“Where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives:” What a future library looks like when there is no there...there

Abstract

In the notably bad 1959 film, Plan 9 from Outer Space, filmmaker Ed Wood, Jr. opened with Criswell making the prophetic statement: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.” For many of us, including Criswell, the future is far off towards the distant horizon. We’ve talked in library circles about things such as Google glass, drones, self-driving cars, 3D printers, etc, but our core work has not really changed in libraries.

We in libraries have also looked closely at our space, trying to come with innovative ways to serve our communities. But we are not the only ones looking at our space - so are our deans, provosts, and presidents. And while we have looked at the future in regards to new things that we will be dealing with, the real reality is that the future will be driven not by what we gain, but by what we lose. And nothing might be as dramatic as the lost of space for collections and students on our campuses. It will get to the point when people might not be able to find the library at all. They might have to follow Gertrude Stein’s famous quote “there is no there there.”

At the Kresge Business Administration Library at the Ross School of Business (University of Michigan) a large gift to the school in 2013 started design work on a new building to replace the older buildings in the Ross Compled. For us at Kresge Library, the future was a good deal closer than we wanted, and arrived with gale-force winds. As part of this project, the library lost both its collection space and student space. During the summer of 2014, the print collection went from around 70K items to around 200. The student space will be managed elsewhere, but seems to be short of the 700 seats we had at Kresge.

What we have been able to retain at Kresge are our services, but they have been altered with the change in resources. This presentation will share how the staff at Kresge adapted from a full service library to an information service unit. He will share the concept of the “ethereal library” and the service mantra that allowed the unit to move forward when the books and student space were removed. Among the topics to be discussed are expanded reference, embedded librarian programs, and the adoption of new services that were possible and desired by the school. The presenter will showcase how you can move from a physical library to an ethereal one, while retaining services, people and your connection to your community.