Bruce Miller is the Founding University Librarian for the UC Merced library, the first new US research university of the 21st century. Before joining UC Merced a year ago, he served for 14 years as Associate University Librarian for User Support Services at UC San Diego. Miller envisions the university library, to be called the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library, as a "physical place on campus intertwined with a digital presence on student and faculty computers." It is scheduled to open in 2004.

TLtC: Because many library resources that have been traditionally available in print are now available in digital form, will the UC Merced library be built to house fewer print materials?

BM: First of all, this is a premise that is often misunderstood. Scholarly journal publications are widely available electronically now, but that's only one of the many formats of materials that need to be used in a research library. At a research library we gather information necessary to support research and education, regardless of its format. That means scholarly journals, books, videos, 78-rpm records -- whatever it takes to support the research interests that are underway. So, there are a lot of materials that are not available in digital form that need to be housed in the library.

And yes, in the research library, print journals are rapidly being replaced by online versions, and those are great. They meet people's usage patterns quite well because they give you the opportunity for 24/7 access, you don't have to come to the library to get access to those materials, and because people typically use just a piece of them, such as one article, it's very suitable for using a computer connection.

Our basic policy is not to duplicate. So, if a journal is available electronically, we will not provide paper access. We think the money that would be spent on paper access would be better spent on acquiring additional resources. The physical impact is that print journals take up a lot of room and it costs money to process them, check them in, shelve them, and ultimately, the cost to bind them to preserve them over time. Those are areas where we may realize some cost savings, as well as space savings.

A systemwide research project, called the Collection Management Initiative , is underway to determine usage patterns of electronic materials. However, we already have a lot of experiential data that tell us that people rarely use bound issues of journals (depending upon the field or subject area) that are five years old or older. If we can provide them online, there's no point in the extraordinary expense in acquiring the print version and putting them on our shelves, where they would ultimately acquire dust. If someone does need one of those journals, then our plan will be to get it from one of the other campuses or regional storage facilities. And in most cases it will be digitized on demand and emailed directly to the person. (An effort to enable this service systemwide is currently in the planning stages.)

To sum up my answer to your question, the UC Merced library will still need to house print materials but I think the rate of growth of filling the shelves might not proceed as fast as it would if we were going to support all print journals on the shelves. But, again, print journals are only part of a research library's collection.

TLtC: In what ways is the physical library facility going to be different from libraries built in the past?

BM: We want the library to be a very inviting place. We want people to visit when they need assistance from librarians, when they need direct access to materials that are on the shelves, or when they need a place to study or engage in collaborative research activities. We're very intent on providing that kind of space.

An architect's rendering of UC Merced's Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library.

To that intent, the Merced library is designed with very open and flexible spaces. There are a wide variety of study and collaborative spaces, ranging from very noisy and busy to very quiet. Distributed throughout the building are places where a large group can gather and a small group can gather. There will be a cafe and yes, you will be able take your coffee into the stacks.

We've done another thing that I think is pretty significant -- we made a concerted effort to integrate student services activities within the library. So a student could come into the building, go to the information desk to get help with the library or student services, take care of some business in the Registrars office or academic counseling, go over to the student government offices, get a cup of coffee, meet some friends, and go up to the stacks to work on a class project -- all in one trip and all in one building.

That's how people work. Why should you have to go one place solely for one thing and somewhere else for another when it's all part of one academic enterprise? We know that much education happens outside the classroom -- that's what this place is. It's the outside-of-the-classroom education place.

Right in the middle of the library we will have a large room that has copiers, print-on-demand services, and special format printers -- kind of like a full-featured Kinko's. We'll have significant media support where you can go for special resources, software, and hardware that you might not have on your own workstation.

We intend to use self-checkout very heavily to give people more control. We plan on using systems that make it easier to have a bulletproof checkout system. We're going to use a radio frequency identification card in the books, similar to a building pass system. You will put your book or other publication on a card reader and it will print out a receipt, telling you the due date and other pertinent information.

The building design also reflects a hidden agenda: we want students to think of the library as their point of entrance to electronic information resources. That is, if we have students in the building, it greatly increases the odds that we can educate them about library and information services, as well as events. For example, we will have large screens or electronic billboards on which we can put announcements for lectures and other events, as well as educational messages, such as "Do you know that the California Digital Library has the journal you're looking for? Find it at www.cdlib.org." We can do a lot with a 15-second flash with people walking by that will hopefully result in them having more insight into how information resource systems work.

An operating principle behind all of our decisions is that we've designed circulation patterns to fit the way people walk through the building in such a way that it's very natural to have a single point of entrance and exit, which allows for more flexible staffing models.

TLtC: Which university libraries served as examples or models for the planning of the UC Merced library?

BM: We looked at quite a few of them. The model that I brought with me was from UC San Diego, where we had renovated a library and created the Center for Library and Instructional Computing Services, known as CLICS . It's a model of ubiquitous access to online resources that includes support staff, a place to study, and access to print materials. The UC Merced building will be somewhat different in that we will expect our students to have laptops, so we plan to have ubiquitous physical network connections as well as wireless connections.

TLtC: That leads to my next question: what role will personal computers play in the library, both in the physical facility and for remote access to its holdings?

BM: The entire Merced campus, including the library, will be built with wireless access in mind and there is an expectation that students will have laptop computers. In the library we'll also have ports throughout the facility for people to connect to the network. So, there won't be many computer terminals or labs in the library because access to the library will be wherever you happen to "plug in." The visual landscape will be pretty nice because you won't see rows of terminals.

My belief is that computers in the libraries should be set up for how people work at their desks. For instance, when I'm writing a paper I'm pulling material from several resources -- the web, email, the CDL, etc. -- and then putting them all together. That's one reason for allowing people to bring a computer with them to the library. In addition, we plan to have computers in the library to do basic functions for people who won't have a computer with them.

An interesting change that is on the horizon is how people access and search library catalogs and what they do with the results. A future scenario that is quite possible is that you have your laptop with you in the stacks, you search the catalog wirelessly through your web browser, you receive the results, and walk right to the physical location of the publication. And perhaps in the future people will be using personal digital assistants (PDA) to do this. People might not need to print out results in the future. Print patterns will change as people learn new ways of working. All of these technological enhancements create great flexibility in that people can work in the ways that make the most sense to them.

TLtC: The TLtC feature article this month is about information literacy and how librarians throughout the UC system are spearheading efforts to help students become competent in seeking, evaluating, and using information. How will the librarians on your staff work with faculty and students to reach this goal?

BM: Our plan is fairly simplistic. We intend to work closely with all faculty and to integrate teaching about information literacy [see related TLtC article ] into their coursework as is appropriate for their subject area and course. Some say that this approach is naïve but we don't believe that. UC Merced is planning its courses now as we start to hire faculty and we're all very intent on educating our students in ways that are really relevant to their growth. So we're including the library in the planning of the curriculum.

I believe the common wisdom is that having a class like Library 101 doesn't really work very well and students probably won't remember what they learned. It's helpful to some extent but most of these needs are pretty situational. The way we learn today is in the context of the immediate situation.

It will be a challenge to meet this need because you never have as many staff as you need to do all the things you want to do. How can we figure out how to make it happen without it being necessary for staff to provide hands-on instruction? We might have staff develop online modules that plug into the courseware that faculty are using. We see this as a priority and it will drive how we develop our services and whom we hire.

TLtC: Where are you in the planning stages for the library? What's next?

BM: The design phase of the building is complete and soon we'll be moving into what's called the "working drawings" phase, in which we'll also work on the interiors. The official start date for our students is Fall 2004.

I am in the process of hiring our first staff person, an Associate University Librarian for Public Services, who will help develop the instruction and services that will be offered in the library. In the year I've been here, my assistant and I have been accepting gift materials from donors, and have been doing some fundraising. We have an endowment and a fund that we established for the World Cultures Institute collection that we're going to build and we've been planning projects with some of our partners to digitize materials that support the research and education agenda of UC Merced.

During this next year we'll acquire the library management system, which is the software that will allow us to buy books, catalog resources, provide checkout of materials, etc. We will also begin purchasing materials for the collection. Right now we're in a large building at the Castle Airport and Development Center and there's a large warehouse space that we'll clean up and put book stacks in and will shelve them in there, so we'll have a working library that we can then move to the new library facility when it opens.

TLtC: Describe the experience of building a library from the ground up.

BM: It's a grand adventure. It's really exciting to create something from the ground up like this. I've been at it a long time and in my past experiences I've always had to say, "I can't do this because…" The "because" is no longer there.

I think the real interesting thing about the UC Merced situation is that although we all know a lot about pedagogy and what goes on in the research university, we have the same needs as all of the campuses, so we probably won't invent anything new. But because we're starting from scratch, those needs are expressed in more extreme ways to us. So instead of an interesting add-on or evolving types of ways of doing business, we have to do these things from the very beginning. Our role is to push the boundaries, but they are the same boundaries that everybody else is looking at.