The problems of non-activism you;re seeing are simply extreme exhaustion. Library budget have been slashed and reduced since before I started working in them in 2002. In 2005, I had a total annual book budget of $5000 for History (of the world, including new hires in Africa and China), Modern Languages, Economics, Gender Studies, and ICT. My last R1 library had, by 2014, stopped purchasing books unless by explicit request. What little monograph budget we had went to predetermined university press plans for digital books.
In 2002, we as librarians had long been asked to do more with less. By the time I left libraries, libraries had begun to accept they must do less with less. And that was all before COVID and our 45th president.
Librarians are too overworked to protest. And departmental faculty have rarely met their librarians and have no idea what their libraries and librarians SHOULD do for them. They can't protest what they have never known.
Sidenote: Universities are funded by states. States have radically reduced funding to universities for two primary reasons: politically, because of anti-intellectualism, neoliberalism, and No Child Left Behind (it's an ugly culmination); and economically, due to state budget cratering as Amazon and online shopping rose and didn't collect state sales tax in the 200s and 2010s. I haven't seen much discussing the loss to state budgets of online shopping during those 20 years, but I think it must be significant.
I have nothing but sympathy for academic librarians feeling the squeeze in their day-to-day work. And I agree that these problems are all, at root, about budget. I think part of seeing a change, though, is encouraging leaders to think about the big-picture effects of their discursive decisions. Lots of players (bookstores, small / independent publishers, public libraries, reviewers and social media fans, etc.) are participating in a special moment for books, despite their own budgetary limitations. I think those experiences and those ways of talking about books (instead of Silicon Valley talk about austerity, "open," and disruption) can be a model!
Isn't part of this is that books are a diminished part of the role academic libraries play? It to put it differently: students and academics aren't going to the library to pull books off shelves, and rather than being temples dedicated to the old way of doing things, university libraries are looking for new purpose?
Sure. Librarians have access to more metrics than ever before, and would point to decreased demand. Patron-driven acquisition also complicates things. With ebooks, publishers basically make everything available to patrons free until (say) ten pages are read, at which point the title is purchased automatically. So that end of things is often entirely down to demand.
But libraries are investing in Open Access initiatives for books and in some cases publishing OA books themselves, so I don't think it's a case of their believing there's no interest in books. Ideology—the belief that books shouldn't be paid for, including by libraries—seems to play some role. And if that's the idea coming from academic libraries (find me one that hasn't shown the movie "Paywalled"), then it's hard to blame patrons for getting books other ways, including sites with bold IP claims.
The temples-of-the-old-ways claim could be made about any other element in Bookworld, from bookstores to public libraries to publishers themselves—all of whom seem to be participating in an especially exciting moment for books. I agree that some library leaders do appear to be looking for a new purpose. But that post-book sense of purposelessness, as opposed to robust celebration of traditional books, may contribute to their defunding?
The problems of non-activism you;re seeing are simply extreme exhaustion. Library budget have been slashed and reduced since before I started working in them in 2002. In 2005, I had a total annual book budget of $5000 for History (of the world, including new hires in Africa and China), Modern Languages, Economics, Gender Studies, and ICT. My last R1 library had, by 2014, stopped purchasing books unless by explicit request. What little monograph budget we had went to predetermined university press plans for digital books.
In 2002, we as librarians had long been asked to do more with less. By the time I left libraries, libraries had begun to accept they must do less with less. And that was all before COVID and our 45th president.
Librarians are too overworked to protest. And departmental faculty have rarely met their librarians and have no idea what their libraries and librarians SHOULD do for them. They can't protest what they have never known.
Sidenote: Universities are funded by states. States have radically reduced funding to universities for two primary reasons: politically, because of anti-intellectualism, neoliberalism, and No Child Left Behind (it's an ugly culmination); and economically, due to state budget cratering as Amazon and online shopping rose and didn't collect state sales tax in the 200s and 2010s. I haven't seen much discussing the loss to state budgets of online shopping during those 20 years, but I think it must be significant.
I have nothing but sympathy for academic librarians feeling the squeeze in their day-to-day work. And I agree that these problems are all, at root, about budget. I think part of seeing a change, though, is encouraging leaders to think about the big-picture effects of their discursive decisions. Lots of players (bookstores, small / independent publishers, public libraries, reviewers and social media fans, etc.) are participating in a special moment for books, despite their own budgetary limitations. I think those experiences and those ways of talking about books (instead of Silicon Valley talk about austerity, "open," and disruption) can be a model!
Isn't part of this is that books are a diminished part of the role academic libraries play? It to put it differently: students and academics aren't going to the library to pull books off shelves, and rather than being temples dedicated to the old way of doing things, university libraries are looking for new purpose?
Sure. Librarians have access to more metrics than ever before, and would point to decreased demand. Patron-driven acquisition also complicates things. With ebooks, publishers basically make everything available to patrons free until (say) ten pages are read, at which point the title is purchased automatically. So that end of things is often entirely down to demand.
But libraries are investing in Open Access initiatives for books and in some cases publishing OA books themselves, so I don't think it's a case of their believing there's no interest in books. Ideology—the belief that books shouldn't be paid for, including by libraries—seems to play some role. And if that's the idea coming from academic libraries (find me one that hasn't shown the movie "Paywalled"), then it's hard to blame patrons for getting books other ways, including sites with bold IP claims.
The temples-of-the-old-ways claim could be made about any other element in Bookworld, from bookstores to public libraries to publishers themselves—all of whom seem to be participating in an especially exciting moment for books. I agree that some library leaders do appear to be looking for a new purpose. But that post-book sense of purposelessness, as opposed to robust celebration of traditional books, may contribute to their defunding?