From the Times-Picayune:
The remodeled undergraduate library at the University of California, Berkeley, is modern and sleek. Its top two floors have low-slung couches, a nap pod, and meeting spaces with glass walls made to be written on and colorful furniture meant to be moved.
The library has even dropped its rules against food and drinks on those floors. That’s because they no longer contain any books, which could be damaged or stained.
California’s oldest university has removed 135,000 books from Moffitt Library to create more space for students to study, recharge and collaborate on group projects.
Libraries are 4,000 years old, but the digital revolution is changing their use on college campuses. From coast to coast, college libraries are removing rows of steel shelving, stashing the books they held in other campus locations and discarding duplicates to make way for open study spaces. Their budgets are shifting away from print to digital materials.
. . . .
“I’ve never actually needed to use a physical book,” Xiao said. “I’ve never checked one out. I can’t honestly say I even know how.”
Link to the rest at the Times-Picayune and thanks to Dave for the tip.
They’ve done this with the libraries at the University of Texas too, but please note that the books haven’t been discarded or destroyed! They’ve been moved to an storage facility on a satellite campus. They’re still in the catalog. If you want one, you click Request from storage (or whatever the button says) and specify the library on the main campus where you want to pick it up. You’ll have it in one day. It’s a terrific system that accommodates all library user needs.
As a librarian, I understand the necessity of *some* weeding and of making libraries welcoming, multi-function spaces. But many people don’t seem to understand a) that a lot of weeded material is NOT available online; b) that serendipity and unknown unknowns are integral to research (you can’t request something via interlibrary loan if you don’t know it exists); and c) that not everything that is online can be found using Google.
Alas for guest researchers like Yours Truly, who is allowed to use the stacks, but not the university computer systems (guest privileges have limits, which is fine.) I go to the library to do research in the stacks and Special Collections. Granted, I am a micro-minority as a guest researcher, but putting the stacks into storage really makes life hard, or expensive, for off-campus academics and independent researchers.
My alma mater offers their alumni free access to the library’s electronic collection. I use it frequently. Since I live quite distant from the old grey halls, it is an amazing resource.
Considering the competitiveness of the last school I went to in the late 80s, it was all too often that I went to look for a book needed for my project and would find it missing– not checked out but hidden somewhere in the stacks by some delightful classmate. I love to be able to look for books electronically and I must say I like the idea of a nap pod. We used to have to sleep in the carrols.
I have always found group projects to be an incredible waste of time. In my day we called these revised “libraries” the student lounge.
Always detested “group projects” from preschool through college. The other students in any group very quickly detected that I actually cared about the quality of the final product, so they were happy to slack off while I did all of the work most of the time–but then everyone in the group got credit for what I had done. Infuriating.
And then of course in job interviews I always had to lie and say that I was, indeed, a “team player” when what I really wanted was to be given a really quiet corner somewhere away from everyone else so I could get my writing projects done well and on time.
Same here. I was a slow learner; it took more than one “project” before I caught on…
I didn’t have many of those, but the one I remember best was a history project in eighth grade that paired me with one of the toughest kids in the school. She was fascinated at how smart I was, thrilled that she got a good grade on the project, and actually did try to contribute. We became friends after that and boy, nobody bothered me for the rest of that year. 🙂
My next group projects were in college and post-college, where I lucked out and had decent people. But yeah, they can be an absolute horror.
I had a plant design professor who assigned a semester-long design project. Teams of two. He gave us one reference and a mandate to design a facility to implement the process, price it out, and evaluate its economic merit. Weekly progress reports required. It was off to the library to do research. On our time.
He made it clear that he would be grading individuals, not the teams, so he suggested making it clear who did what when. Just a suggestion.
Come semester’s end, he dished out an incomplete to one soul partnered with an extremely competent and outspoken young lady because the final report read as if she had done all the work. The victim wasn’t a slacker, just too easy going for his own good.
Group projects are a regular part of real world employment. Knowing how to navigate the dynamics is critical to a successful career.
We learned a lot of real world engineering that semester.
(He was also a stickler for proper technical writing.)
+1. When I was managing dev teams, I knew which programs in the area included realistic group projects and the training was reflected in beginning engineer performance. Team skills are usually not a deciding edge an engineer’s career, but a significant factor. Brilliant dedicated people always excel, but a solid contributor seldom loses.
It does seem to be a trend; a friend of mine who’s also a college librarian said that much the same thing is happening at his library, and most of his library’s book budget goes toward ebooks. As I noted in my coverage of the piece, libraries are gradually shifting from being places where books and magazines are to learning “sandboxes” with a variety of tools available. And to make the room for the tools, stuff like bulky paper has to go.
I guess if the purpose of the library is “provide what students need to pass their classes”, it’s easy enough to determine what needs to be made available in electronic format.
That’s not really a “library.” It’s more like a central repository for course material…
More than course material. University libraries don’t have to be limited to coursework. Or books for that matter. Many (most?) have media collections too.
But it isn’t a law of nature that knowledge needs to be stored on dead (and rotting) tree pulp. As long as the required materials are available on demand, going digital is as useful as print.
Seems to be a trend, especially in STEM, medicine, and law. There is another driving factor that is not often mentioned: paper books are expensive to process and store.
Keeping a collection that is continually pawed over by patrons in accessible order requires many hours of grueling staff time. A mis-shelved book might as well be it the trash barrel. “Shelf reading”, going over each book on a shelf, checking and correcting out of order books is mind numbing and has to be done continuously in any busy library. Returned books have to be returned to their place on the shelves. If a campus is sprawling, books often must be trucked from branch to branch. This physical fiddling is expensive. I don’t know about academic libraries, but for public libraries, these expenses can approach the cost of acquisitions to keep the collection current.
Converting open shelf stacks to study areas and going to electronic circulation makes tremendous financial sense. As an institution expands, study areas must also expand. Instead of building out new square footage, reusing space freed up by electronic access means better services to more patrons at less expense. Not surprising to see it happen.
As it will be in the future, so it was at the start of man,
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:
That the dog returns to its vomit, and the sow returns to her mire,
And the poor fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire,
And that after all this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins,
Where all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as water will wet us, and as surely as fire will burn,
The gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return!
I’m tempted to offer odds that the works of “that dead white colonialist” are not available in the online resources of this “library.”
They may not be worried about paper publications any longer, but steam from evaporating snowflakes is still not good for your electronics.
Students also need safe space to protect them against books.
Good one!
Good burn!
The exact same thing is happening to the University Library to which I go, twice a week, to write.
This is the Australian University that produced Howard Florey who, together with his team of scientists, changed the course of history when they developed penicillin into an antibiotic treatment. And now they’re getting rid of books!
Don’t get me wrong – I love e-books and electronic access to journal articles etc. However, I cannot see the academic benefits for generations to come when ‘student collaboration’ is deemed more important than keeping books in a library.
My two cents worth anyway…
I hear ya Kristian, but from what I understand the books are still available digitally.
To me, the limiting factor for a more rapid adoption of non-fiction is a combination of the devices on one hand and providers on the other.
I read and write a lot of non-fiction and would love nothing more than the Amazon to release a program similar to ibooks author for Fire tablets.
Sounds more like a student union.