From card catalogues through microfiches to online catalogues: today, the FHWS library is largely digitalised. But one thing hasn’t changed: the library is a place for people.
When it started in 1977, the FHWS library had about 900 books and three employees: its director at the time, Roland Greubel, an administrative assistant, and a temp. "When I started, there was no library in the sense that you think of it today," Greubel says. "There were books in faculty rooms or in dean's offices and a library room which was shared between the faculties of business administration and social work, which was a five metre long shelf."
The situation in Schweinfurt was similar: there was a temporary glass case in the middle of the foyer on the Ignaz Schön campus, which contained mainly older books that the lecturers no longer needed. Discarded tool racks from a local company served as shelves. "The library was partitioned off with glass walls that were open at the top. That meant that the noise level in these rooms was unbelievable as soon as it was break time," remembers Regina Trautner, who started as a librarian at FHWS in Würzburg in 1985 and has been working at the Schweinfurt site since 1989.
Lack of budget as a particular hurdle
One particular hurdle in the early days, according to Greubel, was that the library had no budget. Funds were allocated directly to the faculties at the time. Although there were allotments for purchasing books, the professors were supposed to buy what they needed themselves. To begin with, Greubel's main task was to collect the available books from the lecturers. "The faculties of social sciences and business administration quickly realised that a central library offered advantages, for avoiding books being acquired in duplicate, for example. When other faculties saw that it was going well, they followed suit," Greubel reports.
Collecting books, managing faculty budgets, coordinating journals: these were the employees’ main tasks to begin with. Cataloguing also took up a lot of time. In the early years there were card catalogues, but the beginning of the 1980s saw a switch to a catalogue with microfiches – postcard-sized microfilms that store information at a greatly reduced size and allow it to be enlarged again with the help of a reader. Another intermediate step towards digitalisation followed with CD-ROMs on which catalogues and directories were stored. Each changeover was accompanied by a long period of data collection before online catalogues were finally introduced in 1994.
From a career in administration to applied IT
Today, the library is strongly influenced by digitalisation. While it used to be more about administrative tasks, Jens Renner, who has been in charge of the library since 2019, describes the job as "applied IT". He estimates the current stock of books at about half a million. Of these, 150,000 are printed works – and there is an increasing downward trend.
"Roland Greubel was a champion and pioneer of electronic media," Renner says. He continued that practice when Greubel retired in 2019 and Renner took over his post. The FHWS library is considered to be a pioneer in the field of e-media: Last year, only 1,500 print books were purchased – and 20,500 e-books. "We were better prepared for coronavirus than other libraries for that reason," says Renner.
Every electronic offering is the result of a contract. And every contract has to be negotiated. That involves some work. With a few exceptions, the library concludes one-year contracts, because ultimately the budget is also allocated annually. Where possible, Renner buys e-book bundles, some as small as a dozen but others as large as 500 e-books. There are currently around 200 contracts in place.
Open access: the library is dedicated to the topics of the future
A large part of the library’s work also consists of monitoring the new publications market on a daily basis and conducting training sessions. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the library hosted 171 events in 2020. The library is also a pioneer in the field of open access: FHWS adopted an open access policy in April 2021, encouraging scientists to publish their research results with free access.
The FHWS library has always been a long way ahead when it comes to media equipment and information transfer. Things looked less good in terms of the space available. In the 1983 to 1985 university management report, Greubel wrote: "The space available is completely inadequate, particularly at Würzburg, and has indeed become an ordeal for users and staff." Students had to thread their way between staff desks, the reading areas were always in use and users sometimes sat on the floor. In 1984, the library already had over 54,000 users per year – about half the population of Würzburg.
For the first ten years, the Würzburg library was located in a 100 square meter lecture room. The situation improved when it moved into the new rooms on the Münzstraße campus in 1987. However, the number of student workstations in Würzburg is currently limited to 70 due to the city centre location, and there is no space for group rooms.
Vandalism at the new building in Schweinfurt
In the 1990s, Schweinfurt said goodbye to the approximately 120 square metre glass box and moved into the new building between the main building and the canteen. It was the victim of vandalism in 2005: an intoxicated 22-year-old broke 24 windows in the library and caused 25,000 euros worth of damage. "That was a terrible sight. Years later, I was still finding splinters in the corners of shelves," Trautner recalls.
Apart from that, the library has so far been spared any major damage. "Book thefts are far less common than you might think," Renner says. Nowadays, a print copy costs around 80 to 120 euros, rarely even 200 euros – not sums worth the risk of theft. E-books are much more expensive – sometimes up to 2,000 euros, because the publisher usually only sells one copy. According to Greubel, however, it is more common for books to be returned dirty or damaged: "A student once returned a book the corner of which had been bitten off by his dog." Renner adds: "We are a library for users. Even if it is a place of books: the library is about people." The goal of an academic library is to help people.
Renner and his predecessor Greubel came across the profession rather by chance. What they lend people is less important to them than the social exchange and the opportunity to be able to help others. Trautner also sees the library as a place for people: "I continue to see the library of the future as a feel-good place where our students enjoy spending time, and a meeting place for culture and international encounters."
How lending worked 40 years ago
Libraries used to work with card catalogues: each book was listed on an index card with bibliographic information and shelfmark. The cards were each sorted by author and keyword and stored in cabinets full of wooden boxes. The loan term was four weeks, as it is today, and could be extended twice. Interlibrary loans became possible for the first time from 1983 with the introduction of IT catalogues with microfiches.
