by Michelle Kraft
What does the future hold for libraries? CNN.com believes it will be one without books. The CNN.com article primarily focuses on public libraries and the young hip library-chic librarians embracing technology. (By the way I hate how CNN has sort of split librarians into the young hip techie librarians vs. the old out of style bookish librarians. It irks me. Tech savvy has nothing to do with being young, old, hip, boring, chic, or dowdy. Both types of librarians have tech savvy and non-tech.)
The article, “Welcome to the Library. Say goodbye to the books.” on Boston.com (posted by Cynthia on Medlib-l) is about one prep school’s idea of the future library. The school eliminated the 20,000 volume collection and will be spending $500,000 for a “learning center.” Laptop friendly study carrels ($20,000) and three large flat screen TVs ($43,000) projecting data from the Internet will occupy the space where the book stacks once stood. So what will students read? Where are the English lit. books that they might read for class? Ah so glad you asked. The school bought 18 electronic readers ($10,000) which will be loaded with these tomes. My first thought, only 18 readers for a whole school to loan out? My second thought, what a licensing nightmare. Maybe I am overly sensitive to that because science and technology materials tend to have more licensing hoops to jump through than high school resources….Read entire post by Michelle here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/
