Confessions of a Mad Librarian

If you're an academic librarian who suffers from seasonal affective disorder, you may want to print out this article and stow it away until the spring thaw comes around.

Dennis Dillon, associate director for research services at the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin, has written a commentary for the Chronicle of Higher Education on what he sees as the long but inevitable twilight of academic libraries as we know them (currently available on the free section of the Chron's website).

The arguments for cutting library purchases of books and for outsourcing operations are well meaning. And the uncomfortable facts are that libraries are collections, publishers are distributors, and both collecting and distributing could be done online if enough money, organization, and expertise were put into the effort. But the arguments against those moves include a wealth of legal, financial, practical, political, pedagogical, and philosophical reasons.

This is a reasonable start to a reasoned defense of libraries. He builds up a good head of steam over the current limitations of electronic resources management, but then he gets diverted:

As I limped back to the gym on an age-challenged ankle, I saw a beat-up paperback copy of Plato's Republic in a trash can. Every college student knows how to find Plato on the Web, and the book was no longer worth carting around. Maybe Bob was right, and the university shouldn't be spending quite so much money on library books.

While he doesn't predict the "end of books" or the wholesale elimination of libraries, Dillon does foresee a very different library:

One day we may see book machines in every library or bookstore that can print and bind any book you want, machines that will draw on a database of millions of digital titles. Or every institution of higher education might create an official online repository of its faculty members' publications -- including books, articles, and multimedia works -- thereby replacing traditional journal publishers and university presses. Or some future version of Amazon.com may allow you to purchase or rent any book in the world, in whatever format you want, for as long as you want.

But all that is speculation. Here are the certainties: People will continue to write books, people will continue to read books, and the academic-publishing process needs to be reformed so that we can continue to meet our goal of scholarly communication in an economically sustainable way.

If I'm reading it correctly, it's a call for help in the Serials Crisis, but I'm not sure how many librarians (or library users) would consider it a happy ending. Whether or not this is reasonable supposition, I can't say. Personally, though, it saddens me to consider that this might be the future of college and university libraries. I'm a stacks roamer: even when I have a print out of everything I need from the OPAC, I like perusing the nearby shelves, seeing if there's a possible title I've missed in my online search. Perhaps it's a sign of my online retrieval skills, but I've made marvelous finds of relevant material that way. Not to mention there's the wonderful timewaster of just going through, picking books/bound journals with interesting titles and plunging into the table of contents to see what's there. In New Library Order that Dillon foresees, that serendipity would be gone.

What a shame.