Removing easy access to print materials is also troubling though it is understandable and widespread in academic and industrial research settings because of online resources as simple as google and wikipedia. I hate to only complain so here are a couple suggestions. Are costs rising as a result of ever-expanding online resource acquisitions? Journals are almost too easy to access now, and people wouldn’t even bother with some articles if it meant you had to walk further than the printer in the next room. Many companies are saving a lot of money by renegotiating contracts in this bad economy, the libraries should have a lot of power. Maybe some electronic resources could be dropped or accomodated through inter-library loans of printed material? Could the libraries pursue NSF money? I’m sure there are no easy decisions or answers but libraries are critical to the instructional and research academic system. I hope these extreme measures aren’t beyond what is necessary.

And the cut in hours? I’ll just echo what’s already been said: scholarship does NOT end at 5pm.

Books that are found in Arts Libraries are different than all the other books that one finds in the library in general. These are often books that are very rare: books about the arts are often printed in fewer numbers than other books, contain beautiful prints and images, go out of print as tastes and trends change, and are occasionally “Artists’ Books” – books that are works of art in themselves. They are materially more delicate and culturally ephemeral than say, books on hotel restaurant management or books on sociology.

Not that books of any type should be sacrificed on the altar of budget cuts – but art books are the books which are literally sacrificed when taken out of a protective environment. As I am sure that you all know, when one visits eBay one can find 1000s of prints, cut out of Art Books and sold piecemeal. Many such “products” have come from my own Doe Library here at Berkeley when our librarians made a similarly fatal decision to move our “N” series out of the Art History/Classics library and into the stacks. There is rarely a book I find in the art section of Doe now which is not written in, ink-markered, with the image plates cut out. This is one reason that I often have to request books from UCLA through ILL – because our own trust has been destroyed.
I see here, Mr. Strong, that you have secretly tried to push this closure through (I actually had to do a “find” for the word “Arts” to find this embedded note). I have read that you are someone who sees the future of the library as digitized. I love the idea of digitizing books – I am thankful to Google Books every time I need to peruse a volume on Somnambulism from the 19th century ! – however you, Mr. Strong seem to have fundamentally misunderstood that different disciplines engage with and use books differently.

An equation or a business graph can easily be studied and copied from a computer screen. A book of art with images is something that one needs to be “with” in the material world. One needs to place volumes next to each other and compare pictures by Poussin or Ingres; see how David Smith’s sculptural works have been photographed; compare a King Vidor film still to a Millet painting. It’s a visual and physical / phenomenological experience – sometimes you need to have volumes open all over a table top – not just move your mouse over something on a screen. It is a discipline and a practice that requires space and moreover protection for the materials.

Unlike books from many other discipline, art books are often artifacts themselves. We all lament when antiquities are looted from museums and destroyed during wartime, but this decision is using a budget crisis to justify destroying our shared cultural legacy. It is no different in consequence than allowing a bomb to go off in the space – just as much damage will be done, and for what? To free-up money for the new furniture that you, Mr. Strong highlight in your very next blog entry? Better to sit on fruit crates with a beautiful intact art book than to luxuriate in a big comfy chair with nothing left to look at. The way that money is spent in this situation, and throughout the UC system itself, is mind-boggling.

At the end of his life, as he fled Paris during WWII, the thing Walter Benjamin most regretted was abandoning his library wherein he had amassed a remarkable collection of volumes, the likes of which we will never see again. Walter Benjamin, Susan Stewart, Mieke Bal, and Jean Baudrillard all tell us, in different ways, that the collector is the soul of his or her collection – that after the death of the collector, the collection no longer coheres. But I think the opposite can also be said, that when a collection of such extreme importance as that of the UCLA Arts Library – one that has been so carefully crafted and curated and guided in its development year after year – is suddenly disbanded, this says something about the declining health of the soul of its host. We cannot have universities without libraries. I very much hope that you will reconsider this terrible decision and keep the Arts Library open and intact. Decades have been spent building this one-of-a-kind collection and I have no doubt that deep regret and lasting shame will be the future consequence of its closure, the disbandment of its collection, and the distribution of its dismembered parts in the inaccessible recesses of the UC storage system.

The loss of Night Powell is also a bad news — I have to agree with Chris when he says that Night Powell has been a relief from a loud, noisy and unproductive space that an apartment can be at night, to the quiet work atmosphere that Night Powell provides during the last weeks of each quarter. I’ve used Night Powell a number of times to study and finish papers.

I realize times are tough, and that the UC library system has less money to spend, but for new incoming students facing enormous fee increases (especially for out-of-state students who are getting sacked with a $2,000-$3,000 increase in their tuition), limiting the hours of the libraries adds insult to injury.