Library at SIO Will Close Due to Budget Cuts

The library at the is slated to close next year, making it the fourth branch to shut down because of budget woes, a school official confirmed today.

The closure will leave the main Geisel Library and a small satellite branch housing biomedical materials as the only libraries left on campus by next fall.

“Right now, the plans are to consolidate the Scripps collection in the Geisel Library next summer,” UCSD's Dolores Davies told City News Service. Davies said there was only a slim chance that the Scripps library would remain open. The closure is in anticipation that more budget cuts are coming from the state, she said.

This past summer, the library at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies was closed, and its 140,000 books transferred to the Geisel Library, according to Davies. Previously, the library at UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest and the Clicks library – an on-campus spot where students used computers and studied – were shuttered, she said.

All the affected libraries have seen reductions in usage, partly because many library material are available online, she said.

Davies said the Scripps library dropped from 44,000 people using it in 2006 to 36,000 in the 2010-11 academic year. “What we're seeing is a steady drop of people using the facility,” Davies said.

By comparison, the main Geisel Library has seen foot traffic climb from 1.6 million five years ago to 2 million this past school year, according to school figures.

–City News Service