“I have a feeling that I am crankier about this than the average person, most likely because I’ve spent the past few months looking for books and periodicals in libraries which have all been sent offsite. And so I’ve spent far more time this year talking with librarians than I have in previous years. This has led to a startling discovery, which is that I know very little about both libraries and librarians.”
So says Ammon Shea, who spent a year of his life reading the OED and has published a book so named.
Consortial uber-libraries?
Back in the day, I used to use the Boston Public Library – the main Branch mostly. If I could not find something there, it was usually available in another branch that I could visit and get the material if I didn’t want to wait for ILL.
Maybe now is the time for consortial uber-libraries that function as a repository for books that are shipped out, but at the same time materials can be checked out. Since consortia are regional, it would be fairly easy for people to drive to them. Perhaps for the inconvenience of having to go there, you can get a longer loan period compared to your home library
books and periodicals in libraries which have all been sent offs
With many materials being made available via database and those being kept up-to-date, we no longer have use for many reference books or past issues of periodicals. There are also the issues of storage space, amount of usage, and preservation costs.
We pay a hefty price for our database subscriptions, and the items therein are available for free download or printing to our customers.
So, in the Library 2.0 mentality it seems to make sense to digitize much of a collection that is not used by the majority of our customers on a daily basis.
>^..^<
database subscriptions don’t have it all
If you are doing historical research, the paper based periodical (not the scholarly kind) is actually more valuable. Yes the content is available digitally, but there is a lot of content that is not. For example you won’t get the ads in online databases. When I was doing a project for one of my marketing courses I needed to go back to periodicals from the 90s to see trends in advertising and get ads that were not available in databases.
I am all for digitization, as long as the digitized version is true to the authentic artifact. Currently, this is not the case.