Article based on the session: Are books still needed in K-12 libraries
I was quite taken aback this spring when I read about the decision of Wellington College, an independent school in Surrey, to remove most of the print books in their library and replace them with e-resources. Are they mad, I have to admit wondering. Was I willing to do this in my secondary library? Was it even appropriate or necessary? Too busy to really think it through, I put the issue out of mind, until I went to the ALA's conference in New Orleans. One of the workshops was entitled "Are Books Still Needed in K-12 Libraries" and I decided that this would be a good opportunity to confront the issue and my preconceptions.
I went to the session not sure what to expect. Moreover, I couldn't help wondering what other librarians might think of the idea of doing away with their print collections. I felt that most would be as reluctant as I was and the side conversations before the start and even after the presentations, proved me right. However, I can't say that I didn't change my mind on certain aspects of the issue. In fact I had the opportunity to think through the various options for my library and to form a clearer idea of the needs of my users.
I was already aware that my student users look for digital solutions to their information needs and only consult print format sources, such as books, if compelled to do so or if they have exhausted other sources and are pointed in that direction by the library staff or teachers. This raised a number of questions.
1. Is it inevitable that students will gravitate to digital sources and rarely consult print format sources?
2. Are students more likely to consult book sources in their digital format?
3. Or, if as I suspect, are students averse to the perceived length and complex nature of the material in either format of books?
As with my third question, I have my suspicions about the answers to the others based on anecdotal evidence and observation of my library users. My conclusions are that my students want quick solutions to their information needs. Thus they perceive digital sources found through a search engine on the Internet to be easier and quicker to access. One of the obvious conclusions coming from this is that both teachers and librarians need to find ways to demonstrate to our students that finding the most appropriate sources for an information need may require hard work. Furthermore, we need to demonstrate that there are times when the appropriate source is a print or an e-book.
Having formed this conclusion, I tried it out on a librarian from a local 6th form college. Her experience surprised me. She said that her students do not have the skills to effectively search the internet for resources and rely on her book collection for their information. I wondered if her observations were correct, and if so, they demonstrated to me the obvious, that different users have different abilities and therefore different needs.
As with all my internal conversations, I have continued over the last few months to muse on the questions I posed myself. Then by chance or serendipity I came across The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember by Nicholas Carr (Atlantic, 2010). It had been sitting on my shelves over the summer waiting to be processed when I came across it while looking for something to read at the doctor's office. I suffered one of those light bulb moments.
Nicholas Carr proposes to his readers that the Internet is rewiring our brains and that as a result there have been profound changes to the ways in which we communicate, socialize and engage with the world around us. Of most relevance to my role as a librarian is the observation by many people he interviewed that they can no longer read long passages of text without becoming distracted. The way they read has fundamentally changed. They skim, they scroll, they flit from one thing to another and when they try to read longer, more complex material they become bored.
The 2008 study by eGenera on the effects of the internet on the young reveals that they don't necessarily read a page from left to right or from the top to the bottom. Instead they skim for information or something of interest. (Carr, 2010) If I am right in the conclusions I am drawing from this, readers who use the Internet regularly will read both print and on screen material in a fundamentally different way than they have in the past before the coming of the Internet. Therefore, the way in which I, as a librarian and teacher, organize and present information, and the types of information I make available must also be different. Thus, the new questions I have for myself are:
are my conclusions correct and what changes should I be making if they are?
