We’ve posted about tool lending libraries before… and here is a library without the books @ The Boston Globe…
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.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “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.’’
Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.
There is room in the world to have an old fashioned library. Just because it is an old technology doesn’t mean it is a bad one. As long as you have a light source (natural or artificial) you can read a book. If the power is off and the electronics don’t have some form of backup power they are paper weights and furniture. This “learning center” will be what my laptop and desktop machines are, toys to amuse myself (I consider my electronics projects and DIY entertainment). This will become more face book than fact book.
Because e-paper holds an image without power and runs for weeks on an AA battery.
You comment on idiocy but you look like ….
Looks like you’ve read the promotional materials. I’ve got a Sony PRS-505 which I use to read papers from the arXiv. I can tell you that even if it is true technically, in reality you have run out of power when you need to use it. It is good for many things – it allows me to work outside – but it isn’t as flexible, durable, or as reliable as a hardbound book.
The future may in fact be digital, but perhaps we should wait until we get there.
Books have the advantage of being mobile and shareable. By investing so much money on TVs and such, you’re forcing the students to go there to study, rather than letting them take the book and go to wherever is best for them.
In my opinion there are good scientific books that are old. So they will be lost with digital libraries?
Okay, the publishers publish new books also as digital versions. But does anybody knows if there are companys where you can buy good old scientific books as a digital version?
“$50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.”
Sounds more like university’s board sees dollar signs more than they see into the future. This is a terrible idea education-wise, but I bet they make more money on lattes than they do on Hemingway.
Seriously though, what the hell kind of school would do this? There’s a time and place for different technologies. Until such a time as every tome committed to print has made it online, and is as accessible and easy to read without having to worry about batteries, cracked screens, eye-bleeding backlighting, and even just spilling by a little late-night soda, we have need for books. They do the job more robustly and better as a means of committing ideas into something that can be shared that require a lot of text to do it in. I’d avoid this school.
“they have spent $10,000 to buy 18 electronic readers made by Amazon.com and Sony.” I presume this includes content, but “$500,000 to create a “learning center,’’” and “$50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.”
Seriously 18 books??? how many students?? They said in the article that one day 48 books had been checked out (i’d guess that 12 people had 4 books each) that leaves 6 books for reference.
If the just bought 500 kindles, and got the free classics and bought content on request, it would make a lot more sense. and they could have sold the books they had.
H
otakuzoku.com
A, perhaps, urban myth is that Apple tasked a group of bright young designers to come up with a new form of media, The laid down some requirements regarding use, users, cost etc and let them loose.
After several weeks/month their conclusion to the need for a compact, easy to use, cheap to produce and maintain media system was…. a book! hard to beat.
The digital world has a) a long away to go to compete fully, b) is far too easy to plagiarise c) just isn’t the same as holding a book in your hands IMHO.
Bad Idea university, perhaps had more to do with it was cheaper to get rid of the books to re-purpose the space than build a new building??
Experience teaches us that new media don’t replace the old. Live theater didn’t disappear because of movies. Radio is still with us, even after the Golden Age of Television. Recorded music is cheap and convenient, but we still enjoy going to concerts.
The same will be true with print in the future. Print will not go away, but it will change. We already see that happening at newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Print will do what it does best, and time will show us what that is.
Sounds like a stunt to me. The people at Cushing (a prep school in north central MA) probably got a big grant from somebody to be the test case.
For the sake of the students, let’s hope it doesn’t end up being a poster child.
Well, today I’ve completely lost faith in humanity. The day that a library is replaced with a coffee shop and a place to check facebook is the day I call it quits.
This is indeed Fahrenheit 451, only now the fires are electronic.
Will all the instructors at this school be forced to give up all the books in their offices? How about magazines and newspapers? Will this school solicit donations from alumni only electronically, no more cards and letters? While there is much information available online, there is still much to be found only in books.
Ray Bradbury himself was unable to go to college, but did manage to educate himself. In a LIBRARY, with real BOOKS. Indeed, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and it is electronic media centers displacing stacks of knowledge.
Just put a disposable MP3 player into the bottom of the coffee cups made from recycled books. Who’s going to want to read, when we’re all blinded?
I’ll have an Animal Farm latte, and some Reading for Dummies gummies, please.
as it has been pointed out no power is needed to read a book!
This university isn’t destroying ALL books, they are simply replacing their technology. Furthermore, I am sure the intent is to minimize actual physical man hours needed to maintain this school’s library.
They also failed to do the math on these investments. $50,000 in books will be worth far more in 20 years than those big screen TVs will in two. They better sell a lot of cappuccinos.
$20,000 on “laptop friendly carrels?” Haven’t they heard of laps?
…But it will be profitable!
The local public library would love nothing more than to get rid of the books. To them the books are an albatross that they would jump at a chance to eliminate. Not because they believe that the future of reading is digital, but because they’d prefer to use that space for more profitable endeavors.
The market of people who read books is shrinking. So like any good businessman, librarians are looking to move into diferent markets.
I’m not sure how we’ve arrived at a place where Libraries focus on turning a profit instead of providing a service, but here we are.
$12,000 coffee machine? Couldn’t you make do with a $2000 one? Then use the other $10,000 for something a little more…uh literary?
very, very bad.
How stupid can we become? “Oh we don’t need books! We has internets now!”
For crying out loud. I spend a good 12+ hours a day on the computer. When I want to read a textbook or fiction or am trying to learn something, I’d -much- prefer to pick up a physical book. It’s so much easier to learn from them. FFS society.
The only “good” thing I can think of from this, is that if someone was made aware of this in time and got a truck, they’d have been able to grab most of those books.
Part of my Zombie Apocalypse/Societal Collapse/etc plans have always involved hijacking a semi and relocating the University’s Library to my secret underground lair, so that it will survive into the new world
“Part of my Zombie Apocalypse/Societal Collapse/etc plans have always involved hijacking a semi and relocating the University’s Library to my secret underground lair, so that it will survive into the new world
”
This may be the best comment ever posted on Make!
Wasnt clear on my previous coment
18 ebooks from amazon and sony, for the entire university acording to the full article.
h
otakuzoku.com
This is what scares me about this kind of thing: Books, ancient as they may be, are still the most durable form of mass information storage we have come up with (and when I say information I mean nothing less than every important thought any human has ever had) Not magnetic disks, not optical disks, not memory chips. Books, ink printed on acid-free paper, and bound with needle and thread. And the best part is, no one needs to maintain them. No one needs to change the batteries. No one needs to keep the dust out or maintain the temperature or read the EULA. The first books ever printed are still around. You can pick them up and read them. The first digital storage system ever made? It could maybe be read, but it would take some scientists, and an expensive lab.
My point is that if we value culture, thoughts, ideas, history, and that sort of thing, then books, made from paper, will have a place.
Ummmmm…..
Who will be there to help users find the resources they truly need? I visited a campus where computers for digital libraries were in place (over 100 nodes). The problem? about 20% were out of order and the rest were being used to browse the internet and send email. Ebooks? Forget it.
This school has one thing in mind with the snack bar and coffee machine: MAKE MONEY and the h*** with students and what they learn or research.
I can get a better education by an all online program ( this requires something many have lost — discipline !) I’m doing PhD work and this is the only way I could attend the particular program. Right now after about two years 4.0 GPA. But, I still go to local academic libraries that have REAL books (at least for now).
fail
web has wiki, but it has cr@p for book selection, and getting free access to books online is just not going to happen for anything that isn’t a very very old.
my local library in milpitas has gone down this road a bit as well. totally new building, much larger than before, but book section is as small as it ever was. now we have banks of web surfing computers instead. its a sad joke.
the short sighted and easily dazzled people that make these decisions should be canned.
learning centers are little more than internet cafes on the public dime. now libraries spend their resources playing dvd/cd rental as well, its just a dumbing down of america, and a waste of our tax money.
the turn of the century may be digital, but the future is analog.
I think it’s a WONDERFUL idea. We should not only liquidate all the libraries; I know of a number of private collections (just old stuff nobody interested in the future has any use for: signed first editions, manuscripts, complete sets of fiction magazines; in other words, trash) I would be happy to take off the owner’s hands.
When you get rid of each codex, journal, magazine, academic dissertation, technical report, research proposal, and whatever other printed material you no longer need because you’ll be using a digital copy of it, SEND THE ORIGINAL TO ME. I’ll see that it gets a good home. I’ll pick it up or pay the shipping costs. I’ll make the process as simple and painless as possible.
If it’s a book, I want it. If it’s a scientific journal, I hunger for it. I love technical reports and research proposals. If it’s somebody’s academic thesis — bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate — I’ll take that, too. If it’s a set of old magazines, say a complete run of Argosy or All Story Weekly (or even Doc Savage), COME TO POPPA.
I’ll find a nice, climate-controlled warehouse (or three) in a nice, dry place (like eastern Colorado) and take ALL the books that nobody else wants. Call me eccentric. There will be some redundancy. Let ME worry about that. I’m led to understand that there are places that NEED books. Go figure.
My philosophy of life is summed up in a small sign on my office door: “They got the library at Alexandria, but they aren’t going to get mine.”
The office I’m sitting in has eight floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in it, all overflowing. Outside the office door is a book-lined corridor to another office the same size, which is also full of books, journals, and six filing cabinets for theses and technical reports; you can’t see the walls. And these two offices don’t even contain the main part of my library. Your books will be happy here and in the warehouses I find to hold the overflow.
I don’t object to ebooks or computers. I don’t object to information in any form. I just have a particular fondness for books: the codex as a work of art. The book doesn’t have to be rare to be valuable.
Just one more thing: I’m interested in everything. Nobody prints books in things that I’m not interested in, although I will admit to having preferences: the sciences, for example; the arts; the humanities; fiction; nonfiction; poetry; history; philosophy; mathematics; engineering; languages; medicine; law; architecture; interdisciplinary works. These are some but not all of my preferences. These are the books I keep handy.
One of my dreams since childhood has been to live in a library. My training is in the cognitive sciences (very interdisciplinary), but I write also and I married a literature professor. We have a son. He likes books, too, in moderation (nobody’s perfect).
Whoever thinks the age of the codex has passed is extremely short-sighted, ignorant, and probably rather stupid as well. I’m absolutely ready to take advantage of an opportunity like the influence of such people, in a heartbeat.
At first glance, it sounds absurd that they wouldn’t need a library– I buy a lot of obscure books that I’m sure aren’t available online, and may never be.
On the other hand, this is a prep school, not a college or public library. Maybe the students really can find everything they need for their classwork online. But I hope the administration checked with the faculty first, to see if that’s really the case. When I was in school, I often did research in the library without actually checking out the books.
Also, as someone in the article pointed out, a lot of what’s available online isn’t free, and they don’t mention whether they’ve budgeted for that. Maybe all of their students are rich enough that they’re not worried about it.
What an absolutely terrible idea. How about spending $500,000 to digitize those books, and let the students decide how to access them? Oh wait, it isn’t about the students anymore, is it?
18 e-books to replace a library. Seriously?
None of these books which are under copyright will be sharable if the idea is that students will all have e-books so that your basic 18 are only needed as loaners. The original paper books could be reloaned many times over many decades. The payoff is for the suppliers of e-books who get to sell a copy to every person who needs it, even if the sum total need is only a week.
So, here’s hoping that enough of the collection is available as open domain and on Gutenberg so it’s worth while. I seriously doubt the availability of millions of books being freely available as is a lending library. It’s gonna cost, just like one program we had here at our local county library, that got cut in cost cutting measures two years ago.
Yes books are durable, and work without batteries.
But a book is useless if you don’t have it when you need it.
If someone else had checked out the hard copy, or you can’t find it easily in the hundreds of bookshelves becuase it was shelved improperly, or the library simply cant afford to carry a copy because not enough people check it out, then you are out of luck.
I’d rather have a digital library with instant access to more books, and the ability to carry lots of digital books in one device, than a paper library with limited access and limited books.
Oh, and for those people who complain about battery life? One word – chargers.
I suppose you don’t carry a battery-operated cell phone because your home phone is just soooo much more reliable and doesn’t need batteries, right?
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