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Posted Jun 3, 2015, 6:49 AM
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Khurram Parvaz
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: NEW YORK
Posts: 2,424
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Plans for New Barnard Library Prove Divisive
Library Journal
January 22, 2015
Quote:
After years of planning, New York City’s Barnard College is ready to begin construction on its new Teaching and Learning Center (TLC), which will replace Barnard’s Wollman Library in Lehman Hall.
New academic libraries are usually considered a positive thing by their college constituencies. Barnard’s plan of action, however, has proved to be divisive, in the process throwing a light on the question of who gets to make the decisions in a library, and who is shut out of the conversation.
In December 2014, Barnard president Debora Spar presented library faculty with plans for the new building. And while the original plans were “very faculty-focused,” according to one librarian, faculty were reportedly not happy with many of the decisions that had been made. Much of their dissatisfaction has centered on the decision to send a large part of the collection—some 40 percent of the library’s holdings—offsite, and the lack of transparency surrounding the decision-making process.
Librarians were equally unhappy at what they perceived as a fragmenting of the library’s effective system of instruction—“the unit that is BLAIS,” according to one librarian, who requested that LJ not use her name—into discrete areas.
“Anything supporting traditional library service is being moved out,” she added. When library staff members have voiced their concerns to Barnard administration, she added, “I feel like we’re being characterized as change-averse and anxious.”
The new library will meet its future without the guidance of Lisa Norberg, former dean of the Barnard Library and Academic Information Services (BLAIS). She resigned her position in December 2014—although not, as has been reported, to protest her lack of input into the new space. Norberg will be devoting her time to her nonprofit open access venture, K|N Consultants, which she has developed with Rebecca Kennison, who will be leaving her position as Director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia in February. “We’d been plotting this for over a year and a half,” Norberg told LJ, “and it had come to a point where we couldn’t go out and fund raise or pursue any kind of foundational money while we were still affiliated with our institutions, because that would have been a clear conflict of interest. So there were strong motivating factors for making this move. I’m sorry that it got conflated with the problems with the new building.”
Several BLAIS librarians, however, believed that Norberg also felt she could not be an effective advocate for the library in the present situation. “Her vision is really about people,” said one. “For me, that is and has always been, particularly over the course of the past five years, under Lisa’s tenure, the great strength of the Barnard library.”
HALF A CENTURY OF INNOVATION
Since its founding in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University, several blocks to the south. Barnard students have full privileges at the extensive Columbia libraries, but the college has always maintained its own library. When Lehman Hall opened in 1959, it was the first new building on the Barnard campus since 1925, and the existing library moved from its 10,000 square foot quarters in Barnard Hall to what was then considered a thoroughly modern facility. A 1958 announcement of the groundbreaking ceremony in the student paper the Columbia Spectator mentioned a state-of-the-art language lab and the fact that “all the social science departments will be brought together for the first time.”
The next half-century saw a steady stream of innovations. Barnard, a private women’s college, is an undergraduate institution, and the library evolved to educate and empower students at the beginning of their academic careers. Among other features, it currently holds an Instructional Media and Technology Services department that circulates more than 1,000 pieces of equipment per semester, a $700,000 grant-funded Empirical Reasoning Lab, more than 50,000 items in its archival digital collections, and an extensive women-authored zine collection, as well as over 200,000 volumes and a large collection of physical archives.
Norberg was hired in 2010 after having served as the director of public services at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for ten years. She arrived inspired by the culture already in place as well as the challenges, which included helping revise the physical space—“the ultimate usability challenge,” she told Barnard Magazine—and developing student and faculty outreach initiatives.
She made a number of student-centered changes, most notably creating the library’s Personal Librarian program. This initiative matches each first-year student with a librarian who becomes her point of contact for the library—“a go-to-person for all things library-related,” according to the BLAIS website. Each academic department and constellation—student dormitory-based groups—receives one as well. Norberg was enthusiastic about her work at the library, and the administration was open and supportive. Six months into her tenure, then-Provost and Dean of Faculty Elizabeth Boylan told Barnard Magazine, “it’s already clear that we will be benefiting from Lisa’s prior experience with space planning and user services, as well as her vision for how our collections and services should develop to serve the changing needs of our community.”
PLANS IN PROGRESS
At the time, plans for a new library were already in progress. The original idea involved moving the library into the Diana Center, Barnard’s student center, which ultimately proved infeasible. On her arrival at BLAIS, Norberg was put in charge of a task force to plan for a gut renovation of the existing library in Lehman Hall. That option, in turn, was put on hold when the Barnard Board of Trustees requested a study to compare the cost of renovating to that of new construction.
The study was completed in the spring of 2013, and that July the board decided to move ahead on plans to demolish the current building and replace it with the TLC. The architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) was chosen by a 24-member steering committee of trustees, senior administrators, faculty, and students in April 2014, and formal planning for the building began in earnest. Days after the announcement, project leaders from SOM convened a “visioning session” with Barnard President Debora Spar, College Dean Avis Hinkson, outgoing COO Greg Brown, Norberg, and a selection of administrators and student representatives. Students outlined criticisms of the existing library, including the need for a 24-hour study space, a lack of defined library functions, and insufficient natural light. (The concrete grill on the building’s façade was designed by solar consultants Victor and Aladar Olgyay—who, according to the AIA Guide to New York City, “somehow got their north arrow confused: the grillage faces slightly south of east, where there is negligible sun loading.”)
In the spring of 2014, a consultant from SOM asked Norberg to compile a spreadsheet with projections for the BLAIS collections in the new library, detailing what should remain, what should be stored offsite, and what could be deaccessioned. Norberg presented what she felt was a progressive plan, she told LJ, taking into account Barnard’s relationship with Columbia and the unique and important aspects of its own collection. “The reaction from the planning committee and administration in particular was one of dismay,” she said. “They really didn’t envision the library giving that much space to books.”
At the same time, librarians and staff were gathering their own input. “Within the library we had a lot of conversations about what we wanted to see in the new space,” a former BLAIS librarian, who requested that her name not be used, told LJ. “We… developed a very specific assessment committee so that we could communicate to the architects what we wanted, as one of many factors to consider.” While there were information sessions for Barnard staff, and another for students and faculty, she said, “there was never a moment when an architect came and spoke to any of the lower levels of the library staff.”
This sentiment was echoed by a current BLAIS librarian: “We were, in fact, the last people considered.”
A RANGE OF CONCERNS
The decision was eventually made for Barnard to keep roughly 60 percent of the collection on site and send the other 40 percent into offsite storage, although this number is reportedly still under revision. All books will be moved offsite during construction; where they will be stored is reportedly an open issue. (Barnard’s press spokesperson declined to comment on plans involving the new building.) Columbia has agreed to house a small number—around 20,000—of “high-circulation, non-duplicative titles” in its Butler Library during construction, according to Damon Jaggars, interim vice provost and university librarian at Columbia. Class reserves will remain on campus during construction in the temporary library space located in LeFrak Gymnasium.
While there had been some discussion of temporarily storing Barnard’s special collections at ReCAP, Columbia’s offsite facility, both institutions decided that this was not a good option. “Those materials, instead of staying at ReCAP, would have eventually come back. That’s an enormous amount of processing on both ends to make that happen, and it would have been a costly endeavor for them and us,” Norberg explained. “I completely understand why that decision was made.”
Whether any of the collection to be stored offsite will be eligible for storage at ReCAP on a permanent basis remains an open question. Columbia had initially declined to offer Barnard ongoing space in the facility, as Barnard is not technically a part of Columbia. The situation is still reportedly not settled, but library staff worry that any other storage option will result in a difficult or time-consuming turnaround on requests.
And although the fate of the collection is a concern for everyone involved, it is not the only issue frustrating everyone from faculty to staff. As both current and former BLAIS librarians stressed, “The library isn’t just the books.”
“We worked very hard to get the organization to a place where there weren’t divisions,” Norberg told LJ. “We broke down a lot of silos and I think people were working incredibly well together. I would hope that dividing things, as they inevitably will be in the building, will not recreate those silos.” She went on to explain: “I think we were on the cusp of being true partners with the faculty in teaching and learning, and it was reaping some exciting rewards.”
HOPE FOR COMMON GROUND
The demolition of Lehman Hall will begin in December 2015. This fall, library faculty and staff will move into temporary quarters in Barnard’s LeFrak Gymnasium, which includes repurposed space in the former swimming pool, drained at the end of the 2012–13 school year.
The 11-story TLC, which is scheduled to open in 2018, will hold a number of labs, including a Digital Humanities Lab and a Computational Science Center; classrooms; seminar rooms; the Barnard Center for Research of Women; an office for the Athena Center for Leadership Studies; and three floors of offices for history, economics, and political science faculty, among other features. There will be study spaces, a café (yet another concern is the café’s placement over the space where the archives will be housed, putting an irreplaceable collection potentially at risk for water damage), and green spaces. Plans for the finished building and cost estimates were not available at press time.
An underlying issue persists. Many of the librarians who spoke to LJ on the subject described being left out of the decision-making process as one symptom of a pervasive lack of respect for librarians in academia. As the former BLAIS librarian said, “Stepping back from this a little bit, I don’t necessarily see this as something that’s unique to Barnard at all. For me it’s a much larger conversation about advocating for the profession.”
Still, Barnard’s librarians, staff, and faculty, both past and present, hold out hope that the Barnard administration and the BLAIS librarians can find common ground. “If the steering committee consulted and partnered with us,” one librarian said, “we could make it all happen.”
Norberg, too, is optimistic. “The administration has reacted, and I think they…have now made the process more open and more transparent, I hope,” she told LJ. “I hope ultimately that the library is more of a reflection of the staff and is better aligned with the library’s programmatic vision.” Norberg added, “I do think it’s unfortunate that this will be part of the story of this new building and the new library. It doesn’t really tell what I think is a remarkable story of how the library reinvented itself…. There were a lot of good things going on.”
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One man with courage is a majority - Thomas Jefferson
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