By Stefanie Olsen
Out of the spotlight, a number of universities are working on bookless, digital libraries that reflect a growing understanding of how today's tech-savvy students access information. Last December, Google started on a wildly ambitious and somewhat controversial plan to digitize the collections of some of the world's largest university and public libraries in an effort to make hard-to-find books accessible by the click of a mouse.
A number of universities are creating bookless, digital libraries that reflect a growing understanding of how today's tech-savvy students access information.
Stanford librarians aren't the only academics working on the libraries of tomorrow. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California school system, the University of Michigan and University of Virginia, among others, have also been digitizing their collections, developing new technologies and creating a lasting archive of electronic material.
Instead of physical books, libraries will house group study rooms, a communal workspace and computer terminals with access to millions of industry journals, scholarly papers, academic research and books in digital form, as well as the Web. Specialized librarians will teach students heuristics, or scientific methods to seek information.
On the East Coast, MIT has for nearly five years run "D Space," a repository to capture all types of digital material, including books, articles, theses, technical reports, images and simulations. The Cambridge, Mass., university is also working with publishers of print and online materials to obtain long-term access to digital copies that may be under subscription and that will eventually be pulled from the Web. MIT even has a supercomputer center in San Diego to store all that data.
MIT also has also begun using open-source software called "Lockss," created at Stanford, to harvest electronic journals from the Web so it can archive them for later use, even if the material is licensed. That way, if a journal ceases to exist, at least MIT has a copy of the information.
Other universities are also taking books off their shelves. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, moved nearly 90,000 volumes from a main library to other buildings to make room for computers. By the fall, the Longhorn campus will have a so-called "digital information commons" in the main library to help students find the books elsewhere.
Yet the biggest challenge to digitizing libraries are the concerns of publishers and intellectual property rights holders. Copyright laws have changed over time and can be different outside the United States. As a result, many book-digitization projects must entail copious amounts of time researching the rights of works and obtaining permissions.
In truth, a digital library transformation has been on the way since the late 1960s. Henriette Avram, a librarian working at the Library of Congress, pioneered a national catalog of books called the MARC (for machine-readable cataloging) record that was shared over a computer network.
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