Creating Significant Learning Environments
Key findings from the report include:
Leading-edge librarians and patrons say that the advent of e-books has produced a major transformation in book searching and borrowing at libraries.
- Book-borrowing habits are changing
- Library holdings are changing
- Librarians’ roles are changing.
Major Medical Library Closing Its Doors to Patrons and Moving to Digital Model — The Digital Shift via kwout
When you have only 100 people per day entering your physical library and checking out an average total of only 40 books per day but have have 35,000 daily digital downloads of articles it only makes sense to close your physical doors — even if you are the world renowned William H. Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University.
By January 1, 2012, the John Hopkins Medical library will close its doors. The library already commits 95% of it’s acquisitions budget to electronic journals and databases so the closure was inevitable. If you really think about this, wouldn’t you rather have your Doctor, a scientist or a Medical researcher spending their time searching the data on their iPad than walking the stacks.
When the best of the best are going completely digital can the rest of the library world be that far behind?
Video-Game Rooms Become the Newest Library Space Invaders – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Looks like my colleagues up in Canada are once again at the cutting edge of innovation. The University of Calgary is adding a gaming space as part of their $175 million dollar Taylor Family Digital Library. Gaming spaces like these aren’t examples of pandering to students but are generally connected to a gaming programming program or other digital media activities that require students to understand and explore the history of gaming. It is good to see the foresight from institutions like U of C and many others in the US and Canada who are recognizing that gaming is a significant part of our culture that will be studied like everything else.
Amazon to Introduce Library Lending for Kindle – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
This is a start. It will be interesting to see how preserving the annotations will work out. Lets hope that starts us on the journey of making all books available in a digital format.
Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
The title Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library is so appropriate that I simply had to repeat the Chronicle of Higher Education commentary post. Brian T. Sullivan is an instructional librarian at Alfred University and suggests that the Academic library has died and the autopsy report reveals the following factors that contributed to its death:
Sulivan expands on these 6 points in the article. He also offers the following summary statement which is a very hard pill to swallow and even though Sullivan is an instructional librarian I am sure he has angered many of his professional peers:
…it is entirely possible that the life of the academic library could have been spared if the last generation of librarians had spent more time plotting a realistic path to the future and less time chasing outdated trends while mindlessly spouting mantras like “There will always be books and libraries” and “People will always need librarians to show them how to use information.”
PLEASE remember I am simply repeating what this library professional has written about.
