It is no secret that the use of the libraries has undergone drastic changes and numerous articles have been written on this subject. There are several valuable resources available for understanding the trends and the future of the libraries. I would like to link to a few here that are directly relevant to what I would like to discuss.

• Center for the Future of Libraries (Especially the trends)
• Future Libraries –  An excellent report on the future libraries emerging from a series of workshops held by ARUP (“We are an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants and technical specialists offering a broad range of professional services. Through our work we make a positive difference in the world.”)
• Ithaka S+R publications on collections and preservation
• “Campus Libraries Rethink Focus as Materials Go Digital“

Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013 executive summary (the last available survey from them) summarizes some of the key findings on collections:

• A minority of respondents, even at doctoral institutions, believes that purchasing
  print books to build research collections is important, while the large
  majority believes that building local print collections has declined in importance.
  By comparison, the vast majority of respondents see resource sharing
  as an important library function and there is ample evidence across institutional
  types of the importance of collaborative approaches to serving users’
  information needs.
• For journals, the shift from print to electronic collecting has been, from a
  budget allocation perspective, nearly completed. Library directors tend to
  be more comfortable than are faculty members with the print to electronic
  transition for scholarly journals.
• A possible format shift from print books to ebooks appears to be occurring
  at a more measured pace, with relatively small projected increases in ebook
  spending. Views about the importance of ebooks in their libraries have not
  measurably changed over the past three years. With respect to books, library
  directors may if anything be less aggressive in moving towards electronic
  formats than are faculty members.

Drafting a viable plan for managing the library collections as well as the efficient use of library spaces to meet the emerging needs of the students and faculty are activities that we are engaged in. These are extremely difficult topics on which there are differing views, but this statement generally applies to anything we do in library and technology services! What is important is to have broad, and informed conversations, take into consideration multiple dimensions of the issues and come to a sensible conclusion. Yup, easier said than done, but we are making progress…

We are a small liberal arts college and we treasure our libraries and our collections. We are committed to continuing to build our collections so that it serves our faculty and students. However, it is also our collective responsibility to do these in an informed and responsible fashion that recognizes the emerging trends and looking into near future. It is quite obvious that this is where the differences in opinions arise.

You can look at our current collection statistics here. As you can see, we have a fairly large collection. In comparison to our other liberal arts college peers, we fare well. This comparison is based on some traditional metrics such as books or collections budget per student or faculty. I have serious questions about the validity of such metrics, but that is for another post!

You can also look at the library circulation trends at the College over the past few years in our 2015 annual report.

Checkout Trends

If you include data from 2010 and 2011, the decline is even more pronounced. The facts are: our collections budget has essentially stayed flat for the past three years, we continue to add close to 8,000 books to our collections, and checkout trends indicate a significant decline. Of course, the cost of books as well as journal subscriptions have gone up in the past three years, so a flat budget means we had to make necessary adjustments to our acquisitions policy. We do this in a transparent way, for eg. publishing a list of journals whose subscriptions we plan to stop and asking for feedback from the faculty before actually doing it. We have a healthy mixture of the traditional collections development by the librarians with patron driven acquisition.

But, when you look at the data, it is clear that the use of printed books in the library are on the decline. I will be the first to accept that this is an oversimplification of the facts and that there is a lot more to this than the data presented here. For eg. our library staff observe the usage of the stacks, we look at the reshelving data, so on and so forth before making the claim on the reduced use of the stacks. There are many others who point out that the students and faculty do a lot of browsing in the stacks that are not captured here. Whereas this is true, is this a contributing factor that has changed significantly in the past five years? If so, how exactly should this be factored in the discussions about the collections?

But, whether it is Wellesley College or elsewhere, there is a general consensus that there is a noticeable decline in the use of printed books. It is also true that this is very discipline dependent in that the decline is far more pronounced in the sciences than in the humanities. As you saw in the Ithaka S+R survey, resource sharing through consortial participation is emerging as a trend. We already have several excellent collaborations and fantastic interlibrary loan (ILL) service. How do we use this to balance the on local collections?

Those in favor of local collections argue that ILL, like electronic resources, tends to be very goal oriented in that if you know exactly what you want, they work well. However, they do not lend themselves to browsing and discovery. So, where should the balance be? We know that we all have space limitations and even if we decide to continue to build the local collections, we simply cannot accommodate them all in the long run. Does it matter if we hold these collections ourselves (and move some to offsite locations) or rely on shared resources?

We also see that the library is being used heavily by students and in very different ways than before. For example, we notice and hear the need for more collaborative spaces where it can be “noisy” and a clear separation between “silent” and “noisy” spaces. We are also seeing trends in other libraries to make available collaborative spaces for active learning as well as “makerspaces” where the students and faculty collaborate and learn to “make” or “build” things.

Considering all these aspects, one question that we and other libraries are struggling to answer is “what is the optimal strategy for maintaining the on campus collections?” Obviously it is not that easy to answer this question. What exactly does such an optimization involve? How do you do it so that it still serves the community well? How do we balance the on campus collections with off site storage as well as consortial reliance? Who gets to decide where to draw the line?

Thankfully, we have a very engaged oversight committee at the College (Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policy) and a subcommittee has been formed to examine these difficult questions and help us draft a strategic plan for the future. We are looking forward to working with the committee to develop this plan.

If you have opinions on the future of library collections and the library itself, you should contact me and I will be happy to put you in touch with the committee members. It is extremely important for every one of the community member to express their opinions. Observing silence on such an important matter may come to bite you later!

Finally, talking about browsing and discovery, I think there is an excellent opportunity for the technologists to think about a virtual stack to emulate a physical stack. Of course, it requires the mapping of our library collections virtually, but, browsing would require that each holding is digitized and viewable online, which is a non-trivial task.