Some faculty at the University of British Columbia are concerned with a new storage system the school’s library is planning. The system will use a robotic crane to retrieve books; students will be able to browse book lists, but they won’t be able to wander along pulling and flipping through books.
This worries Max Cameron, a UBC political science professor and the chair of the Faculty of Arts library advisory committee. He is concerned library users won‚Äö√Ñ√∂‚àö√ë‚àö¥t be able to find important materials if they can‚Äö√Ñ√∂‚àö√ë‚àö¥t physically browse the shelves.
Cameron’s concern is that the school is trading a very human process of discovery by browing, and sometimes by accident, for the storage-and-retrieval efficiency of the new system. However physics professor Douglas Bonn is not concerned, because in his field much of the research is conducted on the World Wide Web, and not in the library stacks. (Suggested by Phillip Jeffrey.) [Link]
Comments
@ 06:08
Physical access to the stacks has always been a pleasure for me. It invites exposure to new materials, the serendipitous discoveries which may spark new lines of thought. To remove that, to close the stacks, lessens the experience.
A few years ago I was involved in developing a protoype mobile browser for library research. One of the issues was just this. If you narrow and focus a user, directing them straight to the resource they seek with a single minded purpose, how do you design or develop to include that accidental discovery and the pleasure of browsing?
And we could talk about card catalogs…..but maybe some other time.
@ 14:44
I browse the electronic catalog all the time. If you search for information by the LC Call Number (or Dewey) you’ll get exactly what is stored on the shelf.
Browse away!
Of course, the best book I’ve read in years, I read because the bright orange cover caught my eye. Unless Catalogs show covers, that’ll go by the wayside.