NIDA Library Closed for "Budgetary" Reasons

SALIS member Mary Pfeiffer, Chief of Library Services at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Library in Baltimore, Maryland, was informed late last Fall that there was a good chance that monies for the library would no longer be available. It’s now official. Let’s add one more library to the dustbin.

The NIDA library has its early roots with the Addiction Research Center (ARC) founded in 1935 in Lexington, Kentucky. ARC did both clinical and pre-clinical research on drug abuse and addiction as part of a Federal prison hospital which treated heroin addicts. In the early 1980's the ARC moved to the Bayview Medical Center at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland to expand its research interests and to support intramural scientists at NIDA.

Included in the collection are 10,000-12,000 bound volumes of journals, some dating from the 1930's, and approximately 8,000 books. A reprint collection contains every article ever published by the research program staff from its inception in 1935. Also among the holdings are the entire set of the Committee on Problems of Drug Dependence meetings abstracts/minutes since its inception in 1929, and numerous other government documents and materials only found in such special collections.

Services performed by the library staff for the four hundred staff of the NIDA intramural center and others include:

•  Provide print and online journal articles
•  Perform online literature services


•  Inter library loans


•  Create and Maintain Online Catalog


•  Editing service for intramural staff


•  Program to assist people when English is a second language

Service is of utmost importance to Mary and her staff, so much so that Mary has been known to answer her home telephone with, “Library”. She also makes it a point to have staff call her at home when someone needs information that staff can’t provide. Never mind that the NIDA library receives hundreds of requests a day from NIDA intramural staff and others concerned with addiction issues. The decision to close the library and distribute materials, which have been collected, organized and maintained for over seventy years, “was strictly a budgetary decision”. With budget cuts to NIH, the library was just another item on the list of the general budget that would have to go.

Many of the scientists were shocked by this decision as was Mary Pfeiffer, who had been working with the architect to select furniture and design the new library space in the new building to which the research unit was moving. Now she and her two library technicians will be re-situated, i.e.) moved elsewhere to do other jobs. Most likely Mary will be given an editing (she has a writing and editing background) or possibly an administrative position, with apparently no regard for her expertise nor the fact that she has built and maintained this collection for over twenty four years.

What will this mean in the long term for those who had relied on Mary and her staff for the information they sought? Will it be just a few clicks on Google for them to find the information? What about the history of this research unit so long a part of the early drug addiction research in America? And gee, I thought drug abuse was supposed to be one of the major problems in America. Certainly Congress thinks it’s important when it gives NIDA over a billion dollars a year to fund addiction research. What happened to the notion of organizing information and making it available to people who want to learn and explore a subject in detail, with qualified alcohol or other drug information specialists to lead the way? Harry Eyres column “In Praise of Libraries” in the Financial Times last weekend, couldn’t have summed it up more acutely when he wrote “closing or impoverishing universities and libraries is one of the surest signs of a philistine, foolish government”. *
And what will happen to the collection? The NIH National Institutes of Health main library will most likely take part of it. Individual scientists may keep some of the books they have been using in their research and possibly Mary may be able to offer some of it to other SALIS libraries. For the moment, they are waiting on rules of “Federal property distribution.” This seems to be one more sad outcome for yet one more addiction collection, and one more step towards the Googlization of America.

* Eyres, Harry. “In praise of libraries”. Financial Times Weekend March 10-11, 2007 p.w20.