Local prep school library goes all digital media

According to the Boston Globe, Cushing Academy, a prep school in Ashburnham, MA, is getting rid of all the books from its library and going fully to digital media. The library itself will be converted to a media center, complete with laptop-friendly carrels.

Cushing’s headmaster, James Tracy, calls the tangible books “an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.” According to a school news release, “Our internal research has shown that students rarely rely on printed books for their academic work, and instead search for information online, either in our library space or on their laptops.”

The announcement comes as a bit of a shock to a longtime book-lover such as myself. (I even arrange my personal books in Library of Congress catalog order.) On the other hand, I realize I’m trending the same way -- one of my current reads is T. A. Brown’s Genomes 2, available online gratis from the NIH. The price is hard to beat! And I love the availability of old out-of-print volumes on Google Books.

Ever wonder how scholars in the first few centuries of the present era felt about the disappearance of their beloved scrolls in favor of the more compact codices?

According to a Wikipedia article, most scrolls that were not converted to the newer form were lost to posterity. Unfortunately, printed books may prove more durable than their digital replacements.