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Libraries to lease off-campus building for storage
By DONNA BUDNIEWSKI
Reporter Assistant Editor
The University Libraries, desperate for space to store its burgeoning collection of materials, will lease space off campus in a building to be constructed by Hart Hotels Inc., owner of the local Holiday and Hampton inns.
Construction is slated to begin next spring on the approximately 15,000-square-foot building—large enough to store up to 1.5 million volumes of low-use materials—which would be called the Collection Conservation Center, Barbara von Wahlde, associate vice president of University Libraries, and Stephen M. Roberts, assistant vice president of University Libraries, reported yesterday to the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.
UB is in the last stages of negotiating a contract under which the libraries would lease the building, to be located across the street from the Holiday Inn on Niagara Falls Boulevard in the Town of Tonawanda, for 20 years at about $300,000 a year.
The building would feature specially designed, 30-foot-high "canyons of stacks," with bins constructed to hold materials according to size for the densest possible use of space—or 10 times the density of storage space on campus, Roberts said. It also would include conference and reading rooms for on-site use of materials.
Roberts said the University Libraries ran out of storage space some time ago. About three miles of materials now are housed in non-public storage areas on campus, and ongoing book and journal acquisitions require an additional 1.5-2 miles of new shelving every year. The Collection Conservation Center would restore critical space back to the libraries to be used for students, faculty and more shelving, said Roberts.
"It's going to give us a lot more flexibility than we have now," he added. "For the past five to 10 years, we've been cannibalizing user space...to put up more shelves." The various UB libraries have room for 72 miles of shelving, but the library owns 75 miles of materials, or more than 3.5 million volumes.
Moreover, in an age where so much information is available to students and faculty online, the libraries' foot traffic continues to grow—last month an all-time record 135,000 people walked through the gates of the Undergraduate Library in Capen Hall, which is "the highest by 20,000 for any month we've ever had," noted Roberts.
Von Wahlde and Roberts assured senators that librarians are consulting with faculty regarding the transfer and accessibility of materials to be stored off-site. Criteria used in deciding which materials to store off-site will vary according to the needs of the academic discipline, said von Wahlde. Plans are to have a retrieval system in place that doesn't require students or faculty to visit the storage site, include scanning, electronic transmission—often in less than two hours—and on-site or campus mail delivery within 24 hours, she said.
Without the new building, the libraries face "massive, permanent removal of books, journals and other materials in our collection, to the extent of 1.5 million volumes," according to a fact sheet von Wahlde and Roberts distributed to senators. Digital storage of materials, considered an unstable medium for long-term preservation, coupled with the exorbitant costs of maintaining access to electronic journals means that for now, physical storage is the only option for preservation. Only about 1 percent of published materials will ever be converted to digital format, the fact sheet noted.
On another issue, von Wahlde reported that the skyrocketing costs of both print journals and maintaining access to electronic journals is forcing UB and other SUNY schools into exorbitantly expensive, long-term agreements with publishers that have a near-total monopoly on their services.
One such agreement being negotiated by SUNY with Elsevier, a major publisher in the sciences, has UB and SUNY "over the barrel—it's very difficult to extract yourself," Roberts noted.
The tradeoff for maintaining perpetual access to the current list of journals UB subscribes to through Elsevier is the company's demand that SUNY schools not reduce the number of monographs or journals they already purchase. So as libraries' budgets tighten due to the economic realities plaguing higher education in New York State, they may be forced to cut back on other services or materials, or lose access to many important journals needed by faculty and students, the librarians said.
Von Wahlde told senators that this issue, as well as others related to scholarly communication in the digital age, such as intellectual property rights and tenure issues related to the challenges posed by electronic publishing, will be the focus of a one-day conference, "Publishing the Future: Scholarly Communication in an Information Age." She encouraged faculty to register for the conference online at http://libweb.lib.buffalo .edu/ScholCom/. The conference, to be held on Nov. 11, will bring together nationally recognized leaders to discuss the critical transformations taking place in scholarly communication.