Q&A WITH UNIVERSITY
LIBRARIAN BRIAN SCHOTTLAENDER
As part of the News Update
series of Q&As with campus leaders, this interview with University
Librarian Brian Schottlaender looks at how university libraries have evolved
from hallowed caverns of bookstacks to contemporary hubs of multimedia
information. UCSD’s 11 libraries have been at the forefront of that
evolution, especially in the areas of digital access and online content.
Schottlaender discusses how campus libraries are adapting to fit new user
trends, and he predicts future changes that will make libraries more communal
and more wired (but with plenty of books still on hand).
Q. What’s on
the horizon for the UCSD Libraries in terms of new projects and acquisitions?
Schottlaender:
The Digital Library Program is at the top of the list. We’ve been
carrying out several projects related to digital content development with
some of our campus partners, such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
And we’re trying to establish ourselves as the pre-eminent institution
involved in digital library development related to non-print formats like
music and moving images.
Also, we’re thrilled
about our acquisition of the Herman Baca archives. Herman Baca is a third
of the triumvirate, along with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, that comprises
Chicano activism in California. We will spend the better part of two years
organizing the archives and creating a publicly accessible online guide.
This could set the stage for a kind of interaction with the greater San
Diego community that we haven’t seen much of in our short history.
Q. What are some of
the biggest challenges you face today as UCSD’s University Librarian?
Schottlaender:
We are in the middle of a rapidly evolving transformation in the information
environment, but we continue to carry out traditional library functions,
like the acquisition of print resources, and we also must provide an increasingly
expectant end user community with all the digital resources they have
come to know and love. So, like most research libraries, we’re devoting
more resources to digital content.
Every year, we compile a statistical
report called “A Day In The Life of the UCSD Libraries” (http://libraries.ucsd.edu/services/dayinthelife.html),
and all of its numbers—the people who come through our doors each
day, the items they check out, the times they access our Web page—have
been increasing steadily, in no small part because our student body is
growing. When I arrived on campus five years ago, we had fewer than 20,000
students. Our eventual enrollment is anticipated to be close to 30,000
students, and that has real implications for us in terms of funding, philosophy,
space and staffing.
Q. How do you build
the quality of our campus libraries in an era of shrinking budgets?
Schottlaender:
One way is to build upon the incredibly deep print collections at UCLA
and Berkeley as foundational resources rather than trying to replicate
them. Expedited document delivery processes allow us to make statements
like, “If you want something that is located in one of the regional
library facilities in L.A. or Berkeley, you can have it within 48 hours,”
either because we have shuttle services that literally drive up and down
the state, or because we will scan material for you and put it up on a
Web site. That has allowed us to focus our energies and our resources
on being what we can be that isn’t what they are.
We’ve put a lot of emphasis
on digital library development. We have successfully put increased effort
into fund-raising from federal grants agencies that have an abiding interest
in digital library capabilities. And with the announcement of our 3-millionth
volume acquisition earlier this year, we launched a collection endowment
initiative. We have raised six new endowments in the first six months,
and we would like to raise at least ten a year for the foreseeable future.
If I had to identify two things
as absolutely critical to building quality with limited resources, I would
list staff first and collaboration with other campus entities second.
Our programs and services and collections are only as good as the staff
we are able to recruit and retain. And I’m very happy to say that
our campus colleagues have been immensely receptive to collaboration.
Q. What are the various
ways members of the campus community use the libraries?
Schottlaender:
Many libraries around the country are finding their head counts dropping,
but that’s not the case here. This campus is really impacted for
space; where are students supposed to study? Every now and then, someone
will say something to me like, “I was in one of the libraries the
other day, and I saw nothing but students sitting around studying.”
And my reaction is always that I’m actually very glad that they’re
studying in a place where they have access to other information sources
if they need them.
So there’s the physical
front-door issue, and then there’s the Web site front-door issue.
In 2002 we invited a number of our academic and administrative colleagues,
including the presidents of the Graduate Student Association and the Associated
Students, to tell us how they use the Libraries, and they said that they
were very confused by the multiplicity of ways we make information content
available. That was a little startling for us as librarians, because we’re
in the access business.
If you want to access an electronic
journal on the Libraries’ Web site, you can go through our online
catalog, Roger, or click on a link that lists every online journal we
subscribe to, or go through our Sage portal to electronic resources. But
users have told us, “Just give us one place to go get that stuff,
because we don’t have the time or the expertise to figure out where
we ought to be looking.” When we asked, “What do you do when
you want information?” nine people out of ten said, “I go
check Google.” At first, librarians tended to dismiss that approach
to research as being perhaps a bit simplistic. Now we’re thinking,
“We’re not going to change that, so how do we create an academic
Google?,” and a committee is now looking at the Libraries’
Web site. People make comments like, “I love the library but I never
need to go there.” What they mean is, “I never need to go
there physically,” but they in fact come here a lot, through the
Web. And so the interface that we develop for that is increasingly important.
Q. What about library
patrons from the external community?
Schottlaender:
Anybody can use the UCSD Libraries in person; all they have to do is pay
for parking. People over the age of eighteen who are residents of California
can check material out by joining the Friends of the UCSD Libraries. Also,
anyone can use the Libraries’ online reference shelf (http://libraries.ucsd.edu/refshelf.html).
It’s one of our most popular Web pages, and it was chosen by the
Union-Tribune’s Business section as one of the best sites on the
Web. It has everything from the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary
and the Encyclopedia Britannica to rarified things like the Grove Music
Dictionary. Some of the shelf’s contents are only available to UCSD
faculty, students, and staff, and those are marked by bracketed boxes
that say “UCSD only.” If it doesn’t say that, it’s
open to the public.
Q. With more and more
information available online, do you foresee a day when the UCSD Libraries
are “book-less”?
Schottlaender:
The short answer is “no.” There are certain kinds of information
that do not lend themselves well to the digital medium, and books, in
fact, are a prime example. Users have been very slow to embrace e-books.
It is no accident that our first foray into the digital environment has
been in the area of journals, because articles are more defined bites
of information. Will we ever be journal-less, without any hard-copy journals?
Maybe sooner rather than later. But book-less? I doubt it.
I believe there will always
be legacy print collections that libraries will continue to steward. And
I believe that a certain percentage of the information produced annually
will still be print-based—there are emotional and cultural ties
to hard copies of books. Our 3-million-and-first volume was an interesting
case in point. I went to my staff and said, “Let’s get out
there and make our 3-million-and-first volume a digital object.”
They came back and said, “The community isn’t ready for that
yet.” So the volume is an artist’s book consisting of a wooden
box that contains paper with words typed on it, videotape, a computer
disk, and miscellaneous other items—just about every media type
you can think of.
Q. Would you hazard
a prediction or two about what the UCSD Libraries will look like in the
year 2020?
Schottlaender:
I think the “gathering place” function of the libraries will
be more explicitly apparent, but I don’t foresee a return to the
grand reading rooms of libraries built 50 or 100 years ago. Instead, I
see smaller reading rooms where people can talk to each other and look
over each other’s shoulders and say, “What’s that cool
thing you’re looking at?”
I’m convinced that the
atmosphere of libraries will be dramatically different. I think we’re
going to see fewer physical collections and more user space. On one end
of the spectrum, you might have reading lounges where you can get coffee
and a snack. On the other end, there may be more carrels and more higher-end
workstations, and we may see an environment with more information types
integrated on the desktop.
Q. Any final thoughts?
Schottlaender:
I love the story that Audrey Geisel tells of how she and Ted came up to
campus for a walk and first saw the main library. Now remember, in those
days this building was much more isolated than it is now; it literally
rose up out of the ground. As Audrey recalls, Ted said, “Wow! If
I were an architect, that’s the library that I would build.”
And so when Ted passed away, Audrey decided that this would be Ted’s
library.
There is an old saying in the
academic world about the library being at the heart of the institution,
and I think that’s always true. Here at UCSD, it is wonderful to
work at an institution where that is geographically true—Geisel
Library actually is located at the center of campus—and metaphorically
true as well, because the abstraction of the library building serves as
the campus logo. I don’t know of any other university where that
is the case.
###
|
