Cross Books Off the Back To School List
September 19, 2014
No more pencils, no more books, no more…wait! No more books? According to an io9 article, “The First College In The US To Open Without Any Books In Its Library” dead tree items might be a thing of the past at least for one university. Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland recently opened with 550 students as part of its first class. The brand new campus has the usual campus buildings, including a library. The library, though, is different from your typical archive of knowledge: it is the nations first all digital library collection.
All of the books in the library are available via software that allows the students to download ebooks and what we can assume access to academic databases. An even bigger change is that librarians will not man the reference desk, because its name has been switched to the “success desk.” Librarians will instead be train students on information literacy and how to access electronic resources. Students will still be able to access books via interlibrary loan from other universities. They will also be able to decide how Florida Polytechnic spends its $60,000 library budget.
These are some good ideas in theory, but the technology is not up to being a free and browseable collection:
“Defenders of brick-and-mortar bookstores have argued the opposite, saying that the experience of wandering among bookshelves inspires serendipitous discoveries, while searching a database yields only the exact results you set out to find. While you can find related books in a database, it is unlikely you’ll stumble across an unrelated but helpful book while searching for another one by title.”
In most cases, students are also limited to how many times the can download and read an ebook. Digital licenses can track that kind of usage, so how long will some of these ideas last?
Whitney Grace, September 19, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
One Response to “Cross Books Off the Back To School List”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] cross books – orderofbooks., This is the order of alex cross books in both chronological order and publication order. […]