Where are the books?: The evolution of University Libraries

Newman has six floors. The floors one through five are public areas. Every floor had collections in the building and it was stuffed to the maximum. We started moving books out of Newman in the 2000s. It's been awhile now, especially 10 years ago. I think we've accelerated that process. And the reason is, you know, people were asking for rooms to study in the library, especially for groups to come together. When groups come together, they need technologies, they need screens and they need computers. Sometimes they're using tablets and sharing. So we needed room to provide those things. There are still items in Newman Library, but I'd say a little more than 50 percent of our holdings are off-site now. A lot of those materials are now in the library service center building. So if you see that big gap on second or fourth floor, most of those materials have been moved to the off-site storage facilities. We have about 850 thousand unique volumes in the building. The other building has about 350 thousand volumes, paper volumes, and we have about a million microforms in that building. And these collections are still accessible in multiple ways. The material is easily requestable on the OPAC, the Online Public Access Catalog. Users simply identify the desired item and then the system will walk them through the process and then the items will be delivered to the desired location. We do daily delivery to both Newman, Art and Architecture and Vet Med. It's important that we keep updating basically because in teaching and research keeps evolving and changing and technology has a lot to do with that. But today, content information is made in many different ways and takes many different forms. A lot of it is Internet enabled, but not all of it. There still are print materials that are important. Times are changing and we must use our space in a responsible manner. And I'm very happy to see that the university has provided funding for off-site storage so we can maintain a lot of our traditional paper collection.