The Genesis of a Library : Plans at CSU San Marcos Aim for World-View Books, High-Tech Methods

Those planning the library for brand-new Cal State San Marcos hope to avoid the stereotypical image of dusty books and aisles of card catalogues, and instead create a high-tech facility.

Marion Reid, director of the library, also hopes to seize the opportunity to build a balanced library that focuses on more than Western classical works.

The first task, of course, is to get some books.

“You need a core collection of about 50,000 to 80,000 volumes for students to have when they walk in,” said Reid, who expects to have completed that collection by the time the library opens in temporary quarters in 1992.

Still, the international perspective of the new university will influence how the core collection develops.

“Our core will be different from the focus of what it would have been 20 years ago, because of the university’s mission,” Reid said. “We are not focused on the North American-European concept--we are looking at the world.

“The traditional focus of a small school and a small library has been the traditional works, the Western European traditions, and looking at what the people from England wrote, and what the Western Europeans wrote,” Reid said.

Reid hopes to have not only some of the classical writings of Western Europe, but also of Asia and South America. However, by leaving the beaten path of university libraries, Cal State San Marcos is finding it more difficult to decide exactly what books to put on the shelves.

“It’s harder. Nobody has done it before. There’s no one out there who can say this is the best way to do it,” Reid said.

The last library built by the California State University system was for the Bakersfield campus, about 20 years ago.

Typically, book vendors have lists of books they can supply to start up a library. There are also published lists for colleges and universities, such as Books for College Libraries, now in its third edition.

That list was first published when three University of California campuses began in the late 1960s. It contains a list of 50,000 titles to be used to build a core collection.

However, the need for such a list is being questioned by many in the library field.

“There are a number of libraries that are challenging the Western canon, and the whole concept of a basic list is being questioned,” said Patricia Sabocik, project director of the last edition of Books for College Libraries. “Are they needed

anymore, or should we spend more time looking at the current needs of the faculty and students?

“My sense is that, as schools progress, questions are always raised, and there will always be a need for some type of core collection because it does report a history of education,” Sabocik said.

Reid said the Cal State San Marcos core collection will be established through lists compiled by faculty members, as well as surveys of other universities and libraries with specialties in fields Cal State San Marcos hopes to expand into, such as the Pacific Rim and Latin America.

The library, which won’t move into its permanent home until 1997, must also fulfill the specialized needs of the Cal State San Marcos faculty and its specialties.

Reid gives the example of Donald Funes, professor of fine arts with a specialty in South American music, who is helping develop the library’s music stock.

“The university is committed to multiculturalism, which means we have to develop a balanced collection in the arts, a collection that’s representative of minority artists and representative of cultures other than Western Europe . . . “ Funes said.

“The entire higher educational system in California needs to recognize the necessity of providing an education for a multiculturally diverse population, because the demographics are changing so rapidly, and we have to educate the people for the future,” Reid said.

Funes hopes the collection will have examples of Euro-American classical works as well as ethnic music representative of Latin America, the Pacific Rim, India, Africa and Europe.

Technology will also play a large part in the shape of the library’s music collection. Vinyl is a thing of the past, and Cal State San Marcos hopes to stay in touch with the future by investing in cutting-edge technologies such as interactive compact discs and digital audio tape equipment, Funes said.

Interactive CDs give students simultaneous access to a verbal and visual encyclopedia about the music they are listening to through a personal computer, Funes said.

But acquiring music, books and journals is only part of the difficulty. Getting literature the library can’t afford to buy is where technology will play a large part, Reid said.

Technology helps alleviate some of the high costs of literature, particularly with journals, whose price has been steadily escalating. A yearlong subscription can cost as much as $3,000.

Part of the technology to be used is an electronic index of 9,500 journal titles and new articles, developed by CARL Systems, a marketing and support company for a Colorado-based association of research libraries.

A person doing research could use a computer and modem to scan the index for an author, title or keyword, read a brief description of the article, then purchase the article and have it in their hands “in less than an hour” through a facsimile machine, said Rebecca Lenzini, president of CARL Systems.

Each article will cost about $10, Lenzini said, and Cal State San Marcos’ subscription to the system, called UnCover, will cost $2,500 a year, allowing the university to buy individual articles as opposed to an entire journal, while broadening its resources.

The system will be in place by the end of the year, and Cal State San Marcos will be among the very first university libraries with the potential to have journal articles delivered through the index, Lenzini said. Other libraries have had access to the index, but have not been able to get copies delivered.

“Business and corporate libraries have been able to do this for a long time, but university libraries really have never had the funds, or have placed their funds more toward the purchase of a journal rather than an article,” Lenzini said.

“For scholarly research, what we will be doing is buying information as opposed to materials,” Reid said. The new library, of course, will have some of the more popular journals on hand in old-fashioned paper format, and articles published before 1988 will not be on the computerized index, Reid said.

The newness of the San Marcos library takes away some of the pain that usually accompanies switching to new technology.

“You have to get people weaned away from the paper version of things. That’s one problem that existing libraries have,” Reid said.

But Reid knows there are limits to what a library can do by itself, and, in its infancy, Cal State San Marcos will depend heavily on exchanges with other local libraries.

“Libraries rely on each other. It is recognized that no library can get everything,” Reid said.