--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John McMahon <mcmahon(a)lemoyne.edu>
Date: Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:41 AM
IHE 2/10/10:
"E-Library Economics"
"Suzanne Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University talked the talk in
November at Educause, urging a crowd of university librarians to ³move on to
a new concept of what the university library is² ‹ in her view, a place with
fewer books and more space for students to sit around and access library
resources on their laptops. But when Thorin tried to walk the walk a week
later, she found her path obstructed by hundreds of outraged students and
professors who chafed at her plan to ship many volumes to remote storage.
Thorin might have been visionary in her plan to relieve the library of some
of its print collection in an effort to cut library costs, but she was naïve
if she thought it wouldn¹t meet with resistance on campus. So suggest two
studies, slated to be published this spring by the Council on Library and
Information Resources <http://www.clir.org/> , examining the implications of
the much-ballyhooed shift to digital library collections.
The first, by Paul Courant, dean of libraries at the University of Michigan,
and Matthew 'Buzzy' Nielsen, an Oregon-based library economist, meticulously
compares the costs of keeping bound books on the shelves versus the costs of
warehousing print collections and focusing on delivering library resources
in electronic form. The second, by Geneva Henry and Lisa Spiro of Rice
University¹s Digital Media Center, explores several campus-based efforts to
build new libraries oriented to the digital future.
Taken together, these studies point to twin conclusions: The sooner
professors and students embrace e-books, the sooner their libraries can
start saving money -- but that might not happen for a while."
More:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/10/libraries
JMM / LMC
===================================
June Samaras
KALAMOS BOOKS
(For Books about Greece)
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : kalamosbooks(a)gmail.com
www.kalamosbooks.com