Travis Church / SPPSThough smaller than other universities, Newman Library has several floors of bookshelves.
However, this is not necessarily the case.
Eileen Hitchingham, head librarian of Newman Library, said the biggest definer of library size is money. Tech does not have as much money as Harvard, Yale, or Purdue, perhaps, so it does not have the ability to increase its library as often or as drastically as some other schools.
In addition, "Many purchases come from the Netherlands and the UK," said Hitchingham. These are countries where the US dollar has recently lost strength due to the growth of the Euro.
Newman Library, run by Hitchingham, has welcomed students to its resources for many years. It currently contains roughly 2.2 million printed volumes and maintains nearly 7 million other items of information, including microfilm, video, audio and periodicals, within its 168,000 square feet. In addition, the university subscribes to over 300 online databases. "Almost two million articles are downloaded and used annually," said Hitchingham.
The University of Missouri, also a land-grant university located in Columbia, Mo., has similar holdings in its Ellis Library.
Shannon Cary, the head librarian, said that the library holds 2,970,952 volumes and 195 databases.
While slightly larger in terms of printed materials, Tech utilizes more databases.
In comparison, the California Polytechnic State University, located in San Luis Obispo, Ca., is a bit larger, with an area of 203,605 square feet. Despite its size, it only maintains 775,800 books. However, the library is in the process of adding a large area primarily for digital items such as smart labs, which may account for its lack of materials.
Conversely, Missouri has no plans to increasing the size of its library but it has increased off-site storage. Newman Library has plans for minor expansion, including an Automated Retrieval Cube (ARC) to decrease remote storage, which is nearly full and an inconvienence for students and faculty alike.
All three schools, however, are converting many older publications and outdated items, such as microfilms, to a digital format to make them more accessible to the public.
Purdue, a land-grant university in Indiana, on the other hand, contains a much larger library that maintains over 10 million items, according to their website.
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