“A Computer in a Phone Booth Is Not a Library”

That book was in the library last year because I checked it out and returned it. Now that I need to go back and check a few sentences I want to quote — it isn’t there anymore. It is not checked out to another professor or student. It is simply gone — discarded because it can be accessed online through some bundled arrangement with an library service.

With the book in hand, I know right where to turn to locate my quote. Instead, I am now free to sit down and bring it up online — a longer process. If it is in pdf format, I can print it off. Time consuming. And wasteful, both paper-wise and energywise.

Nationwide, more of my colleagues are frustrated with libraries that are discarding books without consulting faculty. Many libraries have been led by the pied-piper of tech companies into believing that everyone will be reading on laptops, tablets and other handheld media in the future.

That future when we would abandon all books and be reading on digital media was predicted to be 2015. It did not happen! There was an initial upward curve in folks switching to reading on electronic devices. It tapered off and fell back to barely one fifth of readers.

There are a few advantages, such as reading at nighttime without lights and expanding font size for those who need large print. But nearly all serious readers detected many problems with e-readers. Brick-andmortar bookstores remain in business and Amazon orders for printed books remain solid.

One important function of the library was to classify books. I wander the shelves in the 500s and 600s where science and applied sciences are. Books on bogus crop circles or playing music to plants are down in the 100s with the occult and other non-science. But online searches do not classify. Our young students are mostly on their own to discern the accurate from the wrong. Science ignorance is at a new high.

We are paying a huge price to go to online “open access.”

Across time, the cost of migrating online “publications” to new software and hardware rapidly exceeds the maintenance of the book on the library shelf. The migration rate is relatively fast. Depending on our age, we have experienced the short times electronic hardware lasts, from files on 8-inch floppy discs, to 3-inch floppy discs, then CDs, and now flash drives that will soon be obsolete.

Software also changes.

If you are over 30 years old, you probably stored your first files on an MS-DOS system. But if you did not migrate them to newer formats back then, they are gone. We all know folks with photographs on their cell phones, but after upgrading to new phones, found their photos are gone forever.

Vint Cerf, one of the designers of the Internet protocols, warned an audience at an earlier AAAS meeting of the rapid obsolescence of digital media. He told The Guardian “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

Our libraries already contain the documents in print, and are throwing them out for digital media that are soon obsolete.

Despite our enthusiasm for “going digital,” we are actually losing science research that is only “published” on the Internet in so-called “open access.” In 2001, a survey published in the journal Science found that online URLs (the addresses of files accessed online) eroded at a rate of 10 percent every 15 months, and this rate continues today. The newer DOI is just a unique identifier; content disappears regardless. That means that more research that is supported by public money and occupies the time and effort of dedicated researchers, will end up disappearing. And there is no comprehensive internet archive that preserves and migrates up all science publications. On the other hand, journals printed on acid free paper last 500 years and are then easily copied for another 500 years!

Failure to buy into the digital future frustrates futurist publishers. Nothing speaks louder that the millions of college students who overwhelmingly prefer a printed textbook. The backlit computer screen is slower to read, results in less comprehension, accelerates eyestrain, and promotes skimming. While K–12 students are forced to read digital media by futuristic administrators, college students are freer to make textbook decisions and most chose print. They know the paper textbook is superior for the faster “deep reading” that college learning requires. Publishers refuse to accept this, although their predictions that all college textbooks would be digital five years ago has proven wrong.

The push to make classrooms and libraries all digital is promoted by propaganda sent to both K–12 and higher education institutions in the guise of free “journals” touting slogans such as “you can’t teach tomorrow’s students with today’s technology.” Digital obsolescence is a major contributor to the higher cost and lower performance of U.S. education. Unless our classrooms and libraries return to print, we should probably extend both the K–12 and college experiences by another year in order to achieve the former level of education.

John Richard Schrock holds a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Kansas. He worked for the Association of Systematics Collections for three years. When the A.S.C. moved to Washington, DC, Schrock took a job at Emporia State University, directing biology teacher training. He also writes a weekly Kansas newspaper column on education, produces public radio commentaries, and appears monthly on Kansas television.