 "Photo: Joe Griffith / IC")
 "Photo: Joe Griffith / IC")
 "Photo: Joe Griffith / IC")
The Carlson Library on Main Campus and Mulford Library on the Health Science Campus are being renovated to feature “ultra quiet spaces” for students to study, more information commons space, group study rooms and the transition of journals from shelves in the library to an online database.
Dean of the Libraries John Gaboury said changes to portions of the renovations to both Mulford and Carlson Library should be noticeable by spring 2011.
“I would say within a year, it’s not unreasonable for one or two of the floors to be redone,” Gaboury said. “I’m talking both campuses. My preference is that I’m going to ask for phases for both campuses, and that we start phase one for Carlson and for Mulford at the same time.”
Gaboury said the fifth floor of the Carlson Library will be turned into an “ultra quiet space” where no technology and other things that make noise will be allowed.
“Students are telling us with all the technology the areas are very noisy, there’s a lot of interaction, and there’s machine noise and people talking in groups,” he said. “We had some students who said ‘you know, I really want some quiet space where you can hear a pin drop.’ We do have quite a few students that the quiet space is very important to them.”
According to Gaboury, there will be three “zones” in the library: an area for technology, a quieter area where students could work on their laptops and a place where noise would be significantly limited.
An ultra quiet space already exists in the Mulford Library, which Gaboury said has been very successful.
The fifth floor of Carlson Library will also receive new carpeting.
“Carlson Library hasn’t been updated or had carpet replaced in over 45 years,” he said. “The fifth floor where we’re hoping to turn into an ultra quiet space, the carpet is so old there if you vacuum it starts to unravel and come up. We have money now to redo that and to put in new carpeting and new furniture to turn that into the quiet zone.”
All of the research journals on the second floor of Carlson Library will also be removed and put online to make room for more “information common space,” Gaboury said.
“The environment’s changing for libraries. We used to always be just paper journals or we used to be monographs. In the last decades, the journals have moved. I’d say 95 percent of them now come in an electronic format,” he said. “So if students and faculty are accessing that information electronically, we could take the physical space that those items are sitting in, remove them and do something differently with the space.”
But some faculty members do not agree with the technological transition.
Karen Hoblet, associate professor of nursing, said an excessive amount of books and journals have already been removed from the libraries.
“When I go to look for resources for the college of nursing, I must admit I leave this university and I go to universities in this area that continue to have journal collections that I can access easily,” Hoblet said. “We do not have a good collection of nursing journals online and those resources are already limited.”
Gaboury said there is still a commitment to the physical collection but it is not uncommon for things to transition to the internet and more students are doing research online.
“In today’s world, 99 percent of students are now using electronics to do their research and when they annotate and do their citations, it’s all electronic. Also electronic versions, I believe, allows you to do research more effectively.”
Gaboury said the fifth floor of Carlson Library will receive new carpet in May.
Gaboury said the collections in both libraries are being assessed for quality.
“We’re doing a quality assessment to look at books that have very, very low use and in Ohio we’re fortunate that there are regional depositories in major universities. We have one between [Bowling Green State University] and us that we share,” Gaboury said. “We used as a starting point, if it hasn’t been circulated in ten years, take a look at it. The library has not done a quality, critical assessment of the books we have. We do also have some very old things that are falling apart and should go.”
Hoblet said the collection of books in the Mulford Library has already been reduced greatly.
“I don’t even know how many,” she said. “The shelving, after shelves, after shelves of nursing resources are gone and that’s shameful. I do not use my University of Toledo library. I go to Mercy College, I go to Lourdes College, I go to other colleges in this area to use their copies.”
Gaboury said the books that are being removed will be placed in a depository that is shared by UT and Bowling Green State University and can be requested from the catalog at either library and a hard copy of the book would arrive the next day.
Linda Rouillard, associate professor of French, said the collections in both libraries at UT are supposed to be able to support faculty research.
“I am not hearing of a lot of attention being given to how we support faculty research,” she said. “I am seeing a scientific model where if the information isn’t five minutes old, then it needs to go to a depository, and in the Humanities, that’s not how we work.”
Gaboury said he understands the concerns of faculty members.
“But I have a responsibility to move the libraries forward so the resources we have give what you need now, but we also look to the future. That’s what we’re doing with this,” he said.
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