After All, Everything's On The Internet Anyway

It turns out that the library at "Southern Michigan University" has at least one feature noteworthy enough to have been mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

First developed for the warehouse industry, the retrieval system is a vault, with books sitting in bins and arranged according to size, not subject, to save space....

.....A handful of college libraries have installed such automated systems, some more enthusiastically than others. "Southern Michigan University"'s was the second academic library in the country to set up a retrieval system, in 1998. (California State University at Northridge's was the first.) The library stores about 500,000 items -- more than half of its material -- in what staff members call the Automated Retrieval Collection.

"B", who chose the system as dean of learning resources and technology, says the university saved more than $8-million in construction costs, which would have gone toward bookshelves, but instead helped to pay for group-study areas, computer banks, and a television studio.

Asked how the system affected book circulation, he says: "I have no idea, and I don't care." The effectiveness of the library can't be judged on the basis of circulation, he argues, "because that's not what happens here anymore." Faculty members go to the nearby ... (name of institution omitted)... for serious research, and undergraduates do all of their research online now, he says.

Sigh. Wish me luck. At least I'm forewarned not to volunteer any information or ideas that contradict the Official Doctrine that Books Are Bad because Everything's On The Internet.