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?
