City Tech Library Reflections: Past, Present, and Future

By Prof. Darrow Wood, Chief Librarian
In the summer of 1987 we moved into our new space in the Atrium, but in some ways we were soon to be obsolete. We had 150,000 books, 700 journal and magazine subscriptions, and a monster card catalog into which clerical staff filed hundreds of 3 x 5 cards every day. We were eleven faculty librarians whose jobs scarcely changed year to year, except when someone retired. We had a full-time clerical staff, ten people strong, and we employed dozens of part-timers, most of whom were our own students. The new library was built to acquire and conserve. Change was barely on the horizon, so it seemed.
Then the Internet arrived, then the desktop, the laptop, and now the mobile device. With ebooks included we now have over 392,000 books. We have access
to over 100,000 journals and magazines. Over 90,000 items are borrowed per year, almost the same number as visits to our library website. Database searches in 2011-12 totaled 1,339,727. We have a blog, we’re on Facebook, and we tweet. Go to our website — see for yourself.
Rather than one librarian who taught bibliographic instruction in single sessions for a few courses, we now have a team of faculty who teach an expanding array of single-session classes, as well as workshops for faculty and students. We currently offer three sections of our three-credit course, LIB1201, “Research and Documentation for the Information Age.” All this falls under the umbrella of information literacy. Now, rather than meeting around the water cooler or in scheduled meetings, we meet and negotiate via email, our wiki, our Google calendar, OpenLab, and CUNY’s Academic Commons.
In 1987 if you were a student or faculty member visiting the library you knew the librarians weren’t just throwing anything into the collection. New acquisitions were vetted. Books and journals and videos met the needs of students: they matched and supported the curriculum. This is still the case, but now with the explosion of information on the Internet, we are surrounded by so much noise. Instead of straightforward bibliographic instruction, we provide dynamic information literacy instruction. We need an online catalog that separates the wheat from the chaff. Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen had it right: it’s a struggle to keep pace. How do students navigate? How are they informed? How do they use what they find?
Except for perhaps the dozens of file drawers stuffed with thousands of pamphlets, maps and brochures organized by subject on everything, the library offers all the traditional services and resources that we ever did. But now library faculty members are not so much stewards as active collaborators and partners with classroom faculty in support of scholarly communications. Our librarians are busy encouraging open access, educating students and faculty about plagiarism, providing a better understanding of fair use, and working toward identifying and creating alternatives to textbooks.