Feature Writer Romeo Edmead – Stanford Engineering Library to go Nearly Bookless
Five years ago, when the Engineering Library at Stanford University was running out of space for engineering books, administrators figured it was time to build another one. Their plan was not to create more space, though. They actually decided to condense, with an eye towards a much more digital future. The new library, which is set to open next month, will contain 85 percent less engineering books on the shelves. The librarians decided which books will remain in stock after researching the frequency of titles being checked out. They discovered that the vast majority had not been borrowed in at least a
half-decade.
Engineering Library Director Michael Keller is enthusiastic about the transition because of the constant changes in areas like software and bioengineering. Just like Mr. Keller, the dean of the engineering department Jim Plummer, welcomes a digital future too. When commenting about e-books, Mr. Plummer said, “It allows our faculty to change
examples, to put in new homework problems and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way.”
Despite all of the positive energy surrounding this transition, it certainly comes with some opposition. Engineering student Sam Tsai is not quite ready to give up books on shelves. “To read a book on the screen is kind of tiring for me,” Tsai says, So I sometimes like [the] paper form.” In the event that engineering students at Stanford do not cause a major uproar against the new direction, the university may not be completely out of the woods. They should be aware that a recent effort by Arizona State University to use Amazon’s Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks was met with a lawsuit because the device wasn’t fully accessible to the visually impaired.
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