“As far as I know, people don’t use Gov Docs in a bubble,” says Max P. Davis ’07, another concerned Gov Docs user. “Having it all there in one convenient location is fantastic.”

On a recent walk through Gov Docs though, not all undergraduates were so concerned.

To Won-Jin Jo ’07, a novice user, the collection’s location “doesn’t really matter.”

Collins and Carens are also worried about the staffing of the potential Littauer Gov Docs department. According to Carens, recent layoffs at Hilles Library have Lamont employees “‘in fear of losing [their] jobs.” A campaign to educate Harvard students about layoffs has been in effect since this summer through the posting of anti-layoff leaflets and appeals to the FAS administration, Carens says.

Connected with these employment issues, are concerns about the Littauer staff’s ability to manage the complex organization in the Gov Docs department.

“The Gov Docs staff has expertise in assisting users with the collection,” Chopra says. “The reference assistance is invaluable to many people, which probably can’t be replaced if the collection is divided up among several libraries.”

According to Carens, HCL intends to absorb the Gov Docs materials into Littauer, and transfer all responsibility for reference assistance to its current staff.

“By moving the collection, they can reduce staff and they can save money that way. That’s kind of the excuse that they’re using,” Carens says.

Director of HCL Nancy Cline says that staff at the new Gov Docs would be just as experienced and well trained as the current employees, but said she could not guarantee that the actual staff will remain identical.

“Without question, we will have to have people who understand that government documents collection,” Cline says. “You can never predict whether people want to stay or leave, but [we would keep] the types of positions that are currently with us. We would need to have that type of expertise.”

If the proposed plan were implemented, the Gov Docs department would leave its 30-year old home in Lamont when the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS), currently under construction on Cambridge Street, is completed by the end of 2005. Relevant materials would be moved to the new building, making room in Littauer for the enormous collection of Congressional publications, foreign legislative debates and other publicly available archival records that is currently held in Lamont.

The tentative plans are part of a much larger, general renovation of Lamont Library, which will include repairing its aging electrical and plumbing equipment, building a new reading room on the fifth level and installing an elaborate multimedia center on the third level.

According to Cline, plans for that renovation were first proposed in 1999, but promptly put on the back burner because they conflicted with the Widener Library renovations.

“We couldn’t bear to have Widener and Lamont torn up at the same time,” says Cline. “There was a question of how much funding it would take to do the project well.”

Cline attributes the anxiousness felt by employees to the challenges and budget difficulties the HCL is facing as a whole. Although Harvard’s endowment is at an all time high, the payout to HCL, or the money available for spending, has been frozen because buying power is still down 11 percent from previous years. The $90 million renovation of Widener, which so far has stayed on schedule and within budget, has put a significant dent in how much funding the HCL can allocate to other causes, according to Cline.

Sidney Verba, chair of the Faculty Library Committee, says measures to curb spending have taken place on all levels of the HCL’s operation, including an increased reliance on outsourced cataloging, a minimization of book preservation to a “viable core” and the canceling of duplicate journal subscriptions.

Cline says the move to minimize costs may be behind tension over the Gov Docs move.

“Change is uncomfortable, particularly at a place like this,” Cline says. “At Harvard, whatever change there has been in the past has generally been change that results from growth-happy change. This is a very different kind of change, and I think that’s part of what makes it very unsettling. There’s an inherent tension in that for almost all of our employees.”