Professor Michael Brown kindly provided this update on the Stetson-Sawyer project.

I’d been hoping to update the Stetson-Sawyer website but decided that it made sense to wait until the 100 percent drawings are delivered by the architects and the library gets re-priced. If the new estimates come in significantly under earlier ones, that would be good news that might accelerate the project–but it’s a longshot, even given the recession-driven rollback in the cost of labor and materials. The college has definitely modeled the impact of borrowing money to move the project forward, but for obvious reasons there has got to be continued improvement in the markets before the additional principal/debt service costs can be justified.

Code changes aren’t likely to hurt us unless the delay continues for several more years. I’m more worried about the risks of leaving Stetson empty for much more than two years. Empty buildings are notoriously difficult to police for leaks, etc. So I worry about damage to historic finishes over time.

Some wildly inaccurate things were said on Ephblog about the library project in posts a while back. No, Stetson cannot be reoccupied for any purpose without millions of dollars in code compliance costs and renovations, to say nothing of dealing with the impact of asbestos removal, now completed, in the 1950s-era stacks addition. It therefore makes no sense to do anything to the building until we’re ready to build the library. The notion that going electronic saves libraries vast sums of money is a canard, or at least a gross oversimplification. There are some economies associated with going electronic with serials (journals), but the picture with reference works and monographs is more complicated, especially since publishers sometimes charge more for electronic copies than paper ones. People forget that storing mission-critical electronic records requires constant data migration, backups, and software upgrades, all of which are expensive. Then there is the question of Chapin’s rare books and the Archive’s countless documents, which will have to be stored somewhere for the foreseeable future. So the construction of the offsite shelving facility was a smart move for holding down costs; cost per square foot is, I believe, less than 40 percent of the cost of on-campus library space, although you also have to consider staffing and transport costs, etc. The library has also gone deeply into sharing books with regional institutions via its ILL program.

Sawyer is the most heavily used building at the college in terms of daily visitors. If in the future Williams needs less space for books, that will allow the college to open more space for student seating, collaborative study spaces, IT resources, and the like. The library design was intentionally made generic enough to allow for repurposing much of the building’s space in the future. In my view, the risk that the new library, as designed, is too small is still somewhat greater than the risk that it’s too big, although this is admittedly a minority opinion among those involved in the project.

Comments:

1) Thanks to Professor Brown for this comprehensive update. In general, the College underestimates how much of a demand their is for more detailed information from the community of Ephs. Kudos to Professor Brown for taking the time to keep us informed. If only other Williams faculty/officials were so accommodating . . .

2) I can’t speak for all the proponents of “going electronic,” but I was not suggesting that Williams itself build and maintain an electronic repository of books and journal articles. That would be stupid! And I certainly believe Professor Brown when he claims that it would be very expensive. Instead I (and, I think, all the other Ephs pushing this “canard”) are merely recommending that Williams make use of the efforts of other institutions. There are still fees involved, but I think (corrections welcome) that these charges are orders of magnitude lower than the costs of the College doing things itself.

Consider JSTOR, the premier on-line repository of academic journals. For a school like Williams, it costs around $3,000 per year. It’s an amazing resource. There is not a reason in the world for Williams to store a hard copy issue of any journal in JSTOR. Throw it all away. (Or, if you want to be safe, stick those old issues in some warehouse off-campus.) But the whole idea that Williams needs all these physical copies in the center of campus, when only a trivial number of students would even consider looking for a hard copy when the virtual version is available, is absurd.

Consider a book like The Game of Life. Just three years ago, there was no easy way to link to the story of the 1996 ought-to-have-been-Champions Williams women’s lacrosse team. Now, there is. Does Williams need to maintain a physical copy of books that appear for free on-line? No.

Now, of course, there are a lot of messy details to work out. The Chapin rare books and College Archives will need to be maintained by Williams. But 90% (at least) of the books and journals that sit in Sawyer right now do not need to be in the middle of campus. Get rid of them.

4) From the start, I think that I have been the most public critic of the entire Stetson-Sawyer project. You can be sure that, if the College knew 4 years ago what it knows now about its actual wealth, the plans would be very different. But that is spilt milk. Given the work that has already been done, what should the College do now?

Hard to say. The current Sawyer in between Schapiro Hall and YOUR-NAME-HERE Hall is a mess. Walking between those building is like being in a big city. It sure would be nice to get rid of Sawyer. And, I think, the costs of demolishing Sawyer are not that large. (True?) If so, I would like Sawyer to go and then see the amount spent on reconstructing Stetson cut in half, mainly by not expanding its current size. Is that realistic? I have no idea. It could be that, given building codes and what not, the College has no choice but to finish the project, more or less as designed.

Yet if I were a trustee on the campus construction committee, I would want to push on that point. Just how much would it cost to tear down Sawyer and do nothing to Stetson but the minimum necessary to get it up to code? Even in its current configuration, it is easy to imagine plenty of shared and solo study space, the primary purpose of a college library in this day and age anyway. Even better, all the office space would provide room for staff/materials from buildings like Jenness, Rice and Hardy, thereby allowing those structures to be used for student (co-op) housing, an excellent idea which was mentioned by Lizzy Brickley ’10 and Mike Tcheyan ’10 in their successful campaign for the College Council co-Presidency.

5) Is the College really considering taking on more debt? That would be bad. Leverage kills and Williams, with $260 million in debt, is already leveraged enough. I could imagine issuing some new debt while retiring old borrowing, but increasing the total indebtedness in the middle of the worst recession in several generations is a bad idea. Finish Stetson-Sawyer by all means. Just pay cash.

6) Handy collection of links and background on the project here.

Thanks again to Professor Brown for taking the time and trouble to keep us posted.

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