New Report on Future of the Library

The the Washington-based Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has released a new report called The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship:

"The Idea of Order explores the transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution, and the implications of this transition for managing research collections. The volume comprises three reports. The first, 'Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?' by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, explores the degree to which a new research library can eschew print. The second, 'On the Cost of Keeping a Book,' by Paul Courant and Matthew 'Buzzy' Nielsen, argues that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries. The final report, 'Ghostlier Demarcations,' examines how well large text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitization efforts meet the needs of scholars, and the larger implications of these projects for research, teaching, and publishing."

[Source: Law Librarian Blog]