Books

Are Academic Libraries Ready For Kids Who Read?

Uh oh. Now that we’ve dumped all our books and installed wireless everywhere, it turns out that kids read! Call them the generation born with Harry Potter in their head. Is your library ready and do your librarians have the skills to deal with them?

“Kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before,” said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. “And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven’t seen since the 1940s.”
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All of which leads Cart to declare, “We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”

OA Made Simple . . . and Not So Simple

Want a quick way to explain open access to your faculty and students? This article from Auntie Beeb can help. It’s short and to the point.

A tad more complex (and required reading for academic librarians) is the statement on open access from the Association of American University Presses. The idea of taking pricey for-profit publishers out of the loop that produces new knowledge (through often publicly-funded research) and makes it publicly available (through often publicly-funded library collections) is easier to grasp than when open access risks dismantling a disinterested and public effort to select, edit, design, market, and promote the fruits of scholarship – which is what university presses do. They add value, but they’re forced more and more to turn to the commercial publishing sector for business models.

Here’s a simple fact: university presses are not like Random House. Like libraries, they are not profit centers. They are cost centers. And they need support, because university presses are a necessary part of bringing scholarly work to the public, for the public. Faculty depend on them. Libraries need them. And so does the public.

So here’s our homework for today:

Any decision to switch from a market to a gift economy requires very careful thought and planning. The AAUP and its member presses welcome the opportunity to collaborate with university administrators, librarians, and faculty in designing new publishing models, mindful that it is important to protect what is most valuable about the existing system, which has served the scholarly community and the general public so well for over a century, while undertaking reforms to make the system work better for everyone in the future.

This is a group assignment. Each member of the group must contribute equally. It’s worth 100% of the grade.

Library Porn And The Inevitable Future?

The pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton has written another personal essay for the Chronicle about books and libraries, this one titled Red-Hot Library Porn. Benton, an associate professor of English, reminds us that academic library users also include non-millenials who get their jollies more from dusty old tomes than the latest electronic gadgets. After a literate review of some sumptuous sounding books about the world’s grand libraries, Benton goes all inevitable on us and indulges in the idea that the inevitable future is one of libraries without books.

In 20 years, college students will regard books the way they now regard 33 RPM records: a quaint technology, warmer perhaps, but ultimately the province of musty antiquarians.

Although I forgive Benton, most of us know that to casually toss off the idea that technology will soon render books obsolete is a simple mistake that is made over and over again by people who focus solely on technology but ignore the economic and social systems in which books are embedded. As Priscilla Murphy, who traces this thinking back to 1894, puts it in Books Are Dead, Long Live Books:

Looking at the technological possibilities is not the same as identifying corporate priorities, school board politics, teenagers’ habits, or advertisers whims. Books are, finally, intricately interrelated to the rest of the media system – economically, socially, intellectually, even symbolically; and those who have envisioned or feared their wholesale removal from the system have generally underestimated that involvement.

And yet. And yet, after ten or twenty years of the Google Library Project, will academic library interiors indeed begin to resemble minimalist art installations, as Benton suggests?

I taught a library session recently for a class on American Empire in Latin America. A student wanted to research the history of tourism, specifically the history of cruises. I did a search in Google books on “crusing history” and partly by accident stumbled upon an 1895 imprint of Cruising among the Caribees from Stanford University Libraries. Compared to NetLibary or Gutenberg electronic books, this digitized book is very easy to read and “navigate.” The digitization includes the cover and the giftbook plate. Chapter 3 includes information about the cruise ship: its name, its history, and the company that ran it, all nice little leads for a student beginning research and inquiry into the cruise industry and how it fit into the global economy of the early 1900s:

The steamship Madiana lay wrapped in a fleecy mantle beside the wharf. She is large and handsome, a powerful and well-appointed vessel of 3,050 tons, orginally built for English service to the Cape of Good Hope and specially adapted for cruising in hot latitudes. In 1893 she was refitted for the service of the Quebec Steamship Company between New York and the Windward Islands. What tales these ships could tell!

What tales indeed. And now you don’t have to be at Stanford to read about them. Perhaps this is the great promise of the Google Library Project, and the promise that the academic library of the future, although holding fewer physical volumes, will not be souless after all.