By Kristin
I like to poke around on the New York Times website. Mostly I like to read about food, as in the article I mention in my previous post. For those of you who also like to read about food – good food, not junk food and obese kids – let me steer you towards this lovely piece on Thomas Keller and the meal he served his father right before his father died. But my post today is not about barbeque chicken. It's about books, and how the school libraries of the future may not have as many of them as they do now.
Today as I was poking around during lunch, enjoying the world the internet brings to my face and fingertips, I came across this piece in the New York Times about schools eliminating books in their libraries. Books are heavy, expensive, and they're quickly outdated when you want them to be meaningful reference materials. Just because I love books doesn't mean libraries have to be filled with them, right? Anyway, I get most of my news online. I'm writing online now. Online is efficient and free! Who needs books?
Bibliophile that I am, I have to say – apologetically, because I know it's a heated issue – that I tend to agree with the move to put a library's scant financial resources in the digital direction. Why? Because that companionable, mobile and hefty copy of Grapes of Wrath can sit on the shelf for a hundred years or more, but the part of the library that needs to change can no longer change fast enough if it's paper. In the opinion piece, James Tracy mentions the "academic library" and the editors mention the idea of "traditional libraries" in schools. These are important points, and satisfy both the teacher and reader in me.
First, I like the idea that "traditional libraries" are seen as different from "academic libraries." Schools need to provide academic libraries where students can find information about the world they live in. The world my grandmother lived in can be found on the shelf, in a book that will last as long as Steinbeck's. Today's world is immediate, changing, and available online. My students need to be able to research what's happening in the Republic of Zimbabwe today as well as what happened in Rhodesia in the sixties. Frankly, I'd rather they know what's happening today, but my students can learn about that only on the internet and my school has 60 computers for 1,200 kids. I'd rather my librarian put money towards another computer lab than an updated set of encyclopedias.
Literature? Sure. I want my students to read - to know the pleasures of curling up with a good book, a comfortable chair, and a quiet corner. I want school libraries to continue to offer literature, but that's not the biggest part of their budget – reference materials are. I'd like to see the reference-material money spent on digital access.
What are your thoughts on school libraries putting their limited resources of space and money towards the digital world?
I too loved wandering the stacks at Suzzallo, and I think card catalogs are a fantastic way to research. One card is stored with twenty others that match your topic. I can still smell it all.
But, as you’ve all pointed out, it’s not practical for smaller libraries to stay current and provide the kind of storage space Suzzallo has down in its bowels, where the ceilings are 6′ high and stuff is packed in there.
Tom, I’m impressed you can read novels on your iPhone. That’s a lot of next-paging! I’m not even to the kindle yet – my mom has one and I struggle to get engrossed.
I like the idea of balance.
I’m for both. I read all my news on-line, and I read all my novels on my iPhone. But I love paper magazines. In my classroom my reading program consists of moving my three groups of students through three 20-minute sections: guided reading with me, using real books; leveled reading on computers at Raz-kids.com; and silent reading with self-selected books. Balance is good, and ereading is here to stay.
My best memories of being a student at the University of Washington are the hours I spent scouring the science stacks in Suzzallo library for research on some topic, and getting dragged farther and farther back in time, searching out cited papers. Science was in the basement, and it felt like the catacombs down there. I would lose all track of time (and what my original purpose was) as I was pulled farther and farther into the history of the research. It’s too damn easy with Google. So I’m always going to love print on paper, and libraries.
But I was recently cruising the App Store and found field guides for birds, and flowers, and trees,… All that in my iPod is pretty cool!
And I have a collection of vinyl records boxed up in my garage, but I miss changing records, and having to listen to a whole side and then turn it over about as much as I miss walking across the room to change the station on my television set. (I realize at least half of you are saying: What’s he talking about???)
I’m sure paper books will survive, because the batteries never run down. But I think my library should go digital.
I’m for it as well. It is realism. When our students move on to the next level, whether it be work or college, they will need to know how to intelligently navigate the web and electronic databases. Critical literacy is still being fostered… and we’re not just talking a bunch of computers with Google as their homepage, we’re talking using Litfinder, SIRS, EBSCO, and the many, many other useful educational databases IN ADDITION to teaching them how to be smart users of the free web.
I’m even for e-books, to an extent. The experience of holding a book may go the way of our great-grandparents who decried television because it created a different experience than radio.