More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Cushing Academy getting rid of all its books
September 4, 2009 | 1:29 pm
|
By Paul Biba
This is from the Boston Globe and it certainly raises a number of questions. Is this really a good thing to do? Would any of our readers who are teachers or librarians care to comment? Your thoughts would be much appreciated.
This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus.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 library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels ….
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
I think this might be the case of an administrator leaping too quickly into the future. I’m a librarian and a huge proponent of ebooks. I have in the past helped to transform a corporate library into an almost entirely electronic collection. There were pressures in that case to provide content to a global employee base.
One of the things that surprises me in this article is that they’ve purchased only 18 ebook readers. I don’t understand how they intend to support an e-only collection with so few reading devices.
It seems more prudent to me to build the electronic collection while maintaining the past investment of the print collection. At some point those print books will come out of copyright protection and they could be scanned into new digital content.
It does seem a bold move on their part, and yes, any technological problems they encounter, once their books are gone, could come back to bite them. But I applaud their willingness to experiment, and I wish them luck with it.
It’s not as bold as you might think in some area’s of study the move to digital was completed almost entirely 2-4 years ago, at least for the raw scientific data, i dont think ive ever seen a real print journal in the social science field, statistics and economy is the same, even law is highly dependent on online sources and databases.
All thats left in print is the entry level textbooks, almost everything else is digital first, and print second. The is certainly true for most of the fortune 1000 businesses.
It seams radical but remember that theres a different between an research and teaching library and a public library it makes a lot of sense for reasearch libraries to spend budget on making a lot of online content avaliable to student trough jstor, safari, overdrive and similar services instead of on keeping the books around, they migt be overdoing it but well they need to attract students and this clearly sends signals of being in sync with the zeitgeist.
As a school librarian for over 30 years and having been one of the first online over 25 years ago, I tried to emphasize use of both electronic and paper formats. My library was renamed an “Information Center” in 1993 when we incorporated over 50 computers accessing the internet into the program. Educators visited from throughout the Middle Atlantic to observe our students successfully utilizing whatever format met their needs. Students have a variety of learning styles and to eliminate a format which has withstood over 300 years of use seems to be rather adventurous to me.
I’ve carried one type or another of an ebook reader for over 10 years and find the format one that gives me a range of materials in my pocket at all times. If Cushing is really serious about their project they will provide every student with a means of access to as many electronic resources as possible. I recently remarked to David Rothman that I wished that I had had the hundreds of thousands of electronic primary resources presently available when I taught United States history in the late 60′s.
A question I would ask Headmaster Tracy is “How much of the personal electronic data that you created 10 years ago can you readily access today?” I’m quite sure that most of us would have trouble reading some of those old files what with the multiple changes that have been made in operating systems, data storage systems and program changes. I’m all for moving to new systems of information storage and access, but we need to stabilize access to those systems before we completely eliminate the old.
Once a system exists such as that advocated by Rothman and others with a national electronic data library available to all, then we can begin to eliminate older systems which are too costly to maintain.
Very interesting…. I just checked and the Library of Congress websites are presently down for maintenance. Hope no one at Cushing who needed that access has a research paper due on Tuesday morning…..
When I began reading the article, I too thought ‘some prep schools have more money than common sense.’ But near the end comes a telling stat, one which no doubt played a large part in their decision: the students at Cushing simply are not checking out the books. Most of the books they’ve been checking out have, in fact, been children’s books!
Hey, they might have sold off their books and put in a bunch of video game stations…
One of the tenants of school library use is that many more books are used in the library and in the classroom than are checked out. Our ratios often exceeded ten to one for use in the school rather than outside it. That’s what school libraries are all about. They are not “town” libraries nor are they “research” libraries. They are places where students come to utilize materials available for constructive learning activities.
This was the last purpose statement I wrote for the program I administered:
The Library Media Center Program and Curriculum is not only integral to and supportive of the school curriculum, but also provides a mechanism for choice and exploration beyond the prescribed course of study. The Library Media Center Program provides a wide range of resources and information that satisfy the educational needs and interests of students. Materials are selected to meet the wide range of students’ individual learning styles. The Library Media Center is a place where students may explore more fully classroom subjects that interest them, expand their imagination, delve into areas of personal interest, and develop the ability to think clearly, critically, and creatively about the resources they have chosen to read, hear,or view.
The Library Media Center provides a setting where students develop skills they will need as adults to locate, analyze, evaluate, interpret, and communicate information and ideas in an information-rich world. Students are encouraged to realize their potential as informed citizens who think critically and solve problems, to observe rights and responsibilities relating to the generation and flow of information and ideas, and to appreciate the value of literature in an educated society.
The Library Media Center Program serves all of the students of the educational community–not only the children of the most powerful, the most vocal or even the majority, but all of the students who attend the school. The collection includes materials to meet the needs of all learners, including the gifted, as well as the reluctant readers, the mentally, physically, and emotionally impaired, and those from a diversity of backgrounds. The school library media program strives to maintain a diverse collection that represents various points of view on current and historical issues, as well as a wide variety of areas of interest to all students served.
The Library Media Center is the symbol to students of our most cherished freedom–the freedom to speak our minds and hear what others have to say.
I posted previously about NW Missouri State’s e-book program, wherein NWMS gives their students laptops in order to give them access to e-book materials. I agree, standardizing legacy materials for future access is key to the success of these programs, as well as consumer-based e-book transition. But it seems these schools are on the right track.
Cushing’s problems started long ago; why were their children not checking out books from the library media center? My students check out an average of 24 books per child per year from our library media center. That is in addition to the dozen titles they read in class plus those they buy on their own and share with friends. Cushing is guilty of “readicide.” They have killed the joy of reading for their children.
I have the correct information about the “24 books” comment the headmaster has quoted. According to other staff on campus, that figure was completely fabricated. At no time was any librarian surveyed and no statistics were reported. This headmaster embarrassed his own faculty in the news media to embellish his own genius. Sad, definitely, and pathetic. Librarians teach students to be ethical in their online use and he just violated rule number one. His entire speech, located at Cushing’s website, was made when he crashed an independent library meeting last spring. He went on stage unannounced and dismissed the value of his staff while they were in attendance. I know = I was there. Not only that, but he told the entire school community during an assembly that his “librarians had better learn how to drive a truck because that was going to be their next job.” Nice guy. Not at all megalomaniacal.
Joan proved it – it only takes one “fool” to start a “new” trend. Seems to be happening often these days.
I love these prior comments…. people are afraid to look askance at this ridiculous move by Cushing, lest they be thought of as “behind the times” or, heaven forbid, anti-technology. Arguments about “means” aside, we are definitely reading less than we were when “print” was in vogue, becoming less literate in terms of analytic and in-depth thinking.
Reading from a screen of whatever size, and reading from a book, use different parts of the brain.
I recommend: “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” by Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts. Her book received a lot of notice in 2008. She writes that reading is not an innate ability. We have developed the skill over centuries by in fact changing our brain structure. And it’s an ability that can be lost.
This is a quote by her from the New Yorker: “As it develops expertise, the circuitry for reading in the brain becomes both “smaller” in its streamlined regions, and also “larger,” –that is, more widely activated–in those regions engaged in sophisticated thinking, like inference,critical analysis, and insight. This type of activation is the basis for “deep reading” and the highest forms of thought in a society, from novel thinking to the deliberation of virtue. My primary concern for the future of reading is that these critical areas will be short-circuited in the next generation of readers, whose formative years may be immersed too early in digitally driven media. The addictive immediacy and the overwhelming volume of information available in the “Googled world” of novice readers invite neither time for concentrated analysis and inference nor the motivation for them to think beyond all the information given. Despite its extraordinary contributions, the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousand years.”
Oh well, we’ve done a lot of self-destructive things in the last century or two. What’s one more?
My daughter just graduated from Cushing and had a wonderful 3 years there. She is happily in college and adjusting very well. I love books, but not everyone does, and it is most certainly not the mode of learning preferred by people growing up in the electronic age. I applaud Cushing and Dr. Tracy for this courageous move. I only ask that some love for books continue to be incorporated into the Cushing learning experience and that the school’s electronic learning experience have the highest of standards – use this as an opportunity to set the standard to Exeter and the rest. A tall order, but Cushing can and should do it.
@Louise: The brain is a very plastic organ, especially when we’re young. If we properly train our children (and ourselves, for that matter) to read, on whatever media we or they choose, they will not “short circuit” as Wolf suggests.
Today’s reading deficiencies are due to over-distraction and lack of concentration on one task, a discipline to be learned, not an instinctual ability to be buried under modern society.
The very idea that we’re “hardwired” for paper and cannot change goes up there with “Man cannot breathe the air at speeds greater than 30MPH.”
Well anyone that takes a look at this even a year after the fact, the change to technology was successful at Cushing. This year all of the books will be given away, seeing as 4,000 of the most “popular” books were still found in the library, and more kindles will be introduced. There were no technological problems. Kindles could be checked out of the library in the same fashion as a book but had the capabilities of every single piece of literature known. Headmaster Tracy did not feel he was “getting rid” of books but rather bringing in endless possibilities. This comes from a student of the 21st century school…