The new engineering library at the college, set to open in August, will have 85% less books than the one it’s replacing -- a drop from 80,000 to a mere 10,000 books.
Librarians chose which books to keep and which to chuck aside based on how frequently they get checked out. And students aren’t checking out that many, with tons of study material and resources available online.
Stanford library director Michael Keller told NPR.org that eventually, “there won’t be any books on the shelves at all.”
“As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form,” he said.
And how do these presumably book-loving librarians feel about all this? Excited, apparently.
“That’s what we’re so [excited about],” the engineering library chief Helen Josephine said in the NPR.org report. “The idea of actually offering more services, offering more workshops, offering more one-on-one time with students.”
So get ready your Kindles and iPads as Stanford ushers in the age of the book-less library.
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