Hello and welcome to another HOT day!! It’s almost too hot to think, so this will be a short entry.
As I was trying to come up with a topic for today’s entry, I stumbled upon an interesting blog post from North York Central Library out in Ontario about E-books and Library Circulation. The blog post for June 20 indicates that that E-book access in the Toronto Public library had grown by over 400% in the last year!
That’s a pretty astounding number!
The blog also links to an article in The Star which explains how the system works in a little more detail. To summarize, using only a library card, readers download books to their e-readers, and then have them for 3 weeks. At which point the files disappear. No books to return. No late charges. From the convenience of your own home. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Library of the Future!!
However, further embedded in The Star piece is also the mention that traditional library visits were also up for the last calendar year, which presents an interesting question to me: Is the debate between Virtual or Physical spaces actually the question? The idea that each side is almost engaged in a battle to the death, may not be right. The stats seem to indicate that the future may include a library that does both Digital and Physical collections equally well, and in equally accessible ways.
But what about School libraries?
Obviously, the amount of resources at the disposal of a school librarian or district will pale in comparison to those of public libraries, at least they do at the moment. In recent years the movement away from depending, or even needing at all, school libraries has resulted in cut budgets and dwindling resources. I can speak to this, as when surveying graduate courses, I was flat out told (by and MLIS adviser no less) not to go into the teacher/librarian field, as it is a dying profession.
How then, could a school librarian find a way to make an school library both digitally available, and physically welcoming and useful? A piece by Ed Wetschler makes the case that school libraries in the future will have to be Digital realms, yet at the same time warns that there will be drawbacks to this approach, and unforeseen challenges.
But it is a choice between two divergent paths? Would schools best be served by a library that could do both, equally well?
Later this week I hope to start looking directly at technology and tablets in the school and what that could mean. But for the moment, think about our own experiences in libraries (both at school and abroad) as teachers, or just as general library users. How best could the needs of patrons, schools, students, etc be reached by a multi-media approach to library catalogs? It would be impossible to make entire collections E-book/document available, so what type(s) of material would best be served by hard-copy, and digital mediums?
Is it a simply reference works vs. novels/fiction divide, or is there something more?
Is it based on the demand for particular items? Or perhaps on cultural, educational, and intellectual weight?
These are tough question, yet important ones.
If technology allows us to carry our books, knowledge, and resources with us, then what exactly do we want to be hauling around?
Ryan
I can’t live without my e-readers (yes, readers). I have a Kindle and an iPad, and I use them both for reading. In fact, I love them both for reading in different contexts. The Kindle is great for outside and when I have lighting; the iPad is better in under controlled lighting and it allows for colour. That being said, I think it is one of the challenges faced by libraries and librarians — in fact, I think it is a challenge where they can have a big say in the outcome. Which format or formats will become standard? I think it matters. Users need to have confidence that anything they borrow from a library will play on their readers; libraries probably want to control the number of formats they support for all of the usual economic reasons.
As divided as people are between print and digital reading, I think another battlefield will be among e-reader formats.
I’ll save my comments about the elimination of school librarians for another day, but I’ll give you the punch line here. I’ve been hearing about the demise of school librarians and media personnel for years, and I’ve even lived through periods of cutback where these positions were targeted. They’re still here, and some that were eliminated have been resurrected, and they seem to be pretty healthy to me.
I want to be hauling around books!! You don’t get the same experience with an e-reader. I can definitely understand the wonderful ease of getting out books electronically and the lack of late fees would be quite nice, but I am very stubborn and I love browsing the rows and rows of physical books for the ones that I want to read for entertainment. Browsing online for books (on Amazon or places like that) just doesn’t have the same homey feel to it.
Here, here!! Reading on-line gives me a headache. There is much more of a sense of accomplishment when you are turning pages than merely clicking a scroll bar. Plus you never have to worry about your computer crashing and deleting your e-texts if you have them in paper format.
The whole e-books vs real books thing reminded me of a bit from a show I love. The episode had a good deal to do about books being moved into computers and it was a running joke that the stuffy, british librarian held nothing but contempt towards the machines. At the very end, he’s confronted about it, and he gives a surprisingly touching scene on his loves of books. He doesn’t like reading from computers because they lack texture. They lack the feel, weight, and smell of books. Those all deliver memory triggers, and for him, the lack of texture leaves the knowledge gained from a computer as fleeting.
I can’t say how well that’d hold up for all people, but personally speaking I find there’s some truth to it. I definitely retain knowledge better from physical textbooks than online textbooks. When I need to return to some information I learned from a textbook, I have no trouble going to my shelf of textbooks and finding the one I had used as well as its general location in the textbook. When it comes to online material, I’m lucky if I can recall just the specific textbook I had read from.
Similarly, when wanting to reread a specific scene from a novel, I usually find it by the ‘feel’, flipping rapidly through the pages of the book to the general area I remembered reading it from. I don’t think that’s something that will ever be properly replicated in e-readers and the like, and there’s only so far a word find can go.
Even in a library, finding a particular book leaves a much larger impression than simply grabbing it online. How many memories do you have of being at the library and finding a useful or entertaining book? How many memories do you have of encountering a book through a search engine?
One amusing thing that came from my search for the quote from the show that got me talking- there’s a site that actually sells aerosal ‘book smell’ for use on e-readers. A grand total of five designer aromas. Somehow, I don’t see that working out the way one might hope.
I’ve got to get some of that spray. I have a romantic attachment to printed books too. But my little love affair with e-readers is growing quickly.