The day may come when Northwestern undergraduates will no longer have to trudge across campus with heavy bags of borrowed library books to research and write their papers.
University Librarian Sarah Pritchard said there is “definitely a big shift” occurring at university libraries from print to digitized resources. In the next 25 years, all of the books and resources in the NU library’s general stacks could be available electronically.
This process will not, however, make the role of the physical university library obsolete, Pritchard said.
“The key thing that isn’t going to change is the service aspect of libraries,” Pritchard said. “A lot of what we do is service-oriented.”
The process of digitizing resources in universities began before the rise of the Internet, when schools could subscribe to electronic versions of databases. Next came digital subscriptions to academic journals, Pritchard said. Since then, university libraries began housing their own digitizing equipment. At NU, this equipment belongs to the Digital Collections department of the library, which both digitizes library materials and helps the Northwestern community with other projects, said Claire Stewart, head of Digital Collections.
On a daily basis, Stewart said the department completes “drop-off” projects for professors and teaching assistants, such as streaming videos onto Blackboard pages. One project currently being considered involves the use of a “robotic book scanner” to digitize a professor’s collection of former students’ notebooks.
Digital Collections is also helping ASG compile its files into an online searchable database, said ASG Clerk Brooke Stanislawski. The files are currently housed in binders in the ASG office.
“Students will be able to search on past ASG legislation and find other activity on issues they are looking to pass,” the McCormick sophomore said.
Digital Collections also works on digitizing the library’s in-house materials. Digital Projects Librarian Julie Patton said these materials are often rare materials or come from special collections.
“Things that we have that are unique are more widely available (as a result of digitization),” Patton said. “It also gives more people access to resources that can’t be handled extensively.”
The Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of all the Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago, has a contract with Google to complete a mass digitization of library materials. Google representatives will come to the campuses with a truck, fill it with books, take the books to a scanning facility and then return the materials to the university.
NU will likely have its materials digitized by Google in the next few years, Pritchard said. She said the project will likely focus on distinctive collections, such as the materials in the Africana and Transportation Libraries.
The future of digitized libraries is not totally clear, since copyright and cost issues still need to be determined. Libraries will also continue to collect books as “backup copies,” but digitized copies will mean that every library does not need to allocate the shelf space for print copies of every book.
Still, Stewart said digitization will not eliminate the need for library buildings.
“It is an important and valuable enhancement to research,” she said. “(But) it doesn’t replace libraries.” [email protected]
