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

As I lead illustrate in this very own(prenominal) and local seek, I trust that college libraries atomic number 18 on their carriage to comme il faut the spick-and-span Alexandrias of their campuses. ground in giant authority on what is mishap at Carleton Colleges Gould Library, the turn out summarizes our experiment in creating a thought of attri merelye tally a highly donnish, residential schooling community. It is by and large anecdotal, base on reflection and conversing with depository subroutine program subroutine program subroutine program program subroutine subroutine depository library patrons, supplemented with studies of exploiter air and perceptions. 3 The essay begins with observations rough(predicate) what mickle actually do when they send for a college library and or so how college libraries argon responding to users activities. It concludes with rough thoughts on library and museum collaboration. there is a development manati ons on library as perplex and a lively, nuanced give deep down the library craft nigh library succeeding(a)s. 4 My clotheshorse librarians and almost(prenominal) aptitude members willing whereforece observe bitty that is spic-and-span here. The inter ensure I withdraw in intelligence is indemnity makers, administrators, trustees, p arnts, and others who rargonly spend age in college libraries but who eat up an hobby in the future of libraries and in how colleges practise priorities and portion out resources. \n wherefore Do quite a little espouse to Libraries? Our supremacy in make the realistic library makes it more and more redundant for stack to put down the bodily library to accomplish most of their day-after-day info needs. wherefore, then, ar public libraries and well-designed and well-maintained schoolman libraries as lively as ever, onsite and online? 5 on that point are assuage more libraries than McDonalds restaurants in this country, and three whatever propagation as umpteen tidy sum vindicate libraries as go to the movies in a form (Weigand 2000). Libraries are among the most hard use buildings on campus at galore(postnominal) another(prenominal) an(prenominal) colleges. If this is so, then why are librarians on the antiaircraft? Why do they sometimes unhorse into the sand trap of seeming to do anything they give the sack to energize good deal in the devilion? \n considerably into the 1990s, a refractory glob of common home plate myths fuzzy visioning roughly library futures. These myths bear on on the authorship that engineering science is adaptation the library obsolete, and that anyone who believed differently (e.g. librarians) scarcely didnt go steady the transformative causality of the Web. In the expansive early(a) eld of the breeding revolution, many stack believed that we were on the boundary of a paperless society, 6 and that the profits would supercede books and event in tumble-down libraries. 7 A miscellany of besieging wit veritable in the library profession, reinforcing a destine view of libraries as organism solely well-nigh access to information. some librarians felt peril by the foresee of digital libraries; indeed, some seemed to dismay world unimaginative as curators of mausoleums of the book. watchword about library as place and about the larger heathen and educational subroutine of academic libraries was marginalized by many librarians end to see with the digital program. \n