The Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library is now closed.

Due to recent UC-wide budget cuts and the trend toward digital access to university materials, the UCSD Libraries, as all the libraries on campus are currently collectively called, are consolidating their collections under the subtly different moniker, “UC San Diego Library.” In other words, the Mother Ship, aka the Geisel Library, is slowly but surely assimilating the smaller satellites. As many in the UC community have learned during the process, resistance is futile.

Over the past year and a half, the university has closed four physical library locations: the Medical Center Library (April 2011); the Center for Library & Instructional Computing Services (June 2011); the International Relations & Pacific Studies Library (July 2011); and the Scripps Library (June 2012). Much of the material has been incorporated into what Trekkies might call “the Borg,” the futuristic octahedral Geisel building on UC San Diego’s campus that now houses five libraries within one spaceship-like structure. Meanwhile, other parts of the collections from the closed libraries have been digitized or shipped off to the university’s Miramar Road storage annex.

One prominent (and ironic) aspect of this consolidation is the closure of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, housed since 1975 in the Eckart Building, just a few steps up from the beach on the Scripps campus — after all, it was the existence of Scripps, since 1903, that led to the founding of UC San Diego in the 1960s. The Scripps Library’s archives will still be available by appointment, and, as librarian Amy Butros describes, materials can be requested and delivered to designated pick-up spots on campus. But the 9:00–5:00, Monday–Friday open-door dependability is gone. And though, as Butros says, “very few faculty” visited the library or “maintained the practice of browsing the shelves over the past few years,” that option doesn’t exist anymore. Now patrons of Cups, the long-established outdoor coffee stand next to the library, will have nowhere to go on a rainy day. For years, a sign posted by the library on the wall shared by Eckart and Cups has been inviting customers to bring their drinks and snacks inside, “rain or shine.”

For those lucky enough to stumble upon it, the Scripps Library offered one of the most unique study spots in San Diego. Terraced construction gives the building a trapezoidal shape that echoes the coastal wave-cut platform topography of La Jolla. Thick concrete walls provide insulation from the salty air, while floor-to-ceiling glass windows let in abundant light and afford those inside a view of the Pacific. Nestled into the hillside along Biological Grade, a road that plunges almost to the edge of the last cliff before the sea, it’s a fitting home for the oceanographic charts, seismic maps, scholarly journals, and other scientific materials that Scripps has collected in 109 years of existence. Biological Grade also runs past the oldest known continuously inhabited site in California (marked by a placard posted by the Kumeyaay), which people have frequented for at least 7530 years. It’s not hard to see why that spot has been popular — the panoramic vista, the cool sea breeze, the pelicans flying by. It also has a sandy hollow, where it would be warm from the day’s sun and where one (or two, or a family) could sleep. Over the past 100 years, Scripps has surrounded the site with structures ranging from small office cottages to world-class laboratories and a parking lot. Presently, the site is just north of the Walter and Judith Munk Laboratory, where they have at least one seismometer, possibly more. My husband once pointed one out to me through the window of the locked hallway, but the next time we visited, the device had been moved. Its recordings probably reside somewhere in the library by the sea.

While it was in full operation, I had reason to visit the library on only one occasion, but I walk by it on my lunch break, and it was comforting knowing that it was there. Before my husband and I began dating, he took me to look at a map. He had spent many long hours there when he was an earth-sciences student and assistant to interim director Wolf Berger. In the hush of the spacious first-floor room, with its double-paned windows and its view of the ocean and the Scripps pier, he had pored over maps kept in rows of huge, flat drawers, looking for data requested by his boss. I was delighted by the fact that one could look out the window over the surface of the Pacific while studying bathymetric maps of its depths.

When we visited on its last day open, we found the Scripps Library a bit rearranged. The front room was empty, save for a few tables and chairs and a sculpture by Georg Schmerholz called Breaching Whale. The research desk was also empty, but the portrait of William Emerson Ritter, founder and first director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1903–1928) still presided over the front hall. The maps had been moved to the second floor, and though we weren’t sure if it was true, there seemed to be fewer than we remembered. A lot of the shelves were empty, and the place was even quieter than, well, a library. As if to signify the finality of the day, a sonic boom from nearby the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station penetrated the silence, vibrating the huge panes of glass in the windows. At first I thought it was an earthquake, but my husband set me straight, pointing out that it was not the ground that was shaking, only windows rattling.

A few other people were milling about the doomed library, taking pictures, while the librarian sat at the circulation desk a little too cheerfully. I overheard her say that construction would begin the week after the place closed. Lo and behold, when I walked by a few days after closing, plastic sheeting hung in the front windows. The sign on the wall at Cups was still up, beckoning to a pair of locked wooden doors, and another sign that read “Closed Permanently.”

According to UC San Diego Library’s website, by late 2013, the Scripps Library materials will be relocated to the third floor of Eckart or beamed up to the Mother Ship, and the newly named “Scripps Archives and Library Annex” will operate by appointment in a much smaller portion of the building. The first two floors will be renovated and/or repurposed. As director of communications for UC San Diego Library Dolores Davies reports: “Approximately 200,000 volumes and other materials are being moved to Geisel,” and “about 130,000 items, mostly archive materials and a few specialty collections — including ocean maps and charts — will remain on the third floor of Eckart.” I was happy to learn that the maps would remain in the repository by the sea.

As my husband and I discovered when we visited the site in mid-November, the expansive first-floor room of the Eckart building — where the sculpture of the humpback whale once stood and where the maps had been before that — has been transformed into a bank of cubelike, windowless offices. A long, low wall parallel to the front window now prevents the scientists who will soon be working there from looking out over the ocean they might be studying. The whale statue has been pushed under the stairwell during construction, and the library’s life-size diorama of the Little Green Lab of La Jolla, complete with scientist mannequin, has been covered in white plastic sheeting to keep off the dust. The Little Green Lab, constructed at La Jolla Cove in 1905, was one of the institution’s first facilities and is still used by Scripps as a graduate-education office. During its use as a lab, it also housed the institution’s first aquarium. Scripps has continuously kept a public aquarium ever since. The diorama at the library depicts the now-antique glass jars and vials where scientists kept their specimens. The molted exoskeleton of a spiny lobster sits in a tray, ready for examination.

According to the project superintendent, the new design for the offices on the first floor of Eckart originally included remodeled lighting, and the new walls were supposed to go all the way to the ceiling. But in order to stick to budget, the university decided to keep the existing fluorescent lights and build the walls just shy of the ceiling. These changes, “value-engineered” after the design was presented to the university, saved $100,000 from the original estimate. But it looks as if they didn’t skimp on lumber — the new walls are finished in beautiful incense cedar shipped from Northern California. As my husband and I walked around, we inhaled the fresh scent.

In contrast to the Scripps Library, the ongoing construction of the new San Diego City Central Library at 11th and J downtown brings expansion, not consolidation. The new nine-story domed structure, scheduled to open in July 2013, will allow more of the city’s library materials to see the light of day: at its current location, more than 60 percent of the collection is in basement storage, off limits to the public. The E Street branch, built in 1954 on the site of the demolished 1902 Carnegie Library, houses somewhere in the vicinity of 780,000 volumes. The new branch will accommodate over 1.25 million.

From our back porch, we’ve been watching the new library dome take shape in the downtown San Diego skyline, an unlikely curve among so many right angles. We first noticed it around the first of April, when we were driving north on the E Street entrance to I-5. I was so surprised by its presence in the skyline, all I could muster was, “Doooome!” (à la Homer Simpson in the Simpsons Movie, when his actions cause the EPA to cover Springfield with a giant Plexiglas dome). My husband surmised that it was the new downtown library, a sketch of which we both recalled having seen. From the drawing, I didn’t really understand how tall it would be — I had no inkling that we would be able to see it from our house.

As it turns out, it’s southwest of us, and we have a pretty clear view. It sticks up past other buildings in the vicinity, but we can really only see the dome itself, not the rest of the structure. Its roundness, and the fact that it looks like it’s about to blast off, caused my husband to nickname it the “San Diego Space Tit.”

Just before the first of September, on the night of a blue moon, we noticed that the Space Tit had a red signal at its apex. Now what we deemed “the nipple” glows like a beacon every night. Patrons lured by the glowing nipple must be patient — the E Street branch will close in March, and the new library doesn’t open until July. That means a few months of managed chaos for the Central Library. During this time, the collections, according to public information officer Marion Hubbard, will be “weeded out a little more than usual.” Items will be sorted, packed, and hauled by a moving company to the new digs.

At the time of our interview, the city was still in the process of hiring movers for the job, but Hubbard did confirm the implementation of a radio-frequency identification system for the relocation process. All materials will be outfitted with an identification tag and fed into a tube system (yet to be constructed). This will start near the circulation desk, go outside the building, then through what is now the children’s section on the second floor (where visitors can watch as books and other media move along a conveyor belt), ending in the material sorting room. So, before books travel across town to take their places on the new shelves, they will undergo a technology upgrade and take a fantastic journey through tubular space — a fitting preparation for their assimilation into the San Diego Space Dome.

As for the materials from Scripps Library, they will, as Dolores Davies describes, “be placed on plywood library moving carts, loaded onto trucks, and driven up to Geisel Library. The materials will then be unloaded on to compact shelving on the first floor of the east wing of Geisel Library.” Students and library employees will eventually shelve them somewhere in the bowels of the Mother Ship, way up on dry land, out of view of the ocean, where the salty sea air is all that will remind them of their origins. As of now, they are preparing to be assimilated.