The 21st-century Chemistry Library

ACS Meeting News

The chemistry library of yesteryear, with its shelves of aromatic old books and journals, limited hours, and cramped quarters, is disappearing. In its place, universities are building multidisciplinary libraries that depend on digital media and remote storage to save space. These trends and others affecting the future of chemistry libraries were discussed at a Division of Chemical Information symposium during the recent American Chemical Society national meeting in Washington, D.C.

Removing a chemistry library from the chemistry department and preparing for the transition can require a years-long campaign by librarians and administrators. Faculty can be reluctant to exchange a library in their building for one that might be two or three buildings away. On the other hand, faculty often find that consolidation with other disciplines means they don't need to visit multiple libraries to get the diverse materials they need, librarians report. The availability of journals and books online lessens the need to visit a library, no matter where it's located. Furthermore, taking the library out of the chemistry building can free up space for additional labs, offices, or classrooms.

Earlier this year, Jeremy R. Garritano, a chemical information specialist in Purdue University's Mellon Library of Chemistry, surveyed 113 member institutions of the Association of Research Libraries to find out how they meet the needs of the chemistry community on their campuses. Of the 85 that responded, 44 had had a separate chemistry library at some time. Only 19 still have a separate chemistry library, and seven of them plan to consolidate the chemistry library with other facilities within the next 10 years. Three of the chemistry libraries that will remain open will probably be reduced in size drastically in that time frame, according to Garritano.

Until recently, the sheer bulk of printed books and journals led universities to maintain separate departmental libraries across campus to house these materials close to researchers, said Grace A. Baysinger, head librarian and bibliographer at Stanford University's Swain Library of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering. Even these dedicated facilities haven't been sufficient to keep up with the growing collections.

We ran out of space long ago for all the journals in chemistry, according to Andrea Twiss-Brooks, a physical sciences librarian at the University of Chicago's main science library, the John Crerar Library. As a result of the space crunch, many universities are moving older and less used materials out of departmental libraries and into high-density storage facilities, which may be located off-campus.

Storage facilities, as well as modern campus-based libraries, can serve as a safe haven for books and journals, which can be vulnerable to damage within chemistry libraries. The University of Chicago's chemistry library was flooded semiregularly by water from broken pipes, Twiss-Brooks said. The controls for lighting, heat, and humidity were also out of date. The university's John Crerar Library, on the other hand, was erected in 1984 specifically as a library, with environmental controls and protective measures built in.

The increasing interdisciplinarity of research also is motivating the merging of chemistry libraries with other collections. Somebody doing atmospheric chemistry doesn't have to go to the earth and atmospheric sciences library and the chemistry library to pick up books or print journals, Garritano said. They can go to one central place.

Stanford is considering unification of its biology and chemistry library holdings. The university is already planning how it will combine its engineering, computer science, and physics libraries, though the new facility won't open until 2009.

The University of Chicago, which had a chemistry library for nearly 100 years, closed it this summer and merged the collections into the John Crerar Library. This change has become more palatable because many of the chemistry professors are moving into a new interdisciplinary research building that is right next to the science library.

The availability of online resources and computer access to the library from almost anywhere are also sugar-coating the pill, reducing resistance to the centralization of collections and services, Twiss-Brooks said. With journals, reference materials, and data compilations such as the CRC Handbook of Chemistry & Physics accessible at their desktop computers, faculty have less need to visit a bricks-and-mortar library. Availability of tools such as ACS's SciFinder Scholar and Elsevier's Beilstein and Gmelin chemical databases at researchers' personal computers rather than just within the library is also helping to change attitudes.

Of course, digital media can become unavailable if there are computer problems. We have already experienced some big titles going down, Baysinger said. In many cases, people tend to wait for the digital edition to go back online rather than come into the library for the print edition.

LIBRARY RENEWAL

Digital World Reshapes Library's Role And Content

Both chemistry libraries and the information within them are undergoing a radical transformation, according to William W. Armstrong, chemistry librarian at Louisiana State University. He spent this past spring merging LSU's chemistry library collections with those of the main library. He closed the chemistry library for good in mid-May. Armstrong was one of the participants in a symposium hosted by the Division of Chemical Information during the recent American Chemical Society national meeting in Washington, D.C.

Journals and books are increasingly available in digital format, often at the user's desktop. We no longer have to rely on print, at least theoretically, Armstrong said. However, finances limit the extent to which institutions can shift to digital materials, he noted. Open-access resources will mitigate that problem to some degree, Armstrong said, though he expects that their availability will grow slowly.

Other changes are on the way. Chemical information will evolve from human-readable electronic format to machine-readable electronic format, Armstrong predicted. This will render information far more pliable and reusable, he said.

This will also allow information to be harvestable directly from the producer and publisher and placed in data repositories, just as articles are now placed in article repositories. Crystallographers already do this with crystallographic data.

Data left in its original format remain usable by machine for further evaluation or calculations, Armstrong explained. Such data are easily transferred and can subsequently be converted at any time to a variety of formats, including human-readable ones. But, he warned, once data are turned into human-readable form, the conversion can't be reversed.

Digitization is having another effect: It is dramatically shifting the roles of libraries and publishers, Armstrong said. Libraries traditionally have organized, preserved, and provided access to information. But these functions are moving increasingly into the hands of publishers. Armstrong said this trend elicits some questions that librarians and others need to ponder: Is this a good change? Given their transitory nature, are commercial and even society publishers the parties to which we want to entrust the task of keeping and preserving human knowledge?

On the other hand, the shift in responsibilities will give librarians more time to help patrons find the information they need, Armstrong noted. I see the librarian's role there remaining quite important for a long time to come, he said.

Digital media will not banish libraries, however. We have found that the library as a place is very important, Baysinger said. Student housing tends to be high density and noisy. First-year graduate students tend not to have their own office space. So students, faculty, and postdocs will come to the library as a place to reflect, to collect information, and to perhaps use specialized reference resources that are not available outside of the library. Examples of such resources in Swain's reference room include Bio-Rad Laboratories' KnowItAll spectroscopy databases and the National Institute of Standards & Technology's databases on chemical kinetics and surface structure.

Users will also come to libraries to learn how to optimize use of resources. For instance, librarians can help researchers identify tools to visualize their search results, Baysinger said. One example is SciFinder Scholar's Analyze feature, which helps a user quickly refine a search.

Libraries are finding other ways to attract clients. For example, some libraries offer laptops that students can borrow and use anywhere in the library, Garritano noted.

Stanford's new library will include spaces for group interaction, where, for example, members of the engineering community can work on projects, Baysinger said. And the facility could incorporate a caf. That's because the university plan is to make the library's collection almost entirely digital-and therefore invulnerable to the bugs that are attracted by food and end up eating books.

As these examples show, the library, besides just being a place, is also a collection of services, Garritano said. It's not solely about books anymore.

Books and journals will continue to have a central role for both the library and patrons, however. And librarians will continue to offer traditional services related to books and journals, though likely in new ways.

For example, librarians might maintain a revolving collection of new books on shelves within the chemistry department's building. Or they might deliver books directly to offices of chemistry faculty.

One woman who responded to Garritano's survey has taken this localized service a step further. While her university's chemistry library moves into a cross-disciplinary facility elsewhere on campus, she is available for consultation in an office in the chemistry building. She may even continue the practice after the transition.

Some chemistry libraries have occupied the same physical space for 30, 40, 50 years, and many are seeing the necessity and opportunity to break out of that space, further embrace available technologies, and help advance their users' educational and research efforts for the 21st century, Garritano said. Many faculty and students can expect, and hopefully look forward to, these changes in the coming decade.

Even so, the chemistry libraries of the future will face many challenges, Baysinger said. Long-term archival access to digital content is still not assured, she noted. And the overall cost of libraries may be just as high-or higher-as in the era of bricks and mortar. Nevertheless, she added, it is an exciting time for chemistry libraries.