UC Berkeley should stop its planned library closures
Arguably more than housing and other issues that typically attract more attention, the latest battle at UC Berkeley threatens the heart of the university: its libraries.
The university says it wants to close three libraries, including its anthropology library, because it says it can't find the money in its $3.1 billion budget.
The fate of the anthropology library, the only one of its kind in the state, and its nearly 45,000 volumes are at the forefront of a planned transformation of the library system.
UC Berkeley intends to shrink the number of libraries from 23 to 10 “hub” libraries, and seven “satellite” libraries, the latter with fewer services, shorter hours if budgets are reduced, and without a librarian in attendance in some cases.
The mathematics statistics library and the physics-astronomy library would also shutter. Some of the books will be transferred to the main library, but others will be sent to its off-site “shelving facility” in Richmond.
The changes reflect a movement taking place throughout higher education in response to changing reading habits. Students increasingly are using libraries not so much for their books but more as study halls.
But university librarians say the main reason for the planned closures is a budgetary one. They say that the library system has 40% fewer employees than it did two decades ago, even as enrollment increased by roughly 12,000 students. It is not, says university librarian Jeff MackieMason, “a result of judging any discipline as less important than any other.”
Losing the anthropology library represents not only an assault on the most prominent symbol on the University of California's seal (a book), but effectively undermines the anthropology discipline itself.
The library is a “crucial component of anthropological inquiry at Berkeley, both for its legacy and for what it has to offer to future generations,” wrote anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, the department chair.
“The library is the central hub holding together the disparate and often disconnected components that make up, not just the department, but the intellectual field of the discipline on campus as well,” Hirschkind wrote.
I spent a lot of time in the library when I was a graduate student in the department — admittedly in pre-internet days when we relied exclusively on hard copies of books.
Yet the testimonials of current students have been moving. They told me that, despite the profound changes in how information is conveyed, the library still plays an essential role in the intellectual and social life of the department.
They say they actually use the books. Many of the library's holdings aren't available online.
“The University and the Library cannot exist without each other,” a high-level commission on the future of the Berkeley library declared a decade ago. The commission called for a “serious major strategy of reinvestment.”
Yet the university is embarking on just the opposite strategy, disinvesting in a repository of knowledge that encompasses and helps sustain an entire discipline, with special significance for California.
It is not too late to change course.