What is a library?

Last week, I attended the opening of the Goucher College Atheneum, a fabulous new building that was designed to create a learning and community space at the heart of the Goucher campus. Part of the festivities included a panel of distinguished librarians and scholars (including Goucher's President, Sanford J. Ungar, Nancy Magnuson, College librarian, Jim Neal of Columbia University, and Carla Haydn of Enoch Pratt, among others) who posed the question "What is a library?" A complex question in these turbulent times! The eloquent responses from the panelists as well as the audience comments and questions brought home to me that academic libraries are very much needed as community and individual learning spaces. If colleges and universities want to create a community spirit, they need to think about designing spaces, democratic spaces where students and faculty alike feel comfortable browsing for reading material, working on their laptops in the seclusion of the book stacks, or working together to create a group project, multi-media, Powerpoint presentation, whatever! I recently read an apt quotation from an African student who recently was afforded the luxury of a library at her campus. She said, "The library has put us in the spirit of studying!" Yes indeed! I have spoken to many residential students here at Stevenson who are learning that they need to escape the many temptations available in the dorm to get into the spirit of studying and concentration in order to comprehend the material and actually internalize what they are reading. Of course the other aspect of the library is the staff: nothing beats a good librarian who can help you find that pesky fulltext article you can't seem to locate, even though Google takes you to the site that wants to sell it to you for $30 or more if you will just put your credit card number into the form please! Congratulations to Goucher on providing its students with the most functional and beautiful collaborative learning space I've seen in a long time: I predict the building will garner much recognition.