How university libraries are future-proofing to stay relevant

At the University of Adelaide’s Barr Smith Library, roughly 60 per cent of the 144-year-old library’s collection had not been borrowed for more than five years, a report from the university found.

And the University of Sydney’s print resource loans had dropped by 30 per cent between 2013 and 2017. Yet in the same period, the number of students had shot up by about 13 per cent and about 1 million e-books were made available.

Most libraries have adopted a space strategy which involves moving books off site to make room. Photo: Quentin Jones

Anne Bell, director of university libraries at the University of Sydney, recognises that they are working in “a very different landscape”.

“Something that intrigues me about it is that if you go back to the pre-digital era, it was very clear what made a good library: it was volumes on shelves. That metric now has to be answered in a much more nuanced way, so it’s much more about experience (and) access than the fact that you have 1 million or 5 million print books on your shelves,” she said.

That emphasis on experience is reflected in the library’s technology hub ThinkSpace, which provides 3D printers, a desktop carving machine, graphic design facilities and recording studio.

The focus on technology and collaborative spaces does not necessarily mean books need to be thrown out to accommodate new facilities. Ms Bell said that there were generally three options for university libraries with limited space: adding more space, repurposing existing space and pushing more virtual services.

“Libraries are either building new spaces or they’re moving stock out to be able to then repurpose the vacated space and/or pushing their online services,” she said.

“Like a lot of other universities, particularly the libraries associated with the Go8 (Group of Eight) institution, we have a large off-site storage capacity.”

Space-efficient book “vending machines”

What the automated library retrieval system looks like. Photo: UTS

But the storage facilities don’t have to be kilometres away. Macquarie University opened Australia’s first automated book storage and retrieval system onsite in 2012, which stores 80 per cent of its collection. The system has saved 11,000 square metres of extra floor space in the library.

The University of Technology Sydney took it one step further in 2014 and built Australia’s first underground automated storage system with the capacity for 1 million books, located under the site of the university’s new library that is due to open in 2019.

“It means we don’t have to burn our books or throw them out,” Shirley Alexander, UTS’s deputy vice-chancellor of education and students, said.

The underground storage site is 13,000 cubic metres, or about five Olympic swimming pools, and is currently about half full.

It keeps 250,000 of the most frequently used items on the regular shelves, Prof Alexander said. The complex book “vending machine” has about 12,000 steel bins, where the items are kept, across six aisles, each served by a 15-metre robotic crane on rails.

It’s the country’s first underground automated book storage system. Photo: UTS

Prof Alexander said the idea behind the system was for the new library to become more space-efficient.

“We wouldn’t have been able to fit that entire collection into our library. (Using the LRS is) much more efficient, so we don’t have to throw any out, as other institutions had to do,” she said.

“People still want a physical presence of a library, we found in particular our students really liked to be able to go study in the library because it has a scholarly feel, and they’re often sitting around studying with other students, but they also want everything to be available electronically, because they want to be able to get access to it exactly when they want it.

“We need a combination of a physical presence and a very good online presence as well.”

Digitising libraries

University libraries are increasingly adding facilities such as recording studios and 3D printing. Photo: UTS

Donna Wheatley, director of workplace and education strategy at WMK Architecture, who works with the higher education and commercial sectors, said university libraries were rethinking their purpose and strategy in the digital age.

“There’s two aspects to that, because one is that the collections are online and the knowledge is retrieved online so access to the information is conceptually very different and it’s not place-based so they can be accessed anyway,” Dr Wheatley said.

“Secondly, the library itself does not need to physically contain those collections. That allows a large proportion of space to be used for other things.”

She added that the purpose of the library “needs to change”.

“Its primary purpose was a repository for information; it’s actually a place for information to be shared between people visiting the library, so it’s more about the community side of things rather than that sole access to information.

“It’s a little bit future-gazing at this point in time, but it’s thinking about the library being a place of knowledge creation.”