Library Renovation Leads to Soul Searching at Cal Poly

Professors and librarians complain about a shift from print to online materials

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By SCOTT CARLSON

Pomona, Calif.

A $60-million project at the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona is providing a difficult lesson in the challenges of library renovation, and in the changing role of one of the campus's central institutions. The project, now under way, will add an attractive glass entrance and space for computer rooms, study areas, classrooms, and socializing to a dull 1960s box.

But the renovation and addition — which is smaller than originally planned — may leave less space for books, journals, and other printed materials. That has some campus librarians and professors wondering if the library has forgotten its core mission.

The library's dean, Harold B. Schleifer, is quick to point out that a planned second phase of renovation will greatly expand the facility's total shelf space. But there's a hitch: The university has no money for the second phase, and may not for many years to come.

That has led the library to hastily discard tens of thousands of little-used items and to send hundreds of thousands of books to a storage facility at which they will be inaccessible to library patrons.

Bruce L. Emerton, a Cal Poly librarian, says he was so angered to see books and journals taken to trash bins that he has considered leaving the university. "It seems to me that a modern university library should be more than a study hall and a computer lab," he says.

Mr. Emerton and some other librarians at Cal Poly say Mr. Schleifer is too enamored of technology. "I think there's an agenda to get rid of print," Mr. Emerton says.

Mr. Schleifer says he has the difficult task of guiding the library to accommodate technology and new types of study spaces. "Change is difficult," he says. "If you look at our user population, in many ways they are far ahead of us in terms of what they like to use and how they want it delivered to them."

He says the library's paper collection will continue to grow, despite the tight space. After the first phase of the building's renovation, he says, the library will purchase compact shelving as needed to accommodate the growing collection. (Librarians at the university say they heard nothing about compact shelving until The Chronicle called to ask about space in the building.)

Cal Poly's experience is far from unique, and it illustrates the challenges of library renovation at a time when many colleges have plans to overhaul their library buildings. Because so many college libraries were built in the 1960s and 70s, when architecture was megalithic and drab, library buildings are now going through a flurry of remodeling to add light, technology, and social spaces.

Given how tight budgets and campuses are, and how much collections have grown in recent years, something has to give: Some library administrators see this as an opportune time to purge stacks of old paper materials and embrace what they believe is the digital future — especially since libraries already have many of the materials in electronic form as well.

Hard Look at Holdings

Few would envy what Mr. Schleifer had to deal with to get the library renovation started.

He was under pressure to begin the project quickly and to fit the library's programs in an addition that, to save money, was smaller than originally planned. So he decided to take a hard look at the library's print holdings.

The library had not culled out-of-date or little-used materials in years, so Mr. Schleifer believed librarians could find plenty of candidates for disposal — or long-term storage.

After getting an estimate of $240,000 to move and store up to 200,000 books, of the library's collection of about 700,000, Mr. Schleifer proposed to trim that figure by $80,000 by asking his staff to find 70,000 or more books the library could throw out. If a book hadn't been checked out in a decade, and if copies were available at nearby libraries, or if it was damaged, it could be pitched.

The librarians were disturbed enough to write a strongly worded memorandum to Mr. Schleifer. The collection-management staff called the idea of discarding more than 70,000 books to save $80,000 "penny-wise but pound-foolish" and "antithetical to our professional values."

"If the decision is made to discard books at this level we will not be able to help you explain the decision to the campus community," the librarians wrote.

Mr. Emerton, who is the librarian for the art and architecture departments, sent a list of more than 1,000 art and architecture books to faculty members in those departments, explaining the debate within the library. The books on the list were among those that could be discarded. "Dean Schleifer has ... made it clear to me that I will be relieved of my duties if I do not discard books in accordance with the criteria he has devised, and that the cost of hiring a new bibliographer to do the discarding will be charged against [the art and architecture school's] material-acquisition budget," Mr. Emerton wrote.

Lauren Weiss Bricker, an architectural historian, reviewed the list with Judith Scheine, chair of the architecture department, and found very few items that they were willing to give up. Some books, Ms. Bricker says, were very rare and should have been put in special collections, not in a Dumpster.

Mr. Schleifer heeded the advice of his staff and the complaints of the architecture department and set a lower bar for disposal. "I was less concerned with the numbers" of materials discarded, he says now. Setting a high number "was more to get the subject on the table, so that people would actually pay attention to it."

Print or Digital?

To make more room, Mr. Schleifer proposed discarding journals that were duplicated on JSTOR, the electronic journal-archiving program supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Cal Poly's library staff worried about how throwing out the journals would affect the collection in the future.

The librarians sent another memo to Mr. Schleifer, arguing that "while the content might be duplicated in JSTOR, we do not consider the JSTOR copies to be true duplicates." Especially in history, literature, and social sciences, people prefer reading the journals on paper, and printing out copies of journals from JSTOR is expensive and impractical, they wrote.

"We are also concerned because the JSTOR 'duplicates' represent a huge expenditure of public funds and none of us are comfortable discarding something representing an investment of perhaps millions of dollars," the memo said.

The librarians cited a recent decision by Duke University Press to stop adding new volumes to JSTOR as a sign that the journal-archiving project might not be stable in the future. "It is possible we could be left with nothing."

Nevertheless, the print versions of JSTOR journals were tossed. Mr. Schleifer points out that JSTOR was developed as an archive to allow libraries like his to purge old paper journals when space got tight and that other institutions have done the same.

In the end, the library threw out about 43,000 monographs and journals. Aside from the JSTOR journals, most of the collection-management librarians say they are fairly comfortable with what was pitched.

Some 285,000 items were put in inaccessible storage. Although libraries usually put a premium on keeping items accessible, remote storage that allows a library to retrieve items would have been too expensive, Mr. Schleifer explains. All of the items can be found at other libraries in the area, he says.

This is little comfort to some academics on the campus. When Ms. Bricker, the architectural historian, heard that JSTOR journals were sent to the trash and that books were going to storage, she was dismayed. "I began to read about other, even more serious research institutions than ours that are succumbing to this — digitizing books and not seeing the value of the physical object," she says. "I thought, This is a trend, and our librarian probably just feels that he is keeping up."

Zuoyue Wang, an associate professor of history at Cal Poly, makes looking through journal articles an important part of his courses, which cover the history of science. While so many materials have been put into deep storage during the library renovation, getting books through neighboring college libraries has worked well, he says, and "JSTOR has been a lifesaver."

But he did not know that the library had completely discarded the old paper versions of journals archived on JSTOR. "As a historian, I'm concerned," he says. "When you discard journals, students lose the ability to browse. That's something I would regret. I can see why the library would take that step, but I wish they would have let us know."

"We're spending all of this money on the physical space," he says. "We're getting a better library, but not a better collection."

Managing Change

Joseph Branin, director of libraries at Ohio State University, which is also undergoing a renovation, says Cal Poly's experience is not all that unusual.

"Every big academic library that is going through a space redesign is faced with this issue," he says. "There is certainly more and more talk among librarians about what print material to keep, what to store, and what to discard." Ohio State's library once held 2.2 million items on its shelves, but Mr. Branin says materials have gradually migrated to an off-site storage facility. After the renovation, Ohio State's library will have room for 1.5 million volumes. Some at Ohio State think the library should hold more, he says, and some think it should hold less.

When a library purges materials to prepare for a renovation, the process has to be done carefully, with consideration for the library's position in its region, Mr. Branin says. "You have to do a lot of consulting, and a lot of explaining, and try as best you can to get your constituents to understand and cooperate with you," he says. "If you do it too fast, if you do it without careful planning, and if you do it in opposition to a lot of constituents, you're going to get in trouble."

That vital communication is perhaps where Cal Poly's renovation project has fallen short. Early last year, the library staff sent Mr. Schleifer a memo, expressing concern about "the lack of communication to the campus community, especially faculty," about the renovation.

Although Mr. Schleifer cites a long list of meetings, dating back to 2003, convened to discuss aspects of the building project, librarians at the university still seem confused about how the renovation will turn out and how much room will be in the building. They say Mr. Schleifer distributed packets of materials about the building to his staff shortly before a Chronicle reporter was scheduled to arrive on the campus.

And calls to faculty members — even those designated as library liaisons for academic departments — indicate that few know many details about the library renovation or about materials that have been discarded.

Some faculty members tie the lack of information to Mr. Schleifer's management style. "There is a very widespread impression that the dean is quite arbitrary and given to consulting with himself when it comes to making decisions," says David G. Lord, an anthropology professor. "It's problematic, at the very least."

Place to Gather

Other faculty members, however, say Mr. Schleifer is providing precisely what the campus needs most right now: classrooms and study space.

"The space issue is a longstanding challenge," says Barbara E. Bromley, an education professor, pointing to a pile of teaching materials in her office that she shuttles from class to class. "I teach classes all over campus."

"There is no place for students to gather to have friendly academic conversations," says Jane Ollenburger, a professor of psychology who is a former vice president for academic affairs at the university. Many of Cal Poly's students commute, and the gathering spaces that students use now — such as the student center and a food court, both adjacent to the library — don't have an academic air to them, she says.

Like many professors on the campus, she did not know that the library had thrown out paper journals to make room for such study spaces. "The academic part of me is appalled," she says. But with her administrative background, she trusts that Mr. Schleifer and others weighed the costs and benefits of throwing out the journals and storing the other materials.

"I still think that our students are more inclined to look stuff up online," she says. "As times change, we may need to change with the times."