Feature: MSU Library in the Internet Age: More Relevant Than Ever

            MSU’s library has adapted to massive changes in information-seeking technology and now is getting more usage for research than ever.

            With “everything” available on the World Wide Web, many alumni naively assume that the MSU Main Library has become a ghost town. But the library is busier today than ever before, with an estimated 8,000 visitors a day during regular semesters, and as many as 12,000 a day during exam weeks.

            Not only is the library still relevant to students’ academic success, it’s a “place that students want to come to,” says Cliff Haka, director of MSU Libraries for nearly 12 years.

            Wireless network access is now available to MSU students, staff and faculty throughout the building, which is open 24-hours on school nights. Food and drink are welcome — even encouraged with the addition of a CyberCafe on the main floor that serves light snacks and fair trade coffee drinks. More than 500 public access computer terminals make the library, in effect, the largest computer laboratory on campus. High tech rooms allow users to work collaboratively in a hardware and software rich environment.

            The advent of the Web did impact the library, according to Haka. He points out that when he arrived at MSU Libraries in the early 1980s, the main challenge for librarians was to help users find “something, anything,” about certain topics.

            “With the Web, students could now readily find ‘something about anything’ online, and many users, preferring the ease of access from a computer in their office or dorm room, settled for whatever their search engine of choice retrieved,” notes Haka.

            Not surprisingly, foot traffic to the Main Library declined.

            Librarians immediately knew it was problematic for students to rely solely on materials available on the Internet. In some ways, their job became more critical to students, who immediately assumed that “if it was the Internet, it must be true,” says Stephanie Perentesis, library instruction coordinator.

            In addition, the vast majority of scholarly publications — the very items students and scholars should utilize — were nowhere to be found on the Internet of the late 1990s.

A User-Friendly Library

            It became clear that dramatic change was needed. The library’s limited hours and no food or drink policy alone were enough to keep students at bay. “Is it any wonder that users were prepared to pursue another option, regardless of its appropriateness?” asks Haka. 

            The first step was to begin to make the physical environment more inviting. Second was the consolidation of service points to eliminate assistance-seeking users from being bounced from desk to desk.  While librarians might have preferred to staff a desk where only questions in their area of specific expertise were handled, users frequently became frustrated before they got to the “correct desk,” notes Haka. And frustrated users seldom return. 

            To augment library services, an outpost of the Writing Center was established in the Main Library so students could receive writing assistance as they began papers. Frequently, the center’s advice was for students to gather more facts or information to support their assertion. With the users in the library, they can readily return to the Reference Desk, which is just steps away, for assistance in securing the required information.

            Next was the introduction of the CyberCafe, which has been well received by library users. “There is no question that the prohibition of food and drink had always discouraged building use,” notes Haka. “And to what end?  Most of our materials can be checked out and taken to a student apartment where, not surprisingly, food and drink abounds.”

            Opening the building 24 hours on school nights quickly followed. Now, when the Main Library opens at 10 a.m. on Sunday during regular semesters, it does not close again until midnight on Friday. Even between 3 and 5 a.m. hundreds of students will typically be in the building.  

            Students are once again using the Main Library in ever-increasing numbers, to the point that providing an adequate number of seats is once again an area of concern, says Haka.

Librarians in Action

            Of course, the underlying reason for having users, especially students, return to the library was the opportunity to teach them about information retrieval and assessment. Just about anyone can type a few terms into a search engine, like Google, and get millions of “hits” about virtually any topic — prompting the comparison to “getting a sip of water from a fire hose.” However, this approach does not differentiate the academic information seeker from most 10-year-olds.

            Helping freshmen see the need for persistence in research is one of the largest challenges, says Sara Miller, instruction librarian. “Students tend to look for instant gratification when finding information rather than seeking the best source. Introducing students to basic resource evaluation criteria helps them to see why some of the first sites that pop up on a Google search may not always be the best sources of information.”

            The library now functions as both a classroom, where students learn information literacy skills, and a laboratory, where they practice their skills. In 2007, 74 librarians taught 771 instruction sessions in its two instruction rooms, reaching more than 34,000 students.

            Miller often begins her library instruction sessions by having students search for material on the Internet, then uses their findings as a springboard to discuss search strategy and evaluative criteria for Internet resources, and to introduce them to relevant library resources. Users need to learn to execute more sophisticated searches, often in library-licensed databases that are not openly accessible via public search engines. Libraries, in addition to housing and cataloging a wealth of older materials that are not online, organize and pay for subscriptions for scholarly publications.

            “Even with so much information available outside of the traditional library setting, academic libraries have never been more important,” says Miller. “As researchers know, basic Internet searching only scratches the surface of scholarly information, and subscriptions to essential resources are costly. Librarians serve as expert navigators through the flood of available information.”

            Academic libraries are also at the forefront of emerging technologies, making it easier than ever for users to access the materials they need, adds Miller.  

            “Primary sources” has also proven most confusing for first-year students, who encounter the concept during their required semester of Writing, Rhetoric & American Culture. According to Ruth Ann Jones, a cataloger for Special Collections, primary sources are anything that provides firsthand evidence: letters, diaries, scientists’ field notes, the paperwork generated by a company or organization in carrying out its goals, the census forms people fill out every 10 years, oral history interviews, transcripts of testimonies given in a court of law, photographs of an event. In other words, materials “that don’t come pre-packaged with an explanation, that lets them weigh evidence and draw conclusions on their own,” explains Jones.

            Jones and fellow reference and instruction librarian Lesley Brown created an exhibit on display in Special Collections so students could easily identify between primary sources and also important secondary sources. The exhibit is in the process of being digitized for online use.

Special Collections

            MSU Libraries’ collections now exceed 5 million volumes, with new acquisitions averaging more than 80,000 volumes a year over the last five years. About 500,000 of these books are in its Special Collections — rare and unique collections of distinction that the Library continues to assemble, preserve and secure.

            “As part of a great university, it is the library’s responsibility to provide our students, faculty, and visiting scholars with the greatest opportunities to enrich their learning and research to make their MSU experience a transformative one,” says Dr. Peter Berg, head of Special Collections. “One of the ways we do this is by providing them with important and even one of a kind research collections that might lead to intellectual discovery and change their lives forever.”

            For over 150 years, the MSU Libraries has been building important rare book collections in the fields of agriculture, botany, cookery, horticulture, veterinary medicine, and zoology — not surprising given its pioneer land grant status, notes Berg.

            But the library’s greatest success of late has come in two areas not traditionally collected: popular culture and radicalism. “Our world famous popular culture collection began with a donation of comic books, almanacs, westerns and Sunday school books from Russel B. Nye, who taught at MSU for many years,” says Berg. “Today the collection is named in Nye’s honor and, with over 350,000 books, is considered one of the world’s great resources for the study of popular arts and culture dating back to the 19th century.”

            An integral part of the Nye Collection is the world famous Comic Art Collection, which has over 200,000 American comic books, 30,000 foreign language comics and 10,000 volumes of books about comic art. King Features Syndicate recently donated the unique proof sheets for all their newspaper comic strips since the early 20th century. “Once organized, this will allow researchers to look at the entire run of Blondie, Prince Valiant, Mandrake the Magician, and many other strips that have become part of the fabric of American daily life,” says Berg.

            Since the 1960s, Special Collections has also collected radical documents from both sides of the political, social, economic, and cultural spectrum, including materials representing the Black Panthers, the Ku Klux Klan, the Christian right and the Communist Party of the United States.

            Special Collections is making it possible for people globally to see, use and benefit from some of its treasures. Recently, 75 of its most important American cookbooks were digitized and put on the Internet as part of the Feeding America, the Historic American Cookbook Project. Online is a virtual copy of the 1798 first edition of American Cookery, the first true American cookbook, which is part of Michigan State’s world famous Cookery Collection.

            Otherwise, the books of the Special Collections must be perused in the reading room, where food and drink is still forbidden. “Fortunately, our restrictions do not keep people away,” says Berg, who notes that 3,500 patrons visit Special Collections each year, including MSU undergraduate and graduate students and researchers from throughout the country and world.

            Research on Countee Cullen brought Tonya Braddox, master of arts candidate for the English Department, to Special Collections. The library was essential to locating what little information that exists on Cullen’s work, she says. In Special Collections, she found Cullen’s Book, Colors, which contained the poem “The Shroud of Color,” the primary subject of her seminar paper.

            “As a graduate student, the library is quickly becoming a vital source for obtaining information on my research interest,” says Braddox.

Digitizing Libraries

            Michigan State is among the libraries participating in the Google Books Library Project, which is digitizing millions of books from major libraries around the world, making their collections searchable on Google Book Search. In 2004, Google began digitizing the entire holdings at the University of Michigan and other universities across the country. Through a 2007 agreement with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a national consortium of research libraries of which Michigan State is a part, Google will digitize the libraries’ extensive holding in agriculture.

            An unfortunate knee-jerk reaction to the Google Books Library Project has been: “Well, then we can toss all of our holdings and simply rely on access via Google.”

            “Unfortunately there is a huge misconception underpinning this dangerous suggestion,” explains Haka. “That being that materials under copyright protection, and roughly speaking that means most things published after 1923, cannot be shown in their entirety.”

            According to Google, for books in the public domain, readers will be able to view, browse and read the full texts online. But for books protected by copyright, users will get basic background, such as the book’s title and the author’s name, a few lines of text related to their search, and information about where they can buy or borrow a book.

            In actuality, the Google Book Library Project offers a dramatically richer search mechanism for finding materials of interest, notes Haka. The result should be an increased demand for the print volumes currently filling the stacks of research libraries.

            “So there remains a legitimate need to build and maintain collections so that users can have access to materials of interest,” says Haka.

Still Vital

            In 2007, MSU Libraries’ users retrieved 1,629,188 full-text articles from their desktops. However, the library continues to check out over 300,000 physical items per year. After a decade of decline, reference inquires increased during each of the last two years. One-on-one advice and training with a reference librarian—either by phone, instant messenger chat or phone—has also increased.  In 2007, librarians worked individually with 54,547 users at the reference desk.

            So while an ever-increasing array of library resources are available electronically, and thereby accessible in one’s dorm room, office or around the world, the MSU Main Library of today once again stands physically at the heart of the academic endeavor, available to users, whether for research or study, during the day, during the night and even if a football game is in progress.

            “It is the one consistent academic haven that is always available to the MSU community, which is voting with its feet and utilizing this option as never before,” says Haka.

SUPPORTING MSU LIBRARIES

            The needs of MSU Libraries are great and require the support of generous alumni. Ways you can support the library:

• Become a Friend. Friends of MSU Libraries receive invitations to special events, exhibits and tours. Cumulative gifts of $5,000 or more are permanently recognized on the MSU Libraries Donor Wall,
• Adopt a Book: Decades of wear and tear leave their mark on historic volumes. Make a gift for conservation treatment of a rare book, map or manuscript. A bookplate will be placed in the volume your gift helps preserve. A complete listing of books up for adoption is available at www2.lib.msu.edu/giving.
• Endowed fund: A minimum gift of $30,000 establishes an endowed fund, which supports the collection of your choice in perpetuity.

            For more information, contact Diane Nye Mattick, director of development for MSU Libraries, at (517) 432-6123 x137, or e-mail giving@lib.msu.edu.

Darci Smith, ‘92, received her degree in English and is a freelance writer based in Chicago. She wishes food and drink would have been allowed at the Main Library during her years at MSU, especially for the long hours she spent researching Willa Cather.