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157

Why Print? Making the Case for 
Building Print Library Collections
Karl Stutzman, Director of Library Services, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical 
Seminary

ABSTRACT: There are solid strategic reasons for libraries to continue col-
lecting materials in print format, but these may not always be obvious 
to institutional administrators and others outside the library. Especially 
in the field of religious and theological information, print collections 
continue to be a significant resource for researchers. However, inter-
nal and external pressures at institutions with religion and theology 
programs have driven a desire to abandon print collections, often at 
odds with librarians. Librarians in the areas of religion and theology 
need to be able to make the case for widest possible access to impor-
tant resources both in the present and in the future. I present a way to 
make this case on one sheet that is hopefully easy for non-librarians to 
understand. I also offer ideas of when and where to present this case.

CONTEXT AND INTRODUCTION

Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), which is based in 
Elkhart, Indiana (USA), on the traditional homeland of the Miami 
and Potawatomi, is a small freestanding seminary with numerous 
distance programs and a very small campus program. Fortunately, 
our seminary has invested in an excellent library over the years with 
both print and online resources and dedicated staff. Our library is 
housed in a beautiful LEED-certified green construction building 
that opened in 2007—the first theological library in North America 
to be LEED-certified (“Library | Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical 
Seminary” n.d.). I have been at AMBS in various library roles since 
2008. During that time, I’ve seen a great deal of change from mostly 
campus-based programs and print-based library resources to where 
we are now, with mostly online programs and resources.

Atla is a significant professional community for me, and I know 
many of my colleagues are going through similar transitions. I will 



158    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

discuss how AMBS Library is handling some of these changes—hope-
fully in an adaptive way.

I don’t think I can dial back the clock to 2008. Many theological and 
religious studies librarians are likely in the same place. In this time 
of rapid change, though, I think it is unwise to abandon all tradition. 
We shouldn’t throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. I 
think that we need to make fresh cases for some more traditional 
aspects of librarianship as we attempt to serve our communities well.

THREATS TO PRINT COLLECTING

We’ve heard it all, haven’t we?

We as librarians periodically hear downright negative perspec-
tives on print library collections. They get pejoratively called “dead 
tree books.” People assume that everything is online now (or at least 
everything that matters). I get questions from constituents about 
what we are doing in the library—from fellow administrators, from 
donors, from board members, and so forth. The implication of these 
questions is sometimes that we might be backwards or wasting time 
and money on something that doesn’t matter if we still care about 
print books. I’ve experienced this feeling like an assault on our 
profession, as if we are somehow now irrelevant in 2024

Many times, we know the reasons we still need to maintain print 
collections, but it can be hard to fend off all the questions and com-
ments about it.

REASONS TO MAKE THE CASE

I want to be proactive in my communication about our print collec-
tions for several reasons.

The leading reason is that we need to maintain healthy relation-
ships between our libraries and our communities as we adapt to 
change. Actually, these are relationships between us as librarians 
and our communities. We owe it to our communities to engage in 
honest and forthright communication. If we fail to communicate 
about how we’re navigating technological change, our communities 



Conversation Groups    159

will think that we are blithely unaware of reality. I would argue that 
librarians, not books, are the heart of the library enterprise. Hiding 
is not an option if we want to do our jobs with excellence.

Another reason to communicate our strategies for print library 
collections is to work in the spirit of assessment. How well are our 
strategies working to achieve our outcomes? We need to be open, of 
course, to the possibility that our print collections are not serving their 
intended purposes. By articulating our purpose and our strategies 
for getting there, we can see how well it is going. We can’t say that 
something is not working without testing that assumption with data.

Finally, articulating our strategies is a way to secure investment 
in the library. If our constituents understand why we’re approaching 
change with a mix of tradition and innovation, they will hopefully be 
more apt to invest in our libraries.

THE WHY

Image 1: Title page of Desiderius Erasmus’ Latin paraphrase of the Gospel of John, 
a 1522 edition, printed in Cologne, Germany, by Johannes Soter. AMBS Library’s 
volume has the paraphrases of Matthew and John bound together. AMBS Library 
Special Collections; Credit: Karl Stutzman 



160    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

There is something of special beauty in “dead tree books.” Some 
time back, I saw a cartoon that I’ve been unable to locate again. It 
was an image of an “antiquarian e-book dealer.” His “store” was a 
bucket of flash drives.

I’ve sometimes said that print books will be less like typewriters 
after the invention of the personal computer and more like horses 
after the car. Print books are already becoming a higher-end acces-
sory because they are beautiful and valuable in their own right; they 
are not simply valuable for their practical utility. So our articulation 
of the reasons for print collections probably needs to combine some 
of the remaining practical utility for print as well as this sense of 
print books as something higher end.

In my own institutional context, the reasons to continue to collect 
(at least partially) in print boiled down to four key constellations.

Increasing access to resources
Print collections enable us to purchase things that are not available 
electronically. This is still a significant chunk of resources in theol-
ogy/religion areas.

The same titles are usually less expensive in print than are the 
electronic library versions. Collecting in print allows us to maximize 
our collection breadth and stretch our dollars further.

Owning versus licensing
Print collections are “owned” rather than “licensed.” This means 
that “first sale doctrine” applies, so we can sell them, digitize them 
within the bounds of copyright/fair use, and share them with other 
libraries in our network on interlibrary loan.

Licensed collections give publishers and ebook vendors ultimate 
control over access. Licensed books can be removed from the plat-
forms at publishers’ discretion. This has significant implications for 
intellectual freedom.



Conversation Groups    161

Marketing AMBS distinctives
We have invested in excellent space for our physical library, which 
is a marketing tool for attracting new campus students.

Cutting our budget for print collection purchases sends mixed 
messages about our investment in this asset that provides a special 
service experience for persons on campus.

As other small seminaries increasingly gut their physical library 
collections, we have become distinctive in having excellent collec-
tions both in print and online. This is something to celebrate and 
advertise rather than following the pack.

Research shows
The California Digital Library completed research in 2015 comparing 
print and electronic text experiences (“Assessing E-Book and Print 
Book User Behavior in Academic Libraries,” n.d.).

Key findings included: access restrictions and usability challenges 
can make ebooks frustrating, reading online may cause physical 
discomfort, learning experiences are better with print books, ebooks 
provide annotation alternatives, multi-tasking is easier with ebooks, 
deep reading is more convenient with print books, recursive reading 
is better supported by print books.

There are other possible constellations I might mention if I were 
re-doing this today. One important one for our seminary is sustain-
ability: for financial, ecological, and human reasons (to borrow the 
“people-planet-profits” model). Financially speaking, we get more 
“bang for our buck” with print books by making a long-term invest-
ment; and we can also share them with other libraries in a way that 
we’re not usually permitted to share our ebooks, meaning we don’t 
need to acquire as many titles. Ecologically speaking, while all types 
of library materials use natural resources, print books are generally 
produced from a renewable resource (trees), and the bits and bytes 
of ebooks are generally run on nonrenewable and carbon-emitting 
coal power. And in terms of the human element, print books might 
be more enjoyable for staff to work with—they can feel a sense of 
accomplishment in cataloging and shelving—and they are generally 
more usable for patrons as shown in the research.



162    AT L A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

Another constellation I could mention is the sense of community 
built around print books. Typically, online reading is a very solitary 
exercise, more so even than print reading. By using shared spaces 
to read and sharing book collections within a community, librar-
ies build strong and resilient communities with common reading 
interests and bodies of knowledge. Often, we blame social media 
for the political and religious balkanization and polarization here 
in the United States, but perhaps the issue is broader in terms of the 
solitary nature of online reading and online information seeking.

COMMUNICATING THE WHY

IMAGE 2: Portion of the Original “Why print @ AMBS” handout using icons from The 
Noun Project. 

I worked at developing a single sheet that would convey these most 
important reasons.

This started out for me as a simple handout to attach to our budget 
proposal. I wanted to let my seminary’s Chief Financial Officer know 
why our print book budget line was important, and why I couldn’t 
simply take away those funds to pay for increasing database costs. 
So, this was part of an ask for a very modest budget increase.

Then, I brought the handout back as part of our annual assessment 
process. It was a handy reminder of our strategy with collections, 
and it was a starting point for some assessment of whether our 
strategy was working. We pulled data on the numbers of print books 



Conversation Groups    163

and ebooks we had acquired along with the cost for each format. 
We discovered—surprise surprise!—that while we spent about half 
of the individually purchased book collection budget on print and 
the other half on ebooks, we were acquiring far more print content. 
Of course, that does not count the presence of subscription ebook 
collections that come cheap, but those are not always aligned with 
our collection needs and instead serve as supplemental or consortial 
collections. So, we were stretching our dollars further by purchas-
ing print. Of course, there are other elements of this strategy that 
we could and should test, such as our own students’ preferences 
for reading.

Image 3: Portion of the 2023 AMBS Library Annual Report, including an abbreviated 
version of the reasons for print along with colors and images

Finally, I had a brainwave to turn some of the data from our annual 
assessment report that I submitted to the dean into a graphical ver-
sion that could reach a broader audience. This is what it looks like 
(see image 3), and you’ll notice that our reasons for print feature 
prominently here. We added reasons for electronic collections as well 
and displayed some of the graphs showing our strategic acquisitions.



16 4    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

I am not a graphic designer, but I wanted to do my best to make 
something attractive. To make things presentable, I made sure to 
use institutional font and heading styles. Our marketing department 
has a style guide that is very handy. In my first handout, I used icons 
from the Noun Project as a way to make a simple yet accessible design 
(“Noun Project: Free Icons & Stock Photos for Everything,” n.d.).

On the graphical report, I need to give credit to Molly Reed of 
Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI), which is 
the consortium of smaller academic libraries in our state. Molly 
helped me by building an annual report template in Canva, which 
is easy-to-use online design software. Molly made sure to use AMBS 
fonts, colors, etc. Canva allows us to manipulate the same content 
into a variety of types of presentation. It also enables us to recycle 
elements for future years (“Canva,” n.d.).

RESULTS

I’m grateful for a foundation of excellent support for our library 
among our stakeholders.

This communication resulted in several things at AMBS. Our 
library got that small collections budget increase we requested. 
Our dean included our annual report in her report to the board. I 
received some comments from board members who understood our 
collection strategy. Finally, I have felt more confident in my “elevator 
speech” about why I still care about print books.

My results definitely exceeded my expectations. I hope that there 
will be positive results for other theology and religion librarians 
as well.

REFERENCES

“Assessing E-Book and Print Book User Behavior in Academic 
Libraries.” n.d. California Digital Library. Accessed July 12, 
2024. https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/projects-pilots-
and-studies/assessing-e-book-and-print-book-user-behavior-in-
academic-libraries/.

https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/projects-pilots-and-studies/assessing-e-book-and-print-book-user-behavior-in-academic-libraries/
https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/projects-pilots-and-studies/assessing-e-book-and-print-book-user-behavior-in-academic-libraries/
https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/projects-pilots-and-studies/assessing-e-book-and-print-book-user-behavior-in-academic-libraries/


Conversation Groups    165

“Canva.” n.d. Canva. Accessed July 12, 2024. https://www.canva.com/.

“Library | Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary.” n.d. Accessed 
July 12, 2024. https://www.ambs.edu/library/.

“Noun Project: Free Icons & Stock Photos for Everything.” n.d. 
Accessed July 12, 2024. https://thenounproject.com/.

https://www.canva.com/
https://www.ambs.edu/library/
https://thenounproject.com/



