7 Ways To Repurpose College Libraries Once Books Are Obsolete

In the coming weeks, tens of thousands of college students will load their families' minivans, and experience the sweltering chaos of Move-In Day. Upperclassmen in matching T-shirts will volunteer their brawn and brio, as they lug assorted trunks into teeming freshmen dorms. But this year, besides the shot glass collections, the contraband panini makers, and the bulk supplies of Vitamin Water, some of the heavy lifting will be eliminated - thanks to fewer books.

According to research from the National Association of College Stores, one quarter of all college students prefer electronic textbooks to the old-fashioned print versions. What's more, nearly 1 in 5 students made an e-book purchase last semester. Among them, 57 percent did so to obtain required course materials. And the move towards e-readers doesn't seem to be slowing down.

What then will become of college libraries? Will the shelves stay full for posterity's sake, even as virtual libraries become students' leading research destinations? Or will universities find a way to monetize all that extra space? Here are some ideas colleges might want to borrow.

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Comments

[methodman]

01:50 AM on 09/07/2011

Terse books I would rather read online anywas as I will be drawing out their diagrams and charts to learn. Imagination is what should come from good textbooks and how to scope and frame for various purposes. Books aren't dead but people know how to browse far quicker and many people recognize redundancy when they find it so we are reading a wider variety of books from different generations. I am reading two story building books, an Einstein book a photoshop book and an astronomy book.

[RogerDF]

10:13 AM on 09/06/2011

Books may become obsolete but let's not throw them away too soon. And for goodness sakes, let's keep the librarians. These good people are our best guides to credible information.

Two issues that still need to be resolved:
-- If you are doing scholarly work, it's hard to cite the internet.
-- Archival storage of digital data.

[canta2009]

03:06 PM on 08/30/2011

I am a grad student and I can say that I like using the library and internet sources in conjunction. The internet, in the form of online journals and sites like Google Books, have opened up my scholarship and made more sources available to me. But nothing can beat having a good library - with the physical books, librarians, and space devoted to studying. The world is changing and technology is altering the way that we do things but libraries have existed for thousands of year and are not going away anytime soon. The skills of a good writer and researcher cannot be replaced with any sort of technological innovation.

[El Chingaso]

05:03 AM on 08/28/2011

Funny, yet disturbing. As computers have gained a seemingly 100% foothold in U.S society, student performance (aggregate) has significantly declined and personal debt in this country has skyrocketed.

[TheJibreelaMonsters]

10:08 PM on 08/26/2011

the library is one of the best places you can find me on a Friday night

[pfenixfire]

08:35 PM on 08/25/2011

Having graduated from college last year, I can tell you that the only purposes that the library serves is a giant study room when dorms are too noisy as well as a place to meet for group projects.

For those who are social science majors, all of the academic journals are available online. Searching through these online catalogs is far more efficient and accurate than searching through the index pages physical media. Heck, when writing a paper on Eisenhower and his Middle East policies, I was able to get a dozens of government documents with "Eyes Only" stamped at the top from these data bases (to Federal agents on this site: the document were declassified). I had only needed to check out a few books throughout my tenure in college because the focus was more on primary sources rather than secondary sources, which books tend to be (well, excluding memoirs and auto biographies).

I have also been told by my younger sister, who is in high school, that the science department does not hand out science textbooks anymore because new information is coming out everyday making a physical textbook obsolete a year later. Instead, they have a subscription to an online website from the publishers that is constantly updated and provides interactive learning exercises. The economics department at my alma mater was also moving towards this type of setup. Having the interactivity makes these digital textbooks far superior to static physical textbooks.

[Greg Careaga]

12:25 AM on 08/25/2011

Scott Bennett, formerly of Yale, has been an important voice in reimagining academic libraries. His 2003 Libraries Designed for Learning (http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub122abst.html) is a worthwhile read for anyone who is seriously interested in the future of libraries. The paradigm shift in the new millennium has been away from designing buildings for collections first and toward designing for users first.

Our relevance depends on our ability to connect students with all the resources they need to discover information, synthesize it into knowledge, and craft that into new scholarship. It is about our collections but also about the technologies we offer, the expert assistance we provide, and how well our facilities support social learning.

[Marzapan]

12:41 PM on 08/21/2011

What is this garbage?

[reasonshouldrule]

08:04 PM on 08/20/2011

This proposition is a joke. Libraries will always have real books (those with covers and pages you can hold and touch), even if they also have e-information. Libraries will -- or at least should--always be relevant as repositories of the information in the world, which multiplies exponentially with every generation.

This list of what to do with libraries is irrelevant and really, a bit ridiculous.

[TheTXI]

08:46 AM on 08/26/2011

Yes. It IS a joke. It's called humor.

[Andra Claudia Garcia]

05:56 PM on 08/15/2011

this is absolutely not the case.

After working in an academic library for four years I can tell you that the library will never go out of business.

With the recession, came more studious students, realizing that harder work was needed in order to compete in today's job market.

Online books still have not caught on, and there will always be a market for textbooks and books, in print form.

[Peter Neely]

04:20 PM on 08/11/2011

Can anyone guess who hasn't been in a library since their undergrad (or earlier) days?

[Linda Ueki Absher]

03:55 PM on 08/11/2011

I think this is what social scientists have identified as "satire"....

[Clairvoyant Evangelist]

08:09 PM on 08/09/2011

Somebody's scope of knowledge appears to be severely limited.

Limited to Popular Culture, apparently.

Popular Culture they appear to perceive something of a Mighty Sun around which the Earth its way doth wend.

Products, one may imagine, of No Child Left Behind, they remain Children yet today, forward ones, forging forward, carrying banners of ignorance onto new ground.

Perhaps unaware what Universities do, in those parts where they are universities rather than welfare 'Projects' for "students" to roister and party through between sporting events that paid gladiators stage for school mascot glory and to funding to be wrung from equally ignorant alumni, where the Cabalistic Rites of Research are engaged in. Those areas they know nothing of, they having nothing to do with cribbing porous 'tests', designed to allow perennial children to carry on their grade-school begun, middle and high school accelerated, careens toward careers, in entertainment, they all anticipate, knowing nothing, yet of the Dilbert-World that is, in fact, all that the headlong flights they've been surfed along on, from passing teacher's hand to passing teacher's hand, has more-or-less prepared them, per the executive orders of George W. Bush, himself a Child Not Left Behind, when he should have been.

There are books not scanned to Google or Amazon? Manuscripts? That people study? That contain and carry cultural imprints and signatures? ...Whatever those are...

[CentralNY]

12:35 PM on 08/08/2011

I don't think the proliferation of e-books is the threat to college libraries. From my experience, the issues is the lack of studying or serious academic work that takes place in undergraduate libraries.

[armstrong st]

10:46 AM on 08/08/2011

Libraries are no longer popular among students these days because it's easier, faster and more convenient to find what you need online. It's interesting to see what will happen to the libraries within a few years. I guess some will have to close down.

Steve from www.essaytask.com

[rachydee]

01:07 AM on 08/09/2011

The vast, vast majority of College library holdings is not available on the open we, especially if you're interested in cutting-edge and/or interdisciplinary studies. Wikipedia should not be educating our future leaders. Libraries are much more than a place for books, especially at a university.

[armstrong st]

05:04 AM on 08/09/2011

I partly agree with you. Libraries at universities are necessary but I think they should be restructured somehow.

Steve from www.essaytask.com