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January 05, 2008, 03:21 PM ET
The New Library
The Pew Internet and American Life Project came out with a report last week showing that “members of Gen Y are the leading users of libraries for help solving problems and in more general patronage.” Because 13 percent of the respondents in the survey said they went to the public library for help with “solving problems,” the survey “challenges the assumption that libraries are losing their relevance in the Internet age.” (Young adults had a higher percentage, which explains the first comment.)
Part of the success of libraries is due to their new identity as information center, not book repository. A story in The Washington Post the begins:
“You can’t find Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or The Education of Henry Adams at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson’s Final Harvest? Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.
It’s not that the books are checked out. They’re just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.
Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.”
And here’s a story in The Chronicle about what information technology has done to reference desks.
People can conduct their own observations. Next time you enter the college library, count how many kids are at a screen, then count how many are browsing the stacks. If the ratio is less than 10 to 1, your library is an anomaly. And as for the “reading” and “writing” they’re doing at the console, let’s not probe too closely or look over their shoulders, or we’ll get really depressed.
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