Recently I went on a small hike with Zach (7 years old, adorable as they get). His daddy’s my favorite dentist, btw.
We were hiking down the path collecting rocks. He saw one he liked semi-buried in the ground. Bending down, he tried to pry it with his hands. Looking up he grinned and said, “it’s just a loose tooth in Mother Nature’s mouth.”
Too cute to keep bottled up.
The Boston Globe reported a week ago that the Cushing Academy, a prestigious prep school in western Massachusetts, is replacing its 20,000-volume book collection with a “learning center” containing 18 eBook readers and three giant TV screens. It’s replacing the reference desk with a $12,000 espresso machine.
“It’s a little strange, but this is the future.”
ALA executive director Keith Michael Fiels says this is the first library he is aware of to eliminate books.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “Our feeling,” he says, “is that we love books so much that we want our students to not have 20,000, but millions.”
Student Tia Alliy, a 16-year-old junior, said she visits the library nearly every day, but only once looked for a book in the stacks. “Very few students actually read them. And the more we use e-books, the fewer books we have to carry around.’’ Jemmel Billingslea, an 18-year-old senior says, “It’s a little strange, but this is the future.’’
The times are indeed a-changin’. One large library in Utah has replaced a reference service, not with an expresso bar, but with a Delicious account. At least a dozen other libraries I follow have replaced their reference desks with online reference services and in turn replaced those with Ask-a-Librarian Twitter accounts.
Have your deans or city council begun asking if your users are still reading books? Have they indicated that the space occupied by your book stacks might be better used? Is your library still serving a vital community need?
What are the implications of libraries offering collections and services based on usage? Was it a good idea in the past for libraries to eliminate research collections in favor of stocking videos and trendy novels from the best seller lists? Is usage a good indicator of value? Doesn’t it make sense doesn’t it to replace the works of William Shakespeare with big screen TVs offering access to American Idols? After all, they now get more usage (hits) than the Bard.
Libraries are under increasing pressure these days to change the ways we’ve traditionally done things. Is the book just a format medium that needs to be retired? The knee-jerk response to give customers what they want, to keep up with how people are using information, and to seek ways of cutting costs may, in the final analysis, be short sighted. Or, are the downsides of the bookless future things we can address and overcome?
The Cushing Library experience might make a great discussion at your next retreat, board meeting, or graduate seminar.
Here are few links to help you get started (don’t neglect the public’s comments; the discussions are well thought and surprisingly insightful):
MedlinePlus (www.medlineplus.gov), the authoritative online consumer health resource from the National Library of Medicine, has many great new features to help you locate appropriate materials that meet the unique needs of your community. The site, which debuted in 1998 with 22 health topics, now boasts over 800 topics and many new enhancements:
Enhanced Searching
MedlinePlus has new search capabilities to improve your searches. Results now have relevancy rankings and are sorted into two subsets: collections and clusters. “Collections” help you narrow your search by displaying results in 7 content areas. “Clusters” organize your search results into groups based on the most frequent words in the top 200 results. The “remix” button displays the next cluster. You can target your search with phrase searching and Boolean logic. “AND” is the default operator, for everything else use OR, NOT, -, +, and the wildcard *. MedlinePlus was designed to be user friendly, providing a variety of search mechanisms to meet different search styles. Many elements are repeated throughout the site helping users learn to search quickly.
As Clay Shirky said in his 2008 keynote at Web 2.0 Expo, media is a triathalon: people like to consume, produce, and share it. Media that is targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth watching. We might ask ourselves, in what ways are we engaging our audiences? How well do libraries help their customers to be a part of the picture?
Some ways that librarians can include others:
Make your website interactive with blogs, twitter, feeds from library-esq resources, etc. Some of the things we have tried may already be old school. What’s coming down the tube next? It’s pretty fun to at least watch and wonder.
Start projects that the public can have fun with.
Here’s one really fine example. The Bay Area libraries are having a Free 2 Succeed campaign. One library has a Free 2 Succeed job center and career information center. There’s a Free 2 (fill in the blank) decal that people can download from their website and stick on a t-shirt or whatever else. There’s a Free 2 contest where patrons can win prizes for telling what the library has done to make them free 2 move about the community. There’s a video on the Free 2 website that highlights people in the community and what they are free 2 do. Fun stuff.
Scholarships for E-Government Librarians
The Center for Library and Information Innovation at the iSchool at the University of Maryland College Park, in partnership with the Government Information Online Initiative and the University of Illinois at Chicago, is accepting applications for 20 Master of Library Science (MLS) scholarships. The scholarships are for a new online MLS program focused on e-government services and digital government information.
Applications are due by 1 February 2010, and the program is scheduled to begin in Fall 2010. For more information, see www.liicenter.org/libegov.
From Peggy Garvin, SLA/DGI Blog