The Way I See It: Old and New Make Libraries Worthy of Help When Steve Nichols was a boy during World War II, he looked forward to his frequent hikes across the Cape Cod countryside to get to the community's quaint 19th-century library. He still recalls fondly the library's musty, familiar, inviting smell. To him, it was the fragrance of books. Now he knows that the lovely smell was of books crumbling in decay. This rather harsh realization is all part of his learning curve since accepting the provost's request to keep Homewood's Eisenhower Library moving forward in the period between the departure for Yale of director Scott Bennett and the hiring of his replacement sometime next year. Since he started the job as acting director on Oct. 1, Nichols also has learned that looks, as well as smells, can be deceiving. As one of the country's pre-eminent French scholars, Nichols has always been an avid user of this and other university libraries. But he, like most people, saw only their smooth operation. He appreciated that when he wanted a book it was either on the shelf or easily could be tracked and brought to him, usually in good physical shape. As director, he now knows that all that seamless efficiency costs money. Lots and lots of money for crucial, but largely unseen, things. For example, Nichols says that by the time an average $60 book is identified for acquisition, shipped in, cataloged into the computer, put on a shelf and tracked so that its whereabouts are known at all times, it costs closer to $100. That's a low estimate on both ends and does not even account for repair when someone breaks the book's spine to save a place, or pulls it off the shelf by its binding. Other examples: In his first month, Nichols has had to press ahead on the ongoing project to create quality and convenient off-site shelving to ease the pressure of trying to squeeze more than 2 million books into a building designed to accommodate 1 million. And the library acquires about 40,000 new books each year. He was tossed into the midst of the process to select a new library management system to take the place of what we know as Janus, because there are better, more efficient and friendlier ways for students, faculty and staff to find out where books and materials are located. And he has been drawn into the effort to find funds to expand MUSE, the cooperative venture among the library, Homewood Academic Computing and the Johns Hopkins Press to make the 42 Press journals available on a wonderfully flexible computer software program capable of being sent electronically anywhere in the world. The sweeping undercurrent of all these projects is the need for money. Nichols celebrated his first day on the job with Hopkins alumnus Champ Sheridan and his wife, Debbie, who pledged a gracious $20 million gift to the library. But Nichols knows not every day will be like that. In the 30 years since the library opened, its biggest gift had been $2.5 million, also from the Sheridans. In an average year, the library raises about $1 million. Its annual operating budget, though, is $10.8 million with other costs pushing expenditures to more than $13 million. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that raising the kinds of funds necessary to maintain current levels of quality and to press ahead for future growth is not the easiest of all development tasks, in part because nobody graduates from a library. No one has that nostalgia for a building and a service the way they might for their department or their professors. Complicating funding matters further is a generation that is growing up in front of a computer monitor or a TV screen and is not imbued with the wonder of reading and the magic of holding a book in one's hands. Libraries could become cultural relics. Steve Nichols does not think that will happen, and he insists that there should be room for both a 500-year-old Italian manuscript and a journal accessible only on Mosaic software. People, he thinks, will always want to sit under a tree, or curl up on a sofa, or lie at the beach with a book. It's kind of hard to do that with a computer, even a laptop. In a sense, it's this romanticizing of books that may ensure their survival well after the information highway is paved and trafficked regularly. I love to wind my way along the Internet and access information from around the world. But it is still more wondrous to walk into the Peabody Library and marvel at the cathedral of books that towers up from the shiny black and white tiled floor. I get swept away gently leafing through a folio of newspapers from 1789 France. And I absolutely could live right in the Garrett Library at Evergreen House. But we lovers of books and maps and magazines, which we can touch and turn, cannot rely on good intentions and warm feelings to keep our libraries secure and thriving. Those of us who are struggling for computer literacy, because we can envision the ease with which we will be able to access and manipulate information for our work, need to become friends of our libraries, friends with deeper pockets. Steve Nichols is pleasantly surprised at the diversity of people at Hopkins who do support the library. And he is slightly unnerved when he hears someone wonder why the library should get a very big gift. Perhaps he can remind those people that the answer may come to them if they stop and smell the books. --Steve Libowitz, Editor of the Gazette