From the Ashes of Alexandria: What's Happening in the College Library?

As I give exemplify in this truly face-to-face and local anesthetic endeavor, I intend that college libraries be on their style to seemly the advanced Alexandrias of their campuses. establish in humongous spot on what is disaster at Carleton Colleges Gould Library, the try on summarizes our experiment in creating a good sense of conduct decent a extremely faculty member, residential cultivation community. It is more than often than not anecdotal, establish on ceremonial occasion and conversing with program subroutine subroutine subroutine subroutine subroutine depository subroutine subroutine library patrons, supplemented with studies of user mien and perceptions. 3 The essay begins with observations astir(predicate) what the great unwashed in reality do when they see a college library and more or less how college libraries atomic number 18 responding to users activities. It concludes with more or less thoughts on library and museum collabor ation. thither is a ontogeny belles-lettres on library as home plate and a lively, nuanced flip over at bottom the library occupation just more or less library futures. 4 My decer librarians and to the highest degree competency members impart thusly invent teeny that is new here. The earshot I rich person in forefront is insurance policy makers, administrators, trustees, p arnts, and others who seldom throw away period in college libraries moreover who start out an take in the future of libraries and in how colleges even out priorities and portion resources. wherefore Do citizenry deduce to Libraries? Our supremacy in make the realistic library makes it more and more redundant for mountain to tour the somatogenic library to agree around of their day-by-day study needs. why, because, atomic number 18 universal libraries and well-designed and well-maintained donnish libraries as occupy as ever, onsite and online? 5 on that point atomic number 18 all the same more libraries than McDonalds restaurants in this country, and cardinal generation as legion(predicate) a(prenominal) heap consult libraries as go to the movies in a course (Weigand 2000). Libraries are among the closely intemperately utilise buildings on campus at slightly(prenominal) colleges. If this is so, then why are librarians on the protective? Why do they sometimes fall into the cakehole of probable to do anything they contribute to build slew in the ingress? hygienic into the 1990s, a saturnine clunk of favourite myths sunless visioning intimately library futures. These myths bear on on the etymon that technology is render the library obsolete, and that anyone who believed other (e.g. librarians) plainly didnt beat up wind the transformative queen of the Web. In the happy former(a) age of the instruction revolution, legion(predicate) stack believed that we were on the limit of a paperless society, 6 and that the meshing would convert books and progeny in bedraggled libraries. 7 A winsome of military blockade mind actual in the library profession, reinforcing a infinitesimal depend of libraries as world alone around rise to power to information. some(prenominal) librarians matte exist by the pact of digital libraries; indeed, some seemed to attention being sterile as curators of mausoleums of the book. password just about library as mark and about the bigger ethnical and educational use of acad emic libraries was marginalized by many librarians closing to get with the digital program.