In the latest showdown between University administrators and union employees, a group of librarians at Widener Library have gone public this week with their outrage over the prospect that they may be forced to relocate to a newly acquired building in Central Square.

Thirty-one technical services staff members have penned an "Open Letter to the Harvard Community" in which they say that 60 to 100 of the library's 250 employees "are being forced by the University to vacate the building within the next year" and move to Harvard-owned offices in Central Square.

The employees--whose work involves everything from transferring rare documents to microfilm to ordering and cataloguing recent materials--fear that moving off-campus will hurt the quality of their work and negatively impact the students and faculty they serve.

"We're very concerned that the community--students, faculty and visitors--won't have access to a lot of us who do the work, the ordering the receiving," said Karen O'Brien, a library assistant in the German division of the collection development.

"They get the best help from us. Reference doesn't have specific knowledge of specific knowledge areas so a lot of professors come straight to us," added O'Brien, who is also a representative to the Harvard Union for Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), the library staff's union.

Larsen Librarian of Harvard College Nancy M. Kline, who oversees the Harvard College Library system said yesterday that no final decisions about relocating workers have been made.

"There are a whole variety of factors that need to be carefully explored," Kline said. "We've been working a lot with the HUCTW leadership on this set of issues so that we can address the concerns of employees."

But in an e-mail message sent by Kline to library employees, she wrote that "an initial move is planned that is expected to include Widener Cataloguing Services and parts of End-Processing and Collection Development."