College and Research Libraries By D O N A L D CONEY The Flooding Tide Or: Where Did You Go? T o the Library. What Did You Get? Nothing. TH E M O S T important phenomenon likely to affect our libraries in the near future is a very greatly increased college and university enrollment.1 T h e high birth rate of the 1940's guarantees an unusually large supply of college-age youth by the early 1960's. T h e rate of in- crease is enhanced by a general improve- ment in public health. Our complicated culture, resting on a scientific and tech- nological base, requires a great many people of more than high school educa- tion. A prosperous economy supports a rising standard of living, which includes attendance at institutions of higher edu- cation. As this was written, in December, it was fashionable in the year-end busi- ness reviews, to depreciate our immediate economic future. This, for planning pur- poses, must be regarded as a short-term condition. Our whole national proclivity is toward continued and increasing pros- perity for the growing population. In short, we may expect, unless visited by the dislocations of war or economic ca- tastrophe, that universities—whose li- braries we represent—will have to cope very soon and for a long time with steady and very substantial student increases. T h e U. S. Office of Education2 report- ed recently that for the sixth consecutive year a new record in college and uni- versity enrollments has been established. 1 Address delivered before the U n i v e r s i t y L i b r a r i e s Section, Chicago, M i d w i n t e r Meeting, J a n u a r y 28, 1958. 2 U . S. D e p a r t m e n t of H e a l t h , Education, a n d Wel- f a r e . Office of Education. News release f o r December 28, 1957. Mr. Coney is Librarian, University of California, Berkeley. Four per cent more students had en- rolled in colleges and universities in the fall of 1957 than in the fall of 1956. T h i s load is borne unequally; publicly sup- ported institutions gained 6 per cent, whereas privately supported colleges and universities gained only 2 per cent. Lib- eral arts colleges, teachers colleges, and junior colleges showed the greatest gains, and universities the least. In certain in- dividual institutions, according to a re- cent Wall Street Journal survey, a re- markable decline in enrollment is shown. But these are the local groans and rum- blings along the fault lines of academic geology. It is not hard to see that a major upthrust to a new plateau of university enrollment is working; as librarians we need to estimate its effects on our estab- lishments. I work for a university, distinguished among other things for its size. There are certainly disabilities to size, but among its advantages is a self-conscious- ness about planning. Planning for the current 40,000 students on the eight campuses of the University of California in some ways requires more effort than planning for a lesser number. Certainly, the plan costs a great deal more to rea- lize. Problems which might go unnoticed in a smaller institution become apparent earlier in a larger one. There are more people to pay attention to future prob- lems. Instead of one librarian, the Uni- versity of California has eight, who are thus able to worry jointly as well as 3 Wall Street Journal, " C a m p u s P a r a d o x , " December 26, 1957, p . l . severally. Furthermore, we exist as a state of the Union and this means that we are continually prodded by state planning agencies. Our State Department of Finance, which prepares the Gov- ernor's budget, has been sufficiently con- cerned about the effect of current popu- lation trends on the state's business to employ a resident demographer, whose researches have equipped these state in- stitutions with estimates of enrollment u p to 1970. T h u s , for us the predicted hordes are not vague in shape, nor very distant. California's population has en- larged by 34 per cent in the seven years since 1950 as against the nation's 13 per cent.4 Hagrid d en by the rise of the col- lege-age population, it is little wonder that the University of California librar- ians are saddlesore with the problem of enrollment. It has seemed to me that my concern about the effect of a rising student population on the library at Berkeley may suggest useful approaches to this problem on your own campuses, and I offer them to you with regret that they are not more profound. At Berkeley we have identified six factors, growing out of rising enrollment, which appear to have the greatest effect on library operations and hence call for something explicit in the way of a plan. Curricular growth. It seems to us im- portant to try to determine where the areas of greatest growth will be in the university curriculum. It appears at Berkeley (and I suspect this will be true in many universities) that there will be increasing emphasis on science and tech- nology. By the same token the human- ities will occupy a lesser position—no doubt tertiary—with the social sciences lying somewhere in between. T h i s factor certainly underlines the continuation of a trend. It does, however, result in two effects on library operations: it increases the demand for scientific literature, and 4 Wells F a r g o Business Review, " P a t t e r n s of P o p u l a - tion Growth in C a l i f o r n i a , " N o v e m b e r 29, 1957. by that token emphasizes the impor- tance, in our operations, of the branch library system. Research and professional education. In our case, it appears probable that there will be increased emphasis on research and on the professional schools. In other words, there will be a redistribution of students upward. T h i s , we believe, will require eventually the development of branch libraries for certain professional schools now happily served by existing branches or in the main building, and this will lead to the need for duplicating materials now shared by many in some central location. It seems certain, too, that there will be greater need for the private reading and work space desirable for the" encouragement of graduate study. Larger faculty. An inevitable con- comitant of " m o r e students" is " m o r e faculty." At Berkeley we expect the cur- rent 1,050 members of the faculty to rise to 2,110 by 1963—an increase of over 100 per cent. We all know what effect a new faculty member has on our operations. N o matter how well supplied we are with books in his general field, he al- ways imports a new aspect of need and finds the collection inadequate in some degree or other. Men brought into the faculty to augment its variety often find that they must commence to build a col- lection from nearly the beginning. Faculty-student ratio. At Berkeley the educational policy of the institution calls for an improvement in the ratio of facul- ty to students, i.e., fewer students per faculty member. T h e present ratio is one teacher to twenty students. It is hoped to improve this to a ratio of 1:12 or 1:15. Such a change, we believe, will have a direct effect on the Library. T h e possibility of more individual attention from teachers is likely to enliven stu- dents' interest in study and lead them to a fuller exploitation of the Library's re- sources. In some universities this factor will appear in reverse: larger enrollment 180 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES will mean larger classes and greater use of textbooks and the familiar collateral reading of reserve book rooms. Liberal arts changes. Associated with the foregoing factor at Berkeley is the revamping of our College of Letters and Science educational program. T h e aboli- tion of a vaguely disreputable program called the "General Curriculum," the addition of an honors program, more rigid scholarship requirements, the en- couragement of undergraduates to begin their majors before junior year, the re- quirement on all to pass a mathematics examination, all these point to an im- provement in the quality of undergrad- uate students and a consequent increase in library use. N o doubt similar strength- ening of liberal education programs else- where—to match the current emphasis on scientific education—will have a simi- lar effect on other libraries. Size of student body. I have been talk- ing about the ways in which a substan- tially increased enrollment will affect the educational policy of an institution and its faculty. An influential factor is the student population itself. Although we estimate that the emphasis on re- search and professional education at the University at Berkeley will bear power- fully on the library organization, we must not neglect the calculation that within, say, the next five years we shall have on the campus between 4,000 and 5,000 more undergraduate students who will not—as graduate and professional students tend to do—distribute them- selves over a series of branch libraries, but will work in the commoner materials usually found in a central library build- ing. These, then, are the factors that ap- pear to be primary in their influence on my library organization. Some of them will certainly be present in your situa- tion; all of them, perhaps, in others. What kind of plan can be derived from such information? It is apparent that the effects of these influences will bear upon, and shape, the book collection, the building program (and, hence, the dis- tribution of the library's collection), upon policy to some extent, and on cer- tain other matters. A part of the plan derivable from such an estimate of the future will be specific and concrete (as in a building program) with quantities and a time scheme explicitly stated. Other parts of the forest are less well mapped, however, and our analysis there will provide us only with a general, dim, soft-focus view of the future (as in the case of the book collection). A plan for developing a book collection is like an academic plan for a university; so much of its unfolding depends on scientific dis- covery, shifts in society's interest in re- search, the availability of outstanding persons, and the like, that only a general direction of development can be fore- seen. (This is why faculty are always ill housed—except momentarily on the completion of a new building—and why libraries are seldom adequate. Educa- tional policy is intangible and is created instantaneously; buildings and book col- lections grow with only glacial speed.) Clearly, the evidence we have supports the assumption that the Library, along with the University, will continue to grow in research and that the mounting enrollment of undergraduates will re- quire the Library to support an extensive teaching program. Since research will be weighted on the side of the sciences, the technologies, and the professions, it is easy to see that our subscription list will increase—thus mortgaging a large part of the book fund in perpetuity. More journals mean an increase in binding expenditure. There is an uncomfortable converse to this axiom. It will become less easy to find compelling arguments for the money needed for monographic materials, in which form humanities lit- erature mostly comes. Certainly the cost of acquiring books for the humanities— MAY 1958 181 with their preponderance of interest in retrospective materials—is much higher than the cost of journals and contem- porary monographic publications—the form identified with scientific literature. Yet the humanities cannot be slighted in a university—-which is by name univer- sal. Indeed, such authorities as President Eisenhower, Vice-President Nixon, and an editorial writer of the New York Times have, since the advent of the Russian satellites, taken pains to em- phasize the need for tempering scientific and technological studies with the leav- ening influence of the humanities. Never- theless, it will not be easy, we think, to find enough support for this area of study which rests so heavily on a multi- tude of books, many of which are hard to come by, especially in our new part of the world. Greater competition between science and other kinds of study is not the only problem foreseen in the book collection field. T h e r e is the matter of new terri- tory to be covered. Here the evidence is dim and we must hark to the twitter- ing of birds and observe the patterns of tea leaves in order to identify subjects of investigation new to us, so that a reason- able amount of anticipatory collecting can be done. In this, as a Columbia pro- fessor recently remarked, "pre-vision and enterprise are indispensable." We must also assume that increasing amounts will be spent not on books themselves, but on copies of books in forms unattractive to the traditionalist but acceptable to the working scholar. We must consider the library's respon- sibility to the undergraduate and begin to think of what collections are needed to support him in his increasingly difficult task of using a large library system. Let me pass on to the effect of expan- sion on policy and certain other matters. Book collecting policy is a term often on our tongues but, like so much plan- ning, more a matter of recording what goes on than a projected scheme of ac- tion conscientiously followed. My li- brary, like many, has proceeded on the assumption that it is better to buy a book not already present than to duplicate an existing one. Growing numbers of students and faculty are forcing us to depart from this policy. One specialist in a distant building may be expected to inconvenience himself by walking to the nearest library, but let his specialty come to support, say, five specialists and pressure begins to develop for books closer to home. While this condition is sometimes met by splitting an existing collection, it often can be dealt with only by a certain amount of duplication. Keep in mind that the five scholars of my illustration are as likely to be the result of increased enrollment as they are of any deliberate plan of the uni- versity to develop their specialty. Sheer numbers force duplication so that there are enough books to go around. My li- brary has attempted to meet this prob- lem at the undergraduate level by pro- viding a duplicate reserve f u n d used mainly by the reserve book room. We now look forward to the extension of such duplication to branch libraries, and we expect that the commoner sort of reference tools must be duplicated to meet increased use arising at many points on the campus. Perhaps the most substantial policy change will be a departure from the view that undergraduates are capable of find- ing their materials in a library rapidly increasing in size, distribution, and com- plexity. T h e need for a greater number of seats than can be provided by extend- ing the main building or the branches, the difficulty undergraduates find in using the M a i n Library, and the value of supporting the liberal arts curriculum (with its many service courses for pro- fessional programs), all point to the wisdom of a special library service for undergraduates, a policy already familiar 182 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES in the Lamont Library and the Under- graduate Library at the University of Michigan. I come now to the part of planning which deals with the physical develop- ment of the library—its quarters: the architecturally enclosed space within which it performs its function. In the matter of physical planning the Library at Berkeley is well integrated with the planning agencies of the campus and of the whole University. Physical planning at Berkeley is largely in the hands of an active and devoted faculty committee— the Buildings and Campus Development Committee—ably assisted by resident architects and operating through a series of specialized subcommittees. It acts as a sensitive plant which picks up intima- tions of building needs. T h e Library for the past dozen years has been represented on this committee and, as departmental developments have made the need for buildings known, any relevant library planning has gone forward with the knowledge and assistance of the Library administration. There are, at the mo- ment, six buildings just completed or under construction which c o n t a i n branch library space. Beginning next year, and in subsequent years, down to 1965—if the schedule holds—are twelve other buildings containing library ele- ments. Our building program is predicated on three primary factors: (1) an enroll- ment of 25,000 by 1963; (2) an open- ended collection; and (3) the continued dispersal of research materials between the Main Library building and certain branch libraries. Current estimates indi- cate that in order to accommodate an enrollment of 25,000 we should have close to 3,000 additional seats in the li- brary system. (Some skepticism has been shown locally of our seating formula, based on our best estimate, which calls for one seat for every four undergrad- uate, and one for every three graduate students.) Some of these additional seats will be provided in extensions to existing branch library space and in new branch- es, but approximately 2,000 will remain to be provided otherwise, and this we propose to do by means of a College Li- brary building. T h i s building, if con- structed, would provide a physical focus for College of Letters and Science stu- dents and lend impressive support to this college's recently adopted program calculated to increase the depth and breadth of the four-year course of study. A university library's collection is the- oretically infinite and, while practical considerations will keep it from attain- ing this goal, the building plan must ac- commodate materials which cannot be held in the increasingly valuable space of the main campus. Our plan, therefore, includes an off-campus storage building for important but bulky and infrequent- ly used research materials. As the sciences and the professional schools develop, their libraries will as- sume roles of greater and greater impor- tance in the bibliothecal economy of the campus and the increasing bodies of fac- ulty and students who find their pri- mary library satisfactions in these branches will operate to draw more and more books to these locations. For these reasons our building plan includes pro- vision for substantial branch library space. T h e staff, the catalog, and the habits of marginal users are all affected by some new branch library combinations. For example, in our case, astronomy, mathe- matics, and statistics books are soon to be combined in a single library to serve a building jointly occupied by these de- partments. A new earth sciences building will bring together in a single unit the now separate libraries of the geology, paleontology, and geography depart- ments. This improvement in branch library facilities will free substantial parts of MAY 1958 183 the M a i n Library building. It is in the redevelopment of this main building space that we expect to find room for more graduate students and faculty in the humanities, history, and certain as- pects of the social sciences, and for the expansion of space for newspapers, maps, and government documents. T h i s rede- velopment will not come easily. New branch space rides the wave of enthusi- asm for a new building, with the inten- sive support of the department benefited —usually a scientific department or a professional school. T h e remodelling of existing space is less attractive—after all, the walls are there, the roof dosen't leak, and the values of quiet and privacy are not so apparent as is the necessity for laboratories. A n even more important effect of rising enrollment translated into build- ing space is the dispersive effect on the collection. In our case music and music literature are about to leave our main building, agriculture will follow, as well as the most active parts of the social science collection. When built, the Col- lege Library will remove from the main building the reserve book collection. N o t to be neglected is non-library space which may, indirectly, affect the Library. For instance, we believe that our Student Union, to be commenced this summer, and the residence halls, now begun, will increase the concentra- tion of students in the vicinity of the Library and that it will therefore be more used than now. If you will allow me, I shall offer the view that, in a time of rising enrollment, building space becomes the most impor- tant single determinant of a university li- brary's organization. T h e first question raised about additional enrollment is: Where shall we put the bodies? Build- ings are slow to build and expensive. Therefore, their need must be antic- ipated, and care in their planning must be exercised. T h e y are concrete, specific, real; their financing requires the deter- mination of the number of square feet to be contained within them, of the pre- cise dimensions and proportions of their rooms; their use determines their struc- ture. T h e s e specifications compel a li- brary administration to reduce enroll- ment estimates to seats for readers, to cal- culate the effect of additidnal faculty on student behavior toward the library and on the growth of the collection. T h e provision of enclosed space is the focus of institutional planning. Space is the planner's coinage, the common de- nominator to which all physical needs, and most policies, must be reduced. T h e librarian who neglects the planning machinery—and politics—of his campus will find his library reorganized for him. In the tidal wave of population uni- versities today are confronted with a phenomenon unprecedented in its effect, and extraordinary in its widespread and early recognition. T h e storm warnings are u p and the flood stages have been calculated. Don't fail to plan a sturdy and capacious Ark! A Sum More Than Its Parts "Success in this adventure of collegiate instruction seems most likely of reasonable attainment if the student, the professor, and the librarian are thrown into daily contact in such a manner that the sum total of their cooperative endeavors far outstrips the mere addition of their individual accomplishments."—Robert W. Orr in The Library at Iowa State (No- vember 18, 1957). 184 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES