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You can add Iowa Western Community College (IWCC) to your list of libraries going “bookless” or “all electronic.”

The article linked below quotes IWCC president, Dan Kinney, saying it’s all cyber from this point forward and the college will stop acquiring books. We’re not sure if this means all printed material but from the extremely positive tone about the electronic world that Kinney shares in the article, it sounds like no paper at all.

The article mentions the time it took to get materials from another library. Kinney says, “Now, it’s right there,” he said. “They want immediate response time.”

Is that really accurate? Is every book available electronically today? We will try to find out if the library is also ending ILL. If it is and students can only find material online:

1) Is this going to lead to students “satisficing” their info need, taking what they can get and ending it there? What will this do mean for info, digital and info library skills” Will the college be offering more classes/training in judging the quality of online info both from fee-based databases and the open web?

2) Will it cause students to use “Look Inside the Book” from Amazon and Google Books “preview” feature to quickly access material the library doesn’t have access to in electronic form? Is that the intent of Amazon and Google? Of course, not every new book offers a viewable full text, searchable preview? If they do, it’s usually only a certain number can be viewed every x amount of hours/days and is not printable.

Now, a few graphs from the article:

From an Omaha World-Herald Article:

Imagine a library without books, yet with more information than ever before available in an instant.

Cyberlibraries are becoming more common at colleges all over the country, including at Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs.

“The times are changing,” said President Dan Kinney. “Colleges must adapt.”

With the fall semester ready to start, Iowa Western students will use the resources found in the cyberlibrary in the new student center.

“There are no books,” Kinney said. “Everything will be on databases online. We are not going to buy any more books.”

The existing books are being distributed to their respective academic departments.

“Now there are millions of books at the snap of a finger. Now they can click the mouse, and it’s there. Now there’s no limit to the access they have.”

Access the Complete Article

Source: Omaha World-Herald

See Also: Access the IWCC’s Library Web Site

Via Resource Shelf

3 COMMENTS

  1. On the surface, the move to purchasing only electronic resources probably does sound like a funny decision. But research done by OCLC is showing that for a variety of reasons students always ‘satisfice’ to some extent regardless of format. Other research has shown that at colleges and universities, in the presence of electronic formats the use of *all* printed materials will tend to decrease, whether or not the identical information is available electronically. Part of the reason for this, is that students visit the physical library space far less than they once did.

    If this is broadly the case, and I would suggest that on commuter campuses it is, it may make little sense for a library to devote scarce financial resources to growing its collections in a format that will languish on the shelf. Electronic resources present some unique budgeting and collection management challenges to libraries — but conversely, they are beautifully resistant to theft and physical damage, and while connectivity may occasionally need to be troubleshot, the materials will never get lost in the mail and fail to arrive.

    Regarding the concern that Amazon and Google Books will be used ‘for quick access’: My own prediction since the day Amazon introduced its ‘search inside the book’ feature, has been that it is far more likely to serve as a discovery tool. It would be interesting to know whether Iowa Western Community College will cease to be an ILL borrowing institution, because once one has ‘discovered’ useful material, one is likely to desire some kind of access. But as to the concern that Amazon and Google will be abused: The practice of lifting quotations and using them out of context is rather old and persistent. In a pinch, my friends and I used to stand in the stacks and keyword trawl indexes of books within our discipline’s LC call number range. When the practice can be discerned in a student’s finished work, it may be referred to as ‘commonplacing’ — and may in fact be a normal stage in the intellectual development of those who eventually become expert scholars. This idea may warrant further exploration.

    I very much doubt that the sky is falling; but would suggest that there may be no better time for teaching faculty to be on their toes in ascertaining that their students are learning to evaluate and prioritize the materials they are gathering. Librarians have concerned themselves with this question for decades and decades; but faculty have the students’ ears far more than library staff do. In a completely electronic environment, it will be imperative that students develop good search intuition, i.e. the ability to quickly become oriented to the many search interfaces they will have to use — and to the fact that all of those interfaces may be expected to change with some frequency. For the students of Iowa Western Community College ‘everything’ (offered by their library) will in fact be available electronically. But it might *not* be discoverable through Google.

    Mary O’Dea
    Acquisitions Manager
    The Newberry Library

    Speaking for myself, not my institution.

  2. I was a community college librarian for a while and brought in access on our campus to ProQuest (back when you needed to use it on CD-ROMs); later the library moved to the web-based version. Use of print formats dropped, especially once the material was available in multiple locations on campus and to authorized users off campus. The product, and similar online database products for libraries, was devoted almost entirely to periodicals. Books, though, had always been far less frequently used than periodical resources, and this was due in large part to the nature of the assignments given by the instructors. The student isn’t likely to be doing heavy-duty research in a community college where many of the courses will be introductory classes or one step up.

    A community college library may be able to get by cutting its book purchases if it can still support course requirements while doing so (though I’d gag at eliminating them entirely–not everything is online yet and sooner or later even the smallest core collection needs updating). I wouldn’t dream of taking a step like that at a university library (though some subjects where the research would be almost entirely done in periodicals rather than books might be able to manage trimming — not eliminating — book purchases in those areas). I don’t think we’re really at a point yet where electronic resources can entirely replace books in a college setting (though I can’t deny the decreased use of books when online periodical resources are available). But that could just be my inner dinosaur talking.

    Bests,

    –tr

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