Nearly 20,000 volumes headed to Thomas Cooper
It’ll only take a few hours to move USC’s math library out of LeConte College — and that day is coming soon.
The library’s nearly 20,000 volumes will soon be moved to the fourth floor of Thomas Cooper library.
“The department is disappointed,” said Anton Schep, chairman of the Mathematics Department.
Upkeep of the library costs between $50,000 and $75,000 per year, Dean of Libraries Thomas McNally said. And that’s too much, McNally said, as the library received only a few thousand visitors per year and was only open during the day, while the Thomas Cooper Library receives more and is open 24 hours a day.
USC is in the process of contacting professional library movers, McNally said. Once they start, the process will be finished in short order.
“We’re simply taking collections and making them more available to more people more hours of the day,” McNally said.
For most undergraduate students and faculty from other departments, the move will not make much of a difference, according to Schep. He said it will make things more difficult for math graduate students and faculty, because they rely on easy access to old journals.
“What we view as true in mathematics does not change much with time,” Schep said. “Our research depends on having access to old writings.”
But, he added, much of the information is moving online anyway. Students and faculty are making use of electronic access to journals and databases like MathSciNet with increasing frequency, Schep said.
There is also a service that will hand-deliver books to mathematics faculty, or scan the article and send it electronically.
What will go in the unoccupied room on the third floor of LeConte is not yet clear, Schep said, but it will most likely be house offices or, possibly, a new seminar room.