Stanford Business magazine

The 75-Year Evolution of Jackson Library

By Michele Chandler

When the Business School admitted its first students in the fall of 1925, there was no library. It took eight years before the first GSB library opened, tightly wedged into a portion of Jordan Hall that doubled as a classroom.

Today, as plans proceed for the Knight Management Center, the five-story information center building that will include the library is being envisioned as a focal point for the School’s new campus. Once a place where patrons went to pull books off the shelves, the Business School’s new library will devote less space to physical collections of books and documents but significantly increase the amount of information available electronically.

“When you say ‘library,’ people still tend to think of this storehouse that has a lot of physical books and journals in it, but that is not true any longer and is not going to be true in the future,” said Kathy Long, director of the J. Hugh Jackson Library. “We will clearly still have a space for publications, but libraries are more than that now. Our goal is to make sure we can deliver as much as we can to where our customers want it. This may be to their desktop, to their BlackBerry, or to their telephone. The role of the library is changing and shifting, but not diminishing.”

How the inside of the Business School’s new library will look is still under development, but here’s what you might eventually see:

• No entry gate to make the library appear more inviting and encourage walk-in visitors from Stanford and beyond.
• Self-checkout. Already common in several Bay Area public library systems, it reduces demand on library staff.
• A single help desk that combines the current separate reference and information desks.

The new informaton center will be a crowning touch on the kind of transformation the library has been undergoing. In April, Jackson Library—named in honor of the School’s second dean, who reportedly donated parts of his own book collection to fill the first library’s shelves—celebrated its first 75 years. In the digital age foot traffic has dropped an estimated 58 percent since 1968 (to 104,000 visits in the 2006-07 year), while digital use has tripled in three years, to 557,379 visits during the academic year.

To meet this electronic demand, a major part of Jackson Library’s strategy includes having more interactive web 2.0 technologies online and offering web-based services to appeal to tech-savvy users. In 2006, Jackson librarians posted their first video to YouTube, featuring organizational behavior Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton discussing their book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management. The 2-year-old Jackson blog had 23,900 visits between January and March of 2008.

The first floor features the Traders’ Pit, an area with computers offering information from financial data providers including Bloomberg, an electronic display of the NASDAQ and other market indices, and a widescreen monitor carrying financial news from CNBC.

A wing of seminar rooms opened last year in space once occupied by books and other materials that have been moved 50 miles to a storage warehouse in Livermore. Most of the 100,000 volumes moved out of the library were published before 1995 and had not circulated for five years. They can be retrieved on a day’s notice.

While adapting to change, Jackson remains one of the top academic libraries in the country. In 2006, it received a Center of Excellence for Service award from the Special Libraries Association’s Business and  Finance Division. 

 

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