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It was a quiet milestone two years ago when the University of Michigan announced its millionth book online, part of a joint effort of 30 university libraries. any attention this landmark received was overshadowed by concerns of copyright owners and ensuing legal arguments. To date, the consortium of colleges has scanned over 6.5 million volumes.
Book digitization is part of an effort by higher education libraries to meet the demands for instant access to information, new pedagogies, and higher student expectations. In this flurry of activity some people, especially faculty, are concerned that printed books will get lost in the process.
They have reason to worry. Only a small percentage of a library’s books circulate in any given year, so libraries are being more aggressive in culling their collections, keeping the books in highest demand, and correlating their books with course content. This frees up space for access to databases, group and individual work, socializing with peers and faculty, and learning to be a lifelong learner not just a reader – the activities students increasingly see as the library’s purpose.
Libraries aren’t abandoning printed books. The new Grand Valley State University library will hold 150,000 books in open stacks and another 600,000 in an onsite automated storage and retrieval system when it opens in 2013; the six-year-old University of California, Merced library has 100,000 books on its shelves; the main libraries at the nearly 200-year-old University of Michigan have over 8 million volumes.
The book digitization project points to the future. Practically all college students bring a computer to campus. The Wall Street Journal reports that 11 million Americans will own at least one digital reading device by the time this fall semester started. Amazon.com says that customers buy 3.3 times as many books after they buy a Kindle. Those statistics are some comfort following a report from the National Endowment for the arts in 2007 that Americans spend less time reading books, and half of all Americans ages to 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure. (Many of those are college students who would no doubt point out that they read plenty of textbooks and other required material, leaving little time for bestsellers.)
Grand Valley’s dean of university libraries, Lee Van Orsdel, says she plans to purchase an e-reading device of her own, but doesn’t worry that books will disappear. “I don’t think print’s going away until it’s replaced by something more satisfying to the user, and we don’t know what that will be yet.”
Professors worry that fewer books in open stacks means fewer random encounters with new ideas and information from browsing, a treasured part of academic inquiry. University of California, Merced librarian Bruce Miller dismisses this concern, saying browsers only see “what’s left behind.” More important, he says, is a side effect of browsing: building an academic community. “People who lament the loss of browsing are usually older and remember the departmental libraries, the art school library, the business school, etc. You had to go there to read journals to stay abreast of the latest developments, so students and faculty would run into each other there and that’s where the fundamentals and values of the profession were inculcated. We can still do that, but you don’t need books on the shelves to accomplish it.”
Tags: Education, Library, TechnologyFiled under: 360 Magazine
