Cushing Academy of Massachussetts, USA, just did what others can’t do, i.e., remove all dead-tree books and replace it with its digital version. In a Boston.com article, the school reportedly gave away more than half of its 20,000 books collection (while discarding the rest).

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus.

Flickr image courtesy of Ange Soleil

Personally, here’s how I see it. There is a city library that houses all the collections, in both dead tree and digital. School libraries, on the other hand, house textbooks in digital format. Or maybe, like the case for my university, the University library housing the dead-tree collections and college libraries providing the digital versions of textbooks. The main argument is that e-books and electronic journals are expensive. Whilst they are expensive, I think it is well worth the investment. More students can use it (not dependent on the number of copies of a single title), no need for shelves, no torn or wet pages, no lost copies, no outdated copies (textbooks are outdated the moment they come out of the publisher) and nothing for the librarians to catalog and shelf. Downside for the library, no more fines! And oh, library space can be retrofitted with sound-proof areas for discussions, podcasting, video-recording and for reading (of course!). Computers can be provided but with netbooks dramatically dropping in price, all students will be able to afford in 2-3 years.

So what happens to the librarians?

With books being converted into bits and bytes, what will happen to the libraries? This is the question that has been in my mind for quite some time now. The last time I went to the library was a few weeks ago, to select books as references for Computer Science. However, this is only because the funds for books are available and cannot be used for other things, except buy books.

Today, I rarely go to the library for books. All information that I need are available online — more updated than the books in the library. When a book gets published, specially when it is technical/scientific, the moment it goes to press, the information is outdated already. Take a few more months for it to arrive in the country, and by the time it gets to the library, the information is already stale. There are exceptions to this, of course, but generally, the information is old.

The library is evolving, too. Libraries subscribe to electronic journals and this, I think, is the only thing worth going to the library for. However, with journal subscriptions being university wide, one can access the journals via any computer connected to the university network — so what is the point of having a library then? Maybe it will evolve into an internet cafe, where students and faculty can search, download and print journal articles whilst sipping a cup of espresso. Frankly, if my university library becomes something like this, I will be a frequent visitor. However, at the moment, I do not see the need to go to the library. [and yes, I know that not everyone has a computer but it will not take long before each student gets hold of an affordable netbook]

Electronic books, electronic textbooks, audiobooks and other digitized materials can easily be stored in the cloud. So, if this is the future, what will be in the library except for the old and rare books collection?

Anyway, I like to hear from you — let me know what you think will the library look like in the future.

Image courtesy of blisspix@Flickr