Paperless Library, Paperless School

[gary]

An article from Wired News that might be of interest. 


Title: "Who Needs Paper? Not Iowa College" 
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,53747,00.html

>From the article, 
"Students at an Iowa college can forget the quintessential experience of pulling 
all-nighters at the library poring over stacks of books. For one thing, there's 
no library. For another, there are no books. The Des Moines Area Community 
College's West Des Moines campus is the newest of the college's six branches. It 
opened last fall with the mission to collaborate with companies to beta test 
education technologies. Instead of a library, the school has a resource center 
equipped with computer workstations that can access the Web, e-books and online 
journals. The resource center also houses several meeting tables, audio-visual 
materials and a few paper magazines -- but no books."
---

"The school plans to be an entirely paper-free campus. Last year, about 75 
telecommunications students participated in a pilot program to go paperless. Each 
student used a Compaq iPaq handheld to access e-textbooks, syllabi and class 
materials, and to take notes and exams."
---
"Electronics are perfect for journals if you are looking for a tiny piece of 
information, like a paragraph or a few pages," said Bill Crumlish, library 
director at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. "But when you have a topic that 
requires 300 pages to develop an argument or provide a history, books are the 
perfect container for something that requires that depth of exposition."




cheers,
gary 



-- 

Gary D. Price, MLIS
Librarian
Gary Price Library Research and Internet Consulting
gary at freepint.com

The Virtual Acquisition Shelf and News Desk 
http://resourceshelf.freepint.com