Inside Higher Ed :: The Joy of Stacks

Inside Higher Ed :: The Joy of Stacks: "To understand why professors need great libraries, says Andrew Abbott, “you need to think about an ape swinging through the trees.”

Abbott is not an evolutionary biologist, but a sociologist at the University of Chicago. And to Abbott, a scholar in a library is just like a swinging primate. “You’ve got your current source, which is the branch you are on, and then you see the next source, on the next branch, so you swing over. And on that new hanging vine, you see the next source, which you didn’t see before, and you swing again.”

When books aren’t browsable or instantly available, Abbott says, a scholar becomes the ape “with no branch to grab, and you are stopped, hanging on a branch with no place to go.”

At far too many libraries, he says, that is becoming the norm. Many universities are boasting about how they are digitizing collections or building vast, off-site facilities to store millions of books. Even when those books are available within hours, Abbott says, that destroys the way scholars need to think — moving from source to source, not knowing which source they will stumble on."

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