Where did the reference books go?

When we learned that twenty-five percent of the library space was needed to make room for new classrooms and staff offices in January of 2020, major changes had to be made. The back issues of periodicals (magazines and journals) as well as the reference books all had to find new homes on the already full first floor.

As I wrote in my last blog post, these two collections have been whittled away little by little over the years. And like the back issues of periodicals, the slow methodical dwindling down the reference collection was put on high speed at the beginning of 2020. This year the print reference collection was reduced by two-thirds.

More and more reference works are available in preferred online formats. As content is replaced with online equivalents, we have opted to end subscriptions to ongoing series such as the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Others such as the Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954) have simply become obsolete with the advent of Internet search engines and Wikipedia.

In fact, many of our patrons may find it surprising that we have spent more on digital resources than print for many years. (See our growing list of eBooks (https://libguides.hiu.edu/ebooks) and research databases (https://libguides.hiu.edu/az.php)

And even though some books are still not widely available in digital formats such as many Biblical commentaries (which are not technically reference works), we have been slowly moving them to the Main circulating collection to allow students to check them out anyway. They are not gone but are more available.

This kind of challenge is not unique to HIU. Many libraries are finding it practical to repurpose their spaces. It is a time that we all knew would come.