LibraryRemix

It’s a mystery to me why the print vs. online wars rage.  In a recent USA Today article, School chooses Kindle; are libraries for the history ‘books’?, Cushing Academy’s bold move from mostly print to all electronic resources was revealed, rationalized, and ultimately railed against.

Reading the story, I found much about Cushing’s move that appealed to me.  The coffee house library…not a new idea. Others have done this successfully.  And the success of these ventures is more complex than the appeal of a “frothy beverage.”  Walk into any Starbucks or Barnes and Nobel and witness the people engaged with media (computer and print) while they engage with one another, calmly and thoughtfully. Libraries are idea forums.  Coffee houses, in our culture, are symbolic of the type of learning dialogue that should take place in a library.  Marrying the two makes a lot of sense.

I couldn’t help thinking, too, that the arguements offered by some over the loss of print volumes was as old as the practice of collection weeding.  A society whose advancement is bounded by its knowledge (quite literally) reveres its books.  Librarians willing to weed the old, out-dated volumes from the stacks have always battled scores of “book-lovers” who, as I was once  told, “love the smell of old books.”

I am, myself, am an avid collector of the past.  I collect realia, ephemera, and books whose patina invite me to touch where hands once touched long ago.  I sometimes share those collections, showcasing them in the library at school.  I also maintain a community archives in our school library…yearbooks, significant ephemera, representative defunct media devices, all available for historical inquiry.  BUT …I don’t store these precious artifacts in my stacks.  A library’s stacks must, by nature of their purpose, reflect accurate and current information. Even the classic literature deserves a fresh cover, an intact binding that will draw attention to the fact that the ideas within still hold relevance to the learners who come into the library today.

Where Cushing may have jumped the gun is in dismissing paper/print as “old technology.”  I am constantly telling my students (and collegues) that regardless of MEDIUM, it is the information that counts.  Some information is more (or only) accessible via print, some electronically, displayed visually or audibly, or both.  My goal is to provide texts to my community in ALL of the mediums still accessible in today’s world. I seek a balance that says…”Look!  Information is all around you.  Seek it, engage in it, respond!”

More….Bookless Libraries? (Inside Higher Ed)

Tags: ebooks, Kindle, print, weeding

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.