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“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus.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dependent on the number of copies of a single title), no need for shelves, no torn or wet pages, no lost copies, no outdated copies (textbooks are outdated the moment they come out of the publisher) and nothing for the librarians to catalog and shelf.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?
