New England Prep School Library Goes Entirely Digital 168
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Cushing Academy has decided to leap into the future by getting rid of all the books in their library and going completely digital. Instead of dusty stacks, the library is spending close to half a million dollars to install all the hallmarks of a digital learning center. Flat screen TVs, "laptop friendly carrels," and a coffee shop are just the first step in building an area that allows students access to millions of books as opposed to several thousand. Of course, not everyone is completely sold on this move: "[Keith Michael Fiels, executive director of the American Library Association] said the move raises at least two concerns: Many of the books on electronic readers and the Internet aren't free and it may become more difficult for students to happen on books with the serendipity made possible by physical browsing. There's also the question of the durability of electronic readers. 'Unless every student has a Kindle and an unlimited budget, I don't see how that need is going to be met,' Fiels said. 'Books are not a waste of space, and they won't be until a digital book can tolerate as much sand, survive a coffee spill, and have unlimited power. When that happens, there will be next to no difference between that and a book.'"
Books are good (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the REAL problems (Score:3, Interesting)
As computers are completely interchangeable, and if the library is in fact Digital it can easily be backed up somewhere. So long as the data is stored on a backup server you won't lose it on the library end. And Netbooks around here are becoming cheap as dirt, you can get one of those for under 300 dollars, or an old old lappy for under 200. Cheaper than a vehicle, which a fair deal of College students can afford.
They mention that books online aren't free, no, they aren't, but assuming your going digital you should be able to get digital copies (manual scans if you have to) of the books you already have and offer them for free, that way you aren't taking away any of the content they'd regularily have to. You're essentially making it easier for those who DO have money though.
The REAL issues you come across are sources and citations. A friend of mine is majoring in Ancient Mideivel history and Archeology (I know, good luck with that, right?) and the biggest issue when he has to write a paper is some crap about it having to come from a peer reviewed source or some scholarly document. BASICALLY, in order for them to use any quotes or facts in their papers (which they must have at least 10 quotes in every paper) they have to go through the trouble of FINDING a book that has a check mark by some organization or another (Unesco? Maybe? I don't know).
The internet has tons of information but little of it will be credible for humanities students.
Defeats the purpose of libraries (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like they just wanted to get rid of the library and use the building space for something else. Oh yes, here we go:
Oh look, beancounters deciding to abandon the literary arts! What a surprise. Except not, since this is America after all. At least they donated them rather than burning them or throwing them out.
The sad part is they additionally justify this by saying the library wasn't used very much.
How can they possibly tell how the library is utilized by checkout rates? The whole point of a school library is to go there, find a book you need to reference, make copies of the relevant pages, and go.
Re:The Paper Book Remains King (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, e-books are very compelling to me for one reason: I could carry my entire library with me at all times. My 32GB hacked iPod mini really changed the way I listen to and enjoy music. Before, if I went somewhere, I had to think ahead of what CDs I might want to listen to. Now I put my entire music collection on one tiny device. Awesome! I can even take it with me when I go for a run.
I think e-books will end up being the same kind of enabler. We're just in the same place we were with MP3 players before Apple entered the game: functional but kind of unpleasant to use. If other technology serves as a guide, I have no doubt that we'll solve these problems. I'm looking at this early tech as a fun time to be a computer scientist and programmer.
Re:Coffee Shop? (Score:3, Interesting)
absolutely. Nothing says proper education like monetization of a captive audience with the twin addictions of caffeine and sugar... In public schools they now have vending machines and snack patrols for those who need candy in the five minutes between class, but don't have the athleticism required to walk all the way down the hall and back.
Re:Terrible idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Paper Book Remains King (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I still write the first draft of my fiction on a 1917 Royal manual typewriter, listen to Mozart and Haydn and read hardback books such as the current one I'm reading about the fight to build the Hubble Space Telescope.
There are some things that have not been surpassed.
Serendipity is not allowed in modern education (Score:2, Interesting)
Abombination! (Score:2, Interesting)
And no - I am not over-reacting. I recently visited my home town and thought I'd check out the old city library which I heard had been given a big makeover.
It was like visiting a shopping mall. Modern and clean, but no character whatsoever. Most of one entire floor out of the five was nothing but PCs inhabited by large amounts of students who already have more than enough access to the net as it is. There was a coffee shop, a crÃche, another entire floor dedicated to meeting and conference rooms. One floor was labelled as storage - staff only. I know where all the books went now!
Out of five floors, only one and a half of them actually had books in them. Unbelievable for a major city library.
I had a larger science fiction collection at home than a library supporting hundreds of thousands of people.
New York Public Library is doing something similar (Score:3, Interesting)
The NYPL is doing something similar. President Paul LeClerc got a ton of money from wealthy contributors, and he's de-emphasizing the print collection and boosting the digital collections.
The signature example of that was selling the Donnell Library on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/arts/design/07nypl.html [nytimes.com] The Donnell was a landmark library for 50 years, that people grew up with, and a magnet for teenage science nerds, poetry fans, etc., from around the City and neighboring suburbs. They had the best collection of science books for children and teenagers I've ever seen, and one of the first record and film collections. LeClerc made a deal with a hotel to tear down the Donnell Library (which he's already done) and build a hotel in its place, with a library half the size in the basement (that part of the deal fell through with the financial crisis). The theory was that the new library wouldn't need as many books, because it would have a big digital collection.
In general, LeClerc is leading the NYPL to build up its digital collection at the expense of the paper collection. This is good in some ways, if I want to look something up in their digital newspaper collection, or some of their digital science and technology journals. It's bad in other ways, since most of the major medical journals I want to read are too expensive for them to subscribe to online. (Most journals charge libraries a fee based on the number of students and faculty in their school, and a NYPL librarian told me that the New England Journal of Medicine would charge them a fee based on the entire population of New York.)
With infinite money (or far enough in the future), a digital collection could be as good as or better than a paper collection for most (but not all) purposes, and might be better overall. But with the money and technology they have now, a digital collection loses an awful lot.
The librarians told me that the Donnell had special collections, such as foreign language collections in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Yiddish (!), and every language they speak in New York -- more languages than Google. When they closed the Donnell, they broke up the collection, and most of the books were just thrown out as garbage. (I once looked up some books from the 1960s in Spanish on Mexican murals. When Isaac Bashevits Singer won the Nobel Prize, I looked up some of his Yiddish short stories and struggled through them with my German and Hebrew.)
In the 1980s, I worked for McGraw-Hill, and one of the best things about that company was that I could use the McGraw-Hill library. McGraw-Hill published about 50 business and technical magazines in the electrical, mining, machining, chemical, aerospace and I forgot what other industries. They had files of trade magazines going back to 1917, with standard reference books for every industry, and a book division with elementary, high school and college textbooks (think Samuelson's Economics), and classic business and technical books. They also had a great journalism collection. The guys who built the electrical industry in the 1930s wrote articles about it for McGraw-Hill magazines. You could stand in front of the bookshelf on that industry and get a good idea of what the industry was all about.
The top management was really pushing computerization. They decided to throw out all the books and magazines and replace them with Nexis and other databases (because the McGraw-Hill magazines were on Nexis, they got a special deal). Realize that this was a publishing company, whose employees had dedicated their lives to books. Instead of getting a book or magazine, all you could get was 20-page printouts (dot matrix, no pictures). We used to refer to it as the Alexandrian Library at McGraw-Hill.
The Stacks (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried to study there again with the same results. I learned to not study at the library, but rather to use it to learn about things that I never had even thought to ask a question about. Wandering The Stacks became a Zen like activity in the pursuit of learning. No electronic library will ever be its equivalent. No electronic library will ever allow you to simply turn around to discover a hundred year old chemistry book set in an old Gothic font or present you with books long out of print. No thank you, I will wander The Stacks, I will walk a hundred paces, stop, take out the book at my right knee, and learn.