This commentary is by Amy D. Moore of Pownal, a faculty member at Community College of Vermont, faculty co-chair of the Technology Curriculum Committee and a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee on Technology.
Recently I was approached by my union to reach out to my senators here in Bennington County to support Sen. Collamore’s bill to “save the libraries.”
I have been teaching as a faculty member employed by the Vermont State College system for over 20 years now. I’ve been hearing updates on this plan for well over a year and I think it is a fantastic effort to improve our library services and save our students money on their education.
Here in Bennington County, the Vermont State College system has presence for two of its colleges pre-merger — one of the 12 Community College of Vermont academic centers and a Vermont Technical College nursing program. Neither of these programs has a physical library and, in Bennington County, the Vermont State Colleges keep no physical library books or materials in circulation and there are no librarians employed or visiting in person.
Never has the AFT (our union) or others advocated for “improving” our library access here in Bennington County and, after my more than 20 years of experience with our virtual library we share with Vermont Tech, Hartness Library, I’m glad they didn’t.
No Vermont State College libraries are closing. It is frustrating to read opinion pieces stating such things. Those colleges and universities that had physical libraries still have them. The Vermont State College system has done data analysis on circulation and found that the volume of material never or rarely entering circulation is expensive and unreasonable to maintain.
Building and maintaining spaces for printed materials is more demanding on every kind of resource — human, energy, weight capacity, and space. Tell a traditional-aged student today you need to have 10 or 20 times more space because you’re storing printed material, CDs, DVDs, and microfiche and they’ll tell you that’s a museum, not a library.
Yes, when I was first employed by Vermont State Colleges and started teaching at Community College of Vermont in Bennington, I had never heard of a college that didn’t have a physical library. Yes, I love the smell and ambiance of any college library’s stacks. But that is not the library; that’s nostalgia, nostalgia for thousands of noncirculating books.
I learned quickly that Hartness (Community College of Vermont’s library shared with Vermont Tech and, for CCV, only online) met all my needs as a lifelong learner and faculty at CCV, and they did it better than the traditional college libraries I grew up with.
If I wanted a book that was available only in physical form, I could request any book, CD, or DVD in the entire Vermont State College system and have it mailed to me. It always showed up the next day I got mail and I could return it to the system by leaving it at CCV’s front desk.
I will mention, I was sometimes denied a book because it was too popular in some other Vermont State College’s library. E-book collections and academic databases are vast, very available, extremely accessible, and growing constantly. I can get a book anywhere I have internet access — in a car, at my house, at another job, at a friend’s house, on my boat, on vacation in Europe.
I can usually save them in ways that they are accessible in places I don’t have internet access. I can read it with my eyes, print it on paper (most students don’t own printers today — also outdated technology), have it read to me by my computer, highlight it, bookmark it, share it, quote it in a forum with links to access — do all kinds of things I could not do with a printed, borrowed text.
For my students, Hartness has subscribed to the O’Reilly/Wiley digital library, which holds every computer science book they’ve ever printed and more. It has video instruction and all sorts of tools I can use in my classes.
Sure, it has all the outdated texts too, but the applications I’m usually teaching update every six months. Stacks of old computer science texts are often completely irrelevant and were an expensive investment.
Some of my students do purchase printed copies of the e-books they can get for free. That’s fine. But for so many of my students, using free-to-them, top-quality e-books from Hartness means living essentials instead of texts that literally cost hundreds of dollars and will be useless in a few months.
Hartness, besides printed material delivered by mail or over the internet, also provides video instruction services, has librarians available to chat with or call, and embeds librarians in classes so they can support the library needs of students and the faculty can focus on the content they’re experts in. The Vermont State Colleges library will as well.
There’s a reason video stores closed and, if you want to rent a DVD, you can still find a Red Box. Most people stream their movies today — for hours watched, that media delivery system is primarily virtual.
That’s the analogy here. We don’t need a 5,000-square-foot store, the people to run it and maintain it, the expensive inventory, or the energy for all that stuff when 50 boxes in small spaces around the county — indoors and out — can be managed by one person and serve many.
Vermont State College libraries are being reinvented to save costs, better serve our students’ modern library needs, and use less energy all the way around. My union advised me that all the current library space will still be library, but it will hold a lot less “books.”
I’m all about this fact-driven, money-saving, student-supporting change. It means the Vermont State University campuses will still have books, but also a library that has served Community College of Vermont exceptionally for decades.
