Proposed Closure of UCLA Arts Library Sparks Protest

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Worries about services and transparency prompt faculty letter and a petition

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 08/20/2009

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Arts and Chemistry libraries considered for closure
Faculty outcry takes form of Facebook group, petition
Letter to university librarian demands open meeting

Following a furlough program approved in July [PDF] to contend with massive budget shortfalls throughout the University of California system, the library administration of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has appointed study teams to examine "the service and collection issues associated with closing the Arts and Chemistry libraries."

University librarian Gary Strong first mentioned the possibility in an August 4 blog post about the 2009-2010 library budget describing a number of further proposed measures to meet the library's $1,830,021 operating budget reduction.

According to UCLA, the Arts Library has "more than 270,000 books in the fields of architecture, architectural history, art, art history, design, film, television, photography, theater, and allied disciplines," though one-third of its holdings are housed in another facility. The Chemistry Collection is part of the Science and Engineering Library, and supports "the research and instructional interests of the departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and the Molecular Biology Institute."

Support for Arts Library
As reported by the LA Times Culture Monster arts blog, UCLA faculty and students have come out strongly in favor of the keeping the Arts Library open in recent days. A Facebook group (with more than a thousand members) has mobilized to "Save the UCLA Arts Library," and the UCLA faculty have drafted a letter to Strong expressing their "outrage and dismay" at the library's impending closure.

Strong hoped to assuage some concerns, telling the LA Times, "This doesn't mean we would stop serving the arts community." He added, "We would do this from a different location. The fact is that we cannot support all of the separate libraries that we currently have."

Transparency issues
Aside from concerns about the collection, the letter also accuses the library administration of communications and consultation missteps:

Those who did not see the closure of the Arts Library buried in your blog entry of August 4, 2009 found out about it though word of mouth, Facebook, email and water cooler rumors. The lack of any effort on the part of library management to consult arts and humanities faculty about these plans points to a lack of transparency in the library’s operations that we find most troubling. This lack of transparency is further underscored by library management’s failure to consult with the UCLA Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication on this critical issue.

The letter demands an open meeting for "interested faculty and students at the beginning of fall quarter."

The letter has been coupled with a petition to save the Arts Library, which contends that "the permanent elimination of a critical UCLA institution must not be the solution to a short term budget crisis." As of Thursday morning, the petition had collected more than 1,100 signatures, as well as a significant number of comments.

Many comments acknowledge the distinction between the closure of a library and the dissolution of a collection, but the writers still express concerns that the closure of the facility will adversely affect the Arts Library's services.

No similar protest has apparently arisen regarding the Chemistry Collection, which is smaller than the Arts Library.

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