The renovation and expansion of Schaffer Library has transformed an aging building into a spacious, 110,000-square-foot facility that accommodates new and emerging electronic technologies while maintaining a commitment to traditional print resources.
At the library's dedication on May 22, Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library (and a former professor of French at Union) hailed what he called “one of the best collegiate libraries in the land.” Here are excerpts from his remarks:
Libraries have enjoyed what is arguably the simplest and most enduring set of organizing principles of any cultural enterprise. Simply put, libraries have had, since their origins in antiquity, only three basic functions — to acquire materials, to store and preserve those materials, and to make them available for inspection. These are the fundamental characteristics of any library, as valid for Schaffer Library as they were in the great library at Ephesus.
What separates one library from another is the attitude its proprietors adopt in relation to the traditional functions. And what sets the present era apart from virtually all others is the rapid — indeed revolutionary — ways in which information technology is transforming each of these core functions. And it is in the skill with which the new Schaffer Library accommodates superb print collections and electronic information that will make it a central place in the life of this community of students and scholars.
The actual physical possession of texts — whether inscribed on cuneiform tablets, on papyrus or vellum or paper — has, until the very recent past, been at the heart of the library enterprise. Precisely what kind of things a library owned, in which subject fields, and in what scope or scale gave collection building a necessary focus and gave an individual library a particular — and at times a peculiar — identity. The founders and directors of the legendary library of Alexandria, for example, set out to build an authentically global collection. And they did, even if it meant resorting to outright theft, as was the case of the manuscript copies of the works of Aeschulyus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Yet this paradigm, that a library is what it owns, has come under the powerful influence of information technology within the past decade. As a consequence, a library can suddenly bring its readers into contact with abundant information found in products that cannot be purchased and owned by the library. These products may reside physically anywhere in the world, instantly available to patrons in the Schaffer Library's reading rooms through regional, national, or worldwide telecommunications networks. If the library's function is to satisfy the curiosity of its patrons, doing so by placing them at electronic gateways that take them to information dispersed globally but retrievable locally through a computer network is no less valid a function than putting books, journals, and manuscripts from our physical collections in their hands in reading rooms.
If collections, either print or electronic, are the point of origin in a library's identity, then access to these collections is a necessary corollary. For two millenia, using a library collection meant going physically to the library itself and actually getting into the reading rooms to use its materials. In the realm of access, information technology is also working wonders for libraries. Because no library today can afford to collect everything it fancies for its readers, satisfying their information needs means accessing the collections of other libraries. Today, one can sit at a computer terminal in Schaffer Library and search the catalogs of the New York Public Library and virtually all the catalogs of our world's greatest research libraries.
It is, of course, through digitizing library collections and making their actual content available on-line that we see technology's greatest potential to transform traditional definitions of access. We now have the technical ability to create perfect, computer-based replicas of books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, maps, films, and sound recordings and make them available to readers world-wide through the Internet. This is the brave new world of the so-called virtual library. Will it ever really come into being in a way that fulfills the research and teaching needs of an academic community such as Union's? Not really, I think. I've calculated that to digitize the superb collection of nearly 600,000 books now housed in the Schaffer Library would cost a minimum of $240 million dollars. We are surrounded by generous benefactors this afternoon, but I think it is unrealistic that any great library will ever be given the resources to engage in the mass digitization of its collections.
No one should therefore place any credence in the prognostications of naive futurists who predict that libraries will be rendered irrelevant or obsolete as a consequence of information technology; who predict, on a regular basis, the demise of the book; or who promise that the contents of the Library of Congress will become available on a computer chip the size of a penny. Rather, the function of libraries for generations to come will be precisely what you are seeing here at Schaffer Library. Libraries will continue to build and preserve impressive print collections while simultaneously broadening technology platforms to access ever greater numbers of electronic information sources. The better a library is at merging traditional concepts of library service with advances in information technology, the more central a place it will become in campus life. And the more compelling it will be to visit physically, not virtually.
You have managed this merger of the traditional and the new with exceptional skill at Union, and it is this success, as well as the sheer beauty of the new Schaffer Library, that is already bringing so many students and faculty here every day and night. The best context in which Union's newest achievement should be seen is, I think, not simply that of an advanced information center. The latter is indeed important and it is clear that the Schaffer Library is an enormous success. But what this facility best represents is the continually evolving, centuries' old commitment of Union to learning, to scholarship, to writing, to teaching, to the transmission of information. This wonderful college has — with the generous support of alumni, friends, and the Trustees — given to the next century of Union students and faculty the most wonderful library imaginable. Could any gift be better, be more timely, or more in keeping with Union's superb tradition of quality? I think not.
The new Schaffer Library has a number of features that enhance ease and convenience of use by faculty, staff, and students:
Shelving capacity for 750,000 books and bound periodicals;
A current periodicals reading room with display capacity for 1,400 journal titles;
400 seats for users, including tables, study carrels, and lounge chairs;
Ten group study rooms;
Multimedia, electronic classroom workstations throughout the building for Internet and electronic database access;
The Preservation and Digital Imaging Laboratory;
The Writing Center;
The Language Laboratory;
Instructional Technology and Audiovisual Services.