Surrounded by school's knowledge, head of library outlines next 2 years of book services
By Laban Pelz
The Collegian
The books that once filled the shelves of Henry Madden Library now lie in a south Fresno warehouse while a new home on campus waits to be built.
“This is probably the only time you’ll see nearly a million volumes in one room,” said dean of library services Michael Gorman, though “in a couple years we won’t need it anymore.”
Gorman and Fresno State President John Welty toured the storage facility Wednesday. Gorman outlined the new system students have been using to get a book while Welty reaffirmed the need for the new library.
“The library is the heart, the lifeblood of a university,” Welty said. “For years we’ve struggled with a library that’s too small. This (planned new library) will serve students for years to come.”
Gorman said Henry Madden Library was built with 13,000 students in mind when constructed in 1979. Fresno State now has a population of nearly 20,000 students.
“It was absolutely inadequate,” Gorman said.
He said the new library, which is scheduled to be ready for the fall 2008 semester, will be able to support 30,000 students as well as others from the community. It will be the largest building on campus, he said, rivaled only by the Save Mart Center.
“It will be a serious research collection,” Gorman said. “The most advanced in the Central Valley.”
Gorman said the new procedure students must go through to check out materials is working well.
A couple times each day a van makes trips between campus and the warehouse, ferrying books to and from students, who must request the material in advance. Gorman said circulation is about 600 books a day, which is more than he had expected.
“I was surprised at the amount,” he said. “I thought it would be a lot less.”
Gorman said one of the biggest losses that has come with the library’s literary exodus is less “in-house circulation,
“For every one book checked out, there’s two left on a desk. There’s a heavy in-house use,” he said of what in-house circulation was when the library was operational.
What leads to in-house use is study space, which Gorman counted as another casualty of the transition. He said there were 1,200 places to sit and study before parts of the library began to close down; now there are 100.
“It’s concentrated and awkward,” he said.
Concentrated with books is the warehouse, which manager Chris Ebert said is doing well with a college’s worth of volumes.
He said while student assistants are running the book circulation, movers did most of the work bringing the text in.
“Sometimes there’s an HQ in the JX,” Ebert said. “But they’ve done an amazing job. It came together much better than we thought.”
Ebert said it’s normal for libraries to misplace books and now it’s happening more often.
“We always lose them, but now we can’t blame others,” he said.
Ebert said the warehouse is meeting between 85 and 90 percent of students’ book requests.
Comment on this story in the News forum >>
|
