Forty-five years after Lamont: the university undergraduate library in the 1990s - The Library and Undergraduate Curriculum

INTRODUCTION

When Harvard University's Lamont Library opened in 1949, it was the first library designed specifically for the undergraduates of a research university with collections and services housed in a separate building. Forty-five years later, undergraduate libraries in research universities face transitions on a much larger scale. The tools of research, teaching, and scholarship are changing; the way undergraduates use libraries is changing; and the resources and services they use are changing. The scholarly model of the past 500 years--the physical distribution of ideas and information stored and expressed in printed words on paper--is being joined to the future, to the era of hypertext and multimedia documents stored in digital form and distributed almost instantaneously on a worldwide communications network. At the same time, the performance of research-intensive universities is the subject of public debate with the value of an undergraduate education as one major topic. If an undergraduate education at a major research university is worth the price, the adequacy of library service for undergraduates is an important factor for students and their families to consider.

The establishment of Lamont Library marks a milestone in the development of library services and collections for university undergraduates. The opening of Lamont, at a time of major expansion that established research-intensive universities in the United States as the finest in the world, accelerated the end of single central libraries as the norm in research universities (Froomkin, 1993, p. 50). The division of main libraries into research and undergraduate libraries was a first step in a long process of decentralization and distribution of central library collections into separate buildings. The construction of separate library facilities for rare books and manuscripts, regional collections, and storage of low-use materials has continued into this decade (Kuhn, 1969, p. 188; Wilkinson, 1971, p. 1568).

DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARIES

The establishment of separate undergraduate library buildings was an attractive administrative choice for many reasons. Research collections of printed materials became so large that they were difficult to manage physically and were overwhelming to many novice users. When rapidly growing central collections required additional shelf space and the construction of new buildings to house them adequately, library and university administrators split central collections and services into two units for the two major user groups--undergraduates on the one hand, and faculty and graduate students on the other--and built a new building for one. The new library building could be much smaller than the one required to house the collection for both groups. Keyes Metcalf, the librarian at Harvard, recognized the difficulties undergraduates faced when using Widener Library, with a collection, building, and services designed for faculty and graduate research, and that housed library collections which were quite small, and he successfully promoted the construction of a new building for undergraduates. When other universities emulated the Lamont model, it sometimes made more sense for them to construct a new research facility. But in either case, following construction, the collections were divided and partially duplicated, and the appropriate services were set up in each building. At many universities, research collections were then closed to undergraduates. Braden (1970) carefully documented this process at Harvard, Michigan, South Carolina, Indiana, Cornell, and Texas.

By the late 1950s, at Cornell University, the old central library, built in 1891, was overflowing with more than 800,000 volumes in a space built to hold half that number. A new building, Olin Library, was constructed for the social sciences and humanities research collection. When Olin opened in 1961, the old building was remodeled, renamed Uris Library, and reopened in 1962 with 42,722 volumes of the projected 50,000 basic collection (Braden, 1970, p. 103; Wilkinson, 1978, pp. 143-44).

By 1970, separate undergraduate collections and services were a well-established feature of many university library systems. Kuhn lists nineteen new buildings constructed after Lamont opened. The library literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s is filled with articles, books, symposium papers, and at least two dissertations (Braden, 1967; Wilkinson, 1972) documenting and assessing the effectiveness of the movement. Wilkinson, who headed the Uris Library from 1962 to 1967, grouped undergraduate library services into seven functions or collections: study hall, social center, reserve book dispenser, browsing collection, listening facility, visual materials center, and reference services (1971, p. 1568). The undergraduate library differed from the traditional central library in significant ways. It provided open access to a carefully selected core collection and special services to undergraduates in one location, including new services not usually available in research libraries of the time (e.g., audiovisual and instructional services), and it was constructed or remodeled with undergraduate use patterns in mind (Braden, 1970, p. 2). The popularity of this strategy with undergraduates was measurable. Book circulation to undergraduates increased, large course reserve collections were established and used heavily, and building traffic included not only students seeking quiet study space away from the noise of the dormitories but also those who wanted to see and be seen. Nearly thirty years after it opened, a 1990 use survey showed that Uris Library is still popular, accounting for 25 percent of the foot traffic in the sixteen-unit Cornell University Library (Murray-Rust, 1993, p. 1). The change was also popular with faculty and graduate students, who appreciated having more of the research library's collections, study carrels, and reference librarians to themselves.