A UC Berkeley report says that “New Chancellor Nicholas Dirks should spend more money on the library at the University of California, Berkeley, as its books, services and space will be more important than ever over the next two decades.”
Why? Here are a few of the reasons given in the report:
Libraries, “both as places and services — will be more, rather than less critical to University research and teaching in the next 20 years.”
“Even with so much scholarly information appearing online … researchers need help sorting the wheat from the chaff … Paradoxically, the massive and largely unregulated expansion of scholarly materials and information on the Internet has made it more difficult for scholars to locate authenticated materials.”
The report is “wary of digitized collections such as those created by Google and academic publishers. University brains tend to think in terms of centuries; their counterparts in the private sector often plan by quarter or year.”
The report warns that “publishers are not reliable long-term stewards of scholarly information. Journals change hands, and publishers come and go.”
“For now, the report says, physical collections of books and journals are still the best way to preserve scholarly information for the long term, along with university-sponsored digital library projects including the Hathi Trust.”
Read it! Read it! 