General Library Statistics

Taken from kempbros.com

I recently interviewed Carol Perruso, the Collection Development Officer and Librarian for Journalism, Social Work and Sociology. Among the things we talked about were statistics about library usage at CSULB during the 2010-2011 fiscal year:

- More then 1.3 million people entered the library, a 23% increase since June 2006, when library renovation began.

- Usage of computers in the Spidell Computer Lab is up 0.4% from last year.

- The total number of items used, both checked out and inside the library, was 517,618 (up 7.2%).

- Usage of online databases reached more than 1.3 million sessions (up 9%).

- Library instruction sessions, which teach students research skills, critical thinking research skills and research technique have increased steadily: 600 instructional sessions per year reaching 11,0000 students.

Taking all this information, we can see that library usage has been increasing steadily in the past few years, despite the fact that college enrollments are presently decreasing. What things are fostering this sort of growth, despite all expectations? This is something I hope to explore in my final project.

The library as the new place to be?

 The social life of a college student is typically busy and hectic, and more often than not you can see groups of eagerly chatting students all over the campus. Though in Tom Hiemstra's case, that particular place where he prefers to meet his friends isn't the sort of place that is usually associated with lively conversation and carefree social freedom.

Photo by Amanda Lam

Tom is a junior Chemical Engineering major at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

"The library wasn't really a place I thought I could hang out," he said. "You think library, you think stuffy old book collection or some sort of hushed museum, not a place where you can spend hours just talking."

Over the course of his college education, Tom believes that he spent most of his free time in the library, as opposed to trendy coffee shops, school food courts, or even in designated recreation areas. Libraries in the past few years, have changed in that they are no longer just a book repositories, but rather entirely new entities. Referred to as library as place, the phenomenon has seen the role of the library go from a storage place of knowledge to an actual community, where people can go to socialize and relax in addition to study.

Tom noticed parallels with other more conventional hang out spots. "I work as the assistant manager at a local coffee shop and I see people in the library do exact same things in my shop. They break out their laptops, they rearrange chairs so they can fit more people at a table and they end up just having a good time with their friends."

Police reports man caught masturbating in library

A man was caught masturbating on Oct. 17 in the University Library, though the woman who saw him did not report the incident to the police until the following day. The suspect currently remains at large, and is described as being in his 30s, wearing frameless glasses, a black t-shirt and khaki pants, reported University Police Captain Scott Brown.

In a currently unrelated incident, a woman contacted the police after receiving disturbing phone calls coming from a campus phone number. The same number would call her phone a few times a day over the course of a couple of weeks. Police were unable to track the number because of the uniform number displays for department lines.

"It's really disturbing how we still have to deal with things like this," said junior Political Science major Stanford Swanson. "You figure it'd happen somewhere else, not here."

Daily 49er

Librarians in the information age (A rebuttal)

In a response to an op-ed that I covered last week on the under-appreciation of librarians, Dan Terzian, a fellow at the legal clinic New Media Rights, claims that libraries and librarians have to adapt and conform to the "digital revolution."

Terzian opines that the revolution has "made many librarians obsolete." Traditionally, librarians provided valuable services that advised research and guided information seekers, but now with the advent of the internet and Google, those services are slowly being taken over by automation and digital sources he said, citing Google Books and Google Scholar as examples. For many college students, he states, Google is the first and last information searcher they need.

The New York Public Library, photo by David Iliff

Terzian states that the revolution should "spark library evolution." Classically trained librarians have a place in academia and university settings, but are largely obsolete in public libraries. He suggests that the role of librarians in public libraries should be taken up by English or other liberal arts majors who are attracted to the "literary librarian lifestyle." These new librarians wouldn't safeguard information, he claims, rather they would "teach patrons basic research in the information age."

He does acknowledge that librarians have been hit hard by budget cuts, but attributes it not to the specific targeting of libraries for budget cuts, but rather just the entire public system needing to tighten its belt. Others have been hit just as hard, he states, like public university students and other state employees.

He calls for innovation in libraries and cites the New York Public Library as an example, with its "digital strategy -- including e-publications, crowd-sourcing projects and a user-friendly online library catalog." He points out that with these achievements, the library actually makes more money than it spends.


Los Angeles Times

Saving libraries, but not librarians

In an op-ed article in the LA Times, Regina King, an Orange County librarian, laments at how the state of California underfunds and overworks librarians in the state, citing that California has 3,432 librarians for a population of 37 million, roughly 10 thousand people to each librarian. The national average, she states, was six thousand people to one librarian. The state of school librarians is even worse she says, with one librarian to nearly six thousand students; the national average is one to 865.

Photo from the L.A. Times

Public funding for libraries, she states, is at an all-time low after the operation revenue from state sources shrank from 12.8% to 8.7% from 2001 to 2008. The Public Library Fund, a state program that aids libraries individually, has never received its full allocation of funding from the state. Gov. Jerry Brown even proposed getting rid of state funding for public libraries entirely.

Librarians are public employees, but do not have the strong unions that others like firemen or policemen do. Because of that, King says that librarians are much easier to lay off. She cites the Los Angeles Public Library in 2010, when it cut 328 of its full time positions.

Public perception of librarians are also negative, she states. When asking a young student what he thought of librarians, he said, "Librarians check out books. They read a lot. They tell people to be quiet." These misconceptions are held far and wide by all age ranges. Librarians, she states, do much more than that, like run programs, build collections based on their patrons wants, and serve as "the ultimate gatekeepers and organizers of high-quality information."

King later cites national surveys which state that public library attendance has increased 19.7% since 1999, and that losing librarians at this point will compromise library quality dramatically.

The Los Angeles Times

Students see piracy as alternative to high textbook prices

Online piracy, typically associated with the illegal sharing of movies, music and video games, is broadening its horizons with textbooks. The excessive price of textbooks, in addition to the growing ubiquity of tablets and other portable digital media, has driven many a cash-strapped student to illegally download pirated digital copies of textbooks in an effort to save money.

A textbook found on piratebay.org, a popular file-sharing site.
Photo taken from the New York Times.

Cal State Long Beach senior Julie Boll, now nearly $19,000 in debt, found that her textbook costs for the semester would come to nearly $700. With no means of paying, piracy soon became the best option.

"I have paid literally thousands of dollars to [textbook distributors]," Boll told the Daily 49er. "I can't afford to line their pockets this semester, and I don't think they should really blame me."

The textbooks come from a variety of sources: some are hacked versions of official digital copies, allowing for unrestricted copying and distribution, others are uploaded by a determined set of students who physically scan library copies of the textbooks. 

Even some professors are tacitly supporting textbook piracy. "I do not go so far as to provide them with copies, but at the start of every semester, I make it very clear to my students that there are free copies of their $200 textbook on the internet," an anonymous CSULB professor told the Daily 49er.

In response, several major textbook publishers have initiated legal action. Recently, a court found popular file-sharing site Rapidshare liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for textbooks illegally hosted on their site. Publishers have also threatened students with legal actions if they did not pay a settlement.

Further Reading:
NY Times 

Traveling Holocaust exhibit visits CSULB library

Opening Ceremony. Photo by College of Liberal Arts, CSULB.

A circle of tall panels stands in a small side room on the third floor of the University Library, dominating the tiny space with vivid photographs and graphic descriptions of the Jewish Holocaust. The atmosphere in the room is somber; there is no idle chatter nor hushed whispers. Visitors make their way slowly around the circle reading each panel, each dedicated to a particular chapter of the Holocaust, starting with the rise of the Nazi Party and coming to a horrific crescendo as the Final Solution reached its most barbaric.

The "Courage to Remember" is a traveling Holocaust exhibit, sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, first founded in 1991. Three identical exhibits are now making their way across California, stopping at schools, libraries, and other public venues in order to educate and to raise awareness for the Holocaust.

State Sen. Alfred Lowenthal at the exhibit.
Photo by Ashleigh Oldland, Gazettes.

The tour was sponsored by the Foundation for California after receiving a grant from the SNCF, or the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer français, a French railroad company. A panel in the exhibit explains the reasoning behind the grant:

"The role of French Rail in the deportation of the Jews to the death camps rightfully stirs strong emotions, including in the US. Equally, this terrible tragedy continues to motivate SNCF, its board, its managers and its personnel, to support the cause of memory by making public and transparent all of the documents associated with the role of the company during the war."

The exhibit was on display at the CSULB library from September 19 until October 16.