New libraries for a new millennium: Challenges and opportunities
Doris Small Helfer
Searcher; Nov/Dec 2003; 11, 10; ABI/INFORM Complete
pg. 42
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by Doris Small Helfer
Chair, Technical Services Library
California State University, Northridge
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H. Bruce Miller and Paul 1\clalian
arc men who clearly enjoy challenges
and, even more, the opportunities
provided in starting new academic libraries. Mr. Miller is the founding
university librarian at the University
of California (UC), Merced, and Mr.
1\dalian, the founding university librarian at California State University
(CSU), Channel Islands.
Background
lJC Merced is the lOth and newest
University of California campus and
CSU Channel Islands the 23rd California State University campus. UC
Merced is the first new University of
California campus started since the
mid-1960s. The town of Merced bills
itself as the gateway to Yosemite and
currently consists of about 63,000
people. In starting a campus, the University of California does not seem to
follow the model used by the California State University system of having
one campus help to spawn a new
campus until the growth of an area's
population warrants the addition of
another campus. UC Merced is building not only a wholly new university,
but also a planned community able
to house 30,000 people near campus.
The new community will he comprised of many who will work at and
attend the university.
The first freshmen class of 1,000
students is scheduled to start in the
fall of 2004, although eight founding
faculty members and their post -doc42 I
s
lora! students began summer classes
in 2003. The campus expects to grow
by 1,000 full- time equivalent students
every year until it reaches its planned
goal of 25,000 in the next 25 years.
CSU Channel Islands started completely differently than UC Merced.
The campus is located in Camarillo,
California, in Ventura County, midway between Los Angeles and Santa
Barbara. Rather than a brand- new facility, the campus involves the renovation and transformation of the 680acre site of the former Camarillo State
Mental Hospital, more infamously
known by the Eagles song as "Hotel
California." The main entrance winds
through farmland, orchards, and
rocky foothills leading to dramatic
Spanish-revival architecture, built in
the 1930s as part ofFDR's Works Project Administration program. The
sprawling structures with red-tiled
roofs reflect California's past, from
the landmark Bell Tower paying
homage to a nearby mission to the
Catalina and Malibu tile work on the
fountains that decorate many of the
40 courtyards. ln 1998, the state of
California designated $16.7 million to
begin the renovation of the 85 Spanish-style one- and two-story buildings, which funded 100,000 square
feet of space for classrooms and offices.
for many years, California State
University, Northridge J:las had a
small Ventura branch campus serving
residents of Ventura County with a
small library attached. The Ventura
Branch and library have moved from
its previous campus in the city ofVentura to the new CSU Channel Islands
campus. Once CSUN's Ventura campus enrollment reached a level that
could sustain a 4-year university,
early in 2002, it officially became CS lJ
Channel Islands. The new school just
welcomed its first freshmen class this
fall. Campus enrollment stands at
2,270, but that number includes over
1,300 CSU Northridge students attending CSU Channel Islands as a
satellite campus. When the first 4year class graduates in 2007, CSUCI
expects more than 4,000 students to
be enrolled. By 2025, enrollment is
expected to reach capacity and serve
more than 15,000 full-time equivalent students.
Early Beginnings
When Mr. Miller arrived at UC
Merced very early in 2001, the only
other UC Merced employees were the
chancellor, some university advancement and communications employees, and a few others. He was hired
just as the hiring of the academic staff
started. The budget for the University
Library was still a huge unknown at
the time, but Miller did know that
whatever the budget, it would not he
enough for everything that might be
needed down the line. When asked
why the position interested him, he
replied, "Being part of the founding
team for lJC Merced offered a unique
opportunity to help create a world-
SEARCHER: Tile MagaLIIl" lor Dalab,Jsc: Prolessronills
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class research university and a research library for the 21st century
founded on the best practices of the
profession and enabled by emerging
technology. Imagine having the chance
to start a socially responsible, muchneeded, cutting-edge business with a
backlog of customers and the State of
California as the provider of venture
capital. How could you turn down
such an opportunity?"
Preliminary planning and focus
groups about what the library would
need preceded Mr. Miller's arrival at
UC Merced, with money already allocated for a library building. Currently
scheduled to open in the fall of 2004,
the library will be one of the first three
buildings constructed on the UC
Merced campus. The contract for the
construction has been awarded and
the construction will begin soon. The
library will house physical collections
and information resources to serve
the needs of the first American research university to be built this century. Even though it has no large
physical collection yet, the library is
operating as if on the scale of an Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
library. "The library will be both a
building and a service. The building
will house the enterprise that acquires, organizes, and delivers information resources in support of student and faculty research and study.
Library resources and services will be
available in the building as well from
computers connected to the campus
network and to the Internet."
When Paul Adalian started as the
founding university librarian at CSU
Channel Islands in June 2002, he was
much more fortunate in terms of resources already on board. Since the
CSU Northridge library had built a
small academic library collection
over the years, many of the books
needed for a college library were already in the collection. Several years
before Adalian's hiring, the Channel
Islands campus had received several
million dollars to build its collection.
Dean Susan C. Curzon of CSU Northridge's Library and Dean Rod Ilerswww. infotoday.com/sea rcher
berger of CSU Bakersfield's Library
were hired as consultants to CSU
Channel Islands to help start the
planning and purchasing of materials for the library. Yankee Book Peddler, a library bookseller, was contracted to ensure tbc library bought
appropriate books, which were sent
to a contract cataloger for addition to
the OCLC database. CSU Northridge's
library had also hired part-time librarians for the Channel Islands library. Consequently, Mr. Adalian already had a significant collection and
staff when he arrived at CSU Channel
Islands, but that didn't mean that he
didn't have much to do.
Visions
Before coming to UC Merced, Mr.
Miller had worked as the head of
Technical Services at UC San Diego,
so he understood the University of
California system. Miller believes,
however, that he needs to gather semina! works for his university libraryboth in print and digital. Ilis library
and Carnegie-Mellon University are
working together on what is being
called the "Million Books Project." UC
Merced will work on acquiring copyright permission, while Carnegie Mellon will digitize those books on the list
of books for college libraries. He believes this will add between 65,000 to
75,000 books to the electronic shelves
of the library.
Miller says he realized that although there is not as much money
as there should be for the collection,
this is an opportunity rather than a
problem. He can't create the library
in a conventional way, so he is rethinking everything. He believes that
UC Merced will be an equal peer
with the other nine UC campuses
and thinks that libraries arc on a very
important cusp in electronic information delivery. Five years ago, he
says, it would not have been possible to truly have a library based
largely on electronic information,
but today, much more has become
available electronically. I lc is focus-
ing on the University of California,
one university, one library model. lie
views his library as part of the entire
University of California collection,
and as such, he expects to get materials delivered to his library in a day
from wherever it might reside in the
UC system. He docs not plan to have
any print subscriptions, other than a
few popular titles, but rather to rely
entirely on electronic versions of
journals to deliver access. Part of this
is necessitated by the small stall the
library has at present and will have
until the California budget situation
gets better, but he has no intention
of ever adding long runs of periodicals. In this way, he plans to save on
binding and handling costs. Currently, the library stall consists of
Miller, a head of Technical Services,
a head of Public Services, a digital assets librarian, and his assistant.
Miller does recognize that some
basic materials will need to be on the
shelves, even if not necessarily on
opening day. This is perhaps the
biggest impact the huge California
budget deficit will have on the library,
but items users need will arrive within
24 hours through the University of
California's intracampus daily deliveries. Miller explains:
Some library resources will be
in physical packages that sit on
shelves: books, paper archives,
sound recordings, maps, photographs, and much more. Others will be in digital packages,
such as online journal articles,
data sets, and geographic information systems. With the integration of the physical and the
digital to create a 21st-century
library for UC Merced, the librarywill also be a vibrant place
for learning and collaboration.
While there, students and faculty will receive the highestquality support for their information resource needs, and
they will become prepared to
make the fullest usc of the library's digital content and services from their personal comNovcmiJCcr/DcccrniJcr 2003
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143
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UC Merced
puters when they are in the ir
dorms, labs, offices, and homes.
The UC Merced library will not only
borrow from other UC libraries, it
hopes to give back valuable digital content. Not only will the library have the
65,000 to 75,000 digital books for college libraries by2007, but it has a grant
to create digital assets on Japanese art
as well as much support and a significant number of gifts and loans from
the San Joaquin Valley community to
digitize family assets, such as diaries
and important papers about the community and its citizens, including a
Japanese internment camp newsletter.
With his limited staff, Mille r is
looking at different ways to deliver instruction and reference service since
he lacks the staff to teach each class
how to use resources. He is looking at
online tutorials and electronic reference as necessities ra ther than options. He is combining an information
desk for the library with one for all student services. He is also consolidating
circulation, reference, and document
d elive ry. Patrons will do self-check
out. The new library will only have
about 180,000 square feet, which, by
traditional ARL standards, is pretty
small. Howeve r, because UC Merced
will not be adding print journals, he
thinks the campus will not outgrow
th e library for the foreseeable future.
44 I
The library will incorporate a lot of
places for students to not only have
study space, but to also use computers. Miller plans to make the library as
inviting, friendly, and welcoming as
possible to ensure that even though
electronic delivery of services may
elimin ate the necessity for students
to come to the library as often as before , th e students will still want to
come. The library will try to do more
partn erships with other academic
institutions such as CSU Fresno and
CSU Stanislaus. Mr. Miller is trying
to get away from some of the Uni versity of California insularity within
the UC sys tem.
AtCSU Channe!Islands, Mr.Adalian
immediately went about hiring a permanent staff. He has already hired a
head of Reference and a head of Technical Services, both of whom started in
the middle of2003. Mr. Adalian was the
assistant dean for Information and Instruction at California Polytechnic, San
Luis Obispo. He expects a staff dedicated to working hard and making a difference for students. In looking for alibraty software system to best suit his
library' needs, he recently purchased
the Endeavor software, currently scheduled for delivery early in 2004. The final
responsibility CSU Northridge will have
for CSU Channel Islands is to ensure
that the CSU Channel Island records
get transferred to the new Endeavor
software and taken off the CSU Northridge database.
CSU Channel Islands library construction of the new library and media center will begin in February 2004
and is schedul ed for completion is
2006. The building is designed to be
a campus landma rk. Award-winning
architect Norman Foster did the design. Adalian favored the plans already in the works for the new building before he arrived, but he did have
more rooms set aside in the new library for students, student clubs, and
activities, as well as areas both for
quiet individual study and for more
group study a nd participation. Like
the rest of the campus, the library is
partially a remodel, rather than completely new construction. The new library will have two very different and
distinct parts. The old hospital's medical facility was aU-shaped facility; it
will be completely renovated and beco me part of the new library, but
completely new space will be built up
within the U of the of old building connecting to the older facility. The structure integration will not b e seamless.
Users will pass through a hall to the
new building.
Mr. Adalian m ade working with the
30 founding faculty at CSU Channel
Islands a top priority, a priority he extends to his permanent staff. He and
his staff are working closely with the
fo unding faculty and eventu ally the
other new faculty. Since the budget
has gotten tighter, he also wants to
work with th e faculty to ensure that
the library has the instructional materials that the faculty needs. Adalian
was able to license the Saskia Digital
images for art objects, buying the
rights in perpetuity and creating a customizable, Oracle, Web-based database that allows professors to save
their commentary about the work of
art with the image so students can review professorial commentary. He is
working closely with all the faculty, not
only in art, but in biology, chemistry,
and environmental sciences, to handle lots of different types of images.
Since the libra1y and university are still
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•
relatively small, some services can be
offered that might not be possible in a
larger organization. At the end of finals
last spring, the library hosted a Finnish
Finals Finale and was able to serve
everyone in the library Finnish coffee
cakes. The staff is also trying to develop the library as the cultural center
ofthe campus.
Fundraising has become an increasing part in the life of a university
librarian these days. Administrations
mandate it, as they realize that less
and less is being supported by the
state and the schools become more
dependent on getting donations. Libraries reaching out to people in the
community have been surprisingly rewarded, not only by wonderful monetary donations, but also by gifts to the
university that in some cases greatly
increase the university's special collections and digital assets.
Conclusion and Trends
Although both of these libraries
have very different early beginnings, it
is quite clear that a new paradigm for
modern academic libraries is emerging, one very different from the academic libraries of the past. No longer do
academic librarians buy a book just in
case someone someday might want it.
There is no more money for that, nor
will that era likely ever return, even
when budget situations get better. We
have crossed into a new era of "just in
time" document delivery, not "just in
case" acquisitions. The belief that libraries need only promise to deliver
items when needed dominates even librarians claiming and thinking of their
new facilities as ARL research libraries.
Traditional print journals seem no
longer to matter, as libraries stretched
for space and staff realize that electronic journals do not require staffto
check them in, nor staff to send them
to bindery; neither do pages ever get
ripped and torn from their electronic
bindings. And the print function on
a browser can take the place of tired
copiers. While CSU Channel Islands
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dramatic Spanlsh·ravklal ~.rchitecture, built~ the 1930s as.P<).rt o! FDA~ Works
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CSU Channel Islands
had a small book collection built
over many years by CSU Northridge,
UC Merced did not, substituting a
partnership with Carnegie Mellon
University to digitize and get copyright permission for the use of the
Books for College Libraries collection and providing access to digital
versions by 2007.
In another striking trend, though
eliminating the need for students and
faculty to come physically into the library, these new head librarians are
doing more and more to ensure visits
to the library for a variety of traditional and not so traditional reasons.
The library will still be a quiet place
to study, but, in some cases, it will
also be a place to drink lattes and talk
with friends, to study in a group study
room, and to meet with fellow club
members for student body activities
or for instruction in how to do research. For whatever reasons, social
or cultural, the library is increasingly
recognized as a hub and an important research and cultural core of the
university. Both Mr. Miller and Mr.
Ad ali an set the needs of students and
faculty as their number-one priorities
and want to work very closely with
the faculty to ensure their collections
meet students' needs.
Another trend is sadly clear as well.
State universities can no longer count
on money sufficient to run everything
anymore. State university libraries
must build their own endowments in
order to continue to fund what used
to come from the state.ln many cases,
fundraising and outreach to the community results not only in donations
to the library, but also to the additional benefit of access to some wonderful collections, including diaries,
local history, old photographs offamilies and the community. Libraries are
turning these into digital assets that
will undoubtedly be of great interest
to members of the community and
historians, as well as strengthening
ties to local historical associations
and community groups.
In talking to both Mr. Adalian and
Mr. Miller, you get a strong sense of
their dedication and their leadership
in building a staff truly dedicated to
the customers. The librarians they
hire must be involved and engaged to
meet the needs of students and faculty. Only by helping students and
faculty succeed can the libraries truly
succeed. These librarians see themselves as core and the key to success for
students and the faculty and ultimately
for the institutions they serve.
•
For more information on these campuses, check out these Web sites: http:!/
www.ucmerced.edu/lib/ and http://www.
csuci .edu/aboutus. htm.
November/December 2003
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145