College libraries: the condensed version
December 25th, 2006Some great quotes from this piece about print v. digital books and what librarians are faced with.
“Even as the Internet revolution raises the promise of widespread digital publishing, librarians are grappling with deciding which books to keep and figuring out how to efficiently store them — even if no one touches them in a generation. That dilemma is heightened because room and funding for traditional open stacks are scarce, and library space increasingly is being converted to computer labs and study rooms.”
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“But does it matter that no one has read the Blanc books since 1979? What if some future scholar needs its narrative of King Louis XVI’s beheading? Such concerns are driving libraries to create more shelf space in unusual ways, even if doing so limits old-fashioned wandering through open stacks.”
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“If we don’t preserve the cultural heritage and scholarly record, no one else will,” explained Cynthia Shelton, a UCLA associate university librarian. “We know research interests change over time. So we don’t want to be in the business of projecting and predicting that we know we won’t need that book.”
