Now the Library Comes to You

Remember those funny buildings on college campuses called libraries? You know, the places where students would come and go day or night, weekday or weekend? Even I, as dreadful an undergraduate as I was, spent quite a bit of time at the library.

Now it seems entirely possible that you can get a college degree without ever setting foot inside of a library.

Sunday's Des Moines Register has this story on the decline of the library as a place for research and study. The focus of Lisa Livermore's piece is Iowa State's Parks Library. where, "about a decade ago, more than 1.8 million people per year streamed into the ISU library, according to university records. Today, the number is down 17 percent."

It's not that students are studying less. (Well, OK, maybe students are studying less, after all...) It's just that when they're doing research, they're doing it with the Internet, specifically Google. (So this really is a media posting after all, and not just some cranky professor's rant on how today's students don't deserve what we're giving them.)

This is more than simply a preference for ISU students to stay warm and cozy when doing research on a late-winter night. It can have real budget consequences for the library, as Livermore reports:

The ISU library currently ranks in the lower half of academic research libraries in North America, and library advocates warn that the university is likely to suffer if the library continues to lose support.

"We're at a crossroads," said ISU library dean Olivia Madison. "If we don't see an infusion of funds, we will continue to drop in rankings. We'll become a second-rate library."

So what to do about it? Some professors, such as ISU political science lecturer Dirk Deam, say they're opposed to encouraging student research on the Internet. The library is a facility that encourages the serious reading and study of serious academic works, and the 'net simply isn't policed enough for students to be able to sort the fact from the crap online. Plus the 'net encourages students to skim materials for quick answers to specific research or study questions without forcing them to process or critically evaluate the materials they're accessing.

Of course, the argument over whether students should use online sources as opposed to putting on their coats and trudging to the library is moot. The war is largely over, and the Internet and Google have won.

As is the question with all media usage, the question isn't whether students will use online research-and-study services, but whether they'll use them intelligently. Our job as faculty is to point our students as best as we can away from free-for-all sites like Google and toward sites, like Simpson's Dunn Library, that filter information in ways that filter primary and secondary sources.