As I have said before, the heart of the University is faculty and students, and all else is simply support - or in the case of the central administration, a very expensive illusion of support. In turn, the heart of that support and the physical center of the University is the library, for which reason I once got into trouble for mercilessly pillorying a former library dean who felt books should be put in storage in order to make room for more offices and meeting rooms. I believe he is now a mercenary soldier.
Given UNM's relatively small budget and its often bizarre spending policies (How many vice presidents do we now have?), the library collection is necessarily limited, and, consequently, for most scholars on campus, one part of the library system, Interlibrary Loan, is vitally important. I simply could not have done the research, such as it was, that I did in classical history without the ability to easily get materials from other institutions. Filling out ILL forms and hand searching bibliographical sources such as the Library of Congress Catalog and L'Annee Philologique was part of doing academic business at UNM.
This process was of course mightily facilitated by the development of the computer and Internet, allowing one to search databases quickly and order materials remotely. Now, the ILL process has taken another Great Leap Forward (remember that?), marking the path for the future development of the entire library system.
The library has acquired five German-made, heavy-duty planetary scanners and attendant software. These units will allow ILL to rapidly scan articles and book chapters from the UNM collection or of materials obtained from other libraries. The digitized material can then be sent directly to the borrower, and since the request can also be done online, there is no need to actually go to the library. In the case of a loan from another university, if they have a similar process, the material can immediately be forwarded to the borrower.
These units, incidentally, cost more than $100,000, which is certainly a bargain considering how the whole lending process is sped up and made much more convenient for the borrower. And when you consider that buying a new, important vice president costs this much each year and even a library faculty member pulls in $60,000 to $70,000, this sure seems like a good way to spend University resources.
This raises a compelling question: What will the library faculty now do as the library becomes more plugged in? Actually, it must be said that for most faculty, it has never been clear exactly what function these people perform or even why there are faculty in Zimmerman at all.
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The defining characteristics of a faculty member are teaching and research, the former, in my opinion, being the greater service to the institution. Unfortunately, those faculty who are not particularly good at teaching and an administration obsessed with making UNM a research University naturally emphasize the latter, to the detriment of our major mission, providing undergraduates with a liberal education.
Well, most faculties would question the seriousness of the research undertaken by library faculty. I refrain from saying "value" since one might well question the "value" of obscure scholarly stuff produced by the likes of me, but whatever you think of the arcane publications of classical historians, philosophers or mathematicians, this stuff is accepted as serious work. A manual on how to use the library or a bibliographic list of source material most certainly is not.
I am not sure that even library faculty claim they teach, though I have heard that some consider instructing students on the use of library databases (Google does it better) or hauling them around on a tour of the facilities constitutes teaching. It of course does not, and even such instructional services as these are increasingly done by computer.
Why then are there library faculty? They are paid more than the staff, who, in my opinion, seem to do most of the real work of the library and who despise these faculty almost as much as they do the suits upstairs. I might be missing something, but all the positive innovations I have witnessed at Zimmerman in the last 35 years appear to have emanated from the staff, not from the professionals in the faculty and administration. Librarians have been and remain an important component of society, but a degree in librarianship clearly does not make one a real librarian. It simply makes it possible for one to hold higher and better-paid positions -- much like an advanced degree in education.
