Trib: USF library bustling, but not with books

[USFishin]

USF library bustling, but not with books

By LINDSAY PETERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Rodrigo Lodeiro can't remember the last time he pulled a book off the shelves of the University of South Florida library. But he spent plenty of time there last semester, especially in the early morning hours of finals week.

"I'd leave here at 4 or 5 in the morning and go straight to class," he says, hanging out in front of the hulking seven-floor structure, built 35 years ago when eight-track tapes were popular.

His friend Jamie Lago also considers the library something of a second home, but he has one complaint: "Not enough plugs."

USF Libraries Dean William Garrison hears a lot about how much students need.

"Anywhere, anytime, any-device access," he says.

That's why the library is now open 24 hours a day, from noon Sunday to 6 p.m. Friday. And why it recently doubled the number of computers in the first floor Learning Commons and got rid of 100,000 volumes of printed journals to create more study space.

The future of printed books may be in doubt, but students still flock to the buildings created to hold those books. They make themselves at home at the tables and chairs, spreading out with their laptops, study materials and to-go meals. Many sit in clusters working together.

"Here I don't have my Xbox and my Play Station 3," Lago says. "It's where I come to get away from all that."

Students' quest for quietude has made the USF library the busiest building on campus, with 2 million visits a year, Garrison says.

But he knows it takes more than peace and study space to survive in the digital age. Since he arrived two years ago, he has overseen a gradual transformation of the library building and services.

It's happening across the country, says Kathleen Miller, library dean at Florida Gulf Coast University and co-chairwoman of a new taskforce on the future of Florida's academic libraries.

"Libraries are about nothing if not connecting people with information and recorded knowledge â in whatever form that takes," she says.

To pull students in, USF's library offers tutoring in half a dozen subjects, help with online research, and group study rooms complete with Power Point-equipped computers.

The library has created special collections, including:

•An oral history program with stories of the civil rights era, Ybor City, Florida food customs and local arts.

•A Holocaust & Genocide Studies Center, featuring interviews with Holocaust survivors and World War II soldiers who liberated the camps.

•An Internet portal on karst, the porous topography of Florida and other global regions.

And the books are still there, hundreds of thousands of ordinary and obscure volumes of fiction and nonfiction, from 30-years worth of the Texas Law Review to an 1883 account of life in "the Land of the Lorne and the Outer Hebrides."

Among the books are texts for dozens of courses, for students who can't afford to buy them.

Students don't even have to come to the library to use it. Through its website they can access thousands of online journals and eBooks and tutorials on how to search the web.

"A lot of students don't even know when they're visiting the library because they come in through the website," Garrison says. "They don't realize they were able to read the journal article because the library licensed it."

But behind all this change is a simmering debate about what it means to switch from tangible to digital information.

It has created confusion, for instance, about who owns the information they buy, Miller says. In the past, when a library bought a journal, it filled the shelves with those volumes year after year.

Now, with an online journal, they buy the access rights. And when they cancel a subscription, do they lose access to the previous years they paid for?

"When you have something in print, you have it forever, unless someone walks out with it," Miller says. "This is something completely different and we're trying to get it worked out."

These complexities mean lawyers are just as important to a library staff as an information specialist, Garrison says.

Many faculty members take opposite sides in the digital vs. paper debate.

"We know that new information is coming out in the online journals and blogs," Miller says. So the Internet is vital to instructors in the sciences and other cutting edge disciplines.

But in history and English, they still need the texts. Classics are increasingly available in eBook form, but some may never be digitized, Lisa Shapiro and Geneva Henry write in a Council on Library and Information Resources paper, "Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?"

Many professors believe the Internet is so full of short cuts it has degraded the process of learning itself. Some assign materials not found online to force students to find the print documents in the library, says student Sachy Rodriguez, during a visit to the USF library.

"Libraries are symbols of a continuity of past and present; they offer access to the cultural heritage," Shapiro and Henry write.

"As libraries move into the digital future, they need to take into account anxieties about what may be lost: immediate access to print stacks, a tangible connection to the past."

But move forward they must, Garrison says.

Some issues are easy to deal with, he says. Students, for instance, want the Starbucks in the library to stay open past its 3 a.m. closing time.

Some issues are not so easy. Increasing demands for space could require him to get rid of more print volumes. "That has the potential for controversy," he says.

It's a problem at every university, Miller says, so the State University System is planning to build a storage center in Gainesville that all the universities could use.

Garrison has his own dream: A whole new, all-digital library and learning center.

The current library could be used to hold the books while the new building would be filled with computers for online research, tutoring and multimedia production, he says.

Entire sections would be set aside for group studying. And it would have something the current library lacks â a lot of windows.

"Students want more light," Garrison says.

People don't want new things and more technology just because they're new, he says. They want things that help them get their work done and move forward.

"The technology that doesn't work or doesn't meet their needs doesn't last."

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[crambone]

Good schtuff.