The UCSC campus has officially been invited to become a member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It will be #126 in this select group. I love the architecture of both UCSC libraries, the McHenry main library and the Science and Engineering Library. I greatly appreciate the services and the promptitude of very busy librarians, especially in the acquisition system. I like the tools, for instance the speed of searches, even though I am not too fond of certain aspects of it, for instance the tendency to gush unhelpful information instead of the sought out title and an intelligent form of the Dewey shelf browsing. And I’m glad that UCSC leads the good fight in shaping the Open Access Initiative of the future.

But I find it difficult to celebrate this recognition for the following reason. It is astonishing that the ARL didn’t seem aware that a fraught decision to remove and shred about 83000 titles—some of them irreplaceable—was taken in 2014 and executed in the summer of 2016 with no consultation of faculty, in order to create more space. See T. Wipke’s Emeriti’s Editor’s Corner for some of the numbers involved. Or see my two blogs, Pulp Fiction and Bits of Knowledge, regarding this sad affair.