Posted on 06/11/2006 8:07:04 PM PDT by SamAdams76
Last year children's librarian Debby At- well put a new set of encyclopedias on the shelf at Thomaston Public Library.
A year later, it has yet to be touched.
"I have never seen an encyclopedia lifted from the stacks," Atwell said.
Librarians across the state report the millennials, the generation born roughly between 1980 and 2000, are not using libraries the way past generations did.
Reference materials are gathering dust on the shelves of libraries everywhere. Reference librarians are being reassigned to other tasks, and library directors are pondering the future role of the traditional lending library. The trend has sparked an angst-filled discussion for the past several weeks among librarians online.
It's a topic some librarians are reluctant to talk about for fear taxpayers will cut their budgets if word gets out that some of their traditional functions are being usurped. They blame the trend on the rise of online databases and search engines such as Google, a shift away from a print to a visual culture, and even on state and national learning standards that leave little time for school research projects requiring multiple sources of information. Whatever the cause, said some librarians, libraries must learn to adapt.
"Librarians need to be wildly outside the box so we can create new ways to connect to people and connect people to literature or else we are going to fade," said Marian Peterson, director of the South Portland Public Library.
Signs of the shift in how people seek information are everywhere. At Portland Public Library, for example, the number of visitors rose by about 25 percent between 2001 and 2005, but the number of reference questions declined by about 6 percent.
Library use is changing for all age groups. At Scarborough Public Library Catherine Morrison was hired eight years ago with the title of "reference librarian." Now that position has been renamed "adult services librarian" and instead of answering questions and pointing people to printed reference materials she spends much of her time helping them access Internet sources.
"Last week I spent hours helping people sign up for e-mail accounts," she said.
Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit computer library service and research organization, concluded that American college students and teenagers are using libraries and gathering information in vastly different ways than past generations. Among the report's findings:
Eighty-nine percent of college students begin an information search with a search engine; only 2 percent begin on a library Internet site.
Ninety-three percent were satisfied or very satisfied with using a search engine compared with 84 percent who use the help of a librarian.
The most frequent use of libraries by college students is as a place to study.
Ellsworth High School librarian Candice Macbeth said the trend is neither positive nor negative but a "sea change" from the past. She said it was particularly apparent in this year's freshman class.
"A book is their last choice" as a source of information, she said.
She said students will turn to an actual book for a research project only when a teacher requires it, and even then they often do not really use the book but simply list it in their bibliographies. She said today's students do not have the same appreciation for books as past generations. They actually prefer paperbacks to hardcovers, traditionally considered superior to the pulps.
"Books are too slow, too heavy, and they are already carrying around a lot of stuff," she said.
Sarah Muzzy, a junior at Portland's Deering High School, agreed. "The hard ones get in the way when you are trying to read," said Muzzy.
Muzzy said she never uses the public library and avoids the school library when she can. "The way it is set up, it is really hard to go in there. They are picky. You have to get a pass. It is a very complicated process," she said.
She said she finds information she needs for school research projects either with an online search engine or by using the school library's online databases.
Some librarians dismiss the gloomy predictions.
"We are very excited about the fact that students have access to many things," said Judy Montgomery, associate librarian at Bowdoin College. She said thanks to the Internet her library is able to offer students access to 150 databases and 22,000 electronic journals. She said students make heavy use of the reference materials but unlike past generations want personal control of their research.
"They want to find their own way," she said.
Still, she said, the reference desk continues to try to lure students. This year it started offering instant messaging in addition to answering questions by phone, e-mail or in person.
Tim Spalding of Portland, founder of Library Thing at www.librarything.com, a social networking site for book lovers, said he also believes all the angst is misplaced. He said people are reading and writing more than ever before.
"Twenty years ago people were not writing blogs. They were watching TV," he said.
He said the trend away from reference books is a positive development for libraries.
"They will do less stocking of reference work, which is great. They have more room to stock other things," he said.
Nor does he fear that books will disappear.
"Reading novels online is not fun," he said.
And novels, he said, appear to be more popular than ever. He said the huge success of the Harry Potter series attests to that and underlines the huge hunger for shared literary experiences.
"One of the reasons people read Harry Potter is that everyone else is reading it and you have someone to talk to," he said.
Atwell, the children's librarian in Thomaston, said she also believes all is not lost on the newest generation. While reference materials are largely unused, she said the graphic novels she added to the library this year are a big hit.
"It is just a new world," she said.
Atwell said American libraries should follow the example of the British. British librarians now ask people what they are looking for, then show them the different ways to find it.
"They don't even call them libraries anymore but 'idea service centers'," she said.
this is for real, I know I had way underestimated the impact of the internet for modern students until I realized all the work I was doing putting together an outline for my sister was available from wikipedia in a few clicks.
Research projects are never going to be the same.
A year later, it has yet to be touched. .."
I can see that! Google and the net in general is too powerful to overlook. The Net is a new starting point for research where in older days the encyclopedia and the article bibliography was one place to begin.
It is progress.
Agreed. However, you need to be able to discern the BS when using the Internet.
I still have a personal research library at my fingertips.
Our local library looks like a Blockbuster store.Last week out of eight people checking out articles I was the only one with books.
This has been a growing trend for a long time, and I don't think 'Google' should be credited with it. Altavista, yahoo and a variety of other search engines were in common use long before google came along.
One thing that has changed is acceptance of personal searches. I had a date in 1998 who altavistaed me, and I had altavistaed her, before we met. Back then people got kind of freaked out if you admitted you searched their name online. Now it's common place and expected. She gained points in my book for having done that.
The new Santa Monica Google offices are next door to the brand new Santa Monica Library. Coincidence?
I do some work in a technical library. I suspect that eventually most of the collection will be digitized. A huge number of journals are already online and searchable, and the number of materials like this are only going to go up.
And it makes sense. I love to do research, but given a choice between slogging through hard copy or using a searchable copy, I prefer to do the critical referencing via computer.
For certain types of work, there still aren't enough quality materials available, but that is changing by leaps and bounds.
This can, though, lead to rather shallow digesting of information.
And I think of the older days, where I used to pour through journal articles looking at the footnotes to try to discover more sources worth looking at...and painstakingly going through indexes looking for key works...
The future belongs to database utilizing. And to database creation.
When you discover that your mortgage balance is public info that anyone can get, well that makes the notion of a library irrelative.
Here in Broward County Florida the libraries have lots and lots of computers. Some people go on line and some computers are used by school children for hours to play games.
#2 Our libraries have very good VHS and DVD collections. People are checking them out as much as books. Video stores have stiff competition from public libraries and it's free from the library
#3 Mothers with children learning how to read checking out 10 books at a time for them. This is a good trend
#4 Books are much easier to read than computer screens. The tendency is to speed read and skim when reading text on computer monitors. But for finding reading absorbing short bursts of information the internet is incomparable
Our high school library is becoming the research location: It has numerous computers for research. I'm not a library purist: Wherever you can find out the info, go there. The kids just need to be taught how to weigh the accuracy of that which they find: THIS IS A GOOD LESSON FOR LIFE.
I think computers are flatly amazing. It's like having all of the libraries in your own kitchen/wherever.
Hard copy will always be treasured...at least, by this bibliophile!
You just have to cross check. That was true before.
You're right about that. Back in the early and mid-80's at the University of Minnesota, most of my research was done in the reference area of Wilson Library.
A few years back, I went back to get my degree and found that I could achieve a lot of what I was looking for by using Internet searches.
I didn't rely on the Internet alone (and no one should) - but I said to myself at least a few times "Cripes, I wish the Internet were around back when I was first at college!".
I agree.
Earlier this year, I was asked to be a judge for a History fair at a middle school in Minneapolis.
A lot of kids used the Internet ONLY for their research. I asked these kids if they used other sources (books, magazines, etc) and more often that not they said "No, I used Wikipedia only". I usually knocked them down a few points if they didn't have a diversity of sources.
Wikipedia can be a decent source - depending on the subject. But too many kids were taking what I believed was the easy way out.
YES SIR.
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