Why we still need to keep books in our campus libraries

-- The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

"...I would like to make a plea for the value of keeping libraries as physical spaces--as actual, rather than virtual, edifices--and as buildings for housing books and encouraging the conversations between human beings and physical textual materials."

...

"Downsizing the stacks and increasing student and faculty reliance on virtual sources limits the silent conversation between people and books, arrests the opportunity for surprising encounters with unexpected materials, and thus dampens synthesis--the very stuff of new ideas."