Libraries Facilities Master Plan

Linked from the list below you will find the report of the ad hoc Committee on Libraries Facilities Master Plan. This report is the culmination of seven months of spirited discussions about the future of libraries, the information, service, and space needs of faculty, students, and citizens, and the possibilities and constraints surrounding facilities. The report is in several parts:

The library is the information commons of the university, and often serves to symbolize the university as a whole. The number of volumes in a library is a common metric by which the quality of a university may be judged. More important even than size, however, is the reputation of a library for supporting and facilitating the work of faculty and students. This can be done with greater or fewer resources, more or less imagination, and greater or lesser connection to other units.

Why reconsider the University’s approach to the support of libraries at this juncture? By all accounts, libraries are in a state of unprecedented transition. The digital revolution, battles over intellectual property, crises in publishing, and skyrocketing inflationary costs conspire to create dilemmas not only for libraries, but for the university administrations that support them. These are not solely University of Washington problems, but are felt at this university just as acutely nevertheless. There are no obvious solutions; none of our sister institutions have mapped an institutional strategy that serves as a model for the UW. For this reason – and because the budgetary implications of changes in the world of libraries are so profound, the Provost called for a committee to advise him on libraries facilities.

The ad hoc Committee on Libraries Facilities began meeting in the fall of 1999. Membership of the committee (see list, appendix A) included librarians, most notably the Director of the UW Libraries; faculty with expertise in the area of information sciences; other faculty representatives; a graduate student representative; and administrators with portfolios including computing technology and space. The committee quickly divided into three working subgroups: Concepts, Users, and Space. Their individual reports are attached (Appendices B, C, and D, respectively). Although the committee members each took responsibility for consulting with colleagues in their spheres of responsibility and interest, the committee neither held formal hearings nor interviews. The expectation was, rather, that the work of the committee, summarized in this report, would be made widely available for comment following its issue.

It is important to note that this is not a review of UW Libraries as a formal unit, but rather the libraries of the UW. The formal administrative unit, UW Libraries, includes most, but not all of the major libraries on campus. Exceptions include the Law Library and all departmentally based libraries. The committee’s guiding principle was that libraries – as the information commons of the University – are a shared resource and responsibility, and that our well-being as a community of learners and scholars, both within and outside of the UW itself, depends on the decisions that are made about their importance, shape, and size. As a scholarly community, we need to be much more explicitly cognizant of the libraries as a public good, both for understanding and support.

The discussion and recommendations in this report emanate from the committee’s shared understandings about the context in which libraries must negotiate. This context is characterized by change in nearly every dimension:

Change in student population, both quantity and type. There is a growing number of UW students, undergraduate in particular. New fields of study – mostly high technology and interdisciplinary science – are developing continuously. Students are full-time and part-time, evening and day, state-supported and self-sustaining, younger and older, first-time and returning, racially and ethnically diverse, first-generation and fifth-generation, from high school and from community colleges, and so on. As a student community, the UW has never been more heterogeneous.

Change in pedagogy. The use of technology in teaching and learning has been the most obvious and profound change: in the selection and use of materials including the changing nature and use of textbooks, in the development of learning communities, and in the formulation of expectations. New emphases on faculty as facilitators and experiential learning are also notable.

Change in institutional form. The development of UWT and UWB, and the constantly evolving relationship between the three campuses is the most profound change. WWAMI, although not new, is also constantly evolving. Partnerships among institutions – UW and community colleges, UW and other four-year institutions, UW and other Research I universities, UW and industry – all have consequences for institutional structure.

Change in publishing. That publishing costs have skyrocketed is well known. Perhaps less well appreciated is that some fields – particularly high tech fields – have changed the form of knowledge dissemination and have essentially skipped publishing in its traditional format. Computer Science professors don’t publish in the traditional sense; instead they hold seminars and webcast them. Nonetheless, these publications too are catalogued.

Change in the format of information. Books have always been available in libraries. Manipulable, primary data has not. Instead of a map, library patrons can now manipulate coordinate data. Full-text e-journals, online databases, digital books, electronic data sets—these as well as emerging and yet-to-be conceived information formats—all are the concern of academic libraries.

Facilities planning must reflect the nature and pace of these many changes. Libraries’ spaces must address the complexity of today’s library uses but also remain flexible enough to support changes in the ways in which users will rely on libraries in the future.

Against this backdrop of change is that which persists: the needs of users and the purpose of libraries. Users need organized and accessible information resource materials, assistance, and research study space. As the users subcommittee report so clearly demonstrates, users are highly differentiated: faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students have substantially different weights on these three needs. Library facilities should match the aspirations and excellence of the faculty and students in the academic disciplines they serve.

Libraries acquire and distribute collections, organize information and provide access to it, preserve information, and teach applied information literacy. There is more competition in this world, as there is in all of higher education. The concepts subcommittee report explores the purpose of libraries in depth, and shows how they way in which they carry out their missions has changed substantially, even though the basic missions have remained the same.