Libraries, Books, & Digitization

I'm a big proponent of digitization. I can totally get behind Google Books. One of the most useful aspects of digitization is that it makes books, and other text-based media, fully searchable. So in that light this story about Stanford University is quite interesting. Digital books also eliminates the need to place a hold on a book, or recall it because more than one person can download and use a digital book at the same time. Likewise, interlibrary loans would become much faster, easier, and cheaper.

Saving space is certainly a big deal for the library and I can understand the desire to create more space for essential services. However, relying solely on digitized books does not bode well for all disciplines. Especially in the humanities, where so much is reliant on books, there really is something to be said for walking the stacks. Every scholar has had a serendipitous moment and found a useful book they had no idea existed simply by perusing what was located near the book they were looking for in the first place. This is somewhat similar to actually holding a physical copy of the newspaper and perusing the news instead of just searching for the one story you know is there.

Digital books are more difficult to take notes with - jotting a quick note in the margin gives way to a series of clicks that can be cumbersome for some people.

As someone is not a very fast reader to begin with, this story also perked up my eyebrows and made me think that total digitization is not desirable, at least not yet. I noticed that it took much longer to read digital books before I saw this news item, so I can't say that it surprised me.

The question remains, how do we decide what balance to strike between digital and physical books, and what books should be kept in physical form in addition to having digital copies (because let's face it, ALL books can be digitized)?

On a related note, I am all for the complete digitization of archival records. Doing so would make primary research much faster and cheaper, and would greatly extend the life of documents because they would be handled much less.