2024 January 25
Earlier this week, the CfA community was notified that the John G. Wolbach Library would be shut down for budgetary reasons. The spin is that it’s “integrating into the broader Harvard Library,” but the staff are being let go and the physical space will be repurposed, so I think it’s fair to call it a closure. I wanted to try to write a few words about what I think is going to be lost.
For context, Wolbach is one of the top astronomy libraries out there. I’ve always heard it and the Gilliss Library at USNO described as the premiere astronomy libraries in at least the US, and possibly the world (hedging because I simply don’t know much about the international context). The rule of thumb was that if you were looking for a scientific book about astronomy, if Wolbach didn’t have it, no one else did either.
Indeed, Wolbach’s collections served as a major foundation for setting up ADS — I mean, SciX — which, as anyone that interacts with me regularly has heard ad infinitum, in my opinion stands with ArXiv as one of the most important things to happen in science in the past 50 years. It may be true that the backbone of ADS is its comprehensive coverage of the astronomy periodicals, but the kind of thing that makes ADS stand above other literature databases is that it also has comprehensive coverage of books, theses, and other kinds of literature. It is not a coincidence that the home of Wolbach is also the home of ADS. I mean, SciX.
That being said, the other big thing about Wolbach is that it has been way, way ahead of the curve in demonstrating that libraries are not about books. (Echoes of Dijkstra, maybe: “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”) One of the things that was immensely dispiriting about the presentation of the Wolbach closure was the focus on book borrowing rates: I think the number might have been something like 0.6 books per day, and decreasing. No kidding! We have the internet now! The CfA has been very lucky to have a library staffed by people who understood this truth and worked very hard to not just to think about but to demonstrate how libraries can stay relevant — dare I say essential? — in the 21st century.
Some of this had to do with nontraditional resources, like the devices collection. There are informatics projects, like the UAT and MetaSat. There’s extensive work in support of software citation and preservation. There’s the Library Space Technology Network. There are historical projects like Project PHaEDRA, an historian-in-residence program, EONS, and the Women in Astronomy Bibliographies, not to mention significant library support and involvement in the Plate Stacks where I now spend most of my time. The library has long tried to sustain professional development activities within the CfA, which are sorely lacking, and supported the rest of the community by providing meeting space and resources like the video wall. And, not to put too fine of a point on it, most of these activities were supported by external grant funding. Does this seem like a moribund book-lending outfit to you?
Former Wolbach head librarian Daina Bouquin deserves special recognition for being the visionary that instigated most of these efforts. She also taught me that libraries are memory institutions, a description that has stuck with me since I first heard it. A good library is a Leviathan, in the Hobbes sense, that wakes up every day hungry to organize and preserve knowledge. The books are incidental.
And if you ask me, we’re in need of good libraries — say it with me — now more than ever. Focusing specifically on science, lately it’s been seeming to me that something has been coming unhinged in our profession. The amount of material published every year is growing unceasingly, but the rate of actual progress feels like it’s flatlined at best. As with the internet in general, it feels like there is more and more stuff to have to pay attention to and less and less clarity about what’s actually valuable. Making it all the more depressing is the near-certainty that LLMs are about to overwhelm all human communications with a tidal wave of garbage. (They’ll also enable some truly incredible positive things! But all of the evidence thus far indicates to me that the vast majority of their usages will make life worse. If I turn out to be wrong about this, great.) I don’t know if the best library in the world can actually do anything about this, but it sure seems to me like we need some institutions that can take this firehose of information and organize it into knowledge.
More broadly … not to be melodramatic, but with literal Nazis parading around these days, we shouldn’t be taking for granted some of the library basics such as “providing access to knowledge without reporting your interests to the government” or “fighting against people that want to burn books”.
Unfortunately, it’s quite clear that the Wolbach decision is final. On the one hand, I understand that if you’re going to lay people off, you can’t shop around for feedback, and you can’t be wishy-washy once the decision is made. On the other hand, I and many of my colleagues feel immensely dissatisfied with the process that got us here. To paraphrase an astute observation from a coworker (not sure if they would want to be named): yes, this is a decision affecting jobs that basically needs to be handed down from on high. But this is also a big decision that speaks to the foundational values of the CfA community. It demands discussion. I don’t know how you reconcile those two things, but I feel like there has to have been a better way.
In all this broad talk of institutions and community, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that a number of my coworkers are losing their jobs. That sucks. They’re great at what they do and have been working hard, often thanklessly, especially over the past few years with the library very understaffed. All the talk of a “purely budgetary decision” doesn’t soften the blow. I hope you all swiftly land your next dream jobs and/or winning lottery tickets! Thank you for being such wonderful colleagues.
I can’t resist bringing up one of my favorite examples of the kind of support that I got at Wolbach that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. If you’re not tired of reading yet, check out my 2013 post Prosser & Grankin, CfA Preprint 4539: A Bibliographic Story.