It is going to take some time to get used to this.

Having lost an eye in recent times, reading stuff on-line is much easier for me than most print and so I read very little print any more.  Obviously copying and pasting and following interesting links/lines of enquiry is also much easier on-line.  I would be an advocate of giving every school kid a laptop and digitising a lot of course materials but that is largely because teaching is of such variable quality and invariable aimed at some notional average or lowest common denominator which rarely suits most people.

Having said all that, I think the school library is still one of a school's most important resources and a love of books is a quite distinct accomplishment to doing on-line research/learning.  There is an unavoidable social aspect to learning and creating a learning environment and a physical book is still something to be cherished.  Bizarrely, it is still one of my life's ambitions to write a book even though I now rarely read them from cover to cover.


notes from no w here

A library without the books - The Boston Globe

"...A lot us are wondering how this changes the dignity of the library, and why we can't move to increase digital resources while keeping the books."

...administrators said the books took up too much space and that there was nowhere else on campus to stock them.

(above) 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.

And to replace those old pulpy devices that have transmitted information since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1400s, they have spent $10,000 to buy 18 electronic readers made by Amazon.com and Sony.

They needed the space, y'understand. Eighteen students at most will be able to read books they chose themselves. But there's this side to it:

"When you hear the word `library,' you think of books,'' Alliy said. "But very few students actually read them."

At a rough guess, this change isn't going to get them reading any more than before.

European Tribune - Aaaaahhhhhhhhh!! I'm sorry this is my first diary.

card catalogs (wooden drawers, 3x5 cards)

How well I remember - that was the modern, new-fangled system at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. At one time as a grad student I was employed ordering up from the stacks original seventeenth-century broadsheets and tracts for a researcher. The only available catalogues were handwritten in great leatherbound tomes made in the nineteenth century. The pages had been cut out of older catalogues and pasted into the new. The handwriting was eighteenth-century. I spent so much time examining and reading the catalogues that I, er, was slightly remiss in ordering stuff for the researcher. Oh well.

But that was yesterday, and I am (obviously) a three-centuries-old vampire.
 

I can't find it, but we've had this argument before.  So not going through this again...

Someone have a link to that discussion?  Mig?

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

Well, I'm going to still keep my books and I have no plans to buy a digital reader. I think Frank got this right when he commented that "the real agenda to provide a recreational area for rich kids".

Since they are not reading anyways, why have books? Since we seem in many ways to be headed back to a new feudal age, why even teach reading? An illiterate population is easier to control than a literate one. An illiterate ruler can be controlled by the literate church.

Reading is thinking. America, at least, does not seem to want thinkers. Rather, my country wants consumers — consumers of digital media.

In a current library journal, not sure which one, D.J. Hoek, Head of the Music Library at Northwestern University, discusses how music is becoming unavailable to library patrons because iTunes and other electronic distribution mechanisms explicitly only allows the final end-user to download music. He writes that now music is becoming legally unavailable to both libraries and archives.

The written word, it would seem, will disappear too behind a corporate curtain too. Consume forever.

I used to know someone who offered an up-market interior design service. She would literally buy books by the yard at auctions - grabbing whatever rubbish was going, as long as it was old and leather-bound, because it looked like a library to her City clients.

She had a few yards in her own house. The historical fact of holding a two hundred year old title was interesting, the content often less so.

I have way, way too many paper books in the house. I have way, way too many books on hard disk too, but they don't take up nearly as much space, which makes them easier to live with.

I also have a 30" monitor, and it's easier to read books on a big display than it is to read them in print.

Publishing has already become MBA-ised over the last couple of decades, so exotic or creative work is getting much less shelf space than it used to.

However, there are sites that promote - and pay for - new writing online, and I suspect we'll be seeing more of those in the future, perhaps linked to blogs and forums. So the idea of a 'book' is going to fade, and be replaced by more amorphous writing.

Cushing Academy, which is not by the way one of the top-tier prep schools in New England, costs close to US$50,000 for your child to attend as a boarding student, for one year: http://www.cushing.org/admission/tuition.shtml.

This is so depressing I don't know what to think about it.

I would not get too upset until Phillips Academy library decides to dump its books. After all, that's where our political power structure starts...

"The Oliver Wendell Holmes library was built in 1929 and thoroughly renovated in 1987... The library offers students an in-house collection of more than 120,000 fiction and non-fiction books... The Garver Reference Room is home to the OWHL's extraordinary 6,500 volume print reference collection. Included are specialized dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases, as well as biographical, statistical and indexing resources, both current and historical..."
http://www.andover.edu/library/About/Pages/default.aspx

What are these "libraries" you guys keep talking about?

(I keed, I keed.)

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

But books can be used for so much more than a Kindle....

given the money the school has available, the sapce argument is unconvincing. But it does beg the question about school libraries. My school was a very good one, still features in the top 10 in the country by results, but the library was a total waste of time and this was the 70s when people still read books. The books were out of date and largely irrelevant. If you wanted to access a book you went to the public library down the road.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Come to think of it, my school never had a library. But then all the parents were academics, doctors, lawyers, etc (As the headmaster proudly said, when my eldest brother got onto that school) and so it was probably assumed, that the kids got enough books at home.

is easier that way!
In my youth even twenty years ago some brilliant scientist posted ads touting plans for such unknown(at that time) devices like the tazer and ultrasonic pain inducing devices which are of course now the weapons of choice for crowd control at G20 and Bilderberg meetings.