Article: Libraries getting the digital treatment

This article starts out with a bleak story of a student doing research in the library, but is actually a positive story about the California Digital Library. Very interesting article with good information on what libraries will become. For example:

Gary Strong, the UCLA librarian, said that he envisions the library of the future as a space of collaborative learning. Instead of coming to the library to read books, students will be able to collaborate with peers and faculty while looking at and researching collections of rare material, he said.

And...

Last year there were 3.5 million downloads of UCLA's online licensed journals, Strong said. Comparatively, Powell library [at UCLA] had only 1.5 million visits, he [Strong] said.

And students said that due to the increasing availability of online materials, that number is most likely going to decrease.

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Technorati tags: Libraries, Digitization