Libraries losing.

Just finished up several days in Salt Lake City. I wandered around town less than I have at other conferences, but this was primarily because I spent most of Sunday with a fellow iSchool alum. It was great to meet his family and friends--they actually threw a brunch!

The conference itself was especially good for me, but the side conversations were dire. There are considerable shakeups happening out there in library land, and I have been thinking carefully about their effects on colleagues across the country and in my own library. Lunchroom conversation this week has been similar topics: What services will continue into the future? Who will be responsible for them? Will as many people work on providing them? What will the library look like as an organization in 5, 10, 20 years? In six months?

The public news is serious:
A big cut at UW.
Other ARL libraries are cutting. And this isn't a very comprehensive list. For example: my own ARL library is in the middle of a 30% serial cut.

The private news, gathered at the abovementioned conference and via the grapevine: one colleague holding a 'temporary' spot for five years finally had her position advertised: but with a caveat in the job description that makes her unqualified. A 20% staff reduction at another prominent university library. A 'terminal contract' for someone not quite ready to retire. And again, in my own library: a 25% monograph cut last fall BEFORE the campus started talking about across-the-board cuts.

In an environment where the dean says that her two largest priorities are preventing staff and (further) collection cuts, we can't help but wonder if the choice is really hers. In a budget where more than 90% of the money goes directly to staff and collections, what else is there to cut if there is a budget rescission? We're not dumb, and we don't think the collection can really stand another cut. The only temporary solution that I can imagine is a 'year without books,' which some other libraries have done in the past. But I don't know that we would be allowed to only plan for one year. Cuts to budgets take a long time to come back.

Unfortunately for this blog, this leads to a lot of conversations that I would never repeat online. Conversations about whether or not administrators have enough information to make sound decisions. Or whether they understand the information that they have. Conversations about which services (read: departments) have outlived their usefulness. Which ones are nice to have, but unessential.

I had a job interview a few years ago where I went out on a limb at one point. It was a library with about 65 staff, completely traditional in its range of services. Basically, a mid-size college in a mid-size city. In any interview you get asked to do a bit of handwaving: What will the future look like? What sorts of new services do you want to see in the future? How will librarians spend their time as more and more tools become self-service and materials arrive more and more shelf ready? I gave what I thought were pretty middle-of-the-road answers: more data services; more assistance with higher-level projects; leveraging of unique and local collections. The people just weren't getting it though. It's as if they hadn't left the building in 25 years. That's when I decided to go out on that limb and say something to the effect of:

"Look, they (the researchers and students) really don't need us anymore. Someday a provost or a president or a politician is going to come in and notice that there's a lot of people sitting around and not doing anything. As a proportion of new materials, we do almost zero original cataloging--and even that could be outsourced. There's a hundred service companies that will provide shelf-ready books, electronic content, and outsourced web development and technical support. We already have distributed virtual reference--how long will it be before the person on the other end of the chat widget is living on another continent? This isn't a particularly big library, and I haven't seen very much that is out of the ordinary. It could be run with 15 people: Three to hire, train, and supervise student assitants. One to do selection. One (preferably a lawyer) to negotiate contracts. A couple to manage integrate online systems together and design a web front end. One to visit classrooms and do other sorts of teaching and outreach."

You get the idea. But my audience didn't. They were having nothing of it. Two years later? While 15 might not be the right number, there are staff reductions happening everywhere.

The problem with many libraries--not just my own--is that the people who decide who stays and who goes are not the best equipped to make that decision. In only 1 case, out of the 6 I have learned about in recent weeks, is there any sort of rational planning happening to make sure that the library is evolving into some sort of new entity through this process. So what does this mean for the other 5? Irrelevancy? Absorption by another campus unit? A warehouse for grumpy employees treading water until retirement?

Stay tuned. The next few years will be interesting.