Bookless Libraries
There’s much ado about Stanford University’s announcement about its new bookless library. Laura Sydell at National Public Radio (NPR) reports:
The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren’t doing much better.
Some folks say that online journals and e-books just make more sense:
According to Josephine, students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.
For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine says that “with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily.”
The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn’t been taken off the shelf in five years.
Keller expects that, eventually, there won’t be any books on the shelves at all.
“As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form,” he says.
Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field — particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.
Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering, says that’s why his faculty is increasingly using e-books.
“It allows our faculty to change examples,” he says,” to put in new homework problems … and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way.”
Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn at The New Yorker says this doesn’t mean the end of books. It means that there’s an overwhelming number of books:
Amid all the fuss over Stanford University’s announcement that they are unveiling a bookless library (is it the wave of the future? A sign of the literary apocalypse?), everyone seemed to be missing one rather obvious point: when it opens in August it will, in spite of the misleading nomenclature, contain books. True, the new physics and engineering library will house eighty-five percent fewer books, but it isn’t some sort of thought experiment (if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear, will it still make a noise? If a library contains no books, is it still a library?) or Borgesian [magical] symbol. In fact, it isn’t even a sign of the end of books; it’s a result of schools being so overcrowded with them. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Stanford buys the equivalent of two hundred and seventy-three books a day. As you can imagine, that adds up to an awful lot of shelf space and, as a result, Stanford has been forced to move many of their titles to storage facilities miles away.
Fast Company‘s Kit Eaton says it’s just progress:
It’s also the next logical progression in the modernization of library systems. Remember card catalogs? They were once a staple of any visit to a library, and their often hand-typed and hand-annotated reference cards were vital for finding the right book in a collection. But the card index was a perfect contender for digital replacement, even in an era when computers were mainly text-based. First they came for my card catalog … then they came for my books …
The Boston Globe reported on a bookless library last year. According to David Abel:
Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.
This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.
The school’s headmaster, James Tracy,said:
“This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’
But not everyone is ready to jump on the bookless library bandwagon. Keith Michael Fiels, Executive Director of the American Library Association, has some 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.’’
There’s certainly a place for e-books and who wouldn’t rather locate information in online periodicals instead of pulling heavy bound volumes off the library shelves. And then there’s the whole matter of arranging one’s reading schedule around the library’s hours of operation. But surely it’s a mistake to eliminate bound books altogether. Lovers of books know the reasons why.
