We turned our tables into a square to facilitate discussion better, and Kristin practiced what she preached by sitting down with us. She has us each reread the article, and then discuss it for a few minutes with a partner, and write down a question we each came up with on an index card. Then someone started the conversation with their card, and it pretty much just took off from there. It was interesting to see this activity become a serious discussion between peers in a classroom setting, in which Kristin chimed in occasionally but was mostly silent. Obviously we were all extremely against the premise of "banning" all paper books on a college campus, since we are all aspiring librarians or archivists in the library and it is in our professional interest to believe that paper books are still useful. It would have been interesting to have some of the other specializations at SI's take on the article. Anyway, I'd just like to list a few of the concerns we had with the article here:
- What are the actual benefits of "banning" paper books on a campus?
- Imagine how wildly, insanely expensive it would be to digitize a whole library's collection (and faculty collections, too!) and house all that digital material.
- There is a little thing called "copyright law" which prevents libraries from digitizing their own collections.
- What library could ever dream of affording a fully digital collection, when licensing fees are through the roof? At least in today's digital publishing climate.
- What about the special and rare collections of items that for one reason or another cannot be digitized?
- What happens if the system crashes?
- What do you do with all those millions of paper books?
- He says that pretty much everything students read for classes are already in the public domain and are already digitized. What world does this man live in that students use materials at the college level from 1923 or earlier, particularly outside of the narrow world of English literature?
The list of concerns goes on and on. We had hoped that perhaps Marc Prensky was making a parody, or commenting on the current user demand for all materials online, accessible now. Kristin sort of deflated that balloon of hope by saying that in her experience, Marc Prensky is not the kind of person who would say something like this in irony.
I would be interested to hear what people outside of the profession would say about this. Are paper books irrelevant and outdated? Assuming we could provide access to all of a library's holdings electronically, would this be a legitimate plan? And frankly, comments like "I just like how a physical book feels/smells" or "I like using my large collection of bookmarks" are not useful in this discussion.
"It would have been interesting to have some of the other specializations at SI's take on the article."
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it, though? As future librarians/archivists, we are obviously still hugely invested in physical books, both professionally and probably personally, but I'd be interested to hear from others whose careers aren't so invested in physical books. Do they still think they're relevant? Do they see the same issues of banning physical books as we do?
One of my big concerns was based simply on choice. Prensky chose to ignore that maybe people would like to choose to use physical books instead of digital books, but by banning them, people no longer have that choice. (Even after so much time, I still find that article aggravating!)