A message to all who think technology is king: sometimes it can burn you. Beta-Max video cassettes.
The Beta-Max system brings up a larger point relative to Dartmouth as the College plans to renovate Baker Library and build the new Berry Library addition. Though no decisions have been made, there is talk about heavy dependence on electronics. This would be at the expense of access to printed materials. I think this would be a terrible mistake.
Dartmouth occupies an interesting position in the Ivy League. Hanover has always been separated from the rest of civilization and consequently Dartmouth is rather slow to pick up on trends and fads, generally a good thing.
Our situation at Dartmouth is much different than Yale, for example, where I spent the first week of my winter break trying to research at their special collections library, the Beinecke.
The Beinecke was designed in this century during the height of modernism in the late fifties and sixties. Say what you want about the sixties drug culture, but frankly, I think the architecture drove them to it.
The library at Yale is a great example of the weaknesses of modernism. The Beinecke is named in honor of the Beinecke brothers who graduated from Yale and made a fortune by inventing Green Stamps--think Brady Bunch. It is a raised marble cube with no windows, resting on four granite blocks. It looks more like a fortified fallout shelter than a place to house historic manuscripts. But hey, if they drop the big one, I'm there.
There are two things we can learn from Yale's mistake. Be careful of latching onto all things modern without taking into consideration what is being replaced. Secondly, what is good for Yale or MIT is not necessarily right for Dartmouth.
The Berry Library is going to cost Dartmouth $40-50 million. This money needs to be spent on more space for printed material. Work stations for the internet, printers, and scanners are all important tools, and should have a place in the library, but call me crazy, the focus should be on books.
A "virtual library" with computer terminals, fewer books than are currently housed in Baker, and an increased use of the storage library would not serve the Dartmouth community. Hmm, $40 million for a library, and less access to books. Yeah, sounds good.
If the provost decides on this plan, he would be overlooking some crucial aspects of scholarship and students would suffer. When I gave tours to prospective students my sophomore year, the guidebook told us to point out the advantages of the open stacks, mainly the concept of browsing.
When I do a research paper, about one-third of my sources come directly from on-line searches. When I look in the stacks for a specific book, usually there are others near it on the shelf that did not show up on the On-line Catalogue.
I'll sit down on the floor and read the introduction, the index, or even the table of contents to see if I want to use the book. Half the time, the books that come from the On-line search are useless but the ones I find next to them on the shelf end up helping me the most.
Outside of the stacks, there are the books from storage. After filling out a form all you can hope is that the storage librarians are not overwhelmed with these requests. If it's during midterms, or finals, the delay is considerable, I've waited five days for books.
The Library gets 13 feet of new books everyday, while most of this is placed in Baker, the same amount is sent to the storage library. Whereas the storage library is growing at an enormous rate, it's budget for staffing has been frozen. In the past years, services have in fact declined.
I'm all for technology. The fact that though it may be close to 10 degrees below zero, and yet I can have access to the library catalogue from my room is great.
But until we can have access to the actual words that exist in printed materials, I mean read them from work stations or home computers as we can read them in the stacks, then keep the books in the library. And I mean Baker Library, not the understaffed storage library located half way to Lebanon.
We've always been a little nutty about computers, but simply because a virtual library is modern, doesn't mean it's a good idea. This is not a call for tradition, but simply for common sense. Keep the libraries for the books and the fall out shelters for the computers.
