Legal Research

Stanford and The Bookless Library

By admin

The various media views on Stanford University’s foray into a bookless library is very interesting.

You can read about it here:

Fast Company
Stanford’s Bookless Library Heralds the Future of… Book Buying?

Steven Bell: The Kept Up Academic Librarian
Stanford’s Bookless Library Signals Change For The Book Industry

NPR
Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries

LISNews
Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries

“Stanford University’s School of Engineering had more books than its library could hold. So school administrators built a new library — with even less space for books. NPR’s Laura Sydell reports that Stanford’s counterintuitive solution marks a definite move toward digital collections over print.”

It’s clearly a development to watch.

Some areas of information research are probably closer to this reality than others. Some domains (like law, medicine, 16th-18th century literature, and some sciences) have a significantly higher protion of their corpus digitized and searchable than others. Not everything but ILL and resource sharing can pick up the slack.

Someone needs to be exploring the future in feal time and kudos to Stanford for taking the initiative and exploring this frontier a little more assertively.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on August 16, 2010 (boomark / email).