The library system is composed of eight divisional libraries, each funded by its school or college; other library units include Special Collections and University Archives, and the system’s off-campus Annex storage facility. This divisional library system has the benefit of building collections and services that are especially responsive to the users in the various schools. However, the challenge of this structure is to ensure that the parts together create a cohesive research library that acknowledges scholarly interdependencies across divisional lines.

The library’s collection numbers over 2.5 million volumes, and we subscribe to more than 22,000 serials. Using traditional measures of size, the Heard Library ranks 53rd among the 115 North American members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the major membership organization of large research libraries. Among our special collections are manuscripts and book collections from the Agrarian and Fugitive literary movements, which were centered at Vanderbilt; the Kelly Miller Smith papers, which chronicle the civil rights movement in Nashville; and a major archive of literature by and about French poet Charles Baudelaire. We have made a strategic commitment to acquire electronic information resources and currently subscribe to almost 4,000 electronic journals and over 150 research databases. Our expenditures for digital information are well above the median level of the top forty members of ARL.

Challenges

The library faces three major challenges:

The Heard Library is reinventing and transforming itself at an increasingly rapid pace as digital information becomes the publishing norm. This shift affects every aspect of the library’s operation, from our archival responsibility to our acquisitions policy, but our mission remains unchanged. Moreover, we must continue to fulfill many of our traditional roles well into the future. Thus the first challenge is to maintain our traditional collections and services as we build new Web-based ones and to transform the library to an interactive digital commons.

This dual effort will be costly unless we conceive of imaginative ways to maintain the traditional library while at the same time building the most effective parallel digital library. Many traditional commercial organizations are attempting to trade "bricks for clicks" as they develop Web-based business models. Libraries can to some degree trade "books for clicks," but significant educational and research value resides in parts of our paper collections that will likely never be converted into digital form. Because different disciplines have different informational needs, no single strategy will work across colleges or even within a single college. Users in the sciences typically want immediate access to current information, while users in the humanities need access to older materials, such as our outstanding collections in French literature or Colombian history and politics. Publication in the sciences is increasingly "born digital," and will need the advantages of the digital medium to communicate those findings that can only be expressed digitally, whereas in the humanities and social sciences scholarship will largely remain on paper for the near term.

Response

The library must, then, maintain and continue to build print-based collections, albeit on a reduced scale. But the most effective method of fulfilling our dual responsibilities is to acquire digital information as rapidly as possible. This strategy enables us to deal with our increasingly limited book storage space and to offer access to our resources beyond the physical limitations of our buildings. We have already built a substantial digital library, and we must expand it aggressively in the future.

We have promoted the creation and use of library consortia to expedite interlibrary loan service, to negotiate lower-cost license agreements for digital resources, and to facilitate shared storage of less-used materials. IRIS—the consortium of the libraries at the University of Kentucky, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Vanderbilt—includes a joint electronic catalog of the three libraries’ holdings, which enables us to pursue new forms of collaboration, including one cooperative endeavor that promises to help resolve our space crisis.

With our IRIS partners, we are currently developing cooperative acquisitions plans to reduce the duplication of low-demand titles among the three institutions. Bibliographers in several disciplines are already negotiating such plans. Sharing access to single copies of low-use titles will produce savings that can be used to develop a richer common collection.

We expect our Library Annex to be nearly at capacity within five years, depending on our rate of acquisition and transfer. Unless we can construct or purchase additional building space, our print collection will, of necessity, cease to grow once our library buildings and the storage facility are full. We would then be forced to discard a volume for every new volume we acquire, a labor-intensive and expensive solution. Paper-based publication shows no signs of abating in the near-term future. We will choose items to discard by determining whether our consortial partners hold them. In some cases, we may transfer volumes to the other IRIS libraries, which have far more available storage space. We will have the ability to borrow these materials and have them delivered rapidly via a courier service. All of these means of coping with our limited amount of book storage space will place heavy demands on our staff to make the added intellectual decisions of what to keep, what to discard, and what to share consortially.

We must also offer more of our services digitally. It is a priority to continue the aggressive development of our Web-based services as the entry point for both remote and internal use of the libraries’ electronic resources. Electronic course reserves can be linked to various course management software packages now under consideration by some of the colleges and schools. We also plan to substantially increase reference services provided via the Web. Audio and video networking can create a rich, personal, two-way communication medium. Our consortial participation and new technology may permit us to create a joint remote reference service available after our conventional desks close, and possibly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The same technology will support distributed library instruction, a major focus of both the traditional and the digital library.

As we move in these directions, we must also make more efficient and different use of staff to support new services that will be needed in the digital age. Rather than anticipate that new electronic services will necessarily always require additional positions, we will incorporate organizational models that will permit us to reassign staff to new responsibilities. But it will mean significant investment in retraining of staff, and they will need to renew their commitment to acquiring new skills and knowledge at an ever-increasing pace. We may find it advantageous to encourage more flexible structures that allow staff to work across divisional lines. We expect, for example, to assign more staff to work with faculty to help them accommodate new information formats and retrieval strategies in their teaching and research. The library can build new partnerships with the University Press and the Television News Archive as these organizations become digital. The expertise of the library’s technology staff in archiving and database construction can be of use to both these organizations and to faculty who need to archive their digital research findings.

Through these and other efforts, the library will fulfill its traditional missions of information provision and service to users in an increasingly technological environment.

The library is challenged to expand the information riches of the collection to support the ambitious academic programs of the University while coping with information costs that increase at a pace well above the rate of general inflation. For the library simply to maintain its current information buying power, its materials budget must grow at almost twice the rate of recent tuition increases. This reality forces an unenviable choice upon the deans: they must either reduce funding for other segments of their colleges’ budgets to maintain their library collections at current levels, or they must acquiesce in a reduction of their libraries’ quality.

The core of a research library is its collection. The quality of our collection directly affects the University's ability to enrich students' educational experiences and sustain faculty research productivity. The collection also serves as a powerful tool in faculty recruitment.

The transition to the digital library has reinforced the centrality of the collection. Vanderbilt scholars can now create bibliographies, examine literary and historical texts, build chemical structures, survey fine art collections, and read journal articles from their homes, dormitories, or offices. We expect to accelerate the digital conversion of our collection, offering electronic books, and replacing print periodical backfiles with fulltext digital facsimiles. We will provide expanded access to documentary, statistical, and image resources, and we will digitize our own manuscript holdings. We will probably witness a change in the ways information is prepared and packaged; the monograph and the journal may be replaced by new forms as authors fully explore the creative potential of electronic publication.

Even as the collection is radically reshaped, it will remain a print-electronic hybrid. Print materials will continue to predominate in the humanities and social sciences. Area studies, which draw most of their resources from developing nations, will benefit from digital conversion more slowly still. The need to allocate substantial funding to acquire, store, and preserve print publications will continue. Cooperation with IRIS and other consortial partners will allow the development of shared print collections, reducing duplication of low-use titles and building broader holdings in the aggregate than we could build independently. We can also control costs by distributing the responsibility for archiving print materials among consortium members.

Our financial support has been stable enough to prevent serious erosion in collection quality, but it is insufficient if the library is to attain a status commensurate with Vanderbilt's current national standing among institutions of higher education. Vanderbilt ranks twentieth in the latest U. S. News & World Report list of Best National Universities. Yet its library ranks 42nd in collection expenditures among the members of the Association of Research Libraries. Libraries of peer institutions such as Duke, Stanford, Washington University, Emory, and Northwestern all spend more on library collections. Our funding will maintain an adequate research collection, but we do not have the resources to build a superior collection like those at many other major private institutions.

Our ability to hold our present position will be challenged if we hold our budget increases to the 4-5% growth rate of University tuition income. Over the past decade inflation has driven up our serials costs by almost 10% per year. Monograph costs increase 4-5% annually. Purchasing electronic materials through consortia reduces their cost, but they are routinely more expensive than their print counterparts. Digital collections offer enormous advantages, but economy is not among them.

The library's limited space for physical collection growth will also impact collections funding. We are rapidly replacing print with electronic materials (we rank 19th among ARL libraries in percentage of materials expenditures dedicated to electronic resources), and this conversion will enable us to eliminate extensive paper backfiles of journals and indexes. We will also eliminate duplicate monographs as well as items that our consortial partners agree to store for us. But these measures will alleviate, not eliminate, our space shortage. As we reach capacity, librarians will have to invest substantial additional time identifying print titles for removal, reducing the time they can spend carefully selecting new titles. A no-growth print collection is not cost-free. Ongoing shifts of materials from the libraries to the Annex, to other libraries, or to consignment will incur expenses that may reduce monies available for materials acquisition.

The library's endowment for building support and collections currently stands at $13.3 million, far below those of comparable private institutions. Last year, materials expenditures from endowed funds equaled only 1.3% of our base materials budget expenditures. An enlarged endowment to supplement base funding would help us cope with inflation and permit us to expand our collection to a level appropriate to Vanderbilt's national reputation and future aspirations. A collection endowment of $50 million would produce about $2.5 million in supplemental materials funds annually.

The third challenge is to convert library space from a repository for paper collections to a dynamic intellectual gathering place for users and to accommodate growth of the physical collection into the foreseeable future. Every library in the Heard Library system is filled to capacity, and more than 600,000 volumes (25% of the library’s non-Biomedical collection) are stored in the Library Annex. Given the University’s budget structure, deans and their faculties have the option of dealing with the book storage limitations differently. At this time, for example, the dean of the Blair School has agreed to double the size of the Music Library, while the deans at Law and Peabody have indicated that the space occupied by their libraries will not increase. However, the other part of the space problem—user space—cannot simply be addressed by each division on its own. Students, undergraduates especially, tend to gravitate to the most desirable library space without regard to college affiliation. Thus, the Eskind Biomedical Library, the newest building in the system, recently became the most-used library in the system. At some of the other professional schools, library access at night and on weekends is limited to their students only, and Eskind has a regular policy of limiting access to medical students and personnel once capacity is reached. At the same time, the Central Library and the Peabody Library, which should be our primary venues for undergraduate study, are underutilized, primarily because of their uninviting condition.

Response

The emerging digital collections already under development will bring changes to the uses and mixture of spaces needed in the physical library building. While the "library without walls" is emerging as more and more resources are available in dorm rooms and faculty offices, there will still be, for some time to come, digital and paper resources which will only be available in the library building. Even though the number of times patrons must come to the library to borrow materials will likely decline, other reasons remain, and new ones will emerge for patrons to come to a location where resources and assistance are concentrated.

Our experience tells us that students prefer to use attractive library space for individual and group study. Attractive and functional study and research spaces, which we do not presently have, will need to be created. Group study rooms with network access will be an important element we need to be able to offer. Specialized workstations, able to access and/or display resources not readily available on computers typically owned by faculty and students, need to be available. As more and more of the publication universe becomes digital, the library will need to assure easy access to resources that are arcane and difficult to use, just as it does for arcane and little used material in other formats (print, microform, video).

Libraries, for many in the academic community, serve as the focal point for intellectual pursuits. The library has a "sense of place," unequalled by other discrete parts of the University. An academic commons, in which people from across the University can come together for work and intellectual exchange, over coffee or in group studies, would prove a desirable enhancement to the library's facilities. Vanderbilt has world-class recreational facilities and will soon have a newly remodeled student center. We now need comparable quality space devoted to academics where students can pursue their intellectual growth in a place conducive to contemplation and creative thought.

Network access will need to become widespread in all of the public use space in the buildings. Recent developments in wireless networking may assist in easing the expense to provide such access. However, the nature of library buildings (thick cement floors to support books, densely packed stacks) severely limits the penetration of wireless signals throughout the building. A mixture of wired and wireless connectivity seems necessary: wired connections for "big pipe" access with maximum throughput, wireless connections in study carrels and group study spaces for perhaps less throughput but more portability.

If remote storage continues to grow in importance as our collection grows, but stack space does not, short-term and long-term research spaces will need to be created. The serendipitous discovery of unexpected material when browsing the stacks is a significant element for many humanities scholars and a strong incentive for retaining as much "local access" for print volumes as possible. Yet the ability to browse collections in this way was not always possible—indeed the General Library Building was constructed originally as a closed stack library. Physical limitations may require the surrender of the accustomed ability to browse the shelves, but alternatives must be created to balance this loss.

Researchers will need a place to consult and evaluate perhaps dozens of titles recalled from storage or borrowed from consortial partners. If preliminary filtering and selection does not occur in the stacks, the number of books researchers will have to request for retrieval will grow substantially. Not all researchers have study carrels, so some "short-term" assigned study spaces will be needed for the review and evaluation of requested materials.

Public services space in the General Library Building will need to be reallocated and renovated to provide these new types of space. An overall redesign of the building is needed, rather than continued piece-meal renovations. Even if substantial components of the collections are moved to remote storage, the nature of the building and its construction limits the desirability of converting stack space to public or study spaces.

The building occupants are currently in a gridlock situation. Nothing substantial can be moved or reallocated to new uses without removing significant components from the building. The Central Library, Divinity Library, Special Collections unit and Resource Services all have severe space problems. University Archives collections will expand by 20% with the retirement of Chancellor Wyatt and Vice-Chancellor Carr. The Central Library is by far the largest tenant, and serves the largest constituency of the University. If alternative space can be created for one of the other units, the reallocation and reorganization of the space in Central would become much more feasible. We need to hire architectural consultants to study a reconfiguration of book storage and public service space throughout the library system. The probable solution will be a combination of additional remote storage space, remodeling of current open spaces in the Central Library for student study, and possibly the creation of a new Divinity Library connected to the Divinity School.

Conclusion

No unit on campus has seen a greater impact from the Internet and digital technology than the library. The very nature of what we do is challenged daily, and the pace of change is accelerating at an ever-increasing rate. We are, however, dedicated to changing in meaningful ways to continue our mission of service and support to the academic community at Vanderbilt. Our established roles must change, and library staff will need to work hard to help our constituencies understand our new roles and the value we can bring to their pursuits. This shift will take creativity, energy and financial resources. It will require risk-taking and a tolerance for occasional failure as we learn from our mistakes. Our goal is to reinvent the library to meet the information and research needs of the University community.

Our strategies for embracing the future are threefold:

• We will move aggressively forward in developing new collections and services that incorporate exciting new digital technologies, while ensuring that we continue to pay attention to traditional collection and service needs. Digital preservation offers an alternative to conventional storage, and we need to explore these possibilities. We will build new relationships as well. We need to explore ways to work with faculty to gain skills in digital publishing, to join with the University Press as it becomes primarily digital, to find new means of scholarly communication in conjunction with scholarly societies, and to consider a joint project with the Television News Archive to digitize its collection so that it can become a rich content resource on the Internet. The library will be involved with faculty in new ways as digital media enhance and change teaching and learning.

• Our collections must be enriched as the University attains a higher national stature among the leading universities of the country. At the same time we will build on our cooperative relationships with other institutions to ensure the greatest access to the widest variety of research material.

• Finally, we need to provide a place, an academic commons, that invites individual intellectual pursuit as well as a gathering place for faculty and student interaction outside the classroom.

Our strategies are clear, and we are making progress in several critical areas. To continue to move ahead, we need strong continuing financial support from the schools and from University resources. These funds can sustain our current operations and provide for technology enhancement. Special Reassessment funding has long played a vital part in our development of digital services and collections, and it must continue to do so in the future. To make real progress in some of our boldest initiatives, however, we will need external or additional University funding.

A $50 million collection endowment would produce approximately $2.5 million in supplemental income each year for materials acquisitions. If we project materials cost inflation at 6% per year and the growth of the base budget at 4% per year, the supplement would close this inflationary gap and, even after five years, provide an additional $2.3 million to significantly strengthen our collections.

To be optimally effective, the supplement should accrue to the Heard Library system’s overall budget rather than directly to its divisional components, though in practice most of the money would likely be spent by divisional libraries. This arrangement would strengthen the Heard Library's role as an academic support unit by permitting us to offer resources equitably across the entire University, rather than in an uneven fashion segmented by schools or programs. It would also equip us with the flexibility to meet interdisciplinary needs, especially in the acquisition of electronic materials.

• Renovation of the General Library Building

Careful attention must be given to the General Library Building which houses the Central Library, Divinity Library, and Special Collections and University Archives, as well as a number of staff offices. To move toward our goal of creating an academic commons, while providing access to collections and services, we must undertake an extensive study of the existing building; we can then move forward with concrete proposals for refurbishing, additions and other alternatives.

A major renovation of the GLB is required. The older section of the building was dedicated in 1941, and an addition was constructed in 1964. Several renovations of public spaces since then have improved portions of the building’s appearance and utility, but even these renovated spaces now look worn. In some parts of the building, original furniture is still in use and clearly needs replacement. Much of the building was designed as book stacks and cannot easily be remodeled for other uses. We estimate that over one million dollars is needed for structural repairs alone.

The first step must be the development of an overall plan for the GLB. We should start by hiring an architect to develop such a plan, from which more specific cost figures for renovation could be developed. However, at least 130,000 square feet needs remodeling, renovation, and new furniture. Such rehabilitation can cost as much as building new space (currently estimated at $160 per square foot). A major building enhancement project with careful attention to creating highly usable public spaces will enhance the quality of academic life within the University.

• Storage Facility Enhancement

Our off-site, accessible storage facility will be full within five to eight years. We expect to continue to need more storage space for ongoing growth in collections and archives. Construction costs for facilities for high-density storage of books are currently estimated at $3/volume. At our current growth rate of approximately 50,000 volumes per year, we would use $150,000 of new space annually.

• Endowment for Positions

Endowed library positions, relatively common at comparable research libraries, free up funds for other initiatives. Positions suitable for such endowments might include that of the University Librarian and the position of Head of Special Collections and University Archivist. Each plays a crucial role in the development of the library and the University, and each offers a donor a unique opportunity for recognition. Current estimates for endowed positions range from $1.5 to $2 million per position.

• Endowment for the University Archives

The library has the responsibility for preserving and supporting the University's history through the University Archives. Recording, understanding, and making accessible the documents and publications that have shaped the University's development are an essential part of the library’s mission, and one that requires funding beyond what is currently allocated. Creating an endowment for the Archives would regularize its support and enhance its stability. We estimate that $2 million would provide a starting point.

April 2000