07 November 2010

Bookless Libraries ~ Digital Shift for the Academy

Sam Allis of the Globe writes about the Digital Shift that Cushing Academy has made in going bookless in their Fisher-Watkins library!
"Until 2009, the library at Cushing Academy, a small, co-ed private boarding school, looked like any other school library: a crowded space packed with dark canyons of books. It was, says headmaster James Tracy, the least used building on campus. Then, a little over a year ago, Cushing got rid of almost all of its 20,000 books in a radical shift to create a digital library. The goal was to liberate students from stacks full of outdated reference material and mold them into online artistes adept at pursuing research through mastery of databases -- information literacy, in short. To some, the change was a smart step into the digital reality of the 21st century. Others were appalled."
Great! It's high time we appreciate that librarians are really about learning, knowledge, judgment, and research and therefore libraries are not merely storage facilities for dead wood pulp media! Modernize!

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