A library for all: when the community college and town of Irving, Texas, decided to build a dual-use library, it took a lot of planning and money, but ultimately both students and taxpayers won - profile in change

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Amy D'Orio

The students will be going from a library open 65 hours to 73 hours a week, the extra hours mainly coming on the weekends and a whopping increase in the collection and in services. The current library has about 40,000 volumes, and that collection will be included in the new library. Plus, Vance expects that in about a year's time the new library will have probably purchased some 50,000 volumes in its agreement to spend $1 million on new books and materials. Some 25 percent of that money must be spent on academic materials.

The new library will have a children's library and offer popular reading materials, but Vance says it will market itself as a "learning" library that focuses on three specialties: consumer health, computer technology and business.

The college, by not replacing librarians that have left over recent years, has not had to layoff any library personnel. Three librarians will be making the move at the college. At the new library there will be a total of eight librarians, two for the children's department, three from the college, and three hired by the city.

Vance says because the two groups agreed to not operate separately under one roof but as one integrated entity, merging the two staffs has been challenging. Vance says he has tried to get the staff to understand that there is more common ground than differences in what public librarians and academic librarians do, and one can help the other one's customers.

"We have adopted the zebra as our library mascot," he says with a laugh. "This is not a co-administration, it is a very integrated approach."

In the new library, there is not a special academic section, the collections will be mixed and can be checked out by either group. Nor will residents and students be able to tell which librarians are from the college and which ones are city employees.

Furthermore, the librarians generally will not be able to tell who is a student and who is resident. The average age of students at the community college is 28, and some 70 percent are Irving residents and probably have public library cards as well as their college library card. This makes statistical data difficult to gather, since a student might use a public library card one day and the student card on another, Vance says.

Residents of Irving will notice, however, their new library is not like the other branches, Smith says. Significant differences include the library, with the exception of the children's library, being organized by the Library of Congress system instead of the Dewey Decimal system. Also, when residents go to do searches on the computer, they will use the college system.

Smith hopes both matters will be easily overcome, since the college's system is as easily used as the public library's system, and many residents are college-educated and familiar with the library of Congress system.

"This is a very interesting deal and it will be exciting to see how this plays out," says Vance of the overall setup. "I really think it will be a good deal for both parties in the end."