radiant fracture

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/empty-shelves/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19240

I found Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Facebook post extraordinarily depressing; I’ll reproduce it here (apart from the photos, which show lots of empty shelves) so you can be depressed too (or not, depending on your attitude toward these things):

Empty shelves. What used to be the literature collection of the University of Amsterdam in the PC Hooft building now feels like a ghostly place. Yesterday I happened to pass by and noticed that the doors were open, so I went inside and found myself wandering for half an hour through what used to be a buzzing place full of students, academics and, of course, books.

They are gone. After the summer last year, the UvA opened its (splendid!) new humanities library at the heart of the university quarter in the old city. The new building is beautiful, a great place for students and staff to come and study, and at first sight it looks like a true library, including many study places lined with books. I very much appreciate this new building, and yet the impression is deceptive, for most of the physical books have actually vanished from the library’s collection, replaced by digital copies. The heart is gone. What’s left is essentially an empty shell.

I had a conversation with a colleague who works in the UvA’s library context, and who told me how few books are actually left in the collection. When I expressed my feelings of malaise about this development, she asked me “but how often do you yourself still order a physical older book?” And I had to admit it: rarely. I buy books that I want to read. But like almost every other academic these days, I use digital copies of books that I just need to consult.

I understand the cold financial logic of getting rid of enormous collections of books that are never used (a previous librarian could tell me the exact housing costs for each square meter of books, in a city like Amsterdam where space it extremely expensive). But even apart from the well-established fact that digital books are much more vulnerable than physical ones and may simply not survive the future development of technology (take a moment to imagine what that means!), some unquantifiable quality gets lost forever if one can no longer smell and turn the yellowed pages in a book that was published a hundred years ago. They have an aura.

Most of all, I’m saddened by the managerial “presentist” mentality of not being worried all too much about the destruction of cultural and intellectual heritage. I’ll never forget a small exchange I once had in a café, when somebody asked me what I did for a living and I told her that I was a historian. For several seconds she looked at me with a stunned expression on her face, and finally managed to blurt out: “but… but… it’s over!” She just couldn’t fathom that somebody would be interested in the past.

In fairness, here’s a response from a librarian:

Former academic library director here. This is one of the true occasions in which there is a valid “both sides” argument and to a librarian faced with conflicting needs, there’s no true victor. It’s both win-win and lose-lose.

It was amazing how with one click of an auto-signature I added 10k books to the collection overnight. And when a researcher needed something we could acquire in within three hours rather than the processing time it took to acquire a physical copy. (Note my language: I do not distinguish between e-books and real books. They are all “real.”) You could get an item to a researcher no matter where they were as long as they had internet. They could access an entire collection remotely. (And yes, I actually have a micro fracture in one collarbone from too many years of poorly carrying a book bag!)

At the same time, as has been remarked: browsing a physical collection allows for greater opportunities for serendipitous discovery. Holding an item, marking a physical item allows for greater engagement and recall than what has been called “skimmy dipping” a digital text.

Digital books and physical books, ebooks and tree-books— both have and provide different values and needs. When I was director and made choices I would sometimes go through a decision tree: will we want this for a permanent part of the collection? Is this only helping one person and needn’t occupy valuable and limited shelf space? Will multiple users want or need simultaneous access to the text? &c. It’s a fraught balancing act between access and ownership, shrinking budget and space as publishing continues to pump out more (and more expensive) works.

TLDR? Housing an academic collection especially at the doctoral level is a lose-lose scenario.

Most of the other commenters share my despair.

https://languagehat.com/empty-shelves/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19240