Sometime within the next year or so, the Brown University Library will
add its Three Millionth Book, an undisputed cause for celebration. For centuries,
research libraries have been defined by their comprehensiveness, whether
across a broad range of fields (a university library) or in a specialized
subject area. For general research libraries, in an age when most scholarly
subject matter came in the form of books and journals, comprehensiveness
was most easily judged by size: putting it simply, the more books and journals
one put on the shelf, the greater the likelihood that a scholar would find
what s/he sought. As recently as the late 1960's, library school students
were taught that a research library differed from other libraries in that
it "bought everything;" the statement was an exaggeration even
then, but nonetheless it reflected the underlying philosophy behind collection
development in large research institutions.
In 1907 James Gerould began collecting comparative statistics on research
libraries and the so-called Gerould Statistics continued through 1961-62,
when the Association of Research Libraries took over the collection and
publication of the statistics.* Today, the combined Gerould/ARL Statistics
constitute the "oldest continuing library statistical series in North
America," and have been used by generations of librarians to monitor
the progress of their own institutions, bolster budget arguments, and identify
a peer group of libraries of similar size and funding. As a comparative
tool, the ARL Statistics must be used with caution; as the introduction
to the 1993/94 statistics points out, in comparing any individual library
to ARL medians or to other ARL members, one must be careful to make such
comparisons within the context of differing institutional and local goals
and characteristics.
Despite such disclaimers, for many decades the goal of a North American
research library has been to grow, to advance in the ARL statistics, or
at the very least to hold one's own. Of course, size is not an end in itself
--; the intent of the effort is to provide one's clientele with the most
information possible, given available resources. Today, however, as in no
time in history, research
libraries find that "the mandate to accumulate" is being tested
by other mandates, and that measuring library success by counting things
is becoming more problematic than ever.
Major trends identified from the 1993/94 ARL statistics included "large
increases in monograph and serial costs, declining acquisitions of serials
and monographs, and increased levels of activities for interlibrary loan
operations." The relationship among these trends is less obvious than
it might appear. While extraordinary inflation is certainly contributing
to a decline in the acquisition of books and journals, libraries are also
putting more of their financial resources into information which cannot
be counted in the traditional sense --; that is, computerized databases,
whether housed at home or on a remote computer. In 1988/89, the Brown University
Library was spending $8,115 on "electronic information;" today,
$158,906 in acquisitions funds supports faculty and student access to a
wide array of computerized resources, held at Brown or accessible via the
Internet. The availability of these resources --; periodical indexes,
"current contents" information, news services, encyclopedias and
dictionaries, the holdings of libraries around the world, and more --;
not only makes more information available, but also makes it easier for
users to locate and request material not owned by Brown. Over the last three
years, Brown's total interlibrary loan traffic has increased by 36%. Borrowing
requests from Brown users to other institutions went up 27% from 1992/93
to 1993/94, with nearly 18,000 requests processed. As we celebrate our Three
Millionth volume, we need to keep in mind that the Brown community also
benefits by the Library's provision of information which cannot be shelved
and which does not contribute to the volume count.
The "mandate to accumulate" also provides special challenges to
libraries like Brown, which are rapidly running out of space. Libraries
are considered to be at "working capacity" when they are 85% full,
and three of Brown's libraries (the John Hay, the Orwig Music Library, and
the Sciences Library) are already beyond this point. There is still a formidable
amount of information being produced in print form --; some 800,000 new
book titles appeared last year --; and, given the continuing library
need to be as comprehensive as possible, we have no inclination to deal
with this problem by buying fewer books. Instead, a multifaceted approach
is necessary: in the years to come, we may be storing more materials offsite,
making periodical backfiles available digitally or in microform rather than
in hard copy, and (when possible) making some reference titles available
only in electronic form. All of these approaches would save shelf space
without reducing the user's ability to obtain information. As "the
library of the future" develops, will Brown buy fewer printed volumes
in years to come? It is still too early to tell. The death of print has
been predicted for no less than fifty years without a noticeable decline
in the publication of books or in the proliferation of paper. At the moment,
many online resources are still additive; they either have no print equivalent,
or for various reasons cannot substitute satisfactorily for their paper
counterpart. Nonetheless, the explosion of information in digital form has
already had a dramatic impact on the library, and there is no reason to
believe that this impact will diminish as electronic sources become ever
more varied, commonplace, and useful. The library's mandate to be comprehensive,
to provide as much scholarly information for our users as possible, remains
unchanged. It is clear, however, that in the years to come," comprehensiveness"
will no longer be determined simply by counting volumes on the shelf.
*Comparative data from "Introduction," ARL Statistics 1993-1994,
Washington, D. C., Association of Research Libraries, 1995, pp. 5 - 13.