was chat, now the future

[Jennifer_Reiswig at UCSDLIBRARY.ucsd.edu]

     I've been interested in this discussion.  We too have been 
     discouraging chat rooms and other messaging services at our 16 public 
     workstations.  
     
     I'm really of two minds here.  On one hand, I'd LOVE to get our 
     library involved in electronic classes, online chat with other 
     students, and so on.  It's sexy, the students would love it, and I 
     think the library would do a great job helping people learn about 
     these resources.  It would really give us some credibility with 
     faculty as being really important to the curriculum, and it would be 
     fun!  
     
     On the other hand, we have 16 workstations and thousands of students 
     and faculty. Do the math!  It just seems to me that in an era when we 
     can't get enough campus support to keep our core collections intact, 
     how can we expect to be able to become a classroom as well as a 
     library?  I'd love to see us involved in writing proposals to locate 
     more classroom lab space inside the library.
     
     While we're looking upstream, we still need to be worrying about the 
     folks who walk in the library today.  What did they come to the 
     library for?  If they came in to see what journal articles we had on 
     their topic and they see rows and rows of people at the workstations, 
     what will they do?  Some will walk around looking to see if anyone's 
     just "surfing", but most just leave or go wandering around. A few come 
     to the reference desk.  We now keep a special eye out for people who 
     look like they're about to leave because all the workstations are in 
     use.  There ARE other places on campus to do e-mail, chat, and so on. 
     Are they as convenient as the library? No. But there are NO other 
     places on campus where people can use a library collection.  To add 
     classroom or lab space right now, we would have to take away from this 
     unique resource, both in space and money.  So long as that's true, I 
     don't think it's worth it.
     
     Getting more comfortable with *iltering all the time...
     
     Jenny Reiswig
     Biomedical Library
     University of California, San Diego
     jreiswig at ucsd.edu