News and Notes from the Penn Libraries | Spring 2011Published by The Office of the Vice Provost and Director of LibrariesInquiries invited at libdir@pobox.upenn.edu

Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center3420 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6206215-898-7091

Spring 2011

University of Pennsylvania Libraries

Penn Libraries Board of Overseers

Judith L. BollingerLaura BrownThomas J. Cusack, chairErik D. Gershwind, vice chairJoseph B. Glossberg, chair emeritusBernard GoldsteinMark H. GoldsteinGhislain GouraigeSandra GrymesChristine HikawaJames HoesleyAlan S. JacobsMarilyn Kramer Kahn, ex off icioJeffrey C. KeilRodger R. KrouseSusanna E. LachsDeborah Wharton Lippincott, ex off icioCharles MacDonaldEdward P. MallyMargy Ellin MeyersonEllen MoelisJoshua A. PolanJoseph F. RascoffBarbara Brizdle SchoenbergLawrence J. Schoenberg, chair emeritusJeffrey L. SeltzerDhiren H. ShahAndrew M. SnyderAlberto VitaleRonald F. E. Weissman

University of Pennsylvania Libraries

This installment of Ivy Leaves follows the opening of the new Penn Libraries Research Annex (LIBRA). For some thirty years, the Libraries have been placing lesser-used materials in off-site annexes in order to optimize limited on-campus space, leverage the growing benefits of digital access, and better align our facilities to the changing demands of teaching and learning. This Ivy Leaves includes a long-range view of collection manage-ment—both physical and digital —within an evolving schol-arly ecosystem, from Martha Brogan, Director for Collection Development and Management.

RESEARCH LIBRARIES and the NEW STACKS EQUATION

“The library is a growing organism.” S.R. Ranganathan

The Penn Libraries represent an amazing repository of schol-arship amassed over the past 260 years—recently surpassing

six million items, doubling in size in the last 30 years. Acquiring new materials at an estimated rate of 100,000 volumes annually, Penn began to face a serious shortage of space on campus to house its burgeoning print collec-tions by the 1980s. Starting in the 1990s, having exhausted possibilities for further expansion on campus, Penn—like other research libraries around the country—found a cost-effective solution in customized off-site stacks facilities, such as our former HDS (High Density Storage) and the new

LIBRA, where materials less frequently used, but of enduring research value, are stored by size and easily retrieved upon request for use by library patrons.

Academic libraries in North America collectively hold nearly one billion volumes and add an estimated 25 million volumes annually. According to a study prepared by the Center for Research Libraries, off-campus facilities house an estimated 70 million volumes nationwide and, at many universities, are becoming their institution’s single largest “library.” This trend is no surprise given the cost of maintaining materials on open shelves in campus libraries. In a recent essay published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and entitled, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” economist and

former provost, Paul Courant, (currently Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan), calculates the annual life cycle cost of retaining books in campus stacks at $4.26 compared to an esti-mated $0.86 to store them in an off-site facility. Among the Ivies, at least 20% of print collections are housed in high-density off-site facilities, with Columbia and Cornell approaching 40% and Harvard with 50% of its collections off-site, including most newly received acquisitions.

Collections remaining on campus in open, browsable shelving, while still extensive, represent at best a lens into a field of study which virtually always requires amplification through multi-faceted search strategies. Of course, this has been the case for a decade or longer in most scientific disciplines where databases and electronic journals have largely replaced their print manifestations.

Strength through Collaboration

Research libraries, which traditionally relied on the count of physical volumes to measure their stature, have begun to employ a new metric, one we might call the “collaborative strength index.” We have replaced our 1980s t-shirts, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” with the more eco-friendly, “Plays well with others.” In the collaborative index, research strength would rest on dollars spent in support of shared solutions benefiting the Penn commu-nity in concert with other partners. Penn Libraries would rank high in a number of important ways. We are fortunate to have a solid foundation in Borrow Direct—recently strengthened by the addition of Harvard and MIT—and EZ-Borrow which gives the Penn community rapid access to an extraordinary wealth of the world’s recorded knowledge. In 2010, nearly 15% of all items cir-culating to Penn library users came from our partners’ collections. At the same time, we lent out 53,000 volumes from our collections to non-Penn users. This symbiosis is only the beginning of what we can expect to be more extensive and deeper interdependencies among academic libraries.

Continued on the center spread inside.

Renaissance City Views from Above and Afaron exhibit March 14-August 13 in the Kamin Gallery

Collector Jack Sosiak’s large group of city views from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, produced by Georg Braun, editor, and Franz Hogenberg, engraver, between 1572 and 1617 are exhibited.

www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/cityviews.html

Try the new Franklin interface at www.library.upenn.edu

Martha Brogan

LIBRA’s logo is based on the frontispiece engraving from Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s Journal of My Forty-Fifth Ascension, Being the First Performed in America, on the Ninth of January 1793, which chronicles Blanchard’s aerostat voyage from Philadelphia to his landing in Deptford, New Jersey. Martha Brogan is writing an essay about this historic ascension, witnessed by President George Washington along with a host of esteemed leaders and more than 5,000 residents.

University of Pennsylvania LibrariesSpring 2011

OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey envisions a time in the not too distant future when “with the exception of a small number of large research libraries, retrospective print collections will be managed as a pooled resource and physically consolidated in large regional stores.” Penn Libraries may play a pivotal role in the emerging national framework of shared print collections: LIBRA might serve as a vital node—accepting materials from selected institu-tions in some cases while relying on the collections of our trusted partners in others.

In fact, this consolidation is already underway in WEST, (Western Regional Storage Trust), a distributed shared print repository program for retrospective journal archives, established by more than twenty research libraries located in the western United States. WEST will consolidate print journal backfiles at major library storage facilities and at selected campus locations with a gover-nance model and sustainable financial plan to share costs.

Similarly, scholars may come to rely on large-scale digital reposi-tories that are managed as a collective asset. A case in point: HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org), an international community of research libraries that Penn joined in 2010 which aims “to build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials converted from print.” With holdings exceeding eight million digitized volumes and rapidly growing, HathiTrust’s enhanced digital surrogates will serve as a starting point for schol-arly investigation and the repository as a whole will offer tools for text-mining to advance discovery and access.

The Evolving Scholarly Ecosystem

The Penn Libraries must adapt and evolve as we confront new environmental forces—economic, technological, and cultural. And we will do this in the context of reinforcing partnerships with our trusted peer institutions. Penn Libraries will continue to build distinctive collections—physical and virtual—but they will be constructed with a greater awareness of the wider national—even international—ecosystem of scholarship. As a network of

interdependent organisms, North American research libraries can contribute more effectively to creating a robust and enduring storehouse of networked knowledge. When discussing the intersecting interests and futures of scholarly communication and research libraries, a leading thinker from the National Academies Press, Michael Jon Jensen, concludes:

Our scholarly ecosystem is being fundamentally altered by population shifts, by resource availability, and by the huge environmental shifts happening because of the winds of climate change: the Internet and the interconnected world. ...Our missions must be to help build trusted, well-crafted content for our institutions and for our audiences, and to be agile while doing it, regardless of our historic habits.

Penn will concentrate our acquisitions on building and preserving distinctive collections that do not duplicate materials readily avail-able from partners, while also striving to provide access to licensed e-resources that will become essential to most fields of study. As these relationships in cooperative collecting evolve, Penn Libraries will actively engage our own scholars in shaping new systems of knowledge management

LIBRA and the New Stacks Equation

LIBRA, a symbol of scales, provides the Penn community with the opportunity to rebalance the allocation of library space for collec-tions—on campus and off—thereby giving us greater f lexibility to determine the optimal deployment of our highly valued, central-ized campus locations. In the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, a major renovation is already underway on the 6th f loor: the trans-formation of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library into a vibrant Special Collections Center, which will support more fully teaching and research based on direct user engagement with primary source materials. (For details about the renovation, see: www.library.upenn.edu/rbm/closing.html.) A quadrant of the 5th f loor in Van Pelt will be rededicated to properly house rare materials—formerly scattered in various makeshift locations—in an environmentally-controlled, protected enclosure. As the value of Penn’s material assets rises, so too must our commitment to the long-term care of our special collections. The 5th-f loor renovation will feature a state-of-the-art Conservation & Preservation Suite where trained professionals will be able to repair and conserve rare materials in an appropriately equipped facility, for the first time in the Penn Libraries’ long history.

In the coming years, we look forward to conversations with the Penn community about shaping new services for our campus spaces. The Weigle Information Commons, the Steven W. Atwood Library & Information Commons for Veterinary Medicine, and the future Vitale Media Lab for Special Collections pave the way for new partnerships with our users through the customization of the collections, services and tools with the goal of fostering ground-breaking scholarship in the 21st century.

Making Room for New CollectionsRESEARCH LIBRARIES and the NEW STACKS EQUATIONThe Penn Libraries Research Annex

Since its opening in 1998, the High Density Storage Facility at 3001 Market Street has helped us to manage overcrowding in the stacks by housing lesser-used but important materials. In early 2010, the Facility was approaching capacity with 1.6 million items, when the lessor, Drexel University, announced alternate plans for the site and the retirement of our lease.

The Libraries embarked upon a search for a new facility which could house the off-campus collection and offer additional space for future expansion, all while allowing us to continue to ensure the rapid delivery of materials in both physical and electronic form. After a year of effort by the Libraries and Facilities and Real Estate Services, a cost-efficient, adaptable, and long-term space to accommodate Penn’s ever-expanding Libraries was found in West Deptford, New Jersey. The new facility is LIBRA—the Penn Libraries Research Annex.

LIBRA’s spacious new quarters offer an open floor plan that allows for an optimal shelving configuration as well as additional space for growing collections —collections owned by Penn and, possibly, other research libraries as well. There is ample space for staff, materials processing, preparing books for shipment to campus, and digital scanning workstations.

The building’s 32-foot-high ceilings allow for full implementation of high density shelving, a method that maximizes capacity and promotes preservation by housing materials by size instead of subject. LIBRA features ten aisles of 30-foot-high industrial steel shelving in two modules, A and B, with two additional modules, C and D, ready

to receive a similar amount of shelving in a future round of construction.

While open stack shelving at 90% of capacity becomes unmanageable, LIBRA’s high density shelving allows for 100% capacity, with ease of retrieval and reshelving. The key to finding a spe-cific title is the online Franklin catalog. A barcode placed in each volume links the bibliographic record, the physical item, and its location in LIBRA.

To retrieve materials in these towering aisles, the LIBRA staff use a battery-powered lift to reach the appropriate shelf and tray. A delivery van brings materials to campus each weekday and electronic copies of journal articles are delivered directly to the user’s desktop. Although LIBRA is not a browsable collection, it does provide a reading

room for users who wish to access long runs of serials or large numbers of books on-site. And the Libraries continuously track requests for materials in order to relo-cate volumes to on-campus locations, if faculty or student demand require it.

Most importantly, LIBRA allows the Libraries to create new study, learning, and com-puting environments in library buildings while preserving one of Penn’s most significant physical and intellectual assets—its library collections.

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In the last several years, the Penn Libraries have been the grateful recipients of gifts of major rare collections. Curation of these items demands not only space for their housing, but also proper conservation and preservation. Below is a sampling of some of the collections driving strategic rethinking of on-campus collections space:

2008 | Gotham Book Mart. New York’s renowned book emporium comprises some 200,000 items focused primarily on modern and contem-

porary poetry and literature, as well as art, architecture, material culture, music, dance, theater, and film. The collection boasts first editions, books from small presses, experimental literary magazines, books from the personal libraries of Truman Capote and Anais Nin, and items signed by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Woody Allen, Wallace Stevens, and John Updike.

2009 | Lenkin Family Collection of Photography. A major gift from Edward Lenkin (C’71, PAR’12) enabled the Libraries to acquire this out-standing collection of historical photographs of the Holy Land. Comprising

nearly 4,000 original photographs, primarily of Jerusalem and Palestine from 1850 to 1937, the collection serves as primary source material for teaching and research across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including the history of pho-tography, architecture, regional planning, religious studies, history, and political science.

2010 | Chaim Potok Papers. Spanning the second half of the 20th century, this collection documents the literary career and rabbinical life of the noted novelist, professor, and Penn alumnus. The collection consists of correspondence, lectures, sermons, clippings, promotional material, the author’s fan mail, and a trove of writings—from note-books to drafts and annotated typescripts and galleys.

2010 | Running Press Book Publishing Company. Presented to the Libraries by co-founder Stuart (Buz) Teacher and Janet Bukovinsky Teacher, the archive includes the complete catalog of Running Press publications from 1972—when it began—to the present. Along with correspondence, contracts, business records, and other materials such as advertising and promotional brochures, this gift documents the history of an important, independent publishing company based in Philadelphia.

2011 | Lawrence J. Schoenberg Medieval Manuscripts Collection. One of the Penn Libraries’ most generous and insightful benefactors, Mr. Schoenberg has amassed more than 280 manuscript books and documents

from the 8th through 18th centuries C.E., as well as arithmetic tablets from as early as the 21st century B.C.E. Assembled with a keen discernment for documenting the turning points in intellectual and technological develop-ment, the collection affords myriad research opportuni-ties and concentrates primarily on the transformation of knowledge in the Western and Islamic worlds from early

medieval times through the Renaissance. Subject matters include philos-ophy, music, mathematics, astronomy and astrology, medicine, alchemy and chemistry, and technology.

LIBRA will help to alleviate overcrowded stacks, such as this range in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, while allowing us to develop new spaces sup-porting study, teaching, and a growing number of distinctive Penn collections.