I agree with Judy. Working in a (main) library that serves both schools of business and design, I know how the different disciplines rely on different types of resources. We spend much more money on design-related books and more on electronic resources for business. Our circulation figures bear this out: 18% of H's circulated while 44% of N's did. I have seen it as wide as 12% v. 60%. In fact, we have done extensive weeding in the H's of outdated material, where N's are never weeded. We have had to weed the H's (those that don't circulate) to have room for the rapidly growing N's (thanks to mainly to NAAB and NASID). The business students complain that our books are out of date - something we never hear from architecture & design students. We are planning (Very preliminary) a new building - and the demand is for maybe twice the stack space, plus electronic rooms equiped with VCR, CD & DVD players, etc. By no means is anyone suggesting less room for books. Marti Pike Woodbury University Library Burbank, CA 91510 (818)767-0888 x259 Fax (818)767-4534 [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Judy Donovan [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 4:52 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: text vs. electronic At 03:31 PM 10/9/00 -0400Shelly Emmons wrote: >We are in the early, early planning stages of building a new library. I am >wondering: >What are your thoughts on the amount of electronic vs. text information. >Everyone seems to be going towards electronic these days, but I wonder how >wise that is for an art (mainly sculpture) library. > Shelly, Here at Drexel University, we're on the 'bleeding edge'--our Library Dean's vision is the total electronic library. It's a very exciting vision and works extremely well for hard sciences, engineering and even business. But my experience here has taught me that we have a long way to go before "the arts" are adequately represented in digital format. Granted, there are lots of excellent sites with images (AMICO, American Memory Collection, etc) but electronic books and journals are missing the key element--IMAGES--that are crucial to art, design and architecture. Besides this, most faculty and students in the arts are still very print-oriented. We've recently had a lot of publicity about having a "wireless" campus. The engineering students are ecstatic over it, as well as many in business and science. But those in the College of Design arts are not--largely because the materials they need and use (slides and books) are not available electronically. The few that are have substandard images. Students often are assigned the task of scanning images and making slides from books for their presentations. Given that the electronically available image sources are so paranoid about people downloading images, the electronic environment currently does not meet the needs of students in the arts. Our latest round of circulation statistics revealed that the most-circulated books come from two areas: Computer science and art (architecture in particular). Our annual library survey has shown that, despite all the hoopla about electronic resources, the most-asked for resource is still BOOKS. I guess what I'm saying here is, the electronic world hasn't met the needs of the art world yet. And, until both the image problem and the user preference "problem" (arts people prefer browsing the real world and the printed page), I doubt too much will change in the immediate future. So go ahead and plan to wire your new library--but don't assume that the web will alleviate the need for stack space and plan accordingly! Judy Donovan Design Arts Librarian Hagerty Library Drexel University 33rd and Market Streets Philadelphia PA 19104 phone: 215-895-2768 fax: 215-895-2070 email: [log in to unmask] __________________________________________________________________ Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] Administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html Questions may be addressed to list owner at: [log in to unmask] __________________________________________________________________ Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] Administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html Questions may be addressed to list owner at: [log in to unmask]