UC Berkeley's libraries next chapter may be cuts

UC Berkeley ranks among the five best universities on the planet in part because an engineering researcher there has no trouble finding the gravity study he needs from the 1970s. An art historian doesn't have to be in Japan to lay his hands on a 128-year-old Kyoto guidebook. And a French scholar can examine a certain 16th century manuscript on European literary academies, no problem.

Yet the great university's libraries are in trouble.

"We can already see negative impacts on the services we provide, as we stretch our reduced staffing," University Librarian Tom Leonard wrote in an April letter to faculty. He then surveyed them to see if they preferred closing 16 of the 24 campus-supported libraries or just 10, but with fewer librarians.

Leonard expected to announce the libraries' fate in July. Instead, the faculty objected to being told they had just two choices for the wondrous athenaeums: horrible or terrible.

"There are no first-rate universities in the world without a first-rate library," 110 faculty members declared in a petition asking the university for an extra year to find other ways of keeping Cal libraries not just afloat, but great.

"We are in a crisis, and we have to kind of breathe a bit more deeply," said engineering Professor Panos Papadopoulos, who signed the petition. "We need to think more strategically."

Down 12 percent

Blame the decrepit state budget, inflation, a shift from paper to electronic research - or all three. But Berkeley has reduced its library spending by 12 percent since 2008, even as the University of Michigan, its main public competitor, has spent 24 percent more.

Berkeley now spends about $50 million to Michigan's $64 million - and has lost 70 of its 400 library professionals. An additional 20 positions will be kept vacant after retirements over the next three years, Leonard said.

For now, the campus has set aside its library closure plan.

As a result of the petition, Provost George Breslauer and Chancellor Robert Birgeneau will convene a blue-ribbon committee of faculty members to begin tackling the problem in August and make recommendations in December.

"This is a crucial positive step toward avoiding real disaster: making sure that irreparable harm is not done to Berkeley's world-class collections," said Greg Levine, an associate professor of art history who uses four libraries - East Asian, Ethnic Studies, Anthropology and Art History/Classics - "all the time, intensively."

What it means even to use the library is changing.

"We have digitized millions of older books at a pace unimagined only a decade ago, and tens of millions of dollars cheaper than experts believed was possible," Leonard wrote in his faculty letter, noting that the campus spends about $8 million a year on the project with the help of some 5,000 donors.

The University of California founded the California Digital Library in 1997, resulting in "one of the world's largest digital research libraries," says its website.

That was also the year UC Berkeley last heard from a blue-ribbon panel on the condition of its libraries.

"Since then, we have experienced an explosion in the channels through which information is made available, the sheer quantity and varied types of information to be accessed, and the cost of printed materials," Provost Breslauer said. The new committee will "update our thinking about how best to position our (libraries) for research and education in this time of rapid technological change."

Between 2008 and 2011, for example, campus libraries circulated 33 percent fewer print materials.

Yet people still checked out nearly half a million print books, monographs and journals last year, down from 715,383.

Deborah Blocker was one of them. An associate professor of French, Blocker was awestruck at the quality of the libraries - and the librarians - when she arrived at Berkeley in 2005.

"The first person who contacted me was a senior librarian who said, 'What can I do for you?' " she said.

Rare texts

The librarian, James Spohrer, wanted to know what books he could acquire for her, so she made a list - including a volume of 17th century French letters that had been out of print for 150 years.

"He found it and bought it, and with that I could write a chapter of my book," Blocker said. Today, she e-mails once a month to request materials from librarian Claude Potts, who speaks several languages and buys works from around the world.

The loss of such experts troubles Blocker, as does the shift to electronic searching, because the methodology doesn't mimic the way researchers work, she said. That means, for now at least, she finds more of what she needs by visiting the library instead of searching online.

And that leads to another problem: library hours.

'Situation is critical'

"The situation is critical," said Blocker, who remembers when libraries were open daily until midnight. Now, she said, many close for days or weeks during breaks in the academic year.

"Sometimes I go to Europe so that I can work!" she said. "This is still a great library, but it's becoming more complicated."

Leonard, the university librarian, said private contributions allowed the vast Moffitt Undergraduate Library to remain open for 24 hours during key study periods this year, providing unprecedented access. However, "there are legitimate concerns" at the other branches, he said.

Exactly what the faculty can do to maintain excellence is still unclear, said engineering Professor Bob Jacobsen, chairman of the Academic Senate.

"I think there's a lot of hard work in front of us," he said. "The trend is a bad one. The most recent changes are not disastrous, but if allowed to go for a few years, it would be."

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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