Why don’t we have volunteers bring the books back?

Every couple of months, I see something in the comments section of a blog or a news article that asks why Morris Library can’t just have volunteers bring the books, all the books back from the McLafferty Annex. Aside from all of the issues with liability, loss, misshelving, and the scale of such a move, there’s an obvious reason that it isn’t happening. The basement of Morris Library, where the books are to go, does not have shelves. Despite all of the people who have been to the basement for events or tornado warnings, this information still is not widely known.

In case you don’t believe me, here are some photographs of the unfinished parts of the library.

The basement has space for shelves but no shelves.

The sixth floor needs more work than the basement.

The seventh floor looks a lot like the sixth. 

Morris Library after Midnight

The north end of Morris Library will be open all night for SIUC students Sun. - Thurs. this fall. The possibility to open part of the library late at night without having the entire building open was part of the building design when it was renovated a few years ago. Morris Library had been cutting back on late night hours because there wasn't enough money to have enough staff to monitor all of the floors late at night nor interest in having lots of security cameras instead of staff. The extended hours area at the north end of the library has study and computer space but does not have print books or other physical library materials that would need to be protected.

According to the article in The Southern, Chancellor Cheng comments on this change were, "Institutions that have high quality and rigorous programs, like SIU, must provide appropriate opportunities for on campus and off campus students to study individually and in small groups in a quiet and safe setting." I'm not sure if the extended hours area will live up to that. It already is a challenge for the library to be simultaneously as welcoming, busy, and quiet as everyone would like. The quiet part is especially hard. For example, the UIUC Undergrad Library at 12:13 AM is busy, but it is not quiet.

Big Deals and Opportunity Costs

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently the decision at Morris Library and other libraries to drop out of ‘Big Deals.’ David Fowler and Jonathan Nabe gave a conference presentation about the topic, and the article was based largely on that presentation.

Both the Chronicle article and the subsequent comments emphasize the raw dollar cost of the deals and of dropping out of them. Some of the comments note that when they examined their usage statistics, they realized that it would cost more to offer the same level of access to journals in their Big Deal if they dropped out.

When the inflation rate for journals outstrips inflation and the library’s collections budget lags behind inflation, it means the library is going to offer less of something. In the last decade, there were big cuts to the journals outside the Big Deals. It had reached the point that not dropping out of the Big Deal would amount to cancelling subscriptions to important journals from societies and small publishers that weren’t in a position to have a Big Deal.

If you think that the library should have cut something other than journals, please keep in mind that from 2004-2005 to 2008-2009, the serials spending at Morris Library, the Law Library, and the Medical Library in Springfield went from $5.5 million to $6 million. The total (non-capital) library expenditures for that same time went from $14.6 million to $15.2 million. A lot of the cuts already were coming from something other than journal subscriptions. (These numbers come from the ARL Statistics and are not constant dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator, $14.6 million in 2005 is $16 million in 2009 dollars).

We were not looking at how much it would cost to keep the same level of access; it was looking at what loss of access would be the least painful. 

Higher Impact Factor this Year than Last - So What?

Thomson Reuters recently announced that the newest Impact Factors are available. Soon after, I received emails from journal publishers bragging that their Impact Factors had gone up this year compared to last year. My response to these emails was to roll my eyes. According to the documentation, "The journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year." It isn't exactly that, because it only counts the times that the articles are cited by other sources in Thomson Reuters' database, but that's not my problem with bragging about an Impact Factor going up. My problem is that Impact Factors in general have been going up because reference lists have been getting longer. I would be much happier if journals would advertise that they'd gone up in the Impact Factor rankings for their subject areas than if they advertised something as empty as the raw number going up. Although it wouldn't solve all of the problems with interpreting what a boost in Impact Factor means, it would be an improvement over the raw number.

By the way, if you heard somewhere that citations were going down, you may have gotten it from the article in Science by James Evans. Its abstract certainly suggests that by stating, "I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles." The article itself makes it clear, though, that the number of citations went up over time. It says, "In each subsequent year from 1965 to 2005, more distinct articles were cited from journals and subfields. The pool of published science is growing, and more of it is archived in the CI each year. Online availability, however, has not driven this trend." In essence, Evans is saying that the growth in citations and in citation diversity was slowed rather than created with online availability, not that it was reversed.