Starting a revolution: placing a limit on collection size

Citation

Holt, G. (2003), "Starting a revolution: placing a limit on collection size", The Bottom Line, Vol. 16 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2003.17016aab.001

Starting a revolution: placing a limit on collection size

Starting a revolution: placing a limit on collection sizeKeywords: Acquisitions (library materials), Collection management, Materials costs, Space utilization, Space planning

Through most of library history, no matter what the size of the library, librarians have wanted more space. Most especially, they have wanted ever more shelves on which to house their burgeoning collections. This continual demand for more space was based on a nearly sacred principle, that since every book had value for someone, every library ought to buy and hold all the books it could afford.

Many years ago, I heard the most expansive articulation of this principle from the director of Oxford's Bodlian Library. At the end of his after-dinner speech, a fascinated listener asked, "What if you had all the money you wanted? What would you do to improve your library?" Without hesitation and smiling broadly, the Bodlian director replied: "I would build a library that would hold all of our present and future collections, a library so big that I would be able to walk on its roof from Oxford to London without ever coming down."

Contrast that answer with comments from a recent conversation with a public library director from another country. Through his professional tenure he has built a dozen library edifices. These have been of varying size with most having shelves for from 100,000 to 500,000 books.

I told him the Bodlian director story and then asked if he too held to the ever-expanding size principle in planning library interiors. Or had there been a change? He replied, "Only a revolution!"

This revolution, he said, was in the amount of floor space he devoted to books in each of his library designs. At the outset of his career, he reserved 60 percent of a new facility's square footage to book stacks – plus designing in future room to expand collection size. In his most recent library designs, he said, he allocated only 40 percent to book stacks. The other 60 percent he devoted to reading and study seats, listening and viewing areas, public computer units, eating and/or snack areas and "vista spaces" where users can use signage and other visual clues to set a course toward library collections and services self-navigation without bothering staff.

Along with devoting a smaller percentage of square footage to shelving for bound materials, the director also had repositioned book stacks within the library's floor plan. In the simplest terms, he generally had moved book stacks from the center of the library to its periphery. In the open core, pathways and "vista spaces" of his library designs, he placed study chairs and tables, computer stations and staff-access/service desks. These changes drew users toward the center to form user communities, with patrons moving individually toward the edge of the building to browse and find books in open stacks.

In the context of these significant changes, I asked, how did he make provision for growth in the collections. In his new design map, how did he deal with the library's historic need for ever more shelves to hold an ever larger collection? "There won't be any collection growth," he stated. "We are building high visitation, high circulation libraries that will change their operations to meet ever changing community needs. And that means controlling collection size and balancing it with other institutional uses. Besides, other library uses are growing faster than paper materials circulation."

My director friend and I, of course, both recognize that archival book holding remains a principal reason for the creation and upkeep of prime library space. But for most libraries, especially public libraries, the need for ever more stack space, a shibboleth of library planning for centuries, is no longer valid. The transformative force of this shift is networked computing, which has crushed some book markets and changed others. It also has affected the way that many citizens get their information and the kind of information they want. Within this context, limiting the size of paper-based collecting is an obvious policy opportunity.

With this policy, however, comes a set of related changes that affect library building and operations. A few of these are outlined here:

• •

  The "no collection growth" assumption immediately raises the question of the cost of stack storage. Some of our newest and biggest college, university and main public libraries have been built for about the same price as a new European castle. On a square-foot cost, how much is too much to invest in an elegant, massive book warehouse? And should that book warehouse be located on prime campus or city real estate? Put another way, how many users daily, weekly or yearly should make use of heavily stacked collections before the investment in their expensive storage is justified? The St Louis Central Library illustrates a cost-connected storage issue. If we hold the collections constant with no growth in our Central rehab plan, we will creating book storage space that will cost between $200 and $300 per square foot – and we will have to double the size of our downtown building from under 200,000 SF to over 400,000 SF. As we faced this cost, we thought we should consider other less expensive space-gaining solutions. Other city governments in recent library building history often have spoken on this subject with their pocketbooks. The use of San Antonio Main Library as a neighborhood rehabilitation project (outside the downtown high rent district) is one solution. Other libraries like King County (suburban Seattle, WA) and Mid-Continent (suburban Kansas City, MO) have created lower cost administrative and processing centers away from their high demand (and relatively high cost) library branches. None of us would object to spending large amounts of money on a magnificent library, but in this age of limited and finite resources, taxpayers and library professionals ask if this expense is justified to house every old book currently housed there. When collection size and the space devoted to collections storage is fixed, those who plan library buildings have many more options in how to design interior space looks and functions and the kind of building infrastructure needed to support operations.

• •

  Fixed-sizing of collections has another advantage. An engineer who examined St Louis's old Carnegie branch library buildings said that the floor loads throughout these edifices were appropriate for library stacks, a piano factory or a steel mill. With collections limited from growing, it is not necessary to build in stack-weight floor loads throughout the whole building. My staff and I took advantage of this knowledge when we rehabilitated a three-story-plus-basement office building into a regional branch library. When we purchased the building, we recognized that the floors were for office weights, not library stack rates. Our solution was to prepare certain areas on each floor for loaded stack weights and to leave the other floors at office weight loading. We hung the new stacks and the library's public areas on a new exterior frame that brought the stacks up to earthquake-resistant standards.

• •

  Fixed-size collections place a premium on the intellectual and managerial acumen of professional librarians. That is because collection development becomes collection management, with recognition that less material may serve just as well or better than the old policy of holding onto almost everything. Certainly this is the case in St Louis. We have opened or reopened nearly a dozen branch libraries over the last decade. Each one has opened with more public space and fewer books and magazines than when it held more materials. In each case, circulation has jumped and remains elevated over the old facility that held many more (including lots of old) books. Continuing and special project weeding opens up space, makes it easier to display materials, and sends the message to patrons that they do not have to waste their time looking through hundreds of older books to find the few new ones they want to read.

• •

  A related policy issue to fixed-sizing of collections is how to optimize all space within a library building, especially that space given over to shelves full of materials. Turnover rates, a traditional form of success measurement, become policy tools for judging the effectiveness of collections management, become more important. Other measures are useful as well. What is the utilization of materials in-house and what are the use-patterns for study seating and computers. My staff and I continue to devise use targets, including floor-use measures, for all library services.

• •

  Living with fixed size collections also affects how libraries collect. On the one hand, library professionals need to build the largest possible collection to meet the specific needs of those who come to use a particular library. To that needs to be added collections marketing to those persons and groups most likely to use the collections. At St Louis's Central Library, we have just taken on the task of holding an important regional collection directed to non-profit fund raising. To house this collection, we are deciding now which materials from the humanities, social sciences and other research collections can be eliminated from Central book stock.

• •

  All of the policies I have outlined in the previous five paragraphs suggest the need for rational resource sharing of little used materials. One profound illustration of cooperative storage and use can be seen in a huge cave carved into the sandstone bluff that borders the Mississippi River on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota. With temperature, humidity, fire control and lighting all optimized to enhance the life of the collections stored there, university and public libraries from throughout the state send materials they no longer want or need to the cooperative storage facility. With computer-based object identification, storage area staff can retrieve any volume in a matter of minutes. A statewide delivery system makes any stored volume available to any library involved with the state project. The system allows the state's libraries access to older or specialized materials they do not wish to hold while utilizing freed-up space to functions that better serve active users.

I hope this article will help readers think critically about the need for expansive staff space, especially in expensive new buildings. A copy of every book published may need to be saved, but it is not likely that your library is the appropriate long-term storage space for any particular book.

The most extreme advocacy for wrong-headed holding of every book came in the form of a letter I received from San Francisco a few years ago. The writer, a retired professor in Asian languages, berated me for allowing deaccession of an 1897 Chinese-language mathematics textbook from our SLPL collections. After trying unsuccessfully to give away this book to any other library, we placed the volume on a table at one of our semi-annual book sales. A near relative of the professor purchased the book and sent it to him.

When I replied to his letter complaining about our deaccessioning this particular book, I told him how we could not find any library that wanted the volume. Neither could we find how it had come into the collections, and it certainly did not fit into any of our collections-development categories. In the end, therefore, I could not justify why the taxpayers of St Louis had borne the cost of holding, cleaning, moving and otherwise handling this foreign language elementary school math text for nearly a century. The people of St Louis, I told the writer, should not have the financial responsibility for storing this book. I concluded my letter by saying that the little math book was exactly where it should be: in the hands of someone who appreciated it. The professor's job, I told him, was to find a repository that would accept the volume after he died. Then others who shared his definition of the usefulness of the item could have public access to it.

Old institutional mythologies, especially those bound up with familiar annual spending patterns, die hard. The need for "ever more shelving" is one of the most powerful dead hands of the past still affecting the collecting realities of twenty-first century libraries. Obviously, some libraries need to acquire and hold certain kinds of books for many decades. Most do not. And the new realities of networked computing, relatively cheap movement of single books from place to place and the escalating costs of library construction suggest that limiting collection size is a worthwhile policy for more libraries to consider. The decision to limit collection size can bring positive benefits to many libraries as they attempt to match the changing information and reading opportunities of the networked-computing library world.

Glen HoltExecutive Director of the St Louis Public Library, St Louis, MO, USA