thomas Mann, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress who has written in library journals about the value of print and the dangers of rushing to digital media. He insists that as a medium for both storing and dispensing information, books rival, even surpass, their digital counterparts.

"There is a real difference between information and knowledge, and between knowledge and understanding," he says. "I think the screen-display formats are biased toward information. People will tend toward easier things than more difficult things."

Mr. Mann worries about "a drift toward regarding libraries as on-ramps to the Internet rather than alternatives to the Internet." Books, out in the open and classified by subject, are an invaluable element of scholarship, he says. At the Library of Congress, he recently helped a historian who wanted information about lighthouse libraries -- boxed sets of books that traveled among lighthouse keepers along with their other supplies. There was nothing about lighthouse libraries in electronic databases, or even in the online catalog. Mr. Mann took the historian to the bookshelves, where they located 438 books on lighthouses. Fifteen of them included information on lighthouse libraries. "So there was an abundance of material back there, but you couldn't have found it through a catalog search, even if the catalog had a table of contents or an index."

Historians browse the shelves as part of their research, but that activity is rarely mentioned in the literature about library design.

"There is a disconnect between the theory and the practice," Mr. Mann says.

Colleges that resist the trend to become more electronically oriented, he argues, will also have a competitive advantage in attracting faculty members in years to come. Many institutions, keeping that belief in mind, have agreed to put print and digital media under the same new roof. Mr. Meyer, the librarian at Georgia Tech, tells the administration not to separate them: "I'm fighting to make sure they understand the importance of integrating the two types of knowledge."

Books in a Vault

But open stacks take up a lot of space, and some campuses are simply running out of room. At Santa Clara University, for example, a crowded campus and a depressed California economy, along with expectations about the future of technology, have led to a plan for a new library.

The current library is a dank box from the 1960s, with a leaky basement. The new building will feature expanded areas for students to study and work together, "incubators" where faculty members can test technology for use in the classroom, a coffee shop, and views of the California's sunny skies.

As for the books, the newest and the most frequently used, about 150,000 volumes, will be stored on open shelves at the lower levels. The rest, about half a million volumes, will go into an automated retrieval system in the back of the building.

First developed for the warehouse industry, the retrieval system is a vault, with books sitting in bins and arranged according to size, not subject, to save space. When a library patron consults the online catalog and presses a button to place an order, a robot grabs the appropriate bin and a library employee finds the book and brings it out to the student, all within several minutes.

To help foster the serendipitous encounters with useful titles that often result from browsing the shelves, Santa Clara plans to add a "virtual browsing" feature to its online catalog, which will allow students to see books in a particular subject area.

The university went with the retrieval system for several reasons. Planners felt that a building with conventional shelving would be too large for the scale of the campus. Building a large library would cost too much money.

And among trustees, donors, and faculty members of the Silicon Valley institution, there was a debate about the definition of a 21st-century library, says Ron Danielson, the chief information officer, who led the library-planning project.

"On one hand, we have faculty in many of our disciplines, and longtime donors to the university, who want to build a library that will celebrate the book," he says. "On the other hand, we have a number of people here in the valley who think that electronic resources are the way to go, and that's what we should emphasize. We think either of those extremes are wrong, and tried to build a building that will serve both."

Elizabeth M. Salzer, the librarian at Santa Clara, would have preferred open shelving but says the retrieval system was the best compromise. Getting materials from off-site storage would have been too slow, and compact shelving, in which compressed bookshelves move on tracks, allows only a few students to search at a time.

Ignoring Circulation Figures

A handful of college libraries have installed such automated systems, some more enthusiastically than others. Eastern Michigan University's was the second academic library in the country to set up a retrieval system, in 1998. (California State University at Northridge's was the first.) The library stores about 500,000 items -- more than half of its material -- in what staff members call the Automated Retrieval Collection.

Morell D. Boone, who chose the system as dean of learning resources and technology, says the university saved more than $8-million in construction costs, which would have gone toward bookshelves, but instead helped to pay for group-study areas, computer banks, and a television studio.

Asked how the system affected book circulation, he says: "I have no idea, and I don't care." The effectiveness of the library can't be judged on the basis of circulation, he argues, "because that's not what happens here anymore." Faculty members go to the nearby University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for serious research, and undergraduates do all of their research online now, he says.

In fact, most students don't know that Eastern Michigan's library has a storage-and-retrieval system, he adds. "When they hit the 'storage' button" -- the button that sends the robot looking for a bin -- "they don't really know where [the book] is coming from."

Libraries like Eastern Michigan's might reflect the times, but they leave some scholars and librarians feeling depressed. To them, books have a tremendous romantic allure -- they present a thought or a personality, they line the shelves in the homes and offices of the world's great thinkers, and separating undergraduates from them imperils an attractive quality of libraries.

"People like books," says Barbara Fister, librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, in Minnesota. Recently, libraries have added a lot of amenities, in efforts to make themselves as attractive as the local Barnes & Noble. But it's the books, she says, not the overstuffed armchairs and the Starbucks coffee, that make a bookstore a good place to hang out.

Ms. Fister just completed a survey of the research methods of her students. "I was surprised and encouraged to hear that, contrary to what people say, they don't just go online," she says. "They want to use books, and they want to be in the stacks with them."

But that perspective seems to go against the prevailing wisdom. The circulation figures at many college libraries, along with widespread anecdotes among scholars and librarians, suggest that students prefer getting their information and their reading materials online. Notes, reference reading, and other materials appear on course Web sites because professors see that as the best way to reach their students. At Marquette, the prospect of getting to books in the new library seems to make little difference to the undergraduates studying, for the time being, in the old library.

"I've heard that there's going to be a lot of computers and not any books," says Marty Petricca, a senior majoring in business. He approves. "It's not like there's an excess amount of computers on campus," he says, seated at a secluded computer terminal in Memorial. "I don't check out many books, anyway."