School Libraries RIP? The debate continues . . . .

In my previous blogpost ["School Libraries RIP? The debate begins . . . . "], I dared to raise the question of whether or not school libraries need to have books. Little did I realise that even opening up such a debate would elicit such a rear-guard action from librarians – their comments [and abuse!] are published below for all to read. I was somewhat taken aback that such a literate group as librarians should not pick up on the nuance of the argument.

First, my argument related to whether or not schools need to continue to dedicate resources [money and space] to having books in their library. For the record, I think that we all agree that we want pupils to be able to access quality information and books - these are important tools for learning.
The questions we face are:

1. Do schools need to provide a lending facility?
   
2. Do books and information need to be in a printed format?
   

The response to my argument was what Nicholas Negroponte would no doubt describe as a confusion between “atoms” and “bytes” [see Being Digital, MIT 1995, pp. 11-13] . Just because a library doesn’t have physical books [atoms] does not mean that the pupils in there don’t have access to the information/ narratives etc [bytes].

As Eli Neiburger argued in his insightful presentation to the LJ/SLJ eBook Summit [See the YouTube clip – "Libraries are Screwed" part two], in a world where pupils have excellent connectivity and can download any book at any time, there is no value having a “local copy”. Most of us can accept that there is little point owning the DVD if we can we stream and watch any movie on demand; I see no difference with being able to download and read any book on demand. I accept that we might not yet be at a point where this is the case, but with Google’s mission statement to digitise the world’s information, it is just round the corner. It would be naïve to ignore this development and not to discuss its impact on schools and their libraries. To answer my own questions, I can see the day when independent secondary schools no longer provide a lending facility and that pupils will access information and books from the Internet. Over time, mostly likely this will be via their own devices in digital format.

Secondly, at no point did I, nor would I, argue that we don’t need librarians. [It’s OK guys – your jobs are safe!] My article was not an attack on librarians. For those of you out there who have jumped to all sorts of erroneous assumptions about my school librarians here at Berkhamsted, they are an excellent team who are very forward-thinking, adaptable and innovative in their approach. They do what all good librarians should do: they support learning, guide and promote reading and teach research skills. The law of the Internet age is that if you are going to be a middle-man, you have to add value. Teachers and librarians both do this by inspiring young people, teaching skills, promoting understanding and helping them to access relevant information.

So let’s take this debate further forward.
My school is just about to give each pupil a photocopying/ printing allowance for each term so that they can use school “multi-functional devices” [scanner/printer/photocopiers] to support their teaching and learning. Rather than purchasing books for the library [which we need to catalogue, monitor and store] why not give each pupil a termly Amazon voucher to spend on books [in atom or byte format] to support their teaching and learning? The only catch would be that they would have to write a review of the book they read for the School Library blog.