Books and Band Saws: the Future of Libraries. Culture Teaching Strategies Flickr:Toolstop By Jon Kalish, NPR As information becomes more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles.
A small number are working to create “hackerspaces,” where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise. The Allen County Public Library, which serves the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., has a modest hackerspace inside a trailer in its parking lot. “We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business,” he says.
The 50-foot trailer is known as the Maker Station and belongs to TekVenture, an educational nonprofit that had struggled to find a building it could afford before it was approached by the library. “We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business.” This story originally appeared on NPR.org. Related. Welcome to our library web site. The Fisher-Watkins Library at Cushing Academy has changed its focus from printed books and resources to digital content.
A critical element of this effort is the re-design our library's web site to provide a more engaging experience for our students and faculty, connecting them wherever they are (the library, classroom, dorm or home) to digital content and tools that support Cushing Academy's 21st Century Leadership curriculum.We will accomplish this by: Academy ~ Fisher-Watkins Library. A Library Transformed In 2009, The Fisher-Watkins Library underwent a digital transformation.
The Academy replaced the majority of the library's 20,000 printed books with electronic sources and our collection has now become the largest of any independent school in the country. We wanted to create a library that reflected the reality of how students do research and fostered what they do -- one that went beyond the stacks and embraced the digital future. Cushing's library now delivers thousands of web-based electronic books and authoritative database content directly to our students' laptops, while also supporting offline reading with immediate access to hundreds of thousands of downloadable electronic books delivered to our 200+ eReaders and/or students' personal devices.
Highlights of our dynamic, interactive learning center include: Above all, it is important to know that Cushing Academy is not going "bookless. " Library Hours. When Renovating a Library Means Ditching the Books - Education. Bookless Library Trend: Designing Space for Digital Learning. We've been hearing about it for years, but the bookless library has finally arrived, making a beachhead on college campuses.
At Drexel University's new Library Learning Terrace, which opened just last month, there is nary a bound volume, just rows of computers and plenty of seating offering access to the Philadelphia university's 170 million electronic items. Scott Erdy, designer of the new library, says open, flexible space — the furniture is movable and the walls act as one giant whiteboard — allows student and staff "knowledge transfer," a concept reinforced by Danuta Nitecki, dean of Drexel's libraries. "We don't just house books, we house learning," she says. The trend began, naturally, with engineers, when Kansas State University's engineering library went primarily bookless in 2000.
Last year, Stanford University pruned all but 10,000 printed volumes from its new engineering library, making more room for large tables and study areas. Are College Libraries About to Become Bookless? - Education. The number of colleges using electronic textbooks available to students is on the rise.
But what about the rest of the books on campus—the millions of volumes stored in the library? It turns out the digital text revolution is beginning to turn college libraries into places that no longer stock physical books. As Time reports, the engineering libraries at Kansas State University, Stanford and the University of Texas are almost completely book-free. And now at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the new Library Learning Terrace, a 3,000 square foot residence hall-based space that opened in June, there are no books at all.