Here’s a thought from The Bookseller

Michael Holdsworth gives a ‘provocative vision of publishing’s future’.

In an article in The Bookseller’s London Book Fair Daily issue for Tuesday, 17 April 2007, Michael Holdsworth says the following (amongst other things), which may be pertinent to the current debate on students and textbooks:

‘For many students, information that is not online simply does not exist, to the dismay of their sooo-last-century professors. The library is ignored since the chances are that the book will be out on loan, mis-shelved, or will have had the chapter razored out; and the bookshop, where the right coursebooks are perceived to be too expensive or rarely available, is shunned. Time-rich and money-poor, the younger generation surf their always-on broadband to find roughly what they need--and preferably for free (that is, ripped-off or in the public domain).’

Do other people feel that Holdsworth has read the situation correctly? Or is he just being provocative, as suggested in the article’s lead-in?

Filed Under: [Publishing]

Posted on 24 Apr 2007 around 3pm

Comment added by on 22 Jun 2007 around 12pm

I think Holdsworth’s view of the physical library is now out of date, in itself it reflects the situation of the 1990s rather than the late 2000s.  Certainly razoring out, in my experience, seems to have disappeared as with so much available on the internet students who would have behaved that way just plagiarise electronic resources instead as he notes towards the end of this piece.  For the library this can mean savings in terms of not having to replace damaged resources but losses in photocopying revenue.

The library has changed as a space for learning.  In most universities it has more PCs and printers than anywhere else.  It also has the physical advice sources: librarians, especially the subject-specific ones, are very valuable to students, even more so as they move into postgraduate study. The OU Library’s ‘Librarians On Call’ replicates this for students learning at a distance.

Libraries are also a space for collaboration and the volume in them has increased greatly in the past decade.  Whilst one can IM or email among a group, it is still faster to sit round a table and group work activities are increasingly common for students.  Even in this context, e-resources, such as via a laptop, input into discussion.  MIT and the OU led the way in noticing that students no longer come to universities to receive content, rather they come to be with experts and peers of the same type as themselves.  Overall, the use of libraries now reflects this too.

In addition, many academics are not ‘sooo last century’.  Anyone under 40 has had computers in their schooling since secondary school level and academics often have the income to afford the best equipment and often it is supplied by their HEI.  I have had a new PC supplied to me every 2 years for the past six years so can always use the latest approaches.  Academics often need to collaborate internationally, which is facilitated by such technology, and, like students, they are more than happy to access a range of resources without leaving their desks.  Of course for those of us who do, we are now liable to find more books on the actual library shelves and in the right place because fewer students are using them.

Academics are often curious and willing to experiment with new technologies, yet they remain more critical than students, looking for technology which they can use in a sustained way rather than following particular fads.  This is what sometimes makes them seem outdated, but there is never any point in using a new technology for technology’s sake, there have to be genuine benefits for you as a user otherwise there is no point persisting; academics are more quickly aware of this than students, possibly because they are more alert to what their real needs are for accessing information.

When tutors engage with a technology they do so on a genuinely academic basis rather than on the social-usage basis that students do.  People are concerned that they do not know as much as the ‘screen-agers’ but as many undergraduates soon find out, there is much more to using online facilities than communicating with their friends about bands or movies or just nothing in particular.

Overall, we need to recognise that learning and consequently learning spaces are evolving.  This does not mean that traditional spaces are ignored, just used in a way that previous generations would have been surprised at.  This has always been happening, after all libraries long ago stopped chaining down books or holding texts exclusively in Latin.  Students will always see their academics as outdated, but in this they neglect the real engagement on a properly academic level by staff with new technology.

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