Thoughts on a couple of articles

Singh, G. (2002). Evolving space: An examinations of coffee shops in academic libraries. A master's paper for the M.S. in L.S. degree.

Stoller, M. (2006). A decade of ARL collection development: A look at the data. Collection building, 25(2), p45-51.

The first article or thesis, I should say, is part of my continuing research on coffee shops or food service areas in libraries. And I have to say that this article has assuaged at least on of my major doubts. Ms. Singh interviewed students at four major universities in North Carolina that had coffee shops in or near their main libraries. She found that the majority of students she interviewed were using the library for study or other library related reasons and only a small percentage used the library for socialization. The majority of the students drank coffee and found it very convenient not to have to leave the library or its vicinity to get coffee or other refreshments. So there goes my idea that the library would become a social gathering place. However, I still have preservation concerns. Ms. Singh did address, briefly, the issues of preservation but her argument was not extensive or convincing, to me. She said that evidence has shown that damage to materials is minimal, but I'm not sure what minimal means. And balancing the risks of attracting pests with the comfort of patrons is something that needs to be considered very carefully. The author also suggested that food and drink be restricted to areas immediately around or near to the cafe. This is good for containing food to a specific area of the library, but it doesn't prevent library materials from being exposed to food and drink when brought into that area. So I'm still on the fence about cafes in libraries. As a preservationist I strongly want to protect the valuable resources owned by libraries, but I can see the benefits to patrons in having an in house coffee shop.

The second article is a discussion of the new collection development statistics from ARL libraries. On the whole it was a little dull, as some discussions of statistics can be. I gleaned from it that libraries are spending more on electronic resources (duh!) than they have in the past, libraries spend the majority of their budgets in many cases on subscriptions to serials, and monograph spending has been fairly steady but increase in spending doesn't match the increase in costs, so less monographs are purchased on the whole. But not that many less, on average about 5-8%. As for our library, I don't know the exact expenditures but I would bet that we are spending the most on electronic resources and serials and spending a smaller amount on monographs. I think this because our monographs collection is lacking in major areas like computers, engineering and English and many of our books are quite old and out of date. This has shown up in the comments on the recent LibQual survey that the library did, so I expect to see some movement to improve these and other monograph collections when money comes available in the new fiscal year.