For universities across time, the library was the heart, research center, and substance of the knowledge and processes of education that any university contributed to, built on and extended. Indigenous Poet Kaitlin Curtice celebrates how libraries pervade, inspire and become substance of our lives, communities and development [see the first quote below]. Libraries invite us into worlds, understandings and questions that stretch our experience and put us in dialogue [see second quote below] with the direct words and efforts of those of disparate times, outlooks, cultures and conditions.
I write with dismay, grief and sorrow for the permanent closure of MIT Libraries Barker, Dewey and Rotch, and termination of library staff in those libraries. For over half a century, I have learned, studied, researched, reflected, taught, created and rested in these libraries, as an MIT undergraduate, graduate and postdoc student, as an MIT researcher and instructor, and as an MIT alum. Across the diverse ever-changing areas of the studies and investigations that involve me and my students – from physics to poetry, from historical science to electrical engineering, from sculpture to photography, from philosophy to psychology – all the MIT Libraries have stimulated, opened, and connected us with human efforts, current and historical, to understand, express and learn in and with the world. Welcoming for me, and all students, the MIT Libraries were oases, spaces apart from the stresses, deadlines, demands of this school, where one could reflect apart, go to a familiar bookshelf, read in companionship with others and be challenged by human voices new, unexpected and concerned for nature, learning and truth. The MIT Librarians and MIT Libraries Circulation desk were available, interested and open to assist for whatever confused questions, incomplete references, tangential details or specific analyses we might be working on or stumped by [see MIT 1912, third quote below]. There were always other places to look, another staircase to climb, or resources to consider. MIT Libraries could open to anywhere and also facilitate rethinking of one’s own understanding and local contexts.
For MIT to be closing three of its four major libraries, demonstrates a significant retreat from that commitment to truth and knowledge, to engaging students and faculty with voices, works and researches across time and the present. It’s shocking that the 1916 MIT Dome, designed by Architect William Welles Bosworth to hold “the finest engineering library in the world” [still quoted in display in the Building 10 corridor] is now empty of students, staff and closed to the library experience. The MIT Dome has become a shell empty of meaning. There is not a single book or journal in the Reading room under the dome! The brass lettering, Barker Engineering Library 5th floor, embedded in the Lobby 10 Marble walls, is now nonoperative. Rotch Library, with what are, to me, the windowed New Rotch Stacks 7A, built outside of Bosworth’s 1938 Building 7 wall, is still described on MIT’s website as “one of the premier architecture libraries in the US”. Whereas this week I went spontaneously into Rotch stacks for Calder’s Intimate World, that experience soon becomes extinct; this library’s loss is portending for architects and students of art!
Those library spaces matter, with all the stairs, bookshelves, study areas and with the staff, students and readers wandering among them. As a student and researcher, I walked and searched around and around Barker’s circularly arranged stacks [often traversing the entire perimeter to find some specific book or journal]. Having first walked among the card catalogue stacks, opened drawers, flipped through cards and written down book’s LC numbers, I went up and down stairs, in all the MIT libraries, seeking out widely separated LC locations. Those peregrinations had me stop spontaneously, notice something unconsidered, and add to and carry heavy piles of books and journals to a table, xerox or scan station, or circulation. In those physical experiences, balancing drawers, searching among shelves, climbing stairs high and low, carrying heavy volumes – the learner is continually re-impressed by the vast extent of human writing, researching, and expression, that has been the grounds, the work and the process of investigation and knowledge across history. Whereas recently, some students accompanied me into the library stacks, seeing the books, spaces, and for reading, this experience will no longer be available for future students. Already this week when my student and I visited Dewey Library, we were disappointed to find that Dewey no longer displays Berenice Abbott’s creatively composed and historically significant photographs of science in action.
When texts are accessed solely by digitized means, without experiential basis in the original volumes, organization and material contexts, the learner is cut off from the process, extent and relationships that ground and constitute human works and knowledge. Those original works on paper, now being stored in dark spaces away from learner – or even staff-access, are the irreplaceable core and heart of human knowledge, history and expression. As the digital scan forms of many of those works [but probably excluding those whose copyrights are still enforceable] enter the repositories of AI, the works, ideas and facts become plagiarized and misrepresented. [When I was educated, plagiarism was the most serious academic offense; now it is epidemic via AI.] As AI-generated plagiarized text and images expand across the internet’s digital world, the actual voice of human-generated content diminishes.
At another local university, reference librarians are in increasing demand. Chat GPT has not replaced them. Librarians are essential in assisting students and faculty in accessing datasets and other electronic resources that are crucial to the researchers and that have complex and intricate access and use aspects. One librarian at another location uses data transparency laws to uncover and find data that government and other agencies are deliberately seeking to hide. Librarians are inseparable from the research and learning process for these ongoing efforts.
My brother Tom [SB ‘82] reflects that he learned engineering in the Barker Library [he remembers the Foucault pendulum in the Dome journal reading room], spending more time there than in his dorm: “I would go to the stacks to teach myself, look at numerous offers of books on similar topic, looking at the books on the shelves, taking several together, I could understand the subject better than what was said in class. It was difficult material; I read several books. How do you gain perspectives in an efficient manner with no books anymore? How many classic books are available now?” While some academic libraries provide students with electronic access to textbook subscriptions to a particular publisher – there are more than a few publishing companies. Some are out of business, and some will not make their books available online. Present-day students thus have reduced access to diverse perspectives and analyses of engineering topics.
Other MIT Libraries, familiar to me, have already closed over time: Lindgren Library of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences in Building 54; the Stein Club Map Room in Building 14; the Rotch Slide Library/Visual Collections in Building 7, while the Science and Humanities Libraries no longer have integrity spaces in Building 14. When I was an undergraduate, major labs had their own library [and darkroom]. I keenly recall the library of Alexander Rich’s lab, its bookshelves bulging with separate issues of PNAS, Science, Nature, Acta Crystallograhica, its plain wood table strewn with the most recent and contentious articles left open and extended into conjectures on the nearby actual blackboard, and the lab’s pet live iguana watching on. Today’s students and faculty are unaware of these past environments, of reading, lively discussion and learning.
At some future time, historically inclined students may wonder about what people really wrote, said and created. Maybe they will find ways to hack into the spaces, volumes and experiences where humans spoke, wrote, created and struggled, seeking understanding, relationship and connection.
Until then, I grieve for Barker, Dewey and Rotch, the staff, students and works within.
