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In Reply to: (Re)Visiting UC Berkeley posted by Luminator on September 3, 2024 at 20:55:27:
That's South Hall, oldest building on the Berkeley campus and where I spent most of my time in the early 90s. Was called the School of Library and Information Studies when I was there. Then it became the School of Information Management and Systems. And now it's just the School of Information. Forget books! Now we are digital warriors!
You posted photos of Moffitt Library and Doe Library. But why does Berkeley have two large libraries on the same campus? Because the research library (Doe Library) has such comprehensive collections that you have to have some level of subject expertise just to find your way through the stacks. So much book wealth you don't know where to begin. An overdose for undergraduates. Moffitt, the undergraduate library, also has good collections, but they are just the main texts essential for undergraduate coursework, and little more. I used both libraries in the era when they still had floor-standing card catalogs, those things now long gone.
Good photo you've got of the Life Sciences Building. But there was a kind of scandal that happened there. Every graduate program in the life sciences used to have its own departmental library, right next to faculty offices. Was great stuff, as you never really had to leave the building to get your graduate education. But that changed. An administrative decision was handed down to consolidate all life sciences libraries. Done allegedly because centralization of library materials would save big money. So all those marvelous departmental libraries (Forestry, Agriculture, Nutrition, Public Health, Optometry, Botany, Zoology, and Microbiology) got mashed together, losing locality as separate collections and also losing local faculty expertise. Was a really stupid move that downgraded the quality of graduate education in the life sciences.
I also spent years on the Stanford campus, and while much richer than UC Berkeley, that didn't stop Stanford from wrecking their own libraries. The Engineering library, the Biology library, and the Chemistry library were shut down in 2015 and their collections siphoned off into Stanford's main library, which is Green Library. Mashed together what were carefully curated and separate collections into one big pit, where nobody knows their way around the materials with the same care those books had as independent collections. Stanford also had the best reference room book collection that I had ever seen, but that got gutted as well. The main floor of Green library now has acres of computer terminals, but very few reference books. And never mind that 4 million of Stanford's books are stored off campus in a warehouse type setting, boxed and placed on high vertical shelving and retrieved by automated machinery. You expected all university book collections to be on open shelving so people could walk the aisles and browse? No way! Because that does not match with the new trend to warehouse collections offsite! It's a big money saver!! Never mind that many of those books will never be read again.
Just my rant about the ongoing desecration and forthcoming doom for university book collections.
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Follow Ups
- Excellent tour of the campus! More detail from the perspective of a librarian. - vacuous 01:02:11 09/04/24 (1)
- My late aunt was a civilian librarian for the U.S. military - Luminator 07:44:27 09/04/24 (0)
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