Researchers Hit by Library Blaze

Hundreds of municipal and private librarians throughout Southern California are making more phone calls, sending staff members on longer drives and paying more money for long-distance book loans as they scramble to make do without the fire-ravaged Los Angeles Central Library.

Because 20% of the library’s 2 million volumes were destroyed in Tuesday’s fire, the annoyances will linger long after the remaining books are salvaged and the library’s various departments relocate to temporary quarters.

In some cases, it will be impossible to find some of the library’s lost treasures anywhere else in the nation. More common will be the dilemma of knowing a copy of a specialized book or magazine exists but having to decide whether to spend the time and effort to obtain it.

Burden Borne by Everyone

The burden will be borne by everyone from high school term paper-writers to movie studio script-checkers to industrial process specialists to savings and loan researchers.

“It’s going to be costly and inefficient to tap into a lot of smaller (information) resources, but that’s what we’re going to have to do,” said Eleanore Schmidt, reference coordinator for the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System, a joint-powers agency of 28 municipal libraries in Los Angeles County that pool resources and often rely on Central Library materials.

“The impact on our ability to serve our members is going to be devastating,” added Holly Millard, the cooperative’s director.

The Central Library housed the six research librarians who worked for the metropolitan cooperative and another 10 researchers employed by a federally funded project, the Southern California Answering Network, which responds to inquiries from libraries throughout the state. Both operations are shut down and attempting to quickly relocate. UCLA, whose various libraries are regarded as the Southland’s next broadest collection of information, is a likely candidate.

However, even when the county and state cooperatives resume operation, and even when administrative sections of the Central Library find new homes, the loss of key parts of the collection will be felt for years.

A patron searching for a 1946 auto repair manual--part of a prized Central Library collection--may have to wait while librarians consult the computerized National Bibliographic Data Base, and then pay a shipping fee to compensate a library in the East. Similar delays will face an inventor wanting to check U.S. patent data, or a municipal engineer seeking details on standards for slipperiness of sidewalks, or the victim of a rare illness who does not trust his doctor and wants to consult a specialized publication.

In each of those cases, librarians said, the Central Library was probably the only place in California with an answer--and in each of those cases the special collection is feared lost to fire.

‘Information Brokers’

Private librarians employed by banks, oil companies and brokerage houses, as well as “information brokers” who serve even more specialized information needs, said they would suffer.

“A lot of stuff we don’t have because we depended on the (Central) library,” said Ann Shea, research officer and head librarian for Security Pacific Bank and president of the Southern California chapter of the Special Libraries Assn., which includes specialized corporate, university and public collections. “The library had a lot of esoteric materials, like books that were out of print, that people just didn’t buy--after all, most business books don’t make the best-seller lists.”

Especially hard-hit will be any librarian who depended on the Central Library’s science and technology section or its collection of back issues of 18,000 magazine titles, both of which were largely destroyed by the fire, librarians said.

Other Libraries Fill Void

Branch librarians in the Los Angeles system, who routinely referred patrons with difficult research requests to the Central Library, are now sending them to libraries in other cities with reputations for good collections--Long Beach, the second-largest municipal library in the county, with a collection of 870,000 items; Pomona and Pasadena, known for their history collections; Beverly Hills, which has a well-regarded fine arts collection; the Los Angeles County Law Library downtown for legal references; and UCLA’s graduate management library for business-related inquiries.

“The fire wasn’t even out before we started getting questions that normally would have gone” to the Los Angeles library, said Cordelia Howard, director of library services at the Long Beach library.

Several research librarians said Central Library patrons would find UCLA and other university libraries poor substitutes, because members of the general public are usually not permitted to check out books, and because information is usually geared toward academic research, not public inquiries.

Central Was Best Resource

Library cooperative research coordinator Schmidt said a recent study sought to find out whether UCLA, California State University, Los Angeles, or the Central Library had the best resources to answer 15 questions ranging from science to art to auto repair to crop-growing.

Researchers were able to answer 14 of the questions completely at the Central Library, contrasted with only nine at UCLA and eight at Cal State Los Angeles, she said.

That illustrated the fact that the Central Library provided a unique combination of academic, public and specialized information services that will be impossible to replace, Schmidt said.