On one hand, the reporter was interested in a broad overview of my thoughts on the long term future of books. What he did not quote were my concerns that eliminating books under the guise of being “progressive”, without a plan for adequately meeting the reading interests of Cushing students, was not in the best interests of those students. Harry Potter should be evidence enough that recreational reading of books is still very big, and independant reading has a significant impact on student achievement, both short and long term.

While I did not know it at the time, I now understand that the school will be providing 18 Kindles to meet the needs of 400 students! This is not a plan, it’s a disater for these kids.

1. How will collection development continue at Cushing? Ms. Vezina (I hope) will have the best of databases to choose from – at great cost of course. I doubt that Cushing will be able to duplicate the online opportunities at a large research library.

2. This brings me to the question of budget. This whole experiment is not cheap. Is there an alumni gift involved in turning the library into a Learning Commons? Someone who works at Sony, Google, or Amazon perhaps? I’m sure there have been many alumni gifts to the library over the course of Cushing’s history. Is this just the most recent?

2a. What does Cushing’s alumni body have to say about this? Were they informed, apprised, consulted?

3. The new center of the Learning Commons will be a coffee shop (which will pay for itself – according to Headmaster Tracy). So in addition to high tuition, students will be charged for a cup of coffee – whereas the books were free. I’m imagining a student center full of caffeine hyped kids – oops, I’m getting a little reactive now.

4. But seriously, will there still be a place for quiet reflective study and reading? I don’t see that.

5. Why is Cushing’s library catalog still available? I am tempted to fill out an ILL request and see what happens. On the other hand, will we be expected to provide ILLs to Cushing when their students can’t find books anymore? How might an increased ILL demand affect an already overtaxed public library system?

6. Will NEAS&C have any input regarding Cushing’s accreditation? NEAS&C used to have very specific guidelines for library accreditation, but those have been replaced recently with vague questions about whether a school is fulfilling its mission. Based on that, my guess is that Cushing will be accredited. What about the MBLC? There are of course staffing requirements in order to receive publicly available databases – access to these will be more essential to Cushing now (I would say crucial). Should the MBLC create collection guidelines as well as staffing requirements in order to receive access to databases?

7. Will the Fisher Watkins Library be providing access to other types of media like DVDs, audiobooks, CDs, or archival CD-ROMs, etc?

8. Does the Fisher Watkins Library even exist?

9. Headmaster Tracey says the cost will eventually come down. I don’t see that unless it comes down at public expense or the school will eventually find limited access to databases. The publishers will insure that the cost will not come down. Books (previously owned) will have to be repurchased on Kindles. Again, this is a very expensive experiment.

10. Is Liz Vezina finding support in her immediate community? I was impressed in the article that she did voice sadness and a sense of opposition with her “Offline Readers Club”. On the other hand, I am also impressed that Liz has maintained a remarkable open mind in this whole process. Has she been supported and commended for her openness? Many schools might not tolerate open opposition in their midst.

11. Headmaster Tracy said repeatedly in his open chat session that Cushing will have access to “millions of books”, but millions of volumes of junk is much worse than 20,000 volumes of well selected material by a professional librarian (in my opinion).

12. I would hate to see the Cushing Library become a “print shop”. It will be interesting to see how well (or poorly) their printers are used. I recommend printers with many GB of memory as students will get fed up as they wait for their pdf’s to print. Too often have I seen stacks of common apps to colleges sitting in printers long after the students have left the library.

13. I hope that Headmaster Tracy will begin to see value in getting input from his paid librarians. In addition, I hope that Ms. Vezina finds multiple ways to turn this into a great learning and teaching opportunity for herself, her career, and her students. I just hate the thought of her standing at the reference desk making cappuccinos.

Jeff Smith
Middlesex School
Concord MA

Too many libraries spread themselves thin trying to offer everything, when really they need to sit back & determine your particular library’s focus. Are you primarily interested in research? Popular reading? Media? A school library focusing on research, & therefore going completely digital, sounds fabulous to me! Think of all the great databases that could be offered – databases that can’t be offered if you’re spending so much money on encyclopedias & huge, expensive book sets. & let’s face it, in a boarding school environment, there’s a pretty good chance these are teens who know how to use the internet inside & out – an environment in which digital everything (books, music, news, movies, etc) is probably the norm.

I find this ironic since we are always talking about the need to teach teens how to evaluate resources successfully. Yet, sometimes we hear or read a story about libraries (or something else that we know much about) and don’t do as much evaluation as perhaps we should.

Maybe there are some good ideas in the Cushing plans but maybe those ideas need to be balanced with staff and student training, resource evaluation, full analysis of collection use, strategic planning, and perhaps an incremental implementation approach. (Try one or two collections in digital format only, see how they go, etc.) I would love to see more information on the actual process that went into this decision and then a year from now I would love to read a full evaluation of what works, what doesn’t work, what others might try, etc. (BTW, don’t you think that it’s almost better to hear about what didn’t work than what did? That way you know what not to replicate.)

I’m going to go out on a limb again, perhaps the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater at Cushing but maybe by taking that risk others of us can learn something from it. And, maybe not everything that they do will be all good or all bad.

Looking forward to evaluating on the other end of the process.

Management training I’ve been in have always cautioned about dynamics and culture where everyone agrees with one another, so that no differing opinions are given consideration. Sometimes it’s from fear (the differing person is treated in such a way that all learn not to differ); sometimes its self selection (everyone in that committte/team agrees so there is literally no diversity in opinion.) If Cushing is surprised at the response to this, that tells as much about their method of coming to this decision as it does about the decision itself.

I have read many of the comments about this and your blog has one of the more intelligent conversations about it!

they are experimenting from a place of privilege and therefore a place of fantasy for most.

BRAVA!!! This is going to be my new MANTRA, not just for technology and eBooks but our entire profession.

So, so relevant in this discussion. The sentence that caught my eye more than any other in this story was this one: “Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.” To heck with Kindles and eBook readers, let’s get a $12,000 cappuccino machine! To heck with the year’s salary of a librarian, let’s get a COFFEE SHOP! I think that’s a much bigger stumbling block to “why aren’t kids reading?” than understanding reading and interacting with text means different things now and eBooks aren’t the end of the printed word as we know it, even if the headmaster seems to think books are “scrolls.”

And Linda, I agree, there were many huge gaps in the story, which seemed to mostly exist to make people clutch their chests and say Kids these days! No one reads books! What’s the world coming to? while their eyelashes fluttered and they dont have to do anything about libraries in their own communities and schools.

Great post and comments!!

The really positive outcome of the Cushing story for many of us (and I do feel for the librarian there, even with all the gaps in our knowledge when it comes to her situation) is a chance to really bring these issues to the table and find out where our communities stand, as I did with my principal this afternoon. For instance, should measures like volumes per pupil in many state accreditation standards be adjusted to account for digital resources? How much of library usage is really represented by circulation statistics? And if books really aren’t being read, what does that say about the culture of the school and the library?

The sane response, in light of the digital revolution, is to look carefully at the reading and borrowing patterns of your patrons/students. Are most of the books being circulated fiction and leisure nonfiction? Then maybe the need to have 50 books on the Russian Revolution is over and digitized books/articles will fill that research need and provide the same bang for fewer bucks. Even if you make that (hard) decision, you had better be sure of two things: your patrons/students should have computers and Internet access at any time they need it and the teachers had better be educated to the reality that books in digital form are really books and not the “world wide interweb” as many of them seem to believe. Otherwise, you are setting up your students for failure. .