It seems a shame, but I see why. The frequently accessed stuff will go to the Engineering library, which is a bigger facilty. The less frequently will go to storage for retrieval on request.
There are aisles and aisles of journals--much of their content available online these days for those with a UW IP address or login. I suspect those won't be requested much. Even after the consolidation with the Math library a few years ago, I didn't generally see more than a dozen people in there.
I suspect they could have let go a few extra administrators and kept the library, but I don't have the numbers in front of me.
In my first semester at a new university I noted that the library, in the same building as my classroom, held the journal that contained the 1st and seminal article on a key subject of one of my lectures. So after verifying in person that it was really there, I assigned the article as a reading for the previous week. I mentioned that they'd need to actually go to the library, find it in the open reserve stacks, and read it while there.
ReplyDeleteI got immediate pushback from the students, and was even called in by my department head and dean to question why I'd do such a thing, and why the textbook and online sources 'weren't enough'.
For me, there's been a lot of serendipity in going to the stacks. Just finding the textbook for a course that I was taking, I could often find a book adjacent on the shelf with the same Dewey or LOC classification number that covered something I was having difficulty with, but explained it in language that made much better sense to me.
And I've many times encountered the "This material has been moved to storage but the desk attendant will be happy to process a request for access", and yet found that the desk attendant was far from happy, and brought out a manager to interrogate me on how important such access really was to me.
Serendipity is huge--in a library, in a second-hand bookstore, ...
ReplyDelete“… yet found that the desk attendant was far from happy, and brought out a manager to interrogate me on how important such access really was to me.”
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I too have found that the advertised service was somewhat lacking in practice.
More than once I've wanted to bone up on some particular topic, and stood in the aisle perusing one textbook after another looking for one that would be quickly accessible to me. I put each back where I found it; no effort required from the staff. The alternative--"bring me fifteen books from the archive" is quite a bit more trouble for them.
ReplyDelete