The John M. Kuehne Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy Library will permanently close on May 6, the dean of the College of Natural Sciences announced in an email last month. In response, students launched a petition that closes on Friday to save the space.
The library will be turned into a study space for students and provide more workspace for researchers in the Center for Gravitational Physics, according to the email. Currently, there is no timeline for the renovations, said Andreas Matouschek, senior associate dean for research and resource management in the College of Natural Sciences.
The collections in the PMA Library will move to other UT libraries and storage, with the most frequently used materials to be housed in the Life Science Library, according to the dean’s email. Librarians currently working at the PMA Library will remain on staff with other UT Libraries, Stacia Miller, a UT Libraries communications officer, wrote in an email.
“The library has been used less and less as a library, and it’s really mostly used for studying,” Matouschek said. “We thought that we could use that space more effectively for what its main purpose is by taking the stacks out and converting it into student learning, into action spaces.”
A pair of students do not view the change to be positive and started the petition, “Save PMA Library!”, which currently has over 780 signatures. Deepesh Verma and Nicholas Inzunza, the creators of the petition, are both graduate students in the physics department. Verma said he disagrees with the reasons provided for closing the library.
“I have been in Austin, at UT, for a decade now, and (the PMA library) has been the central space for either working (or) just browsing books,” Verma said. “The problem with the PMA is that it’s not designed very well, so there’s not a lot of community spaces … the library is one of those places.”
Inzunza said researchers in the PMA benefit from the library’s natural light as most offices in the building do not have windows. There is “inherent value” to having physical copies of books, and limiting access to those materials would hurt his research, he said.
Verma said people across campus have signed the petition, including undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty and alumni.
“People need to be more worried about these type(s) of closures that are happening on campus, whether that’s consolidation or closures of libraries,” Verma said. “The thing is that piece by piece by piece, we’re getting our University taken away from us.”
