Requesting an "ongoing dialogue" with College Provost Lee Bollinger during the planning process, faculty members concerned about the fate of the proposed $50 million Berry Library project took center stage at yesterday's faculty meeting.
Many of the faculty are concerned the 80,000 square-foot building, which will be attached Baker Library and next to Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, will devote too much space to computers and meeting areas, and not do enough to alleviate the College's overflow of books.
Yesterday's faculty meeting was prompted by a petition signed by 64 members of the faculty concerned Berry's design "could adversely affect the future of both teaching and scholarship at Dartmouth," according to the petition.
"No decisions have been reached," Bollinger said. He said the building committee will create three or four models for the community to review in April or May.
College Librarian Margaret Otto said, "We are at gridlock in Baker."
The Baker Library system currently stores about 10 percent of its books off campus, Bollinger said.
Bollinger said the College intends to "make Berry the crossroads of the campus, the environment in which most people want to go."
For this reason, the Board of Trustees is considering filling the space with "seminar rooms, very high-tech classrooms, with less resources into space for stacks and more into space for students to meet and talk," Bollinger said.
Bollinger said the Board has "some degree of predisposition to electronic data storage."
But some faculty say the College needs more room to store books.
"In literature, in history and in most of the humanities there is a print culture," one faculty member said at the meeting.
He said the current policy of storing overflow books off campus "deprives students and is a significant obstacle to consulting those resources."
College President James Freedman said Berry will not be an entirely electronic resource.
Bollinger said the committee must make predictions about whether printed books or computerized information will be more relevant to the future of academe when they decide what fraction of Berry will be devoted to stacks.
Another faculty member said spaces devoted to collective learning, like the spaces Bollinger refereed to, are seldom successful.
"These seem to fall into disuse," he said.
A different faculty member said there is already adequate space for group study, and, he said, group study is "not necessarily where they are staring at monitors."
But a few members of the faculty supported the idea of a mostly electronic Berry.
"The book is getting fetish-ized ... it is something that may be transformed," one professor said. He said books could become "something like Coca-Cola Classic."
The ground breaking could begin as soon as Spring of 1997, Bollinger said. If all goes as planned, the Berry Library may open in the year 2000.
