Any other thoughts on this as a trend? Not so much about them spending money on the library. I don't know all the details, but it appears the library project is named for someone. Alongside the kinds of marketing issues Michael Perelman mentioned (i.e. you have to build fancy facilities in order to attract the high dollar students who are paying full price so that you can support the rest of the cohort with need based discount rate), legacy looms large as the explanation behind this divergences: it is more likely that a rich alum will give a wad of cash to build something with their name on it than that they will give a chunk of money for operating funds or grad student support. The latter is important, but fifty years from now it will leave no visible residue.
I'm more interested in what they are doing with the library (i.e. as Joanna said, getting rid of Plato because no one had checked him out in a decade). McLemee had a piece in IHE a few weeks ago about the NY Public Library, where they are putting a lot of their research collection offsite to free up space. On the face of it, this seems like another piece of a general trend - i.e. the destruction of public resources. On the other hand, if we take the instance of Plato, part of the reason no one might have checked out "The Symposium" in ten years is that it is already available online:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html
And, even if the edition is worse and it no longer has the aura of the book (like those green clothbound Harvard UP editions) it has the advantage of being fully searchable and available to me as I sit and drink my coffee. For libraries with shrinking budgets - and especially university libraries, where the price of journal subscriptions is through the roof - there is an economic reason for this as well as one of considering the relevance of the library as an institution in the 21st century: estimates are that a library pays for every book it keeps on the shelves once every 7 years, once storage, staffing and circulation costs are figured. There was a time when it sort of made sense to keep a book locally since it might be impossible to get it later. But now the trend is towards thinking of libraries as a systemwide collection instead. I've been doing some research on libraries the last few months and there seems to be some general ambivalence about this, to say the least.
For instance, two of the institutions that have been in the news about this - the NYPL and Harvard, which has recently reorganized its staff in a dramatic way - are both part of the initiative to launch a Digital Public Library of America (the DPLA). The idea would be to create a general online resource that would incorporate most all of the freely available public domain works and, depending on how they can work out the legal issues, some of the contents of libraries like those in Harvard and NYPL. Towards this end, OCLC, one of the major clearinghouses of library data, has been doing a series of analyses to consider the systemwide resources of US libraries, in part to see what kinds of arrangements can be made to open up access to the materials (i.e. as in the case of the DPLA, to make resources you wouldn't otherwise have at your local library available for browsing) and to facilitate the shared archiving of them. This report, by an OCLC researcher named Constance Malpas, was a watershed document for many library directors at colleges and universities:
http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/sharedcollections/default.htm
The report uses another large digital archive - the Hathi Trust, which now contains a about 10 million volumes, and to which Harvard is a major contributor of books - as an index against which she compares the holdings of other libraries. The idea here is that the resources in question - i.e. books - no longer need to be held at a local institution because (theoretically) they could be supplied by a large, collective, digital repository, thus freeing up space, staff and budget at those local libraries. In a sense it fits the other trends towards creating what are called library commons or academic commons - the coffee shop/collaboration spaces that many have lamented on the list.
I am ambivalent about this as well. I see the value in having a large digital library as a researcher. Not only do I already use a lot of digital resources, but we are at the forefront of using these collective digital resources for "big data" analysis (like Google's nGram: http://bit.ly/I9poat). On the other hand, the IPR limitations on this are ridiculous - several lawsuits are holding up the Hathi project and the biggest was brought by an organization that has no standing - the Author's Guild - as few, if none, of their actual members have books in the collection. As for whether it is important to have the library as a quiet place to study, I'm not sure what books in and of themselves add to this - other than providing an acoustic buffer. This is more of an institutional problem: if students want quiet spaces, they will ask for quiet spaces and those spaces will, as the library was, be declared quiet spaces. Books are just a handy synecdoche for the entire culture of the library.
Thoughts?
I wanted to get involved with the conversation about Distance Ed as well, but I couldn't dig myself out of work. I'll go back to exploring the archives.
thanks. Sean