The sheer scale of Harvard can often astonish. The endowment tops forty billion dollars. The University’s real estate holdings in Boston and Cambridge alone comprise over four-thousand acres. And the library’s collections, spread across mile after mile of shelving—57 in Widener alone—come to over 17 million volumes, each one purchased, processed, and then made available to students. During the pandemic, with students away from campus, the question arose of what to do with each of these assets, most notably the books. Libraries are meant to enable patrons to enter the building and leave with physical books, but while Harvard’s population was scattered across the world, this was no longer an option.
For the first few months after campus de-densification in March of 2020, Harvard’s library buildings, like many of the school’s other institutions, was entirely shut down. Only in June of 2020 could students once again access certain collections through contactless pickup or the Scan and Deliver service, in which librarians scan requested documents and email them to students. Although it took nearly four months to re-grant the students and teachers access to physical library books, Anna Burgess, Harvard Library spokesperson, says the transition online went very quickly. “When our library leaders were planning our transition off campus, their priority was the safety of the Harvard community, including library staff,” she says. The delay of physical services until June was the result, in large part, of needing to determine protocols by which sufficient staff could return to campus to actually run them.
Digital library services, both previously-existing and new, were immediately popular with students. The Ask a Librarian service connects students to librarians via live chat or asynchronous email support tickets. There was only a negligible increase in the number of tickets submitted in March 2020-March 2021 over the number submitted in March 2019-March 2020, but the number of live chats more than doubled, from 3004 to 8231. Scan and Deliver use within Harvard similarly doubled, from 12603 requests fulfilled in July 2019-June 2020 to 24202 fulfilled in July 2020-June 2021. Later on, even more esoteric services were widely used. Remote microfilm viewing, in which a library worker will operate a microfilm viewer live on camera on a researcher’s behalf, has attracted 175 appointments since its launch in February 2021.
At the same time, librarians were working on a number of remote offerings designed not to emulate the experience of browsing the stacks but to provide value digitally on their own terms. This is not a new initiative for Harvard libraries: in early 2020, when Corona was nothing but a beer, Lamont Library held a competition for posters with the slogan, “Libraries aren’t just about books. Check this out.” Puns aside, this ethos translated well to the remote era. A July 2020 Lamont newsletter offered consultations with librarians on “digital tools,” on “What’s newly available online,” and on “Syllabus substitutions,” replacing hard-to-find physical texts with online readings.
In cases where this could not be done, digital course reserves were implemented: library staff would, at a professor’s request, scan entire books and make them available online to students in the relevant courses for three-hour periods. This initiative was quite successful, garnering over 129 million views of over 2000 items since September 2020, and Burgess confirmed that it will remain an option even once the pandemic is over.
The use of scanned books was not restricted to course reserves. Many students who searched for materials on HOLLIS from home will have seen “View Online” buttons attached to many of their search results, even those which appear to be entirely physical. These buttons link students to a website run by HathiTrust, an association of academic and research libraries which, since 2008, has maintained a repository of over 13.7 million scanned volumes. Only 6,885,245 of these volumes are in the public domain; the others are normally available only through a search function, and large chunks of text cannot be displayed, in order to avoid copyright violation. During the pandemic, however, HathiTrust created an Emergency Temporary Access System (ETAS), by which libraries can make the scans available to patrons in their entirety. This has been wildly popular: since April 2020, Harvard personnel have used it around 246000 time, accessing around 115000 titles
Although inspired by COVID-19, HathiTrust ETAS is in no way specific to it. Any member library that expects to have to close its physical buildings for more than 48 hours can activate ETAS. Similarly, ending access to ETAS is independent of the end of the pandemic. As Burgess explains, “The agreement with HathiTrust is specifically because our stacks are closed. As soon as the stacks reopen, there will no longer be an emergency need for access to these materials, and therefore they won’t be available online through HathiTrust anymore.” A library’s reasons for opening or closing their stacks are their own, and all that matters to ETAS is that they have done so.
The price of access to this system, split as it is among over 60 member institutions, is surprisingly small. HathiTrust membership fees are assessed on a per-volume basis, with each scanned and archived item having some associated charge based on how many libraries carry copies. While HathiTrust does not disclose how much Harvard has paid for their copyrighted volumes, the total cost of access to public domain work currently comes to $10,559 per annum. The average total fee for libraries in “Tier 3,” the highest tier of membership and that to which Harvard belongs, is about $47,000.
The picture, then, is one of an organization which has successfully (and affordably) moved away from the printed page, but only temporarily. In the spring of 2021, the library piloted a book mailing service, with limits that were generous to say the least: each parcel could contain up to ten un-digitizable items, and users could have up to a hundred total checked out at any time. (Returning books by mail had been possible even in the spring of 2020.) Even before that, in the fall of 2021, Cabot Library made study spaces available to those students who were on campus and being regularly tested by the University.
The pandemic has forced a shift away from thinking in terms of tangible objects, but such a shift is mostly temporary. While lessons have been learned and useful new initiatives will continue, the tradition of getting books from the library will return as soon as it is safe.
A previous version of this article wrongly implied that digital services library services were as significantly interrupted by the pandemic as physical ones. The Independent regrets the error.
At least one person has said to me,“I’m not in love with Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu), but I’d like to be in libraries with him.”