Originally published in the Spring 2011 Visions.
One of the things that I have liked best about being the dean of an academic library is that the position comes with an extraordinary benefit—a master key—a key that gives me access to every library building and every room at any hour of the day or night. If I need to work at a strange time or to retrieve a file when the library is closed, that is not a problem. I have the keys to the kingdom.
One Saturday evening during my Harvard Divinity School days, my wife and I hosted a dinner party. All had gone well. The stroganoff and carrot cake were a success and the conversation flowed as freely as the wine. Well after midnight the talk morphed into a theological debate that became feisty when a historic fact was contested. I no longer remember what it was, but I recall searching my own reference works for the answer, but without success. However, I knew that a copy of the volume that we needed was in the reference room of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, and I had a key. I proposed a trip to the library to settle the matter.
So several of us stuffed ourselves into my VW bug and headed over to Harvard Square, Francis Avenue, and the Divinity School. My trusty key let us into the building. I turned on the lights and we made ourselves at home in the Fenn Reading Room. The needed volume came off the shelf and quickly settled the contest, and in no time we were retracing our steps to the parking lot. As we stepped outside through one of the Gothic archways, we were blinded by the headlights of three police cars positioned to block our exit. Uniformed officers, hands on their holsters, demanded identification and the reason for our unauthorized entry into the library. I had forgotten to call Harvard security before unlocking the building. Fortunately, I had not forgotten my wallet and pertinent IDs, and we were soon on our way home where we regaled the others with our adventure, the intellectual tussle now upstaged by the men in blue.
That experience bespeaks a bygone era when the essence of a library was restricted to a building, a facility that had a limited number of hours, a silo unto itself. Now many of our resources and services are available 24/7 to our students and faculty through their computers wherever they are as long as they can log into the university network. Sixty percent of our total acquisitions budget is now devoted to the purchase of digital resources. Analysis of our usage logs shows that our catalog and databases are heavily used in the lonely stretches of the night. The information kingdom is now substantially digital and available at the hour of our choosing. Now all students have their own master key.
But that heady reality has not eliminated all of my afterhours explorations. Some aspects of the digital world keep me awake at night. For example:
The loss of ownership. We no longer own many of the most pertinent academic resources. We rent or lease most of these databases and journals and are limited as to how they may be used. Many of the digital publishers prohibit us from sending articles from our databases to other libraries. Interlibrary cooperation that characterized the print era is now forbidden in this new reality. Most recently a major publisher— HarperCollins— unilaterally added a charge to the e-books that libraries have purchased once a title has been consulted more than twenty-six times, even though Harper charges more for their e-books than for their print books.
The thought of the unthinkable. In the post-9/11 world, the threats to our world have multiplied and libraries are not exempt. With so many of our resources born digital or transformed to the digital, the networks which house these resources are susceptible, not to fire, water, and silverfish, but to digital sabotage. We no longer have the safety net of collections in the stacks or in the stacks of nearby universities to bail us out in the event of such a terrorist attack.
History reminds us that each new technology brings gains as well as hazards. I have a friend who was dean of a college in Colorado and loved to say that he was “dean of things that go bump in the night.” I could claim that moniker, too.
– Andrew Scrimgeour