university libraries rated

One of many reasons why I’m not jumping up and down in ecstasy at the prospect of my imminent return to Ireland is the quality and quantity of university libraries in the US. This is partly a matter of funding: whereas some of the American universities I’ve looked at have pots of money, Ireland has almost third-world funding levels for its universities, which have left them strapped for such luxuries as books. Even so, I rarely get the impression that university administrations in Ireland, let alone the government (Irish universities depend on public funding), fully appreciate the importance of properly stocked research libraries (one university in Philadelphia has an annual purchasing fund for music around 360 times greater than the sum made available for music at Trinity College Dublin, though Trinity’s resources are boosted by the automatic deposit of all books published in the British Isles). In America the message has got through loud and clear: libraries are vital. It really shows.

In order to explore the point I investigated various library holdings of one seminal author, Heinrich Schenker, who is generally regarded as one of the most important writers on music of the 20^th century (on theory, analysis, performance, editing, and philosophy of music). The results were, to say the least, revealing. In the light of experience I think these results are representative. The number of relevant hits an author search yielded are shown below, with multiple holdings not included.

[British Library: 37

Library of Congress: 36]

Four Irish universities, within about 0 to 3 hours commute of Dublin:

Queen’s University Belfast: 8

Trinity College Dublin: 21

University College Cork: 2

University College Dublin: 7

Four US universities, within 0 to 2 hours commute of Philadelphia:

Princeton University: 42

Rutgers University: 32

Temple University: 30

University of Pennsylvania: 38

Four English universities, within 1/2 to 2 hours commute of central London:

Cambridge University (Newton Catalogue): 46

Royal Holloway College (London University): 17

Southampton University: 22

Sussex University: 31

England comes out of this pretty well, and if one is working in London there are many more alternatives to the libraries randomly picked out above, not least the British Library itself. Consider too that London colleges have a very fine central library, Senate House, in addition to their own holdings. Philadelphia is superb, as not only are there institutions in the city with magnificent holdings (including the main public library), there are several more within easy commuting distance, such as the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, etc. Moreover, Inter-Library Loan is free in many of these places, and you can also use a pooling system in which several institutions, including Yale and Princeton, share books and journals (it’s called Borrow Direct). Ireland is diabolical. With no library anywhere near the best England and America have to offer, the hapless researcher has either to use Inter-Library Loan, which is expensive, or travel abroad, which is also expensive (Berlin, London, and Paris are the obvious destinations). Neither solution is satisfactory, even if there were adequate funding to make them a genuine alternative to a functional library. Electronic resources are irrelevant for the brief survey I undertook, but as it transpires, Irish universities have not implemented the full range of electronic resources that are routinely available in American libraries.