ARS benefits often overlooked
By Sean Reinhart
Lately, the library's new Automated Retrieval System has been getting a bad rap.
One recent article in The Santa Clara suggested that the ARS is "detrimental for research," and that it will bring about a "loss of...browsing." Another piece, billed as "humor," even went so far as to compare the ARS to a morgue, and implied that the ARS was built to "remove cumbersome books."
Leaving aside the poor taste evident in an opinion piece that uses dead bodies as material for wisecracks, I would like to point out that there are many positive aspects of the ARS -- a high-speed, fully-accessible, cutting-edge library shelving system -- which have yet to be mentioned.
First and foremost is the fact that the library has gone to great effort and expense to implement this amazing new system because (surprise!) the library cares about preserving its collection of books and maintaining their accessibility to everyone for many years to come.
As anyone who has searched for a book will tell you, it is frustrating to discover that the book you're looking for isn't there. This is a major problem with open library stacks -- the effort required to keep the books in their proper places (and thus keep them readily accessible) is positively staggering.
With the ARS, those problems vanish. If the catalog says a particular book is there, it's there, and can easily be retrieved -- with an extra bonus being that you don't have to go and fetch it yourself. With the ARS, the library now does the work of finding and getting your books for you.
Of course, it is fruitful to physically browse books, and that is why a significant portion of the library's collection will always remain in the library's open stacks. But it isn't the only way to search for books; it arguably isn't even the best way.
By keeping the most often-used books out in the open stacks and shelving the less-often used ones in the ARS, we are creating a library which provides its patrons with the best of both worlds -- the traditional world of serendipitous physical browsing, and the modern world of precision electronic browsing. The ARS doesn't exist to "remove cumbersome books," as one critic recently suggested: it exists to preserve books and sustain their availability for all library users, now and into the far-flung future.
The ARS is the completed first phase of the new state-of-the-art library, slated to begin construction this summer. During the planned two-year construction phase, the library will continue to offer the same high levels of service the campus community has come to depend upon.
Without the ARS, the library would have been forced to store most of its books off-campus during the interim period, or in multiple, difficult-to-access smaller locations scattered across campus.
When a book is shelved in the ARS, in many respects it is even more accessible than it would be in the open stacks, because it is much less likely to go missing or wind up in the wrong place -- it'll be exactly where the catalog says it is. Shelving library books in the ARS is a way to provide greatly enhanced service to library patrons by doing all their "leg work" for them -- all you have to do is click a button, and the library does the rest.
The ARS is a key component of the library's construction plan which will enable services to continue virtually uninterrupted during the two-year interim phase leading up to the opening of a brand-new, high-tech, state-of-the-art library building.
Like ATMs, vending machines, and popular online consumer sites such as eBay and Netflix, the library's ARS is a major enhancement of customer service that utilizes the best new technologies to improve the speed and quality of service for everyone.
The ARS is an important part of the new library, and an important asset to this campus; it is something the Santa Clara community should regard with pride and satisfaction.
Sean Reinhart is Help Services Coordinator at Orradre Library. He is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Library and Information Science at San Jose State University.