The Paperless Library

The Paperless Library

A friend who used to work at one of the big research institutions back East pointed me to this article about a library without books, in the September 4, 2009 Boston Globe:

ASHBURNHAM - There are rolling hills and ivy-covered brick buildings. There are small classrooms, high-tech labs, and well-manicured fields. There’s even a clock tower with a massive bell that rings for special events.

Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks - the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

This is sad, but inevitable. There is an astonishing number of books (especially from the pre-copyright era) that are available online through books.google.com, and every time I turn around--there's more! And even more than the volume of materials available without me leaving my desk, and having to fly five hours to look at volumes on a shelf, is that I can search through millions of volumes for particular phrases or words, and find information that I might otherwise never see, because it wouldn't be obvious from the title or category that it contained information that I needed.

I am doing astonishing research for books and papers this way. My only criticism is: they haven't scanned everything in yet. Faster! And the sheer volume of volumes not yet scanned is enormous--as well as the vast quantity of documents and papers sitting in various archives that aren't likely to be scanned.

And yet: I'm reading the Harry Potter books right now for fun, and I can't imagine pleasure reading on a computer screen. It wouldn't be pleasure, but work.