Electronic libraries. and paperless office

[Sheryl Dwinell]

Maybe it's a mental block, but I just can't imagine a paperless library,
even if the bulk of the materials to which we provided access were
available online. Go into your reference departments and look at the amount
of printing that students do. They print out pages and pages of web sites
and full-text articles. With the advent of online access to full-text
databases has anyone seen the amount of paper use actually go down in their
library? Maybe it's happened in other places, but here it's gone up
incredibly. They're pretty much doing what they'd do with the actual
physical journal, instead of photocopying, they're printing out the
full-text doc. Plus, you'd need to find some alternate method of document
delivery...floppy disks, email delivery? 

This is not 
>about to happen in the next ten years.  Library schools are still 
>teaching collection development classes!

What's wrong with teaching collection development? Don't you need to take
into consideration the needs of your community of patrons when selecting
electronic resources? You aren't going to have access to every digital item
in creation so you'll have to make choices. How do you make those choices
intelligently unless you have some sort of collection development policy?
The theory behind collection development is what's important, not the
physical manifestation of the items acquired or acessed by the library.
Besides, it's going to be decades before most librarians work in a library
that is totally digital, and librarians graduating now and in the years to
come will be buying thousands, if not millions, of books.

A side rant: In this headlong rush into all things digital, it almost seems
like one is considered a luddite for having an appreciation for books.
There are plenty of people (including a huge chunk of our uers) who despise
having to read things off a computer screen. Even if they made the best,
non-eye straining portable device for reading electronic text, I'd really
miss books.  Maybe the children to be born in the next millenium will be
less drawn to books than folks alive now, who knows. Maybe I'm being overly
sentimental about the appeal of the physical entity.  Digital resources are
great, but do we have to view books with such disdain in order to usher in
the digital age?

Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu