"Library? Schmibrary! Books? Schmooks!" -- Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books. -- David Abel reports in the Boston Globe (500 comments)
PHOTO CAPTION: "Omigod! What have I done? I am the Devil Incarnate!"
Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/04/a_library_without_the_books/?page=2
by David Abel
BOSTON GLOBE
we have seen the future and it does not work. but here it is. take a look.
and read all 450 comments in the Globe website. AMAZING response!
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus.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 traditional library with 20,000 books, we’re building a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books,’’ said Tracy, whose office shelves remain lined with books. “We see this as a model for the 21st-century school.’’
Liz Vezina, a librarian at Cushing for 17 years, said she never imagined working as the director of a library without any books.
“It makes me sad,’’ said Vezina, who hosts a book club on campus dubbed the Off-line Readers and has made a career of introducing students to books. “I’m going to miss them. I love books. I’ve grown up with them, and there’s something lost when they’re virtual. There’s a sensual side to them - the smell, the feel, the physicality of a book is something really special.’’
“We see the gain as greater than the loss,’’ said Gisele Zangari, chairwoman of the math department, who like other teachers has plans for all her students to do their class reading on electronic books by next year. “This is the start of a new era.’’
William Powers, author of a forthcoming book -- due out in 2010 -- based on a paper he published at Harvard called “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal,’’ called the changes at Cushing “radical’’ and “a tremendous loss for students.’’
“There are modes of learning and thinking that at the moment are only available from actual books,’’ he said. “There is a kind of deep-dive, meditative reading that’s almost impossible to do on a screen. Without books, students are more likely to do the grazing or quick reading that screens enable, rather than be by themselves with the author’s ideas.’’
posted by dan at 6:43 AM
10 Comments:
Then there's the problem of reading from a laptop screen for long stretches. You usually look down at a book, a more natural thing IMO, rather than looking out at a screen. You can lay the book on the table and cup your head in your hands. You can put the book in your lap. You can read the book in bed with a pillow under your chest, or lie on your back and hold it over your head. You can read a book in countless positions -- when you get tired of one position, you can try another. You can even take a book to the bathroom and hold it open with one hand. A computer is good for a lot of things, but for long reading sessions it's not.
reading from a screen is tiring and encourages scanning not reading. I have seen a number of studies about this.
...when I was a student I got many paper ideas by wandering in the stacks and looking at book titles. This is not possible with computers.
I am horrified. Now, I may be 65 but I am not someone from neanderthal age. I have embraced the digital age but there is really nothing to replace a book. Maybe a Kindle or one of its competitors but that is merely a different way of reading a book. The internet is great for a lot of things but who could ever read War and Peace on a screen? How many poems that were in that library can be found online? The time may come when everything to be found in a library can be found online but that is a long ways off. Keep the books.
Books are more portable in some ways, and reading off a screen for long periods is bad for youe health...reading a book isnt as bad on your eyes, or back for that matter.....This move I think is very mis-guided.
I'm sure that digital books are future, and that this is the way learning is going to go. I didn't think the technology was there to do this yet. Still don't. There are a lot of books -- especially texts -- not available to the Amazon and Sony readers yet. But, sad to say, books are going ther way of adding machines and newspapers.
derryjmw wrote:
I wouldn't want my child at that school...books=learning plain and simple. The school will get a lot of attention, but I doubt any of it will be positive. What a shame.
Visiting a library is a visceral experience and one that adds to the very nature and texture of being human. There is an indefinable smell of old books, the texture of the pages, wondering who may have read the book before you picked it up. Ridding a library of its books is yet another step in society's slow death march toward not talking or speaking or communicating with another living being. Continuing on this path, we will all be stuck behind our computers, never needing to leave the four walls that surround us, and forgetting how to talk with anyone else. I predict that many years beyond our lives on this earth, some "forward thinking" person of the time will "invent" a building which houses these things you hold in your hands that have words, and illustrations, and stories, and histories recorded on pieces of paper bound together inside a cover.
momshieb wrote:
I love books, I love libraries, I love the dusty smell and the feel of paper under my fingertips. I love nothing better than to curl up on a cold night, under a blanket, with a great book. But that doesn't mean that I can't see any other way of gaining knowledge or doing research. I Support Cushing in its attempt to step into the future. I don't believe that the school is attempting to prevent kids from reading books on the beach, it is simply attempting to teach them how to access knowledge in new ways. Electronic information is clearly the educational wave of the future and it would be pointless to try to stop it. I hope that public schools can one day follow in this path; however, the price tags attached seem to make that unlikely.
This will come back to bite the headmaster, I believe. Browsing through books is one of the best ways to fire up your imagination, connect ideas through the curriculum, and appreciate fine art, words, and thought. Kindle isn't the same, and reading online is hard on the eyes. Yikes!
Notice the headmaster is scratching his head in the Globe photo. MAYBE HE IS THINKING: "omigod, what have I done!"
maybe the body language shows that he regrets what he has ordered....
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