Library buildings are notoriously expensive to build, and funding such a project – even in the midst of the affluent Silicon Valley – can be difficult. The San Jose State University Library had moved into its present building in 1982, but by the beginning of 1997 it was woefully too small for its collections and the wiring, which in the early 1980s was state-of-the-art, was inadequate for all the computers, online data bases and other electronic equipment. At the same time, less than a mile across the city, the San Jose Public Library was in the same position. Faced with similar problems and budgetary constraints, President of the University Robert Caret and Mayor of San Jose Susan Hammer decided to explore the possibility of a joint university/city library.

Such an undertaking as a joint university/city library had never been attempted, at least not in the United States. While the University Academic Senate identified principles that should guide construction and operation of a joint library, it took an entire year of discussions and research on size, location and possible funding before the University and City were ready to negotiate provisions of a Memorandum of Understanding, a non-binding document serving as the framework for development of formal agreements. After many public meetings for citizens of the City and campus-wide meetings for University faculty, staff and students, Operations and Development Agreements were finally signed by the end of 1998, and the voters in the State of California approved the higher education bonds necessary to provide much of the funding for the project. Another year passed before the University and City jointly approved the architectural design for the Joint Library, and construction could begin.

The Joint Library, termed “A Library like no other for a community like no other”, will include the collections of both libraries, comprising over one million volumes and 4,000 journal titles, and together will have an acquisitions budget of over $2.2 million, serving a University population of 32,000 students, faculty and staff and 909,000 city residents. It will mean an increase in electronic access for constituents of both libraries and double the seating capacity; most of the tables and carrels will be wired for electronic access such as personal computers. The total project will cost over $177.5 million, with the city contributing $70 million and the University, which is a state-supported university, making up the remainder through state funding ($86 million), $5 million in direct University funds, and $16.5 million will come from private fundraising. The first private gift was a $1 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and will be used to equip the new library with the latest information technology.

Luckily, San Jose State University is located right in the center of the city. The Joint Library building will be on one corner of the the University’s campus, replacing the oldest library building which since 1982 has housed older, less heavily used materials, various special collections, the School of Library and Information Science, and assorted administrative offices. A new parking garage will be built across the street, and the city’s light rail and bus systems allow for public transit. The Library will have 475,000 square feet of space within its eight floors plus a lower level and mezzanine floor.

Planning for the interior library functions and organization is an enormous challenge. The staffs of the two libraries have already begun to meet and share concerns and ideas, and five planning groups have been appointed, with equal numbers of members from each of the libraries.

The initial challenge facing the libraries was whether to continue to operate as two entirely separate libraries sharing a single building or to blend the two collections to become a single library serving both the university and the city. As one of the purposes of having a joint library was to make maximum use of space and budgets, the latter design was chosen. The City Library’s books and other materials, classified by the Dewey Decimal system, will continue to be cataloged as before, and will be housed on the lower floors of the new building, while the University Library’s books, classified by the Library of Congress system, will be on the upper floors. The overall architectural design of the library emphasizes this division, with the lower floors parallel to the city streets and the upper floors pointing diagonally from the corner of the street into the university’s campus center.

Once that decision had been made, the next challenge to be faced was how the reference collections would be handled. The university librarians and faculty were concerned that a combined reference department and reference desk would lead to poor service for university students and faculty, who would be assisted at times by city librarians who lacked the subject expertise and knowledge of the university reference staff. There was a concern that the difference in reference philosophy between the two staffs could lead to misunderstandings and complaints, as the city librarians, like most public library librarians, would be more apt to completely answer reference queries and perform the research themselves, whereas the university’s philosophy was to teach the students (and faculty) how to be independent locators and evaluators of the information they need. While city residents voiced fears that their questions would be given short shrift by the “more intellectual” university librarians, faculty envisioned their assignments in the techniques of research being sabotaged by the city librarians’ giving out direct answers to students without realizing that the main point of the exercise was to learn to find materials and do research for themselves. City residents also worried that the university librarians would not be willing to work with youth and children. It made some sense to combine the actual reference book collections, but again there was the problem of the two different classification schemes. The idea of staffing two separate reference desks was considered, but it would mean duplicating a number of very expensive reference tools and requiring twice as many librarians to staff two desks simulaneously.

The reference librarians of both libraries decided that perhaps if they met and shared their concerns and those of their constituents some compromise solution might be found. For a number of months they met and learned that while they were coming from different directions their concerns were basically identical, and they gained an appreciation of their counterparts’ needs and fears. From these meetings they progressed to a “shadowing” program, with each reference librarian spending a number of hours at the reference desk of the opposite library, watching and listening to see the differences in techniques and skills. Once mutual respect had been won, the librarians felt more comfortable with the decisions which they made together: each library will continue to own its own reference materials which will have ownership stamps on each volume, but the collections will be merged into a single rich reference collection; government publications reference sources will be interfiled with the reference books; and each library will control the type of use of its own volumes. In order to accomplish this single collection, the City Library agreed to reclass all its reference and government publications from Dewey Decimal to the Library of Congress classification, and the University Library will reclass its government publications from a variety of government document classification schemes to Library of Congress classification. Reference will be handled in a tiered design, with a general information desk to handle questions of location of materials and services and simple questions, a reference desk which will be responsible for assisting with most reference questions, and specialized subject-rich information “pods” where librarians can work individually with patrons on more subject-specialized questions or research, whether the patron be a university student, faculty, or member of the community. There will be a special center where the very latest in research technology can be demonstrated, and it is anticipated that the various companies in the Silicon Valley can use this center to debut their new technologies and software. In addition, there will be telephone and electronic reference service available to all members of both communities. All these decisions and each service will be monitored by both library staffs with regular assessment of their relative success, to ensure that there is equitable access to all collections and services by all library users.

Most of the purely service features of the Joint Library will be placed on the lower level of the building; while there will be no windows on this floor, skylights have been designed to carry adequate sunlight to augment overhead lighting. Much of this floor will contain compact shelving, one of the requirements of all new libraries built by the State of California. This may be used for older journal volumes, for some older and less heavily used monographs, or perhaps older government publications. The microfilm collection, copy center, all technical services, and the circulation operations will all be located on this lower floor. Books Aloud, a program which records books for the blind, will also be accommodated.

The first floor will be the initial entry level for all patrons, and will contain general public services, such as the Library Bookstore, maintained by the Friends of the Library and the Gifts and Donations unit of the University Library, where donated books which duplicate materials already in the librarys’ collections can be sold to raise money to augment the regular acquisitions budget. There will be a retail shop, selling items such as notebooks, computer disks, pens and pencils and similar library- or research-related supplies and perhaps a coffee kiosk, and a computer lab open to all library users. Partners in Reading, a literacy program for the community, will have a designated alcove, and youth services for children and a popular library for light reading will use a large portion of the floor. Escalators, stairs and elevators will lead up to the mezzanine, which will contain the K-12 (Kindergarten through High School, or twelfth grade) curriculum center and a youth craft room, and to the second floor which will house the reference collection and all reference desks and information “pods” or alcoves. There will be computer labs for assisting librarians who teach sessions information competency and library research skills, and the Adaptive Technology Center where patrons with disabilities can receive training in the use of adaptive equipment for completing assignments and accessing library print and electronic resources.

The City Library’s adult and young adult collections, foreign language collection and media will share the third floor with offices for library staff, while the fourth floor will contain mainly offices for administrative and reference personnel and all the computer services offices. The current periodicals reading room, also located on the fourth floor, contains a merged collection of unbound journals. All the various special collections from the two libraries will be housed together on the fifth floor: the City Library’s California Room and Special Collections, the University’s Special Collections Department, Beethoven Center, Steinbeck Center, and multicultural centers – primarily Afro-American, Chicano and Asian research materials.

The University’s portion of the building will be mainly on the top three floors and consist primarily of book stacks with no service points or librarian assistance.

With all the additional space, absolute cutting edge technology, new furniture, and special areas for everything from children’s craft center to high tech remedial electronic equipment, however, enthusiasm for the Joint Library is singularly lacking. Members of both library staffs remain cautiously neutral to outright cynical or hostile about the merger; faculty of the University formed a lobbying group called Save Our University Library, or SOUL; the public or city residents are at best lukewarm about the venture, and the consensus seems to be that the whole undertaking is a “boondoggle” or wild idea, if not a potential nightmare.

What went wrong?

The primary reasons appear to be communication, consultation. and a lack of trust. From the very concept, all planning has been from a “top down” approach. At the beginning of the project, back in 1997 when the University President and City Mayor first explored the idea of a joint library, they did so with colleagues at the very top of management, and meetings and initial research were all confidential. Indeed, most of the library personnel first learned of the project from the headlines and articles in local newspapers. By the time that the library directors had the initial meetings to inform their staffs of the proposal, the damage had begun: the university librarians and faculty felt betrayed that such a major change in traditional library service had not been discussed with the them, that the University President and librarian had in many ways sold the more scholarly and collegial aspects of the university library for a fancy big building and an opportunity to create an innovative library as a capstone to promote and glorify themselves. The promotional materials seemed to be emphasizing the benefits of such a rich merger to the patrons of the City Library while remaining fairly reticent about what the University community would be gaining other than a new building. Even the manner in which the state bonds were presented to the voters throughout California seemed of dubious character: the library was presented as a library for the University, a state-funded institution, in a short sentence at the very end of a bond initiative requesting funding for schools from kindergarten through higher education. There was no mention that this was also to be the City of San Jose public library, and no way of denying the library building funding without also denying the money necessary to remodel and replace badly-needed elementary and high school buildings.

The University and City scheduled open meetings with the faculty and students and with community members to try to allay some of the concerns. While some of the meetings were moderately successful, many attendees felt the facilitators were either unfamiliar with how libraries are operated or were unwilling to listen and try to understand their concerns. Members of the community voiced worries of safety for their small children in a building on the University campus, and were concerned that university students would not be willing to share a facility with the homeless and less fortunate citizens of the city, and the university community were concerned about the influx of small children and the possible groups of giggling teenagers invading the university study areas of the library. Above all, both the university and city communities believed that the City Mayor and University President were placing far too much emphasis on the library becoming a national or even international model for future libraries and too little emphasis on local commitments. “Concentrate on building a library that really works for all of us,” they said, “and if you’re really successful it may indeed become a model for others. But remember, no matter how advanced the building may be, if the merger isn’t successful it will become a model of how NOT to build a library.”

Task forces made up of library staff drawn equally from the two libraries were formed to study various aspects of the building and the internal operation. These too became a matter of concern, when it was seen that political maneuvering by the University Librarian was deliberately excluding some of the librarians and staff.

Little by little, however, things have begun to improve. While there is still considerable concern that the University Library is beginning to reorganize in ways more closely resembling a public library and that the City Library appears to have final word in many decisions, the Joint Library is slowly taking shape. The University Librarian, who was viewed with considerable distrust by many librarians and faculty members, was replaced by a newly hired Dean of the Library; Joint Library Project Managers were hired by first the City Library and then the University Library to facilitate the cross-training and the cooperative task forces; and the University’s Academic Senate is actively involved in a new Joint Library Board, which will serve to protect the academic and research elements of the Joint Library. Aware of the previous aura of secrecy and non-communication, the University Library’s Project Manager is sharing with the entire University community the latest information on any progress made, through a Joint Library Project web-site on the University Library’s electronic homepage. Additionally, she has made it clear to the academic community that she will listen to concerns and suggestions.

Changes are still being made to improve library service to the university community in the Joint Library. Shortly after her arrival, the Dean of the Library met with concerned librarians and staff members when it became apparent that no space had been designated for the University Library’s collection of phonorecords, music CDs and music scores; a space was identified on the fifth floor, creating an ideal situation where all music recordings, scores, and books could be placed together near seating which will all be wired to accept portable CD players and near where turntables for listening to the phonorecords can be installed. Serendipitously, it is also located near the Beethoven Center, the other large music collection on campus. By creating such an ideal music center, the Library has also ensured that the faculty and students in the School of Music and Dance at the University will have a more positive view of the Joint Library.

In preparation for the move to the Joint Library, the Dean of the Library has instigated a massive internal reorganization which will take place during the remainder of 2000, moving the University Library closer to the way it wll function after the merger. Inventories and evaluation of various collections which are necessary before the move will take place during the summer of 2000. Reclassification projects are underway in an effort to make certain that the University Library’s materials and bibliographic records are ready for the merger. As more of the library staff become directly involved in various preparations for the change, they begin to feel they are more valued, that while the Joint Library may not be their preference they are becoming a part of a very large and potentially very exciting venture.

The major accomplishment this past year has been the formulation of the tiered reference services, designed to meet the needs of both libraries equitably. The challenge for the coming year will be to continue to offer library service of a continuing high quality while adding enhanced and new services and finding time to plan other areas of the Joint Library.

Looking back at the Joint Library from its inception, most if not all the chaos and grievances could have been avoided had the City Mayor and the University President taken a more collegial path, presenting the idea to their constituents as a suggestion rather than a reality, and doing so before authorizing newspaper coverage of the project. The present Dean of the Library believes that much of the dissatisfaction and concern voiced by the University faculty and students (and librarians!) could have been dissipated had the jointure been couched not in terms of it being the only way the University could afford to build a new library, but rather as a more sensible, innovative and exciting way of keeping up with the information explosion and making available to the University community qualitatively and substantively better access to more materials through newer and better information technologies. Had the City Mayor, University President, City Librarian and the University Librarian offered open communication rather than making decisions without consulting their constituent communities, an atmosphere of trust could have developed.

There are still many unanswered questions and myriad challenges to be faced. The City and University administrations appear to be reluctant to discuss subjects such as diverse pay and benefits packages between the City Library’s staff and that of the University Library’s staff, or staffing of various areas of the Joint Library and potential redundancies. The location of technical services in the lower level, or underground floor, with no windows and a reliance on light filtering down through skylights from the top of the building is a matter of deep concern to catalogers and others who spend the majority of their work time at their desks. The Joint Library’s computer labs will be welcomed by the students and community families who cannot afford to purchase their own, but university students and faculty are concerned that the computers will be monopolized by people using them for email and general entertainment and not be available for more scholarly purposes. Meanwhile, the administrative levels continue to be sparing with the amount of information they share with their staffs, and library personnel previously excluded from the task forces continue to find their contributions and suggestions ignored. The morale of the library personnel seems to be of less concern to the administration than the more material aspects.

As construction begins on the new building and the major decisions become policy, perhaps there will be more time for all the library personnel involved in the Joint Library venture to reassess positions and the more “people” oriented aspects of combining two very different kinds of libraries. They and their constituent communities will in the end be of more importance than the actual building, where placement of departments and collections can be reconfigured repeatedly if necessary to meet all the various needs. While the striking architecture of the building will be the most visible part, it will in truth be up to the librarians and personnel of both the University Library and City Library to assure that this merger of “town and gown” project becomes successful.

San Jose State University Library / City of San Jose Library Joint Library Project Archive. Website: http://www.library.sjsu.edu/jointlibrary