Library in Transition

Adrian Sannier: "Finally, I suggest you burn down the library. All the books in the world are already digitized! Burn the thing down. Change it into a gathering place; a digital commons. Stop air conditioning the books! None of us has the Alexandria Library; Michigan, Oxford [UK], and Stanford [CA] have digitized their collections. What do you have that they don't? Why are you buying new books? Buy digital and let's spend some more time making those things level, flat, and transparent so a single search turns up everything we have. This has to change, because it's clear that people want to find information digitally. They want to search for it, find it, have it, and then amalgamate search results into a précis. "

"Adrian Sannier, Chief Technology Officer at Arizona State University. Sannier was the keynote speaker at the Campus Technology 2008 conference, and you can watch the video of his presentation, "A New American University for Next-Gen Learners" at the Campus Technology website. In his talk Sannier discusses strategies for putting in place groundbreaking plans that will serve the next generation of students. But in his vision, next-gens apparently don't need physical libraries and the books they offer."

"Frankfurt, 13/10/2008 - The organisers of the Frankfurt Book Fair - the global meeting place for the book world - have conducted a major survey to find out how digitisation will influence the future of the publishing industry, and who will be the driving force behind it. Over 1,000 industry professionals from over 30 countries responded to the survey, issued via the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter. The most interesting results: * China's digital influence in international publishing predicted to increase threefold in next five years * consumers, Amazon, Google believed to drive the digitisation process * e-content will overtake traditional books in sales by 2018"

"Asus, inventors of the netbook, is about to shake up the ebook world with the arrival of the world's cheapest digital reader"

"Webcast of Anne R. Kenney's Distinguished Seminar Series Presentation, "Approaching an Entity Crisis: Reconceiving Research Libraries in a Multi-institutional Context," Now Available"

Doubts about the Kindle from students...

"I asked Kahle how he sees the future of libraries. "Libraries as a physical place to go, I think will continue," he said. "But if this trend continues, if we let Google make a monopoly here, then what libraries are in terms of repositories of books, places that buy books, own them, be a guardian of them, will cease to exist. Libraries, going forward, may just be subscribers to a few monopoly corporations' databases." Kahle's version of the digital library, which he and others are building collaboratively, is open and shareable, without strings attached as with Google's deal."

Dan Greenstein's remarks on libraries becoming smaller, less focused on physical-- and responses

U Mich president's talk on the benefits of participating in Google Books

A pro-Google-Book Search speech, given by the head librarian at the University of Michigan.

Blog about 21st century medical libraries

Blog about 21st century medical libraries, with handy list of resources and of newly founded med school libraries

Google books testimony; witness list in right sidebar