Syracuse University’s Bird Library

One of the articles I read in this month’s issue of American Libraries was an article about academic libraries and the trend toward moving items in the library collection to an offsite storage location (The Myth of Browsing by Donald A. Barclay). Highlighted at the very top of the article was the Bird Library, the library for Syracuse (where I am attending for my MSLIS).

For all of my Syracuse readers, skip this paragraph. For all of you who aren’t familiar with the controversy surrounding the Bird library, read on. Syracuse, and the Bird, wanted to move a significant portion of its low-use books to an offsite efficient shelving storage location, much like Harvard has done. This caused a massive protest from students and faculty - one which caused Bird to cease plans for moving to offsite. I think that’s about the gist of it. Please let me know if I got it wrong!

I can see and appreciate the desire to keep all of the library’s collection on campus, but I think librarians are missing a great opportunity to showcase what is really important about libraries: the librarians. Of course, the collections that libraries hold, organize, and preserve are important - but of what use are they without professionals to “maintain” the collection, as well as connect users to the information they seek?

I am reminded of another quote I read recently, this one in Harvard Magazine. In the article Gutenberg: Harvard’s libraries deal with disruptive change, the author has this quote:

“Who has the most scientific knowledge of large- scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

I think Bird should have highlighted this key idea: that the libraries of the 21st century are not about stuff, they are about people, Specifically, offering services to connect people to information they seek, and to help them utilize that information in a substantive way. Where do you come down on this debate?