I agree with Judy. Working in a (main) library that serves both schools of
business and design, I know how the different disciplines rely on different
types of resources. We spend much more money on design-related books and
more on electronic resources for business. Our circulation figures bear
this out: 18% of H's circulated while 44% of N's did. I have seen it as wide
as 12% v. 60%. In fact, we have done extensive weeding in the H's of
outdated material, where N's are never weeded. We have had to weed the H's
(those that don't circulate) to have room for the rapidly growing N's
(thanks to mainly to NAAB and NASID). The business students complain that
our books are out of date - something we never hear from architecture &
design students. We are planning (Very preliminary) a new building - and
the demand is for maybe twice the stack space, plus electronic rooms equiped
with VCR, CD & DVD players, etc. By no means is anyone suggesting less room
for books.

Marti Pike
Woodbury University Library
Burbank, CA 91510
(818)767-0888 x259 Fax (818)767-4534
[log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Donovan [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 4:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: text vs. electronic


At 03:31 PM 10/9/00 -0400Shelly Emmons wrote:

>We are in the early, early planning stages of building a new library. I am
>wondering:
>What are your thoughts on the amount of electronic vs. text information.
>Everyone seems to be going towards electronic these days, but I wonder how
>wise that is for an art (mainly sculpture) library.
>

Shelly,

Here at Drexel University, we're on the 'bleeding edge'--our Library Dean's
vision is the total electronic library. It's a very exciting vision and
works extremely well for hard sciences, engineering and even business.

But my experience here has taught me that we have a long way to go before
"the arts" are adequately represented in digital format.
Granted, there are lots of excellent sites with images (AMICO, American
Memory Collection, etc) but electronic books and journals are missing
the key element--IMAGES--that are crucial to art, design and
architecture. Besides this, most faculty and students in the arts are
still very print-oriented. We've recently had a lot of publicity about
having a "wireless" campus. The engineering students are ecstatic over it,
as well as
many in business and science. But those in the College of Design arts are
not--largely because the materials they need and use (slides and books) are
not available electronically. The few that are have substandard
images. Students often are assigned the task of scanning images and making
slides from books for their presentations. Given that the electronically
available image sources are so paranoid about people downloading images,
the electronic environment currently does not meet the needs of students in
the arts.

Our latest round of circulation statistics revealed that the
most-circulated books come from two areas: Computer science and art
(architecture in particular). Our annual library survey has shown that,
despite all the hoopla about electronic resources, the most-asked for
resource is still BOOKS.

I guess what I'm saying here is, the electronic world hasn't met the needs
of the art world yet. And, until both the image problem and the user
preference "problem" (arts people prefer browsing the real world and the
printed page), I doubt too much will change in the immediate future.

So go ahead and plan to wire your new library--but don't assume that the
web will alleviate the need for stack space and plan accordingly!



Judy Donovan
Design Arts Librarian
Hagerty Library
Drexel University
33rd and Market Streets
Philadelphia PA 19104
phone: 215-895-2768
fax: 215-895-2070
email: [log in to unmask]

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