Research space needed; books to return

The DE has an article on the return of books to Morris. This is good news. But missing from the article is the reason the books are coming back. It is not because they are valued, but because they are valued less than the McLafferty Annex itself, which is now coveted as a research space. The $1 million required to get the books back materialized once this became clear--or this at any rate is what I gather from comments by the Chancellor some time ago,* noting how many groups had expressed an interest in McLafferty. Of course research space is also a good thing, but this sequence of events seems to show how low a priority the library, and particularly its print collections, has around here. This is yet another reminder, for any needing one, that when an administrator says "we don't have the money to do x" it often means "I've decided to spend the money on y instead". 

The priority on getting the books out of McLafferty rather than in to Morris may help to explain the rather sketchy details in the story as to how exactly the books are going to get to Morris. From reading the story, one gets the impression that despite having had the books in McLafferty for three years, we have made no plan about how to get them back. But the confusion in the story may be as much journalistic as administrative: I welcome comments from readers with more insight into this. McLafferty itself is now closed to browsing, and its books lost in limbo during the transfer. Some such loss of access is necessary, but it will be interesting to see how long the limited access lasts.

* She made these comments at a Faculty Senate meeting, but I haven't been able to find them in the minutes.  

Library Dean Carlson off to Texas A & M

[Update:  The Southern ran a story Friday on Carlson's move, and reports that he is disappointed that 2/3 of our books are still in McLafferty; Carlson is reported to say that failure is due to the lack of state funding for the sixth and seventh floors of the library.]

SIUC's Dean of Library Affairs, David Carlson, is moving on to Texas A & M, the DE reports.  Carlson's departure won't come as a surprise to those in the know (a group I am a marginal member of after having conversations with various librarians on the picket lines), as Carlson lost a major turf battle when Instructional Support Services was transferred to University College.  Now many of the offices housed in Morris are not run by the library; I suppose it is natural that after having overseen the renovation of Morris Carlson may have been irked to find that control over much of the building was given over to another unit. 

Carlson won an award as Illinois Academic Librarian of the Year in 2010, but will be best remembered, at least by this blogger, as the guy who emptied the library of books. Most of our collection remains in McLafferty, which I continue to consider outrageous; while it would have been expensive to return the books, the expense involved was a relative pittance in terms of the overall renovation of the library, and should have been made a major priority from the get go. The new Morris building is admittedly a vast improvement over the old one, and does provide a "campus center" to rival the student center. And of course digital resources are increasingly important, making texts less so. But texts still matter, even old ones, and by consigning them to exile in the vast shed on McLafferty Carlson sent the message to our students that books don't matter.