Libraries and Learning
Tell Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
July 6, 2017
Another day, another article with the man-bites-dog lede “libraries, threatened with irrelevance, now care about students instead of dusty old books.” I won’t bother linking; they are legion.
Libraries aren’t threatened with irrelevance and we don’t face a Sophie’s choice between books and students. In the 40-plus years I’ve been working in academic libraries, both as a student at an ARL library (they had a letterpress! and taught classes on hand-printing books long before they thought to call it a maker space!) and as a librarian working in a small undergraduate library, there was never a point where books lost out and services for students won. From what I can gather from the historical literature, American academic libraries have always provided services to help students learn, and they still have books.
The library I work in today was built in the early 1970s and the planning documents made it clear it was a “teaching library” that must accommodate whatever form learning might take in the future. The internet as we know it wasn’t on the planners’ horizon, but multimedia learning was hot. Luckily the architects, guided by a smart and persistent librarian, designed a flexible floor plan with ample room for wiring and more electrical outlets than the architects thought we needed (though, of course, we’ve had to add more). But none of this was hugely novel. The libraries that predated the current one back to the college’s founding were also designed for learning. We had a lot more books in the 1970s than we’d had in the 1870s, but housing books wasn’t the primary purpose any of those libraries. Learning was. Always.
Books had primacy in the past because students have always prized efficiency. In the 1970s, it was a lot easier for students to find information in books than through other means. Finding articles entailed flipping through indexes or abstracts, interpreting abbreviations, writing down the details, checking the catalog to see if we subscribed to the publication and had the relevant issue, tracking it down on the shelves, and using it in the library or spending money to photocopy the article because journals were harder to replace than books and keeping a complete run was fetishized. Finding a book simply meant looking up call numbers for things that you knew would be in the library unless they were checked out and you could take them home. Easy peasy.
The convenience ratio between using books and using articles flipped. When the library still wasn’t connected to the internet, we had InfoTrac CDs running on a PC connected to a dot matrix printer. Magic! When it suddenly was easier to print out articles than to find books, the dominance of the book in the lives of students shifted (though so far as I can tell, the 1970s multimedia craze never really made a dent). Similarly, a lot of basic questions were hard to answer before Google and Wikipedia. Sure, we get few